Joseph Stalin, the supreme leader of the Soviet Union,
and a tyrant responsible for the death of millions.
I should tell you that on the first night they brought in 300 people.
I saw all that horror.
Yet the man who created all this suffering also had some unlikely friends during the Second World War.
With the help of previously secret documents,
this series tells the inside story of these strange relationships.
With Winston Churchill...
What did you do with all the rich peasants, the kulaks?
And with President Roosevelt...
I am absolutely convinced the Russians did not do this.
It's a television history of this period like no other made before.
These dramatic reconstructions have been carefully sourced from archival
material, much of it only available since the fall of communism.
These encounters behind closed doors are not fiction,
but fact.
This, the first episode in the series, lays bare a history Stalin wanted to hide.
Because before he was allied with Churchill and Roosevelt,
Stalin offered help to Hitler and the Nazis.
Much more help than the rest of the world knew.
On 23 August 1939 Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Foreign Minister of Nazi Germany, visited Moscow.
It was less than two weeks before the outbreak of the Second World War.
He was here because his Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, planned to invade Poland.
And Hitler wanted an agreement with Stalin that kept the Soviet Union out of the war.
But Ribbentrop had a problem.
Officially the Nazis hated the Soviet Communists.
Hitler had previously described Stalin and the other
rulers of the Soviet Union as "an international guild of criminals".
Now, in one of the most surprising turnarounds in the
history of diplomacy, Ribbentrop had to do business with them.
Waiting to meet him were Joseph Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister.
They were about to discuss matters that would change
the lives of millions of people and reshape the boundaries of much of Eastern Europe to this day.
Stalin, like the Nazis, was happy to put ideological differences aside.
Not least because there was a chance to agree between them in
a secret part of the pact, what both sides called "spheres of influence"
over the countries of Eastern Europe.
And it soon became clear that Stalin wasn't prepared to accept what the Nazis were offering him.
Hitler was waiting for news of the negotiations here, at the Berghof,
his house in the Bavarian mountains, above Berchtesgaden.
It was to these mountains that Hitler came for inspiration.
And now the inspired idea of an agreement with Stalin was not going according to plan.
Suddenly the call came through.
Everybody was tense. Hitler was speechless during the phone call.
Everybody noticed Stalin had put a pistol to his head.
Under intense pressure from Stalin, Hitler knew just what he had to do next.
As Hitler and his entourage waited for confirmation from Moscow that
the non-aggression pact had been signed,
clouds gathered over the mountains of the Obersalzberg.
The sky was red, green, sulphur grey.
Frightening. Terrible.
Cruel. Beautiful.
A celestial phenomenon.
It was sensational.
And then a lady in Hitler's entourage, she said, "My Fuhrer, this means no good.
It means blood, blood, blood and again blood, destruction and terrible suffering."
Hitler was totally shocked.
He was almost shaking.
Well, if it has to happen, let it be now.
Then the news arrived that the treaty was signed and everything
came together in a few minutes.
In the early hours of 24 August 1939, German and Soviet journalists
were allowed to witness the signing of the Non-Aggression Pact.
It was one thing for the leaders of these two regimes to reach an agreement,
quite another for their supporters to understand why it was happening.
We were taught to think of the fascists as our enemy,
so to change our personal opinion and understanding,
that with the signing of this pact they were now our friends...
..this of course was very difficult.
That was a surprise, without doubt. We couldn't make sense of it.
We couldn't understand why this was happening at all.
At least we saw it as politically unnatural, if I can put it that way.
Eight days later, on 1st September 1939, the Germans invaded Poland from the West.
On 3rd September, Britain and France declared war on them.
But on 17th September, in a piece of less familiar history,
more than 600,000 Red Army troops invaded Poland from the East.
They headed towards the demarcation line that had been agreed in the secret part of the Nazi-Soviet pact.
Within days, the Red Army had occupied half of Poland,
including the principal cultural centre of Eastern Poland, Lwow.
The city of Lwow had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire
before the First World War.
Now it was about to become part of the Soviet Union.
I was really terrified.
They seemed strange to me.
I don't know how to explain it, but it was really terrifying.
It seemed to us that the hordes had come.
While the Nazis had invaded Poland from the west, the Soviet Union now
claimed that the Red Army had liberated Poland from the east.
But for many of these people in eastern Poland, the misery was just beginning.
Nothing was safe from the Soviets.
If they liked the look of a house, like this one in the suburbs of Lwow,
then they just moved in.
The Soviet authorities forced the family who lived here to camp in one room, while two Soviet officers
and their wives took over the rest of the house and liberated the Polish family's possessions.
They took over our place, the furniture and all the other things,
and they said that everything was now theirs.
We no longer had any right to any of it.
My mother had different types of clothes.
She had nighties, and these nighties were embroidered.
One day the officer's wife put on one of these embroidered nighties and then went up to my mum and said,
"Look, Maria Ivanovna, look how good this dress looks on me.
Such beautiful embroidery. It's perfect for wearing to the theatre."
My mother said to her, "You can't wear that to the theatre."
And the officer's wife replied, "What do you mean?
A dress this beautiful should only be worn to the theatre."
But for many other families in eastern Poland, life was a good deal worse.
In pursuit of Communist ideology, the Soviets targeted many of the better-off middle class,
the so-called bourgeoisie, who lost their houses completely to those the Soviets considered working class.
The Soviets wanted to remake this society, from top to bottom.
Anyone living here who was suspected of supporting the old regime, like Polish intellectuals
and civic leaders, was hugely at risk of arrest.
In particular, the Soviets targeted people who resisted the
idea of eastern Poland becoming a permanent part of the Soviet Union.
Which is why, several months into the Soviet occupation,
Galina Stavarskaya, came into the hands of the secret police.
She had been accused of acting as a messenger for a resistance group.
Three men were there.
They were strong looking, they had big hands, strong hands
and they asked me, "Are you in a secret organisation?"
I said, "No".
"Are you a member of that organisation?" "No."
"What is your role in that organisation?"
I said, "I'm not in any organisation.
"How can I have a role if I'm not a member of any organisation?"
The use of torture during such interrogations was commonplace.
Stalin, in an infamous telegram from 1939,
had personally authorised the use of what he called "physical pressure"
against "enemies of the people".
Then they brought sticks.
They were half a metre long and made out of rubber.
And they started using these sticks.
They hit me with them.
On my neck I had a black scar like a black stripe, and it wouldn't heal.
They hit me,
and I got black scars.
It was like being in hell.
I can't recall it all.
It is very painful to remember it.
They beat me on the head.
They ripped it out.
I was completely bald.
They got pleasure from it.
They were sadists.
That's what I said to them.
Galina Stavarskaya was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment.
She was one of more than an estimated 100,000 people arrested during the Soviet occupation.
Ribbentrop made a second trip to the Soviet Union on 27th September 1939.
Unlike his almost furtive first visit,
now there was a guard of honour and a band played the Internationale.
Four hours after he'd arrived in Moscow, Ribbentrop was meeting with Stalin and Molotov in the Kremlin.
During this encounter, of course, it was no longer necessary to talk of "spheres of influence".
They could now openly discuss the practical question of securing their empires in Eastern Europe.
In the course of the meeting, Stalin said something extraordinary, words which remained secret until
the 1990s, when German diplomat Gustav Hilger's detailed notes of this meeting were discovered.
Stalin's statement, that the Soviet Union would not stand by and let Germany be defeated,
went way beyond anything that the Soviets later admitted had been said at these meetings.
Stalin gave a lavish banquet in honour of the Germans in the Ekaterinsky Hall in the Kremlin.
Amid this Tsarist splendour, Stalin introduced Ribbentrop to the Soviet leadership.
The Nazis and the Soviets were discovering that they had more than just borders in common.
Lavrenti Beria was the infamous head of the Soviet secret police, the NKVD.
And so the leading Soviet communists sat down to feast with some of the leading German fascists.
It was a party that could scarcely have been dreamt of just a few months before.
HE TAPS HIS GLASS
In terms of presentation, generous hospitality and warmth of atmosphere,
recalled the German diplomat Andor Hencke who was present that night,
this dinner was one of the most remarkable events I have witnessed
during my 23-year-long diplomatic career.
These two countries, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union,
were careful to say to the world that they had merely signed a pact,
but they were allies in all but name.
Back in London the British government, having already declared
war on Germany over Poland, wasn't about to declare war
on the Soviet Union as well.
The Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain
said in the House of Commons on September the 20th...
What we will not do is to rush into adventures that offer little prospect of success.
Secure in the knowledge that the British weren't going to interfere, the Soviets
happily collaborated with the Nazis over the business of actually building a new border between them,
in the place where Poland had once been.
The Nazis themselves committed a series of horrendous atrocities in their part of Poland.
At the end of October the German-Soviet border committee
gathered in Nazi occupied Warsaw for a celebration lunch.
This was just one instance an increasingly close relationship.
That same month the German Gestapo and Soviet secret police
also held meetings to see how they could best cooperate.
At this lunch, the Head of the Soviet delegation
could scarcely thank the Nazis enough for all their help.
APPLAUSE
The host of the luncheon party, Hans Frank, Nazi ruler of central Poland
and a man who would later be hanged for war crimes, thought the Soviets just as callous as he was.
That winter in the Kremlin, Stalin moved to strengthen the Soviet grip on Eastern Poland.
He was motivated in part by feelings of vengeance.
20 years before, he'd participated, as a member of this Bolshevik force, in the 1920 war against Poland.
The Poles had defeated them and Stalin had been humiliated.
Now he would pay them back.
Stalin and his head of secret police, Beria, declared that the Polish veterans of this war long ago
were now a threat to the Soviet state.
Beria's NKVD were ordered to comb this area of eastern Poland
and identify the veterans, along with any others who might be considered anti-Soviet.
TRANSLATION: I was given another officer to help me.
We started to count their families.
By February it was all completed and then we were ordered
to resettle them.
And it wasn't just individuals who were targeted.
Stalin and Beria had ordered that their entire families were to be forcibly deported as well.
TRANSLATION: They bashed on the door with a fist or a weapon and shouted "Open!"
It was all very brutal.
They told my father when they pushed him inside to sit down on the floor
and put his hands over his head.
And in half an hour we had to pack.
The NKVD officer was looking at his watch and gave us only half hour to leave our home.
But we couldn't stop crying all the time, we were crying all the time.
TRANSLATION: It was a difficult task.
Very difficult.
Then I was young and it was just do, do, do.
But now when I think about it, to leave kids without milk or anything, it was a very hard thing to do.
When I grew up I started to think about it. What kind of task was that?
Of course we shouldn't have done that when I think about it,
and I thought about it then, but it's one thing to think and another to do.
This was just the first wave of deportations, successive waves
carried away from eastern Poland others the Soviets wanted rid of.
Several hundred thousand people were deported to remote parts
of the Soviet Union, where in the harsh conditions many died.
TRANSLATION: The deportation of the locals from the western territories
which looked horrible,
was nonetheless not a surprise to us because we'd seen it all before.
We were raised to believe that these were enemies of the people
and that they had to be deported.
At the time it was the norm for us.
Back in Moscow, Soviet planners knew that the relationship
with the Nazis was bringing many benefits.
Not just more territory but access to military technology as well.
But the Soviets weren't getting all this for free.
In return they gave the Nazis, officially, raw materials like oil and wheat.
But they also gave them secret help.
Something Ribbentrop had first requested during his visit
to the Kremlin the previous September.
But the Soviets didn't help out in quite the way the Nazis thought they would.
They allowed the Germans a base not in the city of Murmansk but
in a wilderness many miles away, at a place the Germans called
Basis Nord.
For the Soviets, the existence of a German base in this remote area
north of Murmansk, was one of the biggest secrets of the war.
Its presence proved they were directly helping the German war
machine, something they wanted to hide from the rest of the world.
The Soviets didn't even allow the German sailors ashore.
They had to stay on their ships anchored in the bay for months on end.
Their mood was captured in a diary written in April and May
1940 by Dr Kampf, ship's doctor on the German supply ship, Phoenicia.
"There was a really depressive atmosphere on board today.
"There is a lot of friction."
HE SPEAKS IN GERMAN
"Some have written letters of complaint to the High Command.
"We feel completely abandoned and lonely."
Dr Kampf's later diary entries make clear that, cut off from
all civilisation as they were,
many of the crew suffered mental health problems.
Not least the captain, who at one point threatened to kill himself.
HE CONTINUES IN GERMAN
This wasn't just one of the most
secret missions of the war,
it was also one of the most depressed.
But Stalin had been true to his word and allowed a German naval supply base in Soviet waters.
While he was keeping his promise to the Nazis,
Stalin turned his attention to the fate of these people.
Polish officers,
who together with other key figures in Polish society,
had been captured during the Soviet invasion of Eastern Poland in 1939.
Most were kept in special Soviet camps.
The Soviet authorities did not consider these captured Poles
"normal" prisoners of war.
As prominent figures in Polish society, they were all considered a potential threat.
As a result they were closely interrogated about their beliefs and motivations.
HE SPEAKS IN RUSSIAN
One of the aims of the NKVD interrogators was to
see if these Poles were prepared to collaborate with the Soviets.
The NKVD described the attitude of the majority of the Poles as "obstinate".
And they were increasingly perceived as a problem.
In the Kremlin in the early hours of the 5th March 1940,
Stalin finally sealed their fate.
Stalin and a number of other senior Soviet figures signed
one of the most notorious documents of the whole war.
A document that the Soviet Union denied even existed
until the fall of Communism.
HE SPEAKS IN RUSSIAN
Stalin's decision would lead to the murder of nearly 22,000 members of the Polish elite.
Most of them were imprisoned in one of these three camps in the Soviet Union.
Starting in April, those from Ostashkov were transferred,
a few hundred at a time, to the city of Kalinin and its NKVD prison.
What happened here remained a secret until a Russian military
investigation in the early 1990s uncovered the truth.
And in the process, found Dmitry Tokarev, who had helped
arrange the killings personally.
TRANSLATION: I should tell you that on the first night they brought 300 people.
I thought it was too many.
The night was short and we could only work during the hours of darkness.
I saw all that horror.
They came in and a few minutes later Blokhin was wearing special clothing,
brown leather apron, brown leather gloves with cuffs over his elbows.
This produced a horrible impression on me.
I saw an executioner.
Once the killers were ready, the Poles were taken from their cells one by one to an interrogation room
where their names were checked against the list of those to be murdered.
TRANSLATION: The mechanics of the killing were worked out by Blokhin
together with the commandant of our administrative board, Rubanov.
They covered the doors to the shooting cells that led
to the corridor so the sounds of the shootings couldn't be heard.
Then the accused, well let's call them that, were brought through the corridor.
They were brought into the cells to be shot.
The NKVD killed around 250 people a night for several weeks
until all of the 6,311 Poles allocated to them had been murdered.
But when Tokarev recounted the crime 51 years later,
it was not the suffering
of the Poles he remembered, but that of his own killers.
I want to say the following:
it was certainly a horrible business.
Rubanov, for instance, went mad.
Pavlov, my first deputy, shot himself dead.
Sukharev, my driver, shot himself dead, and even Blokhin shot himself dead.
There were three main killing sites, including this one in the west of the Soviet Union,
the forest of Katyn, where nearly 4,500 more Poles were shot by open graves and then buried.
In total, 21,857 Poles were murdered,
a crime that had only been made possible because the Germans
and the Soviets had agreed to dismantle Poland.
Just two months later, the relationship between the Germans and the Soviets was shaken,
because the Germans conquered France in fewer than six weeks.
On 22 June 1940, Hitler signed an armistice with the French at Compiegne, in the same railway
carriage in which the Germans had formally agreed their surrender at
the end of the First World War.
It was a triumph for Hitler.
But a major problem for Stalin.
The whole of his strategy had been based on the belief the Germans
would be occupied in fighting the war in the west for some time,
just as they had in the First World War.
It was a policy that now lay in ruins.
Stalin now decided that it was more important than ever before to keep the Nazis happy.
Deliveries of raw materials accelerated,
and the Soviets helped the Germans in one of their most daring naval missions.
Here in August 1940, off Teriberka Bay
in the far north of the Soviet Union, lay a German ship called
the Komet.
The Komet appeared to be a normal merchant ship, but was
actually an armed German raider.
In one of the most secret voyages of the war, the Komet planned on
sailing through the ice fields
at the top of the Soviet Union to emerge in the Pacific Ocean
and attack Allied ships.
And the Germans could only attempt this journey
with the help of Soviet icebreakers, one of them called the Stalin.
The Russians guided us in those areas where we could drive ourselves.
They had a better eye for the ice, for happenings on the ice,
and when we later got stuck, the icebreakers helped us.
I would like to say they were friendly,
they were reserved but friendly, and for us we liked them.
We saw they were good people.
There were no difficulties,
no upsets.
It all went smoothly.
The Russians were on our side.
You could say that.
This is the sinking by the Komet of the 17,000-ton Allied transport Rangitane,
just one of the seven ships that the Komet destroyed during its months on the far side of the world,
a catalogue of devastation only made possible by the
direct help of the Soviet Navy.
The head of the German navy was pleased with Soviet cooperation -
so pleased that in September 1940 the German Naval Attache in Moscow
was sent to the headquarters of the Soviet Navy to deliver a personal letter of thanks.
In the letter, Grand Admiral Raeder put on record his gratitude
for the immense help the Soviets had provided to the German navy.
The Soviets, of course, officially claimed they were still neutral so, not surprisingly, they never replied.
Ever since this triumphant return to Berlin after the victory over France,
Hitler had been contemplating his next move.
He'd always desired the destruction of the Soviet Union and what he
regarded as the centre of a worldwide
Jewish Bolshevik conspiracy.
And despite the non-aggression pact,
he thought now was the time to do it.
On 31 July 1940 he announced to his military commanders that the German
Armed Forces must plan for an attack on the Soviet Union.
And to them it made sense.
We knew that, in two years' time, at the end of 1942 beginning of 1943,
the English would be ready, the Americans would be ready, the Russians would be ready, too,
and then we would have to deal with all three of them at the same time.
We had to try and remove the greatest threat from the East,
which we'd have to face by the end of 1942.
At the time, it seemed possible.
Though Stalin felt Hitler might eventually declare
war on the Soviet Union, he didn't think it would happen any time soon.
But, ever wary, he agreed that Molotov should go on a mission
to Berlin to see if he could discover more about German intention.
But the truth was very different.
There wasn't much mutual trust around when Molotov arrived in
Berlin on 12th November 1940.
The Soviets were now deeply
suspicious of Nazi intentions in Eastern Europe, and Hitler was still
planning to invade the Soviet Union, though he had not yet given the final go-ahead.
And the atmosphere wasn't helped by the arrival of an unwanted visitor.
The British bombed Berlin on the night of November 13th.
Churchill later admitted that the British had known
Molotov was in the German capital, and that they'd "not wished to be entirely left out of proceedings".
With the British bombers overhead, Molotov and Ribbentrop were forced
to meet in an air raid shelter.
By now it was clear that the two sides had little left in common.
Ribbentrop was even trying to get the Soviets to stop worrying about
what the Nazis might do in Eastern Europe, and attack
the British Empire in India.
In Moscow there were other signs of anxiety about the
relationship with the Germans.
Here at the Lubyanka, the headquarters of the NKVD, discussions were being
held about the formation of a surprising new fighting force.
A small number of Polish officers hadn't been killed back in the spring.
They had agreed to collaborate with the Soviets.
They were to form a new Polish military unit to fight under the
overall command of the Red Army.
In October 1940, several of them attended a dinner at the Lubyanka,
hosted by the head of the secret police, Lavrenti Beria.
HE SPEAKS IN RUSSIAN
They still believed that the other Polish officers remained in prison camps,
though, in reality, they had all been murdered by Beria's men six months before.
Meantime, Hitler ordered preparations to be
stepped up for the biggest land invasion in history.
Here in the forests of East Prussia, a massive new military headquarters
was being built.
And with military movements throughout the Nazi empire, Soviet spies soon learnt of Hitler's plans.
For a very long time, beginning October 1940,
I regularly received information on how the preparations
about the war were going in the west.
In wartime Belgium, spymaster Anatoly Gurievich gathered much
of his information from listening to drunken German officers.
They were drinking quite a lot and talking to each other.
I remembered what they said, and it all said that the war
had to start May/June 1941.
These people said to me that they were ordered to finish moving troops before May 1941.
Intelligence report after intelligence report pointed to the same conclusion:
the Germans were planning to attack.
Stalin didn't believe them.
He thought the Germans just wanted to put pressure on him.
But two of his senior military staff disagreed.
In May 1941 Zhukov and Timoshenko even drew up a plan to launch a
pre-emptive attack into the Germans
massed on the Soviet border, and presented it to their boss.
Five weeks later, Germany attacked the Soviet Union.
In the early hours of Sunday 22 June 1941, Stalin received
a call from General Zhukov.
The German Ambassador to Moscow, Count Schulenburg,
arrived in the Kremlin in the early morning of 22nd June.
It was the first formal notification from the Germans
that anything was seriously wrong with the relationship between the two countries.
Now that the Germans had betrayed him, in desperation Stalin had to form a new relationship -
with the British.
But the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill,
soon found he could not give Stalin what he wanted.
We shall have little chance of getting even a third of the ships through safely.
And it looked as if the Soviet Union was beginning to fall apart.
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