Episode 5: Stilettos in Moscow

In this episode, the focus shifts to Moscow and a look at changes in the Communist world. Nikita Khrushchev, reviled in the Soviet Communist Party for buckling under to Kennedy in the Cuban Missile Crisis, is blissfully unaware of the threat to his power bubbling up in the ranks of the Party leadership. A coup is clearly afoot, but the competition for which bureaucratic apparatchik will replace him—Brezhnev, Suslov, Malenkov of somebody else—becomes unexpectedly fierce. Waiting in the shadows, Alexander Shelepin, former head of the KGB, is sitting on a “dictatorship coach” and a cache of secret documents that he hopes will give him the edge in the power struggle that breaks out in the Kremlin in the fall of 1964.

Length: 26:02

Show Notes For This Episode

Next Episode (Bonus, Recap & Explainer): April 18, 2021

Next Regular Episode: April 25, 2021