[ Woman singing ]
[ Ominous music ]
NARRATOR: A people over 200 million strong
spread over 1/6 of the Earth's surface.
The Russian people have survived world war, revolution,
and a bitter civil war.
Now they come together in mourning for Lenin,
the founder of their new state.
With his death, the people of the newly created Soviet Union
are about to receive a new leader.
Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin are leading contenders.
[ Faint sobbing ]
But unknown to the Soviet people, Lenin -- close to death --
has drawn up a testament,
an assessment of the leaders who will come after him.
The outstanding personalities he recognizes are Trotsky and Stalin.
But his postscript contains a political time bomb --
a damning condemnation of Stalin's character
and the suggestion that the post of General Secretary
should be taken from him.
The testament is never made public.
Despite the efforts of Lenin's wife, Krupskaya,
political maneuvering among the leadership group
ensures a limited access to the testament
at the 1 3th Party Congress,
and only then, under an oath of secrecy.
Stalin has surmounted his first hurdle on his road to power.
As he consolidates his position,
nobody is allowed close enough to guess
what really occupies Joseph Stalin's mind.
But from now until his death,
Stalin will wage war on his own people.
For 30 years, manipulating lives
with propaganda and state-sponsored lies,
controlling them not by personality or political genius,
but by the hypnosis of terror.
ln 30 years, he will annihilate nearly 20 million people.
[ Cheers ]
[ Shot fired ]
By shooting. . .
. . .or starvation. . .
. . .or by transportation to remote areas of the vast country
to be worked to death as slave labor.
Joseph Stalin will bind in a new serfdom
a vast nation of innocent men, women, and children
to achieve for himself the most absolute form of power ever achieved.
And incredibly, within this long drawn-out internal war,
alongside it, these same Soviet people will be called upon
to fight back in another war at a cost of another 25 million people
against another dictator, Adolf Hitler.
This is a war we more readily recognize,
a war we now in the 20th century have come to see
as war founded on myth,
conducted on the basis of race hatred,
with fleeing civilians,
ghetto populations,
and the enormity of planned extermination.
But in 1 92 4, Lenin's warning against the dark nature of Joseph Stalin
is carefully concealed from the Soviet citizens
who mourn the dead leader's passing.
For the moment,
they believe the state's loud proclamations
of a new era in the life of man.
[ Parade music ]
These are days of real social experiment,
of improving standards in health, of sharply increasing literacy,
days of hope.
[ Singing ]
For the moment, Stalin is regarded even by those close to him
as a visionary leader,
capable of making the dreams of the October Revolution come true.
lt is a time when powerful propaganda tools are being forged.
Soviet citizens begin to see themselves
as living in a society more just, more equal, more law-abiding,
and more peace-loving than others.
They are perhaps even beginning to reflect their own image
of comradeship, hard work, Soviet patriotism.
ln these early days, acclaim for Joseph Stalin is unforced.
At party congresses in the mid '20s,
delegates chant his name not from fear, but from genuine admiration.
And he responds.
Brand-new apartment blocks are planned for his appointees
in the Communist Party and Soviet establishments in different cities.
ln the capital, the first designs are drawn up,
and construction begins
on a giant apartment block on the Moscow River.
The huge modern block on the embankment
is planned to be an example of modern socialist living --
spacious, clean, comfortable.
Here, the high officials of the new state will be housed.
The new building -- built to celebrate the Soviet present --
faces the great Cathedral of Christ the Savior,
a potent symbol of the czarist past.
ln these years, among the citizens of the great Union of Republics,
belief grows that the new dawn of socialism
is about to touch the horizon.
The reality will be shudderingly different.
lt will be a reality molded by Stalin with unrivaled ruthlessness.
Behind what Trotsky called his ''yellow eyes''
flares an insatiable appetite.
[ Speaking Russian ]
lNTERPRETER: He was a very vain man.
He tried to conceal it,
but you understand this was a very difficult thing for him to do.
NARRATOR: One man has access
to the most restricted of Stalin's personal papers.
Professor Volkogonov is the author
of a biography of Stalin
which has been widely praised
in the West.
[ Speaking Russian ]
lNTERPRETER: Who was Stalin? What kind of person was he?
Stalin was a man with a powerful but evil mind,
a man who liked two things in this world -- power and fame.
But he liked power the most.
And the more power he had,
the more power he accumulated and kept in his hands,
the more power he wanted.
lt was like a powerful addiction that lasted all his life.
An addiction to power.
NARRATOR: Already, Stalin knows that the Party
is the cockpit of power.
ln four years after Lenin's death,
he has outmaneuvered his political rivals.
Old comrades like Kamenev and Zinoviev,
who helped him conceal the contents of Lenin's damaging testament,
are forced to capitulate.
And Leon Trotsky, Stalin's archrival, is at first exiled,
then deported from the USSR.
The towering figure of Bukharin
makes a public confession of his errors.
Power beyond the Party
will have to be wrenched from more tenacious hands
to transform at a stroke a vast but backward nation
into a truly world-class power.
Even the ambition itself has a medieval, Asiatic ring.
[ Speaking Russian ]
lNTERPRETER: Stalin loved looking at the globe
and pouring over maps.
Even before the beginning of the Finnish War,
he had already ordered that new maps of the Soviet Union
should be published,
with large areas of Finland included in them.
He loved to slowly rotate the globe and look at it.
And it seems to me
he looked at things very much from a global perspective.
He wanted to see the whole globe colored in Soviet red.
And it is not only Stalin who dreams of extending his empire.
Beyond the handspan of the Kremlin, future dangers loom.
ltaly is already a fascist state.
CROWD: Duce!
NARRATOR: ln the Far East, Japan's territorial ambitions smolder.
[ Crowd cheers ]
Adolf Hitler's Nazis are already a national party.
ln many German towns,
its storm troopers are taking control of the streets.
With each election, the Hitler vote rises menacingly.
ln these times, Joseph Stalin is not the only ambitious man
who reflectively fingers the globe.
[ Camera rolls ]
For the Soviet people, this year -- 1 92 8 -- is the watershed.
Stalin's war against his own people
is not declared by Stalin in a single speech on a single day.
[ Speaking Russian ]
lNTERPRETER: Comrade Lenin dreamt
of a 1 00,000 tractors in our fields.
NARRATOR: ln an overwhelmingly agricultural Russia,
at the end of the 1 920s,
over 98 percent of the land is in the hands of individuals,
mostly less than 1 0-acre small holdings.
Less than 2 percent is collectivized in the hands of the state.
Now, a truly astounding decision is taken.
Stalin takes it upon himself to eject from their small holdings
every landowning peasant in this nation of peasants.
Coldly, he accepts that he will cause famine on a huge scale,
suffering beyond anything that has happened
in Russia's history of suffering.
ln the countryside, there is no question of simple reform.
Stalin's aims are to control the crop --
particularly the symbolic grain crop --
and to forcibly dispossess
the landowning small peasantry to Gulags. . .
. . .to form the labor force on the new collective farms.
Collectivization is a storm which breaks slowly.
When it comes, it will involve the starvation of millions,
the imprisonment of millions more,
hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of shootings
in dark courtyards,
and farcical mock trials filmed for a gullible West
eager to believe the great experiment in social justice
is being properly defended.
Perhaps it's coincidence that 1 92 8
sees the return of the Russian writer Maxim Gorky
to the homeland.
Sharing Stalin's own contempt for the peasants,
he has painted them in print as subhumans
who horde while the towns starve.
His welcome is ecstatic.
But Gorky's ideas will prove the keynote
to the propaganda program against those the Party dubbed the ''kulaks,''
the so-called rich peasantry.
So, over rural Russia, the storm gathers and breaks.
As 1 929 ends, the whirlwind batters vast areas of Ukraine
and the Northern Caucasus.
ln this first onslaught,
arrests are made in perhaps a million kulak households.
Heads of families are sent to prepared labor camps,
dependents are deported to Siberia,
while propaganda films create cruel illusions
of peasants celebrating the new reforms.
Stalin's war against the people has opened with a resounding victory.
Now, in the winter of 1 930,
the campaign is extended to include
the whole spectrum of poorer peasants, too.
ln these times, the lives of 1 20 million people
living in 600,000 villages across the breadth of the Soviet Union
will be turned upside down.
Expropriation, eviction, and transportations
become commonplace from Ukraine to Siberia.
Compassion is unthinkable.
ln desperation, peasants secrete grain
or slaughter their beasts before they are expropriated.
This is no secret war secretly conducted.
lts soldiers are youthful special food detachments,
most often recruited from the towns,
and men of the NKVD, Stalin's tools of terror.
lts victories are trumpeted throughout the Soviet Union
as a triumph of the people against grasping, hording kulaks.
There is to be no escape to the towns for the peasantry.
An internal passport system
keeps the dispossessed peasant family on the land.
ln Kazakhstan, nearly 20 percent of the population die of starvation.
Throughout the Soviet Union, whole villages are left without inhabitants.
A million die in the North Caucasus.
ln Ukraine, grain confiscation creates a famine
which kills nearly five million.
This is a man-made disaster.
And in the camps,
over three million newly arrived peasants
in near-starvation conditions
are being worked to death,
reduced, as the up-and-coming young Georgian
Lavrentiy Beria puts it,
''to camp dust.''
''l have seen faces,'' the poet Anna Akhmatova writes,
''l have seen faces turn to bone.''
ln March of 1 930, Stalin publishes his article on collectivization.
He chooses to call it Diz zy with Success.
Yet even while collectivization is gathering pace,
the restless dark mind of Stalin is seeking out other enemies.
The leader's anti-Semitism runs deep.
He establishes a Jewish autonomous area
in distant Birobidzhan near the Chinese border.
He knows from Party experience the thread of nonconformism --
even revolution -- that exists in the Jewish tradition.
To his mind, the location of most Soviet Jews
in the western Soviet Union is not ideal.
But few Jews settle in the East.
Unsurprisingly, they prefer the towns of Ukraine and Belorussia
where they are born.
As collectivization spreads through the countryside,
Soviet Jews for the most part survive the whirlwind
only to reap the Holocaust to come.
Now, Stalin's mind turns in a new direction.
The year 1 92 8 has already seen
the introduction of the first five-year plan.
New construction begins in whole new sectors of the economy.
Machine tool plants, automobile and tractor factories,
and vast communications projects -- railways, canals, roads.
But now the public trials of the mine workers at Shakhty
in the Donetsk region are a warning to industry,
a warning that workers in industry, too,
are to be forced to bend to Stalin's will.
At Shakhty, 55 men are accused of conspiring with foreign powers
to wreck the mines of the Donets Basin.
1 1 are sentenced to death.
The rest, to the slower death of long-term imprisonment.
Stalin proclaims, ''We have internal enemies.
We have external enemies.
This, comrades, must not be forgotten for a single moment.''
The point is hammered home during these collectivization years.
lf industrial production is not reaching the heights set on paper,
intransigence and sabotage of the workers
can be the only reason.
Slogans call for the annihilation of the enemy.
Those who want to restore capitalism will be shot.
Sabotage, treachery,
plots to murder the leader begin to be glibly cobbled together.
Sergei Shchegolkov was 1 7
when he was arrested for plotting to kill Stalin.
lNTERPRETER: Standing before the interrogator,
the first question was,
''Do you know who Stalin is?''
[ Speaking Russian ]
lNTERPRETER: ''Well,'' l said, ''Of course l do. He's our leader.''
Then they asked me why l had wanted to kill him.
l was astounded that they asked this.
Then it began.
[ Speaking Russian ]
Threats, beatings. They held a gun to my neck.
Then hit me with it on my head. All over.
But the worst thing was that they told me to sign a blank confession.
Or they would shoot my mother.
[ Speaking Russian ]
NARRATOR: From the Lubyanka,
Shchegolkov is transported along endless staging posts
on a journey to the unknown.
[ Speaking Russian ]
lNTERPRETER: The transit camps were very depressing places.
Even in winter and early spring, we were only half-dressed.
We stayed in broken-down barracks with holes in the roof
that let the snow in.
When we woke in the morning, we were all covered in snow.
From his last staging post at Kem,
Sergei Shchegolkov was transported to the island of Solovki.
[ Horn blows ]
[ No audible dialogue ]
On the White Sea island monastery of Solovki,
monks have celebrated the rites of orthodoxy for four centuries.
But in Russia, a harsh symbolism is never far away.
Already during Lenin's lifetime, the chants of monks had changed
to the work songs of innumerable prisoners.
Stalin's policies in industry and agriculture
will ensure the stream of new slaves will never run dry.
[ Speaking Russian ]
lNTERPRETER: Before, all the buildings
had belonged to the monks.
There were six three-story buildings converted into prisons --
iron bars, doors with special locks and so on.
At first, it was just a camp.
And then suddenly, it became STON,
which stood for ''Solovki Special Purpose Prison.''
''Ston'' in Russian means ''moan'',
and it was indeed a place of many moans.
And it was to the STON
that the huge numbers of prisoners was sent to serve 25 years.
NARRATOR: ln these years,
the word ''ston'' comes to signify all imprisonment in all labor camps,
predating ''Gulag'' in the grim language of Soviet prisoners.
lNTERPRETER: Furthermore,
all the officials who arrested, interrogated, and deported us
knew very well that we were completely innocent.
NARRATOR: ln these camps,
there is no attempt at communist reeducation.
The object of the system is the brutal extraction of labor.
Through blazing summers and the bitter winters to come,
men like Sergei Shchegolkov are sent out from Solovki Monastery
and from mobile camps along its whole length to work and die
on one of the most trumpeted Soviet achievements of the '30s --
the building of the White Sea Canal.
[ Band members play ]
When the canal is completed and water floods its channels,
thousands of prisoners will be disposed of by drowning.
But the camp at Solovki is just one among the first great Soviet camps
to be established on the islands of the White Sea.
As the collectivization campaign
proves the pressing need for new camps,
millions of new prisoners are dispatched
to other parts of the Soviet Union,
to the harshest areas of Siberia,
and the far northeast where the newly formed Gulag
comes to control a fearsome necklace of camps
stretching the entire length of the Soviet Union.
''They are building a nation'' is the propaganda theme.
lt is a theme many Russians still believe.
But all too often, alongside the great working mass of the Soviet people,
they are the system's zeks, the forced laborers condemned without trial,
driven from the villages of Ukraine, the Caucasus,
the farmland of south Russia, or the deserts of Kazakhstan.
ln regions like Magadan in the far northeast,
the newly-formed Gulag comes to control vast industrial enterprises
in lumber and mining.
ln eastern Siberia, the Gulag is presented as Dalstroy,
the construction facility for the Far East.
These are huge NKVD-run enterprises,
blood brothers in conception
to the great construction enterprises and slave-labor hire companies
which the SS will shortly establish in Germany.
But from camps closer to the great cities,
slave labor is imported to build the Moscow-Volga Canal,
to build more than one in 1 0 new electricity stations,
and to be used as additional labor
in the construction of the great subway
which Khrushchev supervises
for the greater glory of the state and its master.
They are building a nation.
But now, beyond the Soviet Union,
the first gunshots in what will become a world at war.
The Japanese Kwangtung Army,
acting independently of the Tokyo government, invades Manchuria.
lt is an onslaught which brings Japan and the Soviet Union face-to-face
in the Far East.
[ Shots fired ]
The attack is relentlessly pursued against military and civilian targets.
[ Shots and explosions ]
And now perilously close to Soviet western borders,
the German election of January 1 933 sweeps the Nazi Party to victory.
From this moment on,
Adolf Hitler will stand with Joseph Stalin
on an equal pinnacle of power.
[ Crowd cheers ]
He leads a people as yet only partially armed.
He preaches a philosophy
that claims that his people's rightful destiny lies in the East.
ln speech after speech, he lays claim to vast areas of Lebensraum,
living space within the borders of the Soviet Union.
[ Speaking German ]
Now, the destinies of these two great nations
can no longer run peacefully parallel.
Adolf Hitler's own statements
have wrenched them onto a collision course.
Yet Stalin's response to Hitler's rise is not predictable.
The Soviet Union hurries to give recognition to the new Nazi state.
ln May, 1 933, just three months after Hitler becomes chancellor,
Stalin ratifies an extension
of the 1 926 Berlin Treaty of Friendship and Neutrality.
Primakov was a senior Soviet officer and died as a victim of Stalin.
His son quotes a unique passage from Trotsky.
lNTERPRETER: ''The USSR is the only state
that does not have hostile feelings towards Germany.
lt is not concerned about the form and character
of the regime that is in power.''
[ Speaking Russian ]
You see, France and England and other democratic countries
understood full well that the arrival of the Nazis to power
was a threat to the whole world.
But it didn't disturb us.
We just carried on training German pilots and tank commanders
on our territory.
According to the Versailles Treaty,
they were not allowed to do so in their own country.
So, we continued to do it for them.
The fact is we trained our own executioners.
So, if someone says that Stalin was the savior of our motherland
and the father of the nation,
they really ought to understand
that there has never been a worse traitor since Judas.
Across the country,
the Soviet system is able to show dazzling achievements.
Nobody dare mention the devastating cost.
The 1 7th Party Congress records them in full.
Whole new branches of industry in chemicals, synthetics,
and manmade fibers, vast new tractors and automobile plants,
trucks in the Urals, the Dnieper Hydroelectric Project,
and ever-growing literacy levels and levels of secondary education.
The great Party Congress in 1 934 is greeted by Stalin
in gross self acclamation as the ''Congress of Victors.''
The delegates to the Congress are assembled.
Stalin now considers their loyalty.
[ Loud clapping ]
At this Congress, in which adulation of Stalin reaches new heights,
the young Khrushchev.
No shadow of his vigorous denunciation of Stalin
a quarter of a century later crosses his face.
He is one of the up-and-coming princelings of the Party.
Lavrentiy Beria, too.
The monstrous hangman who will serve Stalin in later years
is edging onto the national stage at this Congress.
The best known are the much-photographed stars of the Party,
filmed, praised, and promoted by the press
like a Clark Gable or a Cary Grant.
They are men with nothing less than film-star status.
Prominent among them is Sergei Kirov, a rising Party star,
a member of the Politburo,
tough, ruthless with the lives of others,
but perpetually smiling, energetic, popular.
ln speech after speech,
the Georgian Ordzhonikidze and the flatterer Voroshilov
heaped praise on Stalin as a helmsman of genius.
But among a core group of regional Party secretaries
with firsthand experience of the costs of Stalin's achievements,
the adulation is a mask.
Among the many public votes taken on the last day,
delegates are given the opportunity in secret ballot
to vote for members of the Central Committee
and of course, confirm Stalin as General Secretary.
lt is a formality acceded to by the smiling, indulgent Stalin.
There have been so many formal ballots,
but nobody could have predicted the dramatic result this one was to have.
Now, only hours before Congress breaks up, the votes are counted.
Kirov has just three votes against him.
But, almost unbelievably,
300 delegates had voted against Stalin.
lt confirms the Georgian in all his worst fears,
his nightmares of treachery.
The papers are immediately destroyed, and the results falsified.
Stalin is now shown to have been all but unanimously elected.
But the fate of the delegates and Sergei Kirov himself is sealed.
Of those 1 ,966 delegates,
over a thousand will be murdered
as a new terror sweeps through the administration.
Few of the leading figures are spared,
and for them, it will be no more than the temporary stay of execution.
Of the 1 39-member Central Committee
elected by the Congress of Victors,
98 men will be taken out and shot dead.
Thus far has Stalin brought the Marxist-Leninist dream
in one short decade.
And now, he must face the problem of the popularity of Kirov.
And for a solution, Joseph Stalin looks towards Germany.
Like Stalin's problems with the popular Sergei Kirov,
Hitler has similar problems with his old friend, Ernst Röhm.
Swashbuckling populist leader of the brownshirt thugs
who won the streets for Hitler,
Röhm is now an embarrassment.
ln one devastating night -- the Night of the Long Knives -- Hitler strikes.
Chancellor of the German state,
he personally murders Röhm in a Munich cell.
Conducted by Himmler's brilliant assistant, Reinhard Heydrich,
the Night of the Long Knives is a clean, surgical operation.
[ Crowd chants ]
ln unspoken homage to the German dictator
six months later,
Stalin strikes in Leningrad on his own Night of the Long Knives.
On December 1 , 1 934, Kirov falls to a bullet from an NKVD assassin.
[ Speaking Russian ]
lNTERPRETER: This was an act of terrorism.
One of our state leaders
was murdered.
A very popular person who was loved by everybody.
A magnificent public speaker.
Everyone was charmed by him.
And then suddenly, he was murdered.
How and why could he have been killed?
But when someone telephoned Bukharin and told him about it,
he just put down the phone and said, ''Now Koba will shoot us all.''
[ Marche funèbre plays ]
NARRATOR: At Kirov's funeral,
Stalin behaves like a man bereft of his best friend.
But it is the beginning of countless arrests of Party members.
Everybody who had been involved with Kirov, including his assassin,
is to die in faked accidents.
ln Leningrad, the terror is intense.
Throughout the country,
many thousands of others unconnected with Kirov are arrested.
The pressure is relentlessly maintained.
The aim now is no less than a complete scouring of the Party
for anybody whose loyalty is in doubt.
This is a time when Nikolai Yezhov serves as Stalin's hangman.
A time which is to become known as the ''Yezhovschina,''
the days of Yezhov the dwarf.
Mass demonstrations are organized
to call for the punishment of those guilty of Kirov's death.
Zinoviev and Kamenev, Stalin's old comrades of the early Soviet days,
confess to plots to combine with Trotsky to murder the Soviet leader.
The trials continue.
Bukharin, whom Stalin has stalked for 1 0 years,
is dragged before the court.
[ Speaking Russian ]
lNTERPRETER: lt was a pretense. A tragic farce.
He was interrupted several times by Vyshinskiy very rudely, like,
''Why do you keep telling us all these fairy tales?
Keep to the subject.''
Eventually, he interrupted Bukharin, shouting,
''You are a cross between a fox and a pig!''
And didn't even give him the opportunity
to finish what he was saying.
[ Speaking Russian ]
lNTERPRETER: Stalin was supremely suspicious.
He'd been afraid of assassination attempts all his life,
although there hadn't been one genuine attempt as yet.
For example, wherever he went,
he had half a meter cut from the bottom of the curtains
so that he could be sure no one was hiding behind them,
and, of course, this was almost laughable.
Every time he went to his dacha,
he always chose the way himself from two or three possible routes
just before leaving.
He used to do this in spite of the fact
that the route from the Kremlin to Kuntsevo was fairly short
and the choice was therefore very limited.
Another thing he used to do was to strictly forbid anyone
to remove the snow from the area near the windows of his dacha.
He liked to see the virgin whiteness of the snow
because he was afraid of everybody,
and it was much easier to see any tracks.
Khrushchev recalled how one day Stalin had said that,
''Sometimes, l don't even trust myself, let alone you.''
NARRATOR: The terror spreads far outside Moscow.
The Soviet provincial world is shaken by the arrest of men
the propaganda machine has built into gods.
And with the destabilizing impact
of their confessions of treachery and plots to murder
comes a new infection --
friend denounces friend, neighbor reports neighbor.
The Soviet writer lsaac Babel,
himself soon to die in forced labor, wrote,
''Today, a man only talks freely with his wife --
at night with the blankets pulled over his head.''
For many Soviet citizens, it is a time when nightmares come true.
The terror casts a long shadow.
Madame Muklevich remembers playing
in the courtyard of Stalin's showpiece,
the House on the Embankment.
[ Speaking Russian ]
lNTERPRETER: We liked to play hopscotch.
Once, an old woman stopped
and watched us playing, laughing, and having fun.
She watched us and then asked, ''Do you live in this building?''
We answered, ''Yes, we live here.''
She said, ''No one who lives in this building will be happy.''
And she pointed to the pillars and said,
''Because these pillars are made from gravestones.
Gravestones from the cemetery.
No one in this building will be happy.
You mark my words.
No one in this building will be happy.''
[ Speaking Russian ]
[ Bells toll ]
NARRATOR: ln 1 935, the privileged tenants
see more than the Kremlin towers
from the Embankment House windows.
On the other side of the river,
the Cathedral of Christ the Savior stands white and immensely solid.
lt, too, seems to speak of a privileged status.
Then, one morning,
workers begin to surround the cathedral with hoarding.
Word spreads that icons and statuary are being removed.
ln the Embankment House, the privileged ask themselves,
''ls it possible that Stalin intends to demolish
one of Moscow's greatest monuments?''
But very few people are prepared even then
to question what is happening.
Chairman of the Economic Council, Minister Kuibyshev,
whose death is yet another wrapped in mystery,
is one of the few.
[ Speaking Russian ]
lNTERPRETER: He opposed the demolition
of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior.
He wrote to Stalin explaining how he felt,
that it should not be demolished,
because not only did it have religious significance,
but also great historical and cultural importance.
There were frescoes painted by Makovsky, Vereshchagin,
and sculptures by Klodt and Fyodor Tolstoy.
But his letter just irritated Stalin, and he wrote across it,
''Comrade Kuibyshev, you do not understand the full scale
of the political meaning of this action.
l insist on the demolition of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior.
J. Stalin.''
[ Dramatic music ]
NARRATOR: Where Stalin is undermining
the strength of his country by his aggression against its people,
Adolf Hitler uses the Jews as scapegoats
and sedulously cultivates unity among Germans.
His object is rearmament and war.
Evasion of the limits on German military power
imposed by the Treaty of Versailles
at the end of the Great War are not new.
But now Hitler openly flaunts the treaty.
Panzers, developed on Russian training grounds,
are put into mass production.
A new Luftwaffe is openly built with advanced fighter, bomber,
and transport aircraft design.
By 1 935, Hitler has announced conscription
for an army of 36 modern divisions
and put the nation onto a war-economy basis.
He leaves no doubt in anybody's mind
that the ultimate target is living space in the East.
Joseph Stalin chooses a different route.
His ever-suspicious eyes turn towards the military.
lt is the last institution in the state
that could challenge his leadership.
Among the many military and political families living
in the House on the Embankment,
Mikhail Tukhachevsky is an eminent and commanding figure.
A former czarist officer of noble ancestry,
he is now marshal of the Red Army.
[ Speaking Russian ]
lNTERPRETER: ln the evening,
the car would draw up outside the building,
and Mikhail Tukhachevsky in his uniform
looking so elegant and handsome entered the apartment block.
He was really very handsome.
Everyone looked at him, and we, as children, playing hopscotch,
always stopped to look at him.
[ Speaking Russian ]
lNTERPRETER: Tukhachevsky was no angel.
He was a man who had used gas to suppress the Tambov uprising.
He had also suppressed the Kronstadt insurrection
and had directed a number of Soviet punitive operations.
One could never call someone who had been so sullied a saint.
NARRATOR: But Tukhachevsky was undoubtedly an outstanding officer.
His initiatives include the first paratroops. . .
. . .and the first Soviet exercises in modern armored warfare.
[ Tanks rumble ]
ln the spring of 1 93 7, information is passed to Stalin from Prague
suggesting Tukhachevsky was planning a coup d'etat.
We know now that this was a German intelligence plant
carefully organized by Heydrich
via a fake robbery from a document center in Berlin.
Within less than a month,
Yezhov feels able to compile a list of officers involved in a plot.
From here, the so-called conspiracy widens at a terrifying rate.
Vladimira, daughter of General Uborevich, remembers.
lNTERPRETER: By the 1 1th, they had already been shot.
But they were imprisoned first.
Tukhachevsky, Yakir on the 29th of May,
and Uborevich on the 30th.
NARRATOR: Another senior officer, Gamarnik, an upstairs neighbor,
is given the grim choice,
serve as judge or appear in court as a defendant.
lNTERPRETER: On the 3 1st of May, Gamarnik shot himself.
Gamarnik lived in the same building as us, in an apartment just above.
And when he shot himself,
my mother tried to prepare me for the worst
by telling me that something terrible could happen to my father as well.
l didn't know my father had been arrested.
All of them were young, under 40.
They were all people who were very young during the Civil War
and were charmed by the idea of helping the Russian people.
NARRATOR: Primakov, yet another tenant of the Embankment House,
is already under torture in the Lubyanka.
At the trial, he will confess to treachery
and offer the names of 7 0 officers working with the Germans.
lNTERPRETER: One could say that by eliminating
the people responsible for the country's defense,
Stalin was conducting an act of state treachery.
And what's more,
he did these things in the full knowledge of the consequences.
Lawlessness has its own momentum.
Even by Stalin's standards, due process is a farce.
Two weeks after Tukhachevsky is arrested,
he is brought to a trial which lasts less than four hours,
from 9:00 to lunchtime.
Tukhachevsky, Uborevich, Primakov, and four others are found guilty.
On the night of June 1 2, 1 93 7, all defendants are shot.
Tukhachevsky's interrogation file, recovered from the archives,
is stained with his blood.
Tukhachevsky's death is the signal
for the most concentrated bloodletting yet seen.
Nearly half the whole command staff of the army and navy are murdered.
As Stalin's crony, the incompetent Voroshilov, reported,
''The Red Army has been cleansed of more than 40,000 officers.''
[ Clapping ]
lN RUSSlAN: Glory to our Stalin!
NARRATOR: Those left in the army staffs are totally paralyzed.
All military initiative is destroyed.
lNTERPRETER: All this led to a feeling
that the country had been bled dry.
And Germany knew this.
And some of their officials were even heard to say,
''What are the Russians doing? This is madness.''
NARRATOR: Adolf Hitler, the Austrian,
Joseph Stalin, the Georgian,
now face each other as the clock ticks away
the last hours of peace in Europe.
They each lead powerful nations,
but Germany has been honed and tested.
lt's people are unified and confident.
At what we can see now as the end of the first period of Stalin's rule,
he has created a Soviet Union immensely more productive
than the nation he inherited from Lenin.
But the weaknesses are equally terrible.
The Soviet Union has an army demoralized and rendered fearful,
its individuality and initiative dangerously crushed.
Adolf Hitler, meanwhile, knows that victory in the coming struggle
will go to the nation that is confident in its leaders,
positive in its beliefs.
His nation is prepared for war.
But for the Soviet Union, the great question still hangs fire --
in the crisis to come,
will the people be able to put the horrors of the 1 930s behind them?
Will they be able to regain the courage, the commitment,
of their early faith?
When war comes, will the people of the Soviet Union
be prepared to fight?
[ Melancholy music ]