Hello everyone and I would just like to say thank you all for your support! The last few days have been absolutely exciting with the substantial increase in subscribers and views. As a token of my appreciation I would like to do a semi 700 subscriber special infused with my first ever semi-professional podcast. I did a video months ago with my friend on terrorism however the audio quality was sub par. Here, I got my colleague who is a professor, Richard Tempest, from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Richard Tempest is an Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois. Of British-Bulgarian parentage, he spent his childhood in Moscow, where his parents worked as foreign correspondents, and holds a BA, MA, and PhD from the University of Oxford. He is a former director of the Russian and Eurasian Center at Illinois. Tempest’s interests include Russian history and culture, military history, the political science of the body, and popular culture. He has lectured on these topics nationally and internationally.

He is the author of several books as well as a novel, Golden Bone (Zolotaia kost’), which he wrote in Russian and published under the penname Roland Harington (Moscow: NLO, 2004). It tells the story of an American professor who travels to Putin’s Russia, discovers he is descended from Catherine the Great, though on the wrong side of the blanket, and decides to crown himself tsar. Tempest has recently completed a book on the fictional works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and is currently researching a monograph on the politics of charisma in the twenty-first century.

If you are interested in the book it is in the following link:
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This is also a link to Richard's academic page on the University of Illinois website:
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I had such a great time in this podcast and would like to again extend my gratitude and thanks to Richard for participating in such a lively discussion. As the podcast is quite long I will timestamp in relatively ambiguous terms.

[Timestamp]

0:00 Introduction
6:09 Discussion on the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
12:01 The German State: Organization, Genocide, and Vision
16:48 German performance during the war
24:02 Stalin's motives for the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
35:29 The Japanese and Khalkin Gol as a critical juncture
39:17 The German advance toward Moscow and Alternative History
45:16 A Discussion on Stalingrad and Aggregate figures
48:15 Conclusions about Western Attitudes toward the Soviet Union
58:49 Richard's favorite General's in the Second World War
1:03:59 Outro

We start the discussion with an introduction in which Richard talks a bit about his literary focus on figures such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Then the topic of focus comes about with discussion on the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and the motives behind Stalin: precisely on the ideological spectrum. I decided to switch and talked a bit about Western misconceptions of Soviet and German performance in the Eastern front. Richard also gives his brilliant ideas on how the war ultimately led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and how the Germans performed poorly during the invasion of Poland.

I hope you all enjoy!

[PATREON]
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