This programme contains some strong language and scenes which some viewers may find disturbing
It's 1941 and the Soviets are
struggling to repel a Nazi invasion.
In the Kremlin, Stalin demonstrates his unique style of leadership.
And drama reconstructions carefully
sourced from archival material
reveal the surprising nature
of the Soviets' relationship with their new ally, the British.
With German troops close to Moscow,
the British Foreign Secretary tries to party at the Kremlin.
TRANSLATOR: Do your generals ever get drunk?
They don't often get the chance.
While documents available only since
the fall of Communism
expose the previously unknown machinations of the Americans...
Can I say a few words, Mr Molotov?
..as secret arrangements are made behind the scenes.
I recommend that you paint a harrowing picture of the situation in the Soviet Union.
It builds into a history that reveals just why, as the war progressed,
Stalin came to believe his new allies, the British and Americans,
were betraying him.
In the early hours of Sunday 29th June 1941,
Joseph Stalin, the
supreme leader of the Soviet Union,
decided to pay a surprise visit to his top military commanders.
It was a week since the German invasion and there had been bad news from the front line.
Stalin now wanted to find out for himself just what was going wrong
as more than three million German soldiers pushed forward into the Soviet Union.
PATRIOTIC MUSIC
In the quickest advance in military history,
the Germans had travelled nearly 200 miles into Soviet territory within a week.
TRANSLATION: Our division was in the second wave of the attack.
There was practically no resistance in the areas near the border.
When we did encounter Russians, they were dissolving and were fleeing.
The reality was even worse than Stalin and the Politburo had feared.
In just seven days, the Soviets had lost over 100,000 soldiers.
The Red Army was simply too ill-trained and too ill-equipped to stop the Germans.
HE TALKS IN RUSSIAN, FRUSTRATED
As Stalin was now well aware,
if the Germans carried on their advance at this rate, they would be in Moscow within a few weeks.
CHURCH BELL CHIMES
In the face of the German advance, the Soviet Secret Police committed atrocities.
Most infamously, here in Lvov in Eastern Poland.
The city of Lvov had been occupied by the Soviets for the past two years.
As part of their brutal rule, the Soviet Secret Police
at Brygidki prison had interrogated and tortured political prisoners.
HE SHOUTS IN RUSSIAN
Now knowing the Germans were close,
they murdered en masse the inmates they considered
the most dangerous to the regime, and then set fire to the prison.
For the Nazis, no strangers to atrocities themselves,
it was a propaganda coup.
All together in Lvov, the Soviet Secret Police
shot around 4,000 people before retreating in disarray.
And behind the front line,
there was panic even among senior figures in the Red Army.
At the headquarters of the South-Western front within days of the war beginning,
a shaken Lieutenant General Nikolai Vashugin reported to Nikita Khrushchev,
then the chief political commissar for the area.
At his dacha outside Moscow, Stalin was also feeling the pressure.
He hadn't turned up to work at the Kremlin on Monday 30th June.
And so the key figures in the Politburo decided to pay him a visit.
Stalin was now at his weakest.
The Politburo knew that he had ignored military intelligence which had given clear warning
of the Germans' intention to invade the Soviet Union.
THEY TALK IN RUSSIAN
According to members of the
Politburo who were present that day,
Stalin believed he was about to be forcibly removed from power and arrested.
Wounded as he was, Stalin was still too powerful for them.
But outside Moscow, Stalin's stranglehold on the Soviet population was weakening.
Here in Ukraine, in the west of the Soviet Union,
many people nursed a deep hatred of Stalin and his policies.
HYMN SINGING
In the 1930s Stalin had persecuted the church and pushed through forced collectivisation,
which had led to mass starvation and the death of around seven million people.
Many here longed for a Ukraine independent of the rule of Moscow.
And in those early days of the invasion, some Ukrainians even welcomed the Germans.
TRANSLATION: The political situation was that our enemy's enemy is our friend.
The Germans who fought against the Soviet Union were perceived by us as allies.
Especially since everyone was hoping that they would immediately set up a Ukrainian state.
Everything was ready, and the state of readiness was such
that the collapse of the Soviet Union which happened in the '90s
could have happened then.
This view that the Soviet Union was about to collapse in the face of the German invasion
was not confined to Ukraine.
'This is the BBC Home Forces and Overseas Programme.'
The British War Office told the BBC to avoid giving the impression that
Soviet resistance would last much longer than six weeks.
And while the British timescale of six weeks was soon proved wrong,
it certainly still looked, in the summer of 1941,
as if the Soviet Union would lose the war by Christmas.
The Germans took 2.5 million Soviet prisoners in less than four months.
Here are some of them being thrown scraps of food by their German guards.
Nazi ideology said these people were sub-human.
They were systematically mistreated, starved and beaten,
and the majority were to die in German captivity.
In October 1941, German newspapers announced to the world that the war was effectively won.
PATRIOTIC MUSIC
As the Germans closed on Moscow, a way out was prepared for Stalin.
His armoured train waited at the central station ready,
if he gave the order,
to carry him further east to safety.
In the Kremlin, a crisis meeting was called to decide what to do.
Though Lavrentiy Beria, head of the secret police, had already made up his mind.
The Soviet leadership was in turmoil,
under even greater threat than in the disastrous early moments of the war.
The desperate nature of this meeting, on 19th October 1941,
remained secret until the fall of Communism.
Red Army soldiers dug in
here in these fields on the outskirts of the city.
New defence works were built directly behind them,
manned by special units of the Soviet Secret Police,
who aimed their guns not at the Germans
but at soldiers of the Red Army who dared to retreat.
TRANSLATION: We forced them to fight to the death.
If they resisted or ran away, we eliminated them.
We shot them. That's all.
They weren't fighters any more.
It was hard. It was bad.
I understand.
But what can you do?
Stalin had decided he would make a stand and stay in Moscow.
As a result, everyone else had to stay as well.
This was how he dealt personally that autumn with requests from the army for tactical withdrawals.
THEY TALK IN RUSSIAN
On the phone was Commissar Stepanov.
BIG BEN CHIMES
At this time of crisis, Stalin
thought his new allies, the British,
weren't doing much to help.
Churchill was in two minds about the Soviet Union.
He despised Communism, but he also valued anyone who fought against the Nazis.
Just before the Germans had attacked the Soviet Union,
he'd said if Hitler invaded Hell,
he'd consider a favourable reference to the Devil.
And in the late summer and autumn of 1941,
the British military relationship with the Devil got off to a bad start.
More than a thousand miles away from the fighting in the Soviet Union,
in a frozen wilderness in the Arctic.
This is Spitzbergen,
just 600 miles from the North Pole.
Spitzbergen was important because of one thing.
There were Russian coal mines here.
Though this was officially Norwegian territory,
it was effectively an outpost of the Soviet Union.
The Royal Navy brought a force of Canadian soldiers to Spitzbergen
to evacuate the Soviet miners and others who lived here.
They were also ordered to destroy access to the coal mines,
as there was a fear that the Germans might try and land here later in the war.
The Canadians tackled the task enthusiastically.
The Canadians did manage to demolish a lot of equipment.
But much of the town also accidentally burnt down.
HE TALKS IN RUSSIAN
And from almost the first meeting with the Soviet Consul,
it was obvious that cultural differences were going to cause problems.
He didn't trust the West and wouldn't help with the evacuation.
During one meeting he drank half a bottle of Madeira, two bottles of champagne and then passed out.
The British seized the chance to carry out their orders and evacuate him.
'He was carried onto the trawlers on a stretcher covered by a sheet,
'so that his own people should not know what had happened to him.'
The Soviet Ambassador to London complained about the behaviour of the troops here on Spitzbergen.
Still, despite what happened here,
Stalin knew he needed all the allies he could get.
And he was about to gain another much more powerful one.
Because on December 7th 1941,
the Japanese bombed the United States fleet at Pearl Harbor.
Four days later, Germany, Japan's ally, also declared war on America.
'If you're fit and raring to go, boys, get in to uniform. And why?
'I joined the Marines to knock the Japs off the map.
'I'm in this war for one reason. You know. To pin Hitler's ears back.
'I work hard.
'I know that doing my daily job is vital to my country
'because I am an American.'
The world's biggest economy was now in the war.
And while the Americans knew who they were fighting against,
many didn't seem to know much about who they were fighting with.
We were ignorant Americans
and we didn't know what was going on in Russia.
We should have known.
We should have been aware of it
and they should have taught us something in school,
but they didn't. It wasn't until I got into the Maritime Commission
that I ever knew who Stalin was.
American ships now joined with British and other Allied vessels
and sailed across the Atlantic and then up to the Soviet Union.
These convoys made some of the most dangerous naval voyages of the war.
The storms in the North Atlantic in the wintertime and up in the Barents Sea,
which is north of Russia and Norway,
they are the worst places in the world to be in the wintertime
because the big waves, you cannot get away from them.
And they cannot get away from the storms.
And the big waves come aboard the ship and everything freezes.
45 degree below zero with 50, 60 mile winds.
That stuff freezes immediately it hits the ship.
Having braved the Arctic seas, this was the destination of many of the convoys.
The ice-free Soviet port of Murmansk.
Though the British and other nations also provided aid,
the vast majority of material help from abroad to the Soviets was supplied by the Americans.
And the American sailors soon found they were some of the richest people in town.
There was lots of fraternisation going on.
All of a sudden the captain of the ship yelled around
and he couldn't find any of the crew.
So being the youngest officer of course, my job was to find them.
Do whatever the captain wanted.
So I started searching the ship.
Jim Risk found the crew in a remote part of the ship,
together with a female Soviet dockworker called Olga.
They were all in there, and Olga had gotten a mattress from somewhere
and she was charging two packs of cigarettes a throw.
Having sex, yeah.
So I had to throw Olga off the ship.
And the Russian authorities took a very dim view of that.
They didn't like us telling their people what to do and what not to do.
I did learn very quickly what Communism really was.
All those millions of people they had over there were treated like animals.
Aboard my ship we had six members aboard who were red, who were pink.
We called them Pinkies.
And when we docked back at the end of the year, they were no longer Pinkies.
They had learned...
..what a mistake it was.
HE TALKS IN RUSSIAN
In December 1941, Stalin was trying to build a relationship not just
with the Americans and the British, but with a third new ally - Poland.
And this partnership was to prove the most difficult of all.
Not least because the previous year,
before the Nazis had invaded,
Stalin and Beria, his head of secret
police, had orchestrated a horrific
crime against the Poles.
In the spring of 1940, the Soviet Secret Police had killed more than 20,000 Polish officers
and other Polish citizens considered a threat.
Joseph Stalin had personally signed the document that had led to this mass murder,
but it was a crime that was now becoming increasingly difficult to hide
because his new allies were beginning to ask awkward questions.
In December 1941, a delegation of Poles arrived in Moscow,
led by General Sikorski, the head of the Polish government in exile.
He wanted to know what had happened to the missing officers.
Even though the Poles were now allies of the Soviets,
this was to be a meeting fraught with suspicion and distrust on all sides.
Not that you would have guessed it from the newsreel coverage at the time.
'Another historic day in Moscow is marked when General Sikorski,
'the Polish Commander in Chief, and Mr Stalin together sign a declaration of friendship
'and mutual assistance between the Polish republic and the Soviet Union.
'A sincere and good natured atmosphere pervades the Moscow Council Chamber
'which augurs well for the future.'
HE TALKS IN RUSSIAN
The newsreels made no mention of the strange disappearance of the Polish officers.
But behind closed doors, Sikorski, a plain-speaking man himself,
had no problem in raising this most sensitive issue.
Stalin hadn't just lied about the fate of the missing Poles.
He'd also lied about the fate of their families.
Because even as Stalin met with General Sikorski,
many of the relatives of the
murdered Polish citizens were still
in exile in places like Kazakhstan,
where they'd been forcibly sent by the Soviet Secret Police in 1940.
TRANSLATION: It was a situation with no exit.
We discovered later that in 1941 there'd been an amnesty of Polish citizens.
Nobody told us about it.
Together we rented a dug-out house in Bulajevo.
The house was terrible.
Apart from all of us, there were 12 other families,
who had also been re-located, already living there.
And we had a corner of the dug-out and just the basket we had taken with us from home.
That was where we slept.
Conditions were so harsh in winter that when one of the deportees died,
their body was kept by the entrance to the dug-out until the spring thaw.
We had to walk past her.
Me on the way to school, and my mother on her way to work.
My mother said to the head doctor,
"I can no longer work. I've been living next to dead bodies for a couple of months now.
"It just isn't possible."
It is impossible to comprehend.
The fact that the Poles were now allies of the Soviets
made no difference to the suffering of Nina Andreyeva and her mother,
who had to try to survive in some of the harshest conditions in the Soviet Union.
The Western leaders knew that Stalin
and the rest of the Politburo
here in Moscow were capable of committing atrocities.
But they also knew they needed the Red Army to keep fighting the Nazis.
So Western politicians like Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Secretary who visited Moscow in December 1941,
tried to make the best of this somewhat unusual situation.
THEY TOAST IN RUSSIAN
Despite Stalin's fearsome reputation, Eden had personally warmed to him.
He said later that he "tried hard to think of Stalin as dripping with
"the blood of his opponents but somehow the picture wouldn't fit".
As the drink flowed, the banquet in Eden's honour became rowdy.
Eventually one of the junior secretaries at the British embassy in Moscow
wrestled with a drunken Marshal Voroshilov.
For Eden, the perfect English gentleman,
it was a glimpse into another world.
TRANSLATOR: Do your generals ever get drunk?
They don't often get the chance.
But while socially Eden's visit was a success, politically it was more of a problem.
Eden had arrived in Moscow on December 15th 1941.
He had discovered immediately that Stalin had a surprising idea about
how best to cement the friendship between the two countries.
The British were shocked that, even with German troops close to Moscow,
Stalin was thinking so far ahead to the post-war world.
HE TALKS IN RUSSIAN
He wanted to make a secret deal with the British.
One that allowed the Soviets to keep the massive amounts of territory they'd snatched before 1941...
..including almost half of Poland.
My difficulty
is that I cannot sign a document
without consulting my colleagues,
and we've not turned our minds to these problems yet.
I cannot do this without consulting the Prime Minister,
and I must also talk to the Americans.
When he heard Stalin's demands,
Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister, was incensed
and rejected them outright.
He wrote to Eden that the British
had never recognised Stalin's claim
to Eastern Poland,
and reminded him that the Soviets had acquired this territory
only "by acts of aggression in shameful collusion with Hitler."
But that was all behind the scenes.
In public, the focus was on how the war was progressing.
Newsreels showed Eden's visit close to the frontline just west of Moscow.
Here he saw evidence of a transformation.
The Germans had been ill-prepared for the harsh Soviet winter.
Their advance had stalled.
And the Red Army had counter-attacked.
TRANSLATION: After the artillery fire, we jumped into the trenches
and there would still be some Germans there
who hadn't yet run away,
and we'd attack immediately, and get hold of the trenches.
The stronger ones survived in this hand-to-hand fighting.
I was strong.
I got close and bayoneted him,
right into the chest, it was quick.
Through his coat. It was like piercing a loaf of bread.
He didn't put up any resistance.
The Germans had been raised in a gentle way.
They weren't as strong as we Siberians.
TRANSLATION: But I could well imagine that the physical sort of engagement, of beating,
this was not the speciality of the German man, if it could be avoided.
Our infantry, for example, never even practised with bayonets.
The Red Army forced the Germans to retreat.
In some places more than a hundred miles back from Moscow.
It wasn't a total victory,
but compared to what had gone before for the Soviets,
it was a cause for celebration.
LAUGHING
RUSSIAN CHOIR MUSIC
Buoyed by the success of the Red Army outside Moscow,
and against the advice of his generals,
Stalin now proposed a massively ambitious plan.
He wanted Soviet forces to mount a major offensive in the south in the spring of 1942.
But it was one thing to hold the Germans in winter,
quite another to be able to deal with them once the snows had melted.
Here, outside the city of Kharkov, six Soviet armies assembled
and, on 12th May 1942, they advanced
towards the German lines.
TRANSLATION: We advanced on and on without meeting any resistance.
We kept marching and marching.
We didn't give much thought to the fact
there weren't any Germans around.
We thought we were marching towards Berlin.
In fact, the Germans were luring us into a trap.
We had big losses.
The Germans had allowed the Red Army
to march forward unopposed
so that they could then catch them in a massive encirclement.
And now several hundred thousand Red Army soldiers were trapped.
Just as there had been panic the previous year in the wake of the initial German invasion,
now inside the encirclement there was panic once again.
TRANSLATION: I saw how a general put a pistol to his head and shot himself.
GUNSHOT
The whole picture was just so shocking, so devastating.
I thought I was no longer there.
The Red Army had outnumbered the Germans on the battlefield of Kharkov,
and yet still Stalin's ambitious offensive had ended in catastrophe.
Stalin had refused to let his generals pull back from Kharkov
once they'd realised the German plan.
But as usual, the Soviet leader refused to take responsibility for his mistakes.
He searched for scapegoats like Nikita Khrushchev,
the main political commissar responsible for the attack.
Despite this humiliation, Khrushchev was lucky.
Unlike many who had disappointed Stalin in the past,
he survived.
This was Kharkov under German occupation in 1942.
And these were the very Soviet citizens the Red Army had just failed to liberate.
The Nazis had sealed the city,
and only those who worked for the Nazi regime received food.
As a result, the majority of the population began to starve.
'First they killed dogs and ate them.
But the dogs didn't last long.
So they ate rats, pigeons, crows.
There were some people who excavated fresh graves to get the bodies.
And they boiled them and cooked them in all possible ways.
The Germans here in the Soviet Union were engaged in what Hitler called "a war of annihilation".
In total, around 27 million Soviet citizens were to die during the war,
16 million of them civilians.
In the spring of 1942 it looked like the Germans could be here to stay.
Hitler's forces occupied all of Belorussia, all of the Baltic states,
most of Ukraine, and were still threatening Moscow.
In desperation, the Soviet Union turned to its allies for more help.
Which is why Vyacheslav Molotov went to Washington in May 1942
to meet with President Roosevelt.
And the way these discussions went would make Stalin mistrust the West for years.
Molotov,
like most of the Soviet leadership,
was no ordinary politician,
but a former revolutionary.
Inside his suitcase the White House
valets found first some sausages
and then a pistol.
The Secret Service men did not like visitors with pistols,
but on this occasion, nothing was said.
Mr Molotov evidently thought he might have to defend himself,
and also he might be hungry.
Molotov had made the journey to ask for an immediate invasion of France
to take pressure off the Red Army.
An operation then called the Second Front,
but which was eventually, two years later, to be launched as D-Day.
MOLOTOV MUTTERS IN RUSSIAN
Before his first major meeting with President Roosevelt,
Molotov had a surprise visitor late at night.
Can I say a few words, Mr Molotov,
before the meeting tomorrow?
It was Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt's special advisor.
TRANSLATOR: Of course. Sit down, please.
No, thank you.
I can tell you that President Roosevelt
is a very, very strong supporter of the Second Front in 1942.
But the American generals...
don't see the real necessity of the Second Front.
TRANSLATOR SPEAKS IN RUSSIAN
Because of this I recommend that you paint a harrowing picture of the situation in the Soviet Union,
so that the American generals realise the seriousness of the situation.
HE TALKS IN RUSSIAN
The situation in our front is genuinely serious.
Very serious.
Thank you for your advice.
This use of Hopkins as an intermediary was one of the classic tactics
Roosevelt used to manipulate people or, as he put it, "handle" them.
'That was a favourite word of Roosevelt's. "Handle" people.
'I can "handle" someone.'
That phrase stuck in my mind,
and I kept thinking of it as the war went on.
Roosevelt was always thinking he could "handle" people,
no matter who or what it was.
That he would pull through as the top dog.
The next morning, Molotov met President Roosevelt.
He was careful to take the advice he had been offered in secret the night before,
and stressed now in front of the American military how badly the war was going for the Red Army.
He even suggested that Hitler might defeat the Soviet Union in 1942,
with dire consequences for the Western allies.
I would like you to understand the following.
In 1943, we will be much stronger,
but it may also be that Hitler will be even stronger than us.
Therefore delaying the Second Front may not be as advantageous as we expect.
Mr Molotov has expressed this very clearly.
We want very much to open a second front. That is our hope.
That is our desire.
There remains the question... can it be done?
Together with the Navy and the Army,
we are continuing to examine how to transfer our troops to the Continent.
General Marshall?
There are currently
United States officers working
on the problem, and in London, too.
If all of this work is completed this year,
it may be possible to open a second front in 1942.
Thank you. I'll make sure the President gets this.
The draft communique after the talks
said that an "understanding"
had been reached about a second front happening in 1942.
But to the American high command,
this "understanding" looked
suspiciously like a firm commitment.
One they felt they might not be able to fulfil.
Mr President, General Marshall has sent you his views on the Soviet Union's draft communique.
He feels that the sentence about the Second Front
in the joint communique proposed by the Soviet Union is just too strong.
He wants the reference to the Second Front happening in 1942 to be taken out.
Leave it as it is. Yes, Mr President.
Despite his general's misgivings,
Roosevelt wanted to give Molotov good news to take home with him
and encourage the Soviets to keep fighting.
'Near Washington, a giant Soviet bomber stands poised for flight, her passenger - Soviet Commissar Molotov.
'He came for a week of conferences with President Roosevelt.
'Here he reached understandings on opening a second European front.'
This Second Front was needed more than ever.
Because the Germans were planning a massive summer offensive across these steppes in Southern Russia.
PATRIOTIC MUSIC
This was terrain ideally suited to their Blitzkrieg tactics.
TRANSLATION: Nobody complained in any way. They were confident.
And it was a heroic image to watch a tank whizz by.
We were told what was happening. That was, that we were resuming the attack and that we were going
towards the east, probably for the final destination of Stalingrad.
In Moscow, in the face of this German threat,
Stalin was anxious to know just what his allies were going to do to help.
HE TALKS IN RUSSIAN
The wording of the communique from the Roosevelt talks was now crucial.
Just as the American generals
had feared, this was seen as a firm
promise to launch D-Day in 1942.
But Stalin was about to learn shocking news.
The Soviet Union wasn't going to receive more help from the Western Allies, but less.
To begin with, the Admiralty in London were having problems
supplying the Soviet Union with aid via the Arctic convoys.
The convoys were increasingly at risk
because of the long summer nights and attacks from U-boats and planes.
And then in July 1942 came the disaster of this convoy
en route to the Soviet Union, called PQ17.
Shortly after these pictures were taken,
the convoy received one of the most controversial orders of the Second World War.
The ships were ordered to scatter
because the British had received reports,
false information, as it turned out,
that German war ships were on the way.
And the Royal Navy escort ships were ordered to change course.
You know, you couldn't believe it.
Unbelievable, because...
..we were there to escort this convoy to Russia,
and, you know, to think that the Navy
would desert a convoy,
it just didn't make sense.
It meant that the merchant ships were easy targets for the German warplanes based in northern Norway.
This is footage of their attack on PQ17.
TRANSLATION: A part of the convoy had dissolved completely.
And I remember the attacks that we had with three airplanes, onto one single ship.
You choose one target, but every ship's important.
And then you throw down your bombs, finish it, and that's it.
Of the 39 ships in PQ17, 24 were destroyed.
More than 60% of the convoy.
It was one of the greatest disasters
in British naval history.
As a result all Arctic convoys were immediately postponed.
Then there was further catastrophic news for Stalin.
Because of military setbacks in North Africa and elsewhere,
the Western Allies told him there could be no Second Front in 1942.
Stalin felt betrayed.
Increasingly, he believed he simply
couldn't trust his new allies,
Britain and America.
So back in London, Winston Churchill resolved to do something about it.
Churchill decided to make one of the most arduous journeys undertaken by a political leader during the war.
He would fly many thousands of miles in an unheated bomber to Moscow
to try and make friends with Stalin.
I've discussed it with Maisky and he has informed Stalin.
The Red Army is engaged in one of the bloodiest battles of the war, at Stalingrad.
TRANSLATION: It was Stalin's order not to surrender Stalingrad.
There was a lot of faith in Stalin.
And behind closed doors the Americans want to come to a secret arrangement with Stalin.
Britain after this war will be financially through for a long time.
So post-war peace depends on the unity of our two countries in this situation.
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