Lenin's WWII goo adventure

0:00ABC Listen. Podcasts, radio, news, music and more. Australia is hurtling into a new political era and the Victorian election will be where the change happens. I'm Raf Epstein and every Friday I'm taking over the Politics Now podcast to explore the forces changing Australian politics. Can one nation turn its popular support into political power? Are voters sick of the Labor Party? And can the Liberal Party finally win in Victoria? Search Politics Now podcast on ABC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast was produced on the lands of the Wabakal and Gadigal people. G'day, Matt Bevan here. This is If You're Listening. I realise this is not a day that we usually put out episodes because it's the weekend, but we're trialling something where maybe once a

0:58month or so we will put out a special question and answer episode where me and Cara come on and answer any questions that you have about the show and the stuff that we cover on it. And Cara is here and we're going to do that now. Hi, Cara. Hello. Happy to be here. There's lots of exciting things happening at the moment. We've got a lot going on. Well, I mean, you went away on your honeymoon for a few weeks. I did. And now you've come back and, like, we've got our own YouTube channel and we're doing live events and the midterms are happening. And so, yeah, look, you know, I hope that you were all relaxed on your trip. But, well, now everything is happening all at once. Ten times more work to do now that I'm back.

1:47Yes. That's right. But I'm glad. Very excited about our new YouTube channel. Yes. I mean, it's something that's taken quite some time to come about. It's something that people have been asking for for a long time, but it now exists. You can find the If You're Listening YouTube channel and subscribe to it, and you will just get If You're Listening stuff in your feed, which is very exciting. You will get our usual fully produced big episodes. You'll get some of our episodes that we currently do on Tuesdays on the podcast. We'll see if we can put some of those on YouTube as well. And we're also going to try and do live events. I'll go live and answer people's questions about big events as they're happening.

2:29And our first live, we've chosen a very important event to trial this new technology out on, the midterm elections in a couple of weeks in the US. Very high stakes. We're going to start it off, you know, test all the technology on the biggest international news day of the year. That's right. And so we're going to do it at 3 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, Australian Eastern Daylight Time, I should say, on the day after the midterms. So the midterms, the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, and then we're going to come on air on the Wednesday at 3pm. And I've got a formula for why I picked that time, Cara. Please, please, please regale us. Well, I discovered after many years of, you know, covering US elections

3:21and trying to figure out when they were, because it's weird, because they, you know, they move around, but there also, there is some regularity to them. It's like Easter, you know. And the rule is it's on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. The first Tuesday. Hang on. For the first Tuesday after the first Monday. Yes. So the first Tuesday? No, there has to be a Monday. Yeah, so it basically means that it can't be the first of November. Okay, yes. So it's the first Tuesday in November unless't be the 1st of November. Okay, yes. So it's the first Tuesday of November unless it's the first day of November, in which case it'll be later than that, right? Sure, there's a rhyme for that somewhere.

3:53But the thing is, the fun thing is that that formula, the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, is also the formula that sets when the Melbourne Cup is. Right. It's the Melbourne Cup is. Right. It's the same. It's the exact same formula. And I was finding that, you know, the Melbourne Cup would happen and then exactly 24 hours later is when things sort of start to kick off in terms of actual results being found in a US election. The way that you know when to check in on when the results of a US election are is go from the Melbourne Cup and then wait 24 hours exactly and then check in. And so that's why the Melbourne Cup runs at 3pm on the Tuesday and we will be live analysing the results exactly 24 hours later on 3pm on the Wednesday.

4:44There you go. I'm not sure if that's easier to remember or harder, but it's good to have the choice now. People can give me feedback on that on our live event. Please. So a few weeks ago, the last episode that you wrote the majority of before you went on your holiday was about the attempt from Vladimir Putin to live longer and the discoveries that have been made about the preservation of bodies and specifically the goo that keeps Vladimir Lenin preserved, his body preserved. I was out and my kids were hanging out with their grandparents and their grandparents decided to watch my episode and so they watched the episode about goo and now my kids just wander around the house saying the word goo over and over like this.

5:29Goo! Goo! Goo! Goo! Goo! Which has been fun. But have we had any goo correspondence, Cara? We have had a surprising amount of goo correspondence. We got an email from Andrew who says, Thanks for the show. I've been following it since the early days. I just listened to the Putin-Lenin episode. It reminded me of a trip back to the UK after my year in Australia on a working holiday visa. I flew to Singapore and then made my way back overland with stops, including Hanoi, Beijing, and Moscow. Once I got the route worked out, I realized I could check out three of the preserved revolutionaries. They were all different experiences, with Lenin being the least busy. Seeing Gagarin's tomb in the wall nearby felt almost more significant to me.

6:18Hanoi, Beijing and Moscow, like that's the... Big three. The big three. The big three in terms of checking out goo corpses. Yes. And, well, that's very exciting. But, yeah, do you think he's got a point there, Cara, that there's something about seeing, like, the body that kind of takes away from the sombre, respectful vibe that you want in a tomb? Because, like, you know, you go to a war memorial and that kind of thing. We don't have preserved, like, weird goo bodies in there. No, we don't. It might be a statue, but usually it's sort of some sort of an object or a tomb that is symbolic of the person or the concept rather than a literal gooed-up corpse. Yeah, I think it's because as a child i had a very formative experience at madam two swords museum in the uk where they basically

7:13have like questionable wax sculptures some of them are very good some of them are not very good of various celebrities and historic figures and there is an uncanniness about being able to see someone kind of in the flesh, like to walk around them and see what their face looks like in 3D that I do think undermines their status. It's got a bit of a Weekend at Bernie's energy to me, that at any point they could kind of just be like picked up and sat on a couch, you know? Yeah. Before we move on from Goo though, is there anything that you learned making the Goo episode that you, you know, this is inevitably happens with almost every episode, right? We find things out about something that aren't technically relevant to the story,

8:01but are fascinating nonetheless. Have you come across any goo-related things that we couldn't fit into the episode? I absolutely have the most deranged goo story of all time. There's Nazis, there are two guys called Boris, there is a train full of goo and there is a lot of grass clippings, so perhaps that will, yeah. Go on. Okay, so we're going back to back to june 1941 germany has invaded russia four days later as the german bombers are flying over moscow the russians basically get a group of guys together and they're like we have to make sure that they don't bomb the mausoleum and lenin's body because that's going to make us look really bad. We've got to save this guy. Well, I mean, they were also genuinely concerned that the Nazis would take Moscow and then they would take Lenin's body

8:54and, you know, that would be very, very bad. And we know what they would do with it. Exactly. So they basically established a crack team of guys to come up with what to do. And the first idea, which is a terrible idea, was to fill the entire mausoleum with sand in the hopes that if it was bombed, the bombs would just bounce right off. So that sounds brilliant. Here's the thing. It's like, maybe that could work. I don't know if it could work. Enough guys said that's probably not going to work and so they needed to come up with another plan so another guy comes in this is boris and boris is the chief goo scientist and he has been for the last 20 years and he says look i don't know how the sand's gonna work that's that's the whole time period, by the way. That's the whole. He was. He's the OG goo guy.

9:46He was the junior goo guy. He was the junior goo and now he's the OG goo. So he came in and basically said, look, we've actually got to take him out. The sand and the goo, it's not a mix that we want to investigate. So we've got to take lennon out of here fortunately there was a secret train station under the mausoleum of course and so they prepared the cargo lennon's body for moving and they decided that again they got the crack guys together and they said what's the least bombable town that we have here? Like where wouldn't the Nazis want to bomb? And they decided that a town called Tumen, which is a town in Siberia, didn't have a whole lot going on and that the Nazis probably wouldn't bother with bombing it,

10:38so they caught the train there. On the train Siberia. Yes. So they had three trains. That's why they built that railway. To get Lenin out to Siberia. On the Trans-Siberian. Yes. So they had three trains, one train. That's why they built that railway. They built the railway. To get Lennon out to Siberia. I like to imagine that, like, someone in the mausoleum has, like, pressed a button and then, like, the corpse, like, goes down, you know, like the Thunderbirds, the sequence where the Thunderbirds slide down various slides and chutes in order to get planted into their, you know, Thunderbird 2. I like to imagine that Lennon had to go down a series of slides and shoots down onto a train, you know, and then the train takes off

11:14to Tumen. Tumen. Tumen. So they had two, they took three trains. Two of the trains were filled entirely with guards and one of the trains, the middle train, was filled with Lennon and the entire goo science team. Do they have like a goo card? Do they have like the goo, like filled in like oil tankers for three different goos? I just imagine, I know again that he was probably in like a secret goo case, but I just like to imagine that they sat him up on like a sleeper chair while everyone else was like playing cards around him for the whole week yeah yeah but presumably there was like do you have any two comrades presumably there was like again it's a weekend at bernie in the making. Prequel, I suppose.

12:05Or prequel, I guess. Yeah. So 10 days later, they arrive at this town, Tumen. And once again, they're looking for the least bombable building in the least bombable city. And the least bombable building is the Tumen Agricultural Technical College, which is just an agriculture school. So they unpack Leonard from the train, carry him to the school, carry him to the second floor and store him in classroom number 15. Okay. Just in my mind like in that closet where they keep backpacks, but like somewhere in that room. And he remained there for four years were classes in the classroom going on in the classes ongoing so he's there just four years got their homework splayed out across the case you know that's right um hanging their hats on on him And so he, his body was guarded around the clock and it actually was the most elite

13:08ceremonial position basically for the Russian guard to be guarding his body. It was called post number one. And so the guard that was assigned that position basically had to catch this train to Siberia and then just stand outside this classroom. And that happened for four years. That is such a, like a like a setup for a sitcom. I know. The goings on of the school and the teachers and the principal, like, you know, Abbott Elementary or something like that, except also Vladimir Lenin's corpse and all of his guards are there. We've got a YouTube channel now. So if that's some of the bonus content you'd like to see, let us know. Meanwhile, back in Moscow, there was another team that was established

13:48whose job was to hide the mausoleum because they also didn't want the structure to be bombed. So they got another guy called Boris. This is Boris the architect as opposed to Boris the goo guy. And he was tasked with coming up with a solution to basically conceal the entire mausoleum so this entire red pyramid in the middle of red square and his idea was to build a big scaffold over the whole thing cover the scaffold in canvas and then paint the canvas to look like a house and they did the same thing with the kremlin oh yeah so they made the kremlin look like many houses but still houses and so they had the entirety of the red square which is i've looked this up 73 000 meters squared obviously entirely empty except for these like houses

14:36which oh yes my address address, one red square. Number one. The best real estate in Moscow. Yeah. And it actually worked because there had been bombs falling near the Kremlin, but the Nazis never directly hit the Kremlin, and the Russians believe it's because it looked like houses. A Potemkin village. Brilliant. And then four years later, 1945, Lenin caught the train with the goo scientists back from Siberia to the Mausoleum and he has remained there ever since. And that's the story. Oh, wow. I mean. What can you say? I just can't stop thinking about what it must have been like for that normal town, you know, Siberian Heights High, you know, or whatever. Yeah, the cavalcade. Yeah. Let's put that town on the map.

15:33So we also did an episode about Canada and we've had a number of emails about that. Yes, we did. We had a great email from Stacey, who is Canadian. She says, regarding the Alberta separatist movement, I think you missed an opportunity to go into the maple syrup MAGA movement. Since the pandemic, this has been an ongoing, loud and very well-funded movement on the far right in Canada. There actually was a whole lot about Alberta that didn't make it into the episode because we wound up having to just focus mostly on Quebec. So what actually is happening in Alberta? I mean, the point that we were trying to make in the episode is really how different Alberta is from Quebec. You know, you have these two provinces in Canada and the interesting sort of point that

16:20we were trying to make was that in Quebec, which has a very long-standing, long history of separatist movements, those separatist movements are sort of becoming less influential and people are starting to feel more Canadian in Quebec. Whereas in Alberta, which is kind of like a petro-state, if Alberta was its own country it would be you know one of the world's biggest oil exporters it's truly an extraordinary amount of energy products coming out of alberta and going directly into the united states and much like you know some of the resource states in australia they kind of feel like know, we're creating all this export revenue and we're not getting enough of the benefits from it. And so it's not so much that they kind of go, we hate being Canadian and we don't want

17:16to be Canadian anymore. They just feel like they're being taken advantage of. But the interesting thing is that, you know, they ended up having this sort of semi-referendum, a sort of plebiscite sort of thing, where they were sort of voting on whether they would proceed to have another vote, a binding vote on a referendum to leave Canada. And this is sort of what we were talking about at the time. And we got a lot of pushback from people in Canada who were sort of saying, this is, you know, a minority perspective, not very many people in Alberta really want to separate and that kind of thing. And the referendum has now been held, and so I can give you the result of it. It was sort of held last week.

17:57The result of the referendum was, for question number, let me just go down to question number 10, 75% voted to remain and 24% voted to, well, to hold a referendum on whether they should leave. And absolutely that is an argument, you know, that that's an argument for there being, you know, obviously majority support for remaining part of Canada. But I think a lot of the people who were sort of annoyed at us for talking about it and sort of saying, why are you even talking about this? It's not important. It's such a small number of people, is most countries don't have secessionist referendums. Yes, exactly. Even ones that are roundly crushed, as this one was, Yes, exactly. I don't know that you would find that proportion of West Australians or Queenslanders or Victorians or even Californians or Texans that would be sort of keen to do that, that would vote to separate from the federation that they are a part of. So, I mean, clearly it's not a sign that Alberta is about to

19:27secede, but it's certainly a sign that there is disquiet, I suppose. So, yeah, it's interesting that what's going on in Alberta and how different it is from Quebec. So, this week we are doing an episode about the Israeli elections, which are being held on Tuesday, and I wonder if you can give us any Ford sizzle about that episode. It's a kind of the actual elections are kind of happening at an inconvenient time for us in that they're happening kind of midweek. Yeah. Our episode will be coming out probably while the latter stages of vote counting are happening. The episode won't come out before the election. It'll come out sort of during the vote count and as the coalition process sort of starts.

20:12And it's fascinating the way that Israeli elections work and how different they are, not just from Australian elections, but from really most elections in most parts of the world because the key thing that's different is that there's no geographic component. There are no geographic electorates. So the way that Israeli elections work is the entire country votes as a single proportional vote electorate. Parties that get 20% of the vote get 20% of the seats and parties that get 3% of the vote get 3% of the seats, although you need to be over 3.5% in order to get any seats at all. So if you get 4%, then you get 4% of the seats. And that basically leads to a situation where there is only a primary vote and you end up with an enormous swathe of different political parties.

21:08And the idea of any political party actually getting a governing majority is impossible, essentially. And the way that the Israeli election works is that basically, unless you get a 50% primary vote, you're not getting a majority. And so every single Israeli government is a minority government and works with a whole bunch of different parties. And that is basically unique to Israel because there is no geographic electorates. Even in Germany where, you know, you have a similar situation of, you know, generally minority governments. If one party does really, really well in Bavaria, then they're going to do pretty well in the national election. It sort of flows on and you can get quite a good proportion of seats by campaigning in one part of the country, whereas that doesn't happen in

21:55Israel. Israel is one giant electorate and it's really impossible to tell what is going to happen. One of the interesting things, though, is that Israeli politicians really trust the polls a lot. And so what will often happen is kind of one party will start polling sort of very low and they'll just go, okay, well, we give up. We don't want to be a political party anymore. And they liquidate themselves. And so you've got a situation where every single election, the Likud party, which is Benjamin Netanyahu's party, fights every single election and has done for all of living memory, but they're basically the only party that has existed beyond like three elections. Every other party just kind of in between each election disappears and reconstitutes something

22:46else and and new um leaders the the fame the you know the top leaders sort of change parties all the time and find new alliances and so every time they come to an election the ballot paper is a totally different list of parties and benjamin netanyahu and so it's, yeah, it's interesting and it's very different to basically the way that elections work in almost every other country. And it's going to be interesting to see how it all shakes out and it's almost impossible that there will actually be a result by the time of our episode coming out. So that's going to be fun and interesting for us. Yeah, so how it will work is that there may be a person that's leading and then once somebody is determined as the leader,

23:30the way it works is the president, Isaac Herzog, gives that person 28 days to then form a coalition with the other parties. And if the person can form a coalition, that then becomes the governing party. Otherwise, it goes to somebody else and then somebody else needs to form a coalition as well, which has happened in the past. Yes, someone else will try and form a coalition and then if they fail, then they'll basically go to another election. And, I mean, that's why you end up with a situation where in the last 10 years Israel has had elections in 2019, in April 2019, in September 2019, in 2020, in 2021 and in 2022. And then they've managed to actually, Bibi Netanyahu has managed to hold his government together for a full term of parliament until this election now in October of 2026.

24:29And that's the first time that any Israeli government has held power for a full term since the 80s because the coalitions just always collapse in one way or another. Yeah. in one way or another. It could be a period of serious chaos in Israel following this vote on the 27th. Yes, absolutely one to watch, and we're going to be looking into some of the implications depending on whether the leadership stays the same or changes. Yeah, basically looking at what's at stake as those coalition talks begin. So we'll be there with that on Thursday and we'll also be back on Tuesday with something else. We haven't figured that out yet. We'll put it down. There'll be something on Tuesday, Israel on Thursday.

25:18All right, catch you then. Thanks, Cara.