later and they were shot. Not
for missing dinner, but because they interfered with Stalin`s feeling of separateness, his messianic mission.
He felt very special. It wasn`t for nothing that, you know, we discovered that he loved watching John Ford,
American movies, directed by John Ford, often with John Wayne in them. He loved that because that`s
exactly how he saw himself, it turns out, as sort of a lone cowboy, always alone, no family, an invented
name, no friends. Just the mission. Riding alone into town, gun-slinging, you know, ready to shoot out at
anything. That was him, a Marxist cowboy. And that`s in a way how he saw himself, and why he spent his
last eight years just watching cowboy film after cowboy film, night after night, running the Soviet Union
from his privatecinema. That`s one -- that`s the sort of -- that`s very much the picture after the war.

LAMB: So at the end, where is he?

MONTEFIORE: He`s at his house in Kuntzevo.

LAMB: Kuntzevo is...

MONTEFIORE: His dacha just outside Moscow. One of the things one discovers in this story is
that Stalin didn`t really live in the Kremlin. I mean, Russians thought he lived in the Kremlin and everyone
else thought he lived, but in fact he lived at these country houses. And his main residence in -- around
Moscow was Kuntzevo. This two-story, rather ugly mansion, which he built for himself after his wife`s
death and moved in there. And that`s where he lived. He used to shut himself in at night. Guards were in
the guard houses right about. And inside his house, he