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AIR-RAID SIREN ECHOES | 0:00:02 | 0:00:04 | |
He was a little man, about five foot five. | 0:00:04 | 0:00:09 | |
In his sixties. | 0:00:09 | 0:00:11 | |
Rather tubby. | 0:00:11 | 0:00:13 | |
Enjoyed his drinks and his smokes. | 0:00:13 | 0:00:16 | |
An unlikely hero perhaps, | 0:00:18 | 0:00:22 | |
but in the dark days of the 20th century, he helped save Britain. | 0:00:22 | 0:00:26 | |
This programme contains some strong language. | 0:00:26 | 0:00:28 | |
And he was one of the biggest mass murderers in history. | 0:00:30 | 0:00:35 | |
Stalin was his party name. | 0:00:35 | 0:00:38 | |
We like to think that Britain's survival in the Second World War | 0:00:43 | 0:00:46 | |
was secured by "Our Finest Hour" in 1940 - | 0:00:46 | 0:00:51 | |
the Battle of Britain, Churchill's bulldog leadership. | 0:00:51 | 0:00:55 | |
But more critical was what happened | 0:00:55 | 0:00:58 | |
on the other side of Europe in 1941 - | 0:00:58 | 0:01:02 | |
the horrific life-or-death struggle between Nazi Germany | 0:01:02 | 0:01:06 | |
and the Soviet Union. | 0:01:06 | 0:01:08 | |
And crucial to the outcome would be the leadership of Stalin. | 0:01:08 | 0:01:14 | |
Stalin meant "man of steel", | 0:01:15 | 0:01:18 | |
but the reality of his war in 1941 didn't live up to that name, | 0:01:18 | 0:01:23 | |
as he lurched from crisis to crisis, coming close to a nervous breakdown. | 0:01:23 | 0:01:28 | |
It was touch and go. | 0:01:34 | 0:01:37 | |
In 1941, the Man of Steel blew it. | 0:01:37 | 0:01:43 | |
His military bungling cost millions of lives, | 0:01:43 | 0:01:47 | |
he nearly lost Moscow, and almost let Hitler win the war. | 0:01:47 | 0:01:52 | |
I want to explore how, despite his spectacular mistakes, | 0:01:53 | 0:01:58 | |
Stalin clung on to power and led an extraordinary fightback | 0:01:58 | 0:02:04 | |
against Hitler's military machine. | 0:02:04 | 0:02:06 | |
This is the Second World War from the less familiar Russian perspective - | 0:02:06 | 0:02:12 | |
a story of dramatic twists and turns | 0:02:12 | 0:02:16 | |
that helps us understand why Nazi Germany was eventually defeated, | 0:02:16 | 0:02:22 | |
AND why a Stalinist "Iron Curtain" came down across half of Europe. | 0:02:22 | 0:02:28 | |
This programme contains some strong language. | 0:02:29 | 0:02:39 | |
Stalin would be the big winner from World War Two, | 0:02:39 | 0:02:43 | |
but he had to learn to bend and compromise in order to win. | 0:02:43 | 0:02:48 | |
He would even enter into perhaps the most bizarre shotgun marriage | 0:02:48 | 0:02:54 | |
in diplomatic history, sealed with an arch-capitalist | 0:02:54 | 0:02:57 | |
during a drunken evening at the Kremlin. | 0:02:57 | 0:03:00 | |
Stalin had a strange, almost seductive charm. | 0:03:07 | 0:03:12 | |
Winston Churchill, an unremitting enemy of communism, | 0:03:12 | 0:03:16 | |
responded with respect, at times, even affection, | 0:03:16 | 0:03:20 | |
towards the man he himself nicknamed Uncle Joe. | 0:03:20 | 0:03:25 | |
This is the enduring mystery of Stalin - | 0:03:25 | 0:03:29 | |
the friendly uncle and the Man of Steel, | 0:03:29 | 0:03:33 | |
a titan of the Second World War, and a monster of the 20th century... | 0:03:33 | 0:03:40 | |
who got away with it. | 0:03:40 | 0:03:42 | |
The German invasion of the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa, | 0:04:06 | 0:04:12 | |
started here on the Bug River, | 0:04:12 | 0:04:14 | |
180 miles east of Warsaw, early on 22nd June 1941. | 0:04:14 | 0:04:20 | |
And it began as a walk-over. | 0:04:22 | 0:04:25 | |
Along a front 1,000 miles long, | 0:04:30 | 0:04:32 | |
more than three million German troops, in three vast army groups, | 0:04:32 | 0:04:36 | |
surged across the border, and deep into Soviet territory. | 0:04:36 | 0:04:42 | |
Officially, the Soviet Union called it a "surprise attack", | 0:04:53 | 0:04:58 | |
but more than that, it was a paralysed defence. | 0:04:58 | 0:05:02 | |
Paralysed from the very top by the Man of Steel. | 0:05:02 | 0:05:06 | |
For hours, Stalin would not even allow his commanders to fire back. | 0:05:06 | 0:05:11 | |
It must surely go down | 0:05:11 | 0:05:14 | |
as one of the most spectacular military blunders in history. | 0:05:14 | 0:05:18 | |
By noon on Day One, a quarter of the Red Air Force had been destroyed - | 0:05:24 | 0:05:29 | |
over 1,200 planes, many of them lined up on the ground, uncamouflaged. | 0:05:29 | 0:05:35 | |
In Moscow, Stalin was beside himself with incredulous rage, | 0:05:40 | 0:05:45 | |
lashing out at everyone around him. | 0:05:45 | 0:05:49 | |
"This is a monstrous crime! | 0:05:49 | 0:05:52 | |
"Those responsible must lose their heads!" | 0:05:52 | 0:05:55 | |
But this was a disaster born in his paranoid mind, | 0:05:56 | 0:06:01 | |
and in the brutal terrorized regime that he had created. | 0:06:01 | 0:06:06 | |
1941 was a damning verdict, | 0:06:06 | 0:06:09 | |
almost fatal, | 0:06:09 | 0:06:12 | |
on 20 years of Soviet history. | 0:06:12 | 0:06:15 | |
Josef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili seemed an unlikely leader - | 0:06:23 | 0:06:29 | |
small, with a withered arm and a club foot, | 0:06:29 | 0:06:33 | |
his sallow face pock-marked from smallpox. | 0:06:33 | 0:06:36 | |
As a child in dirt-poor Georgia, deep in the Caucasus, | 0:06:36 | 0:06:41 | |
he was regularly beaten by his shoemaker father. | 0:06:41 | 0:06:44 | |
Nor did Stalin sound like a leader. | 0:06:50 | 0:06:53 | |
With his flat, monotonous delivery, | 0:06:53 | 0:06:55 | |
he was hardly a great orator, | 0:06:55 | 0:06:59 | |
and he never lost his thick Georgian accent. | 0:06:59 | 0:07:03 | |
This was an outsider's voice, and faintly ridiculous. | 0:07:03 | 0:07:08 | |
One British wartime interpreter likened it to Wigan Pier, Lancashire - | 0:07:08 | 0:07:13 | |
almost as if George Formby had been made dictator. | 0:07:13 | 0:07:18 | |
TRANSLATION IN BROAD NORTHERN-ENGLISH ACCENT: For a job well done in constructing | 0:07:22 | 0:07:29 | |
the Moscow Metro, we declare gratitude | 0:07:29 | 0:07:32 | |
to the whole underground construction collective of engineers, | 0:07:32 | 0:07:36 | |
technicians and workers, both male and female. | 0:07:36 | 0:07:42 | |
Stalin wasn't an intellectual | 0:07:51 | 0:07:54 | |
like Lenin and the Bolshevik elite. | 0:07:54 | 0:07:57 | |
His doting mother wanted him to become a priest, | 0:07:57 | 0:08:01 | |
but young Stalin was expelled from seminary. | 0:08:01 | 0:08:04 | |
He found his true calling as a revolutionary bandit | 0:08:04 | 0:08:07 | |
in the dying years of Tsarist rule. | 0:08:07 | 0:08:11 | |
His speciality was bank robberies. | 0:08:11 | 0:08:13 | |
In one heist in Tbilisi, he and his gang seized a quarter of a million roubles | 0:08:13 | 0:08:19 | |
and left around 40 guards and bystanders dead. | 0:08:21 | 0:08:24 | |
But Stalin was a crook with a cause. | 0:08:24 | 0:08:28 | |
The proceeds of this and other raids helped fund the Bolsheviks | 0:08:28 | 0:08:33 | |
in their bid for power. | 0:08:33 | 0:08:35 | |
After the Revolution in 1917, | 0:08:39 | 0:08:42 | |
Stalin concealed his ambitions behind a facade of dull reliability. | 0:08:42 | 0:08:48 | |
A backroom boy, not a big hitter. | 0:08:48 | 0:08:52 | |
He was made General Secretary of the Party. | 0:08:52 | 0:08:56 | |
Sort of keeper of the card indexes. | 0:08:56 | 0:09:00 | |
Neither he nor his administrative job | 0:09:00 | 0:09:03 | |
appeared to pose a threat to rivals, | 0:09:03 | 0:09:06 | |
but slowly, carefully, Stalin began accumulating power. | 0:09:06 | 0:09:12 | |
Stalin made a career out of being under-estimated. | 0:09:15 | 0:09:20 | |
Behind the unimpressive exterior, this was a man with a sharp mind, | 0:09:20 | 0:09:26 | |
a formidable memory and a capacity to get to the heart of any problem. | 0:09:26 | 0:09:33 | |
Unlike other dictators, Stalin wasn't a great talker, | 0:09:33 | 0:09:38 | |
but he was a good listener, | 0:09:38 | 0:09:41 | |
skilled at reading the tone and thrust of a conversation | 0:09:41 | 0:09:46 | |
while disguising what he himself really thought. | 0:09:46 | 0:09:49 | |
At meetings he would say little, | 0:09:49 | 0:09:52 | |
waiting for his moment | 0:09:52 | 0:09:54 | |
while doodling obsessively. | 0:09:54 | 0:09:58 | |
This is one of Stalin's doodles. | 0:10:03 | 0:10:06 | |
Hard lines, sharp angles, wolfs' snouts. | 0:10:06 | 0:10:10 | |
A sinister glimpse behind the calm, modest exterior | 0:10:10 | 0:10:16 | |
into a mind that was savage, vindictive, often paranoid. | 0:10:16 | 0:10:20 | |
Here was a gangster, a street thug, | 0:10:24 | 0:10:27 | |
but with a strategic brain | 0:10:27 | 0:10:30 | |
and absolutely no respect for human life. | 0:10:30 | 0:10:34 | |
In the power struggle after Lenin's death in 1924, | 0:10:43 | 0:10:48 | |
Stalin employed his gangster logic to get rid of his rivals. | 0:10:48 | 0:10:53 | |
He cleverly shifted his political allegiances, allying with the Right to eliminate the Left. | 0:10:55 | 0:11:01 | |
Trotsky... | 0:11:01 | 0:11:02 | |
Zinoviev... and then tacking leftward to kill off the Right - Rykov... | 0:11:04 | 0:11:10 | |
Bukharin. | 0:11:12 | 0:11:15 | |
And in the 1930s, Stalin stitched up the loyalists and close officials | 0:11:17 | 0:11:22 | |
who'd helped him rise, | 0:11:22 | 0:11:24 | |
subjecting thousands to macabre show trials, torture and death. | 0:11:24 | 0:11:29 | |
Stalin had learnt that a well-timed beating or bullet could get him what he wanted. | 0:11:30 | 0:11:36 | |
Nowhere was this lesson more brutally applied | 0:11:41 | 0:11:44 | |
than in his handling of the army. | 0:11:44 | 0:11:47 | |
Stalin was haunted by history, in particular how Napoleon Bonaparte | 0:11:51 | 0:11:56 | |
had exploited the French Revolution to jump from corporal to emperor. | 0:11:56 | 0:12:01 | |
Determined to weed out any upstart "Bonapartist" in his army, | 0:12:04 | 0:12:08 | |
Stalin appointed a new class of political commissars to watch over his officers. | 0:12:08 | 0:12:14 | |
And he purged hundreds of progressively minded generals, | 0:12:19 | 0:12:23 | |
including Mikhail Tukhachevsky - a charismatic early exponent of tank warfare. | 0:12:23 | 0:12:29 | |
The confession of treason extracted from Tukhachevsky | 0:12:29 | 0:12:33 | |
was handed to Stalin spattered with blood. | 0:12:33 | 0:12:37 | |
The Soviet leader was utterly unrepentant. | 0:12:39 | 0:12:42 | |
"Who's going to remember all this riff-raff in ten or twenty years? | 0:12:44 | 0:12:48 | |
"No-one." | 0:12:48 | 0:12:50 | |
Nobody was safe, except Stalin, | 0:12:50 | 0:12:54 | |
and he controlled the surviving members of his inner circle through raw fear. | 0:12:54 | 0:13:02 | |
Men like his foreign minister Molotov. | 0:13:02 | 0:13:05 | |
Western diplomats called him Stone Arse because he was so stubborn, | 0:13:05 | 0:13:10 | |
but in private, Molotov was totally under Stalin's thumb. | 0:13:10 | 0:13:14 | |
When Stalin had his Jewish wife Polina thrown in jail, | 0:13:14 | 0:13:19 | |
Molotov joined the rest of the Politburo | 0:13:19 | 0:13:22 | |
in voting for her imprisonment. | 0:13:22 | 0:13:25 | |
Stalin's oldest buddy was Voroshilov - | 0:13:28 | 0:13:30 | |
a former metalworker who liked dressing up in military uniforms. | 0:13:30 | 0:13:34 | |
Good company over a few drinks, but really rather thick, and no threat. | 0:13:34 | 0:13:40 | |
Beria was head of Stalin's secret police. | 0:13:40 | 0:13:45 | |
He liked to keep his hand in by doing some of the torture himself, using a truncheon. | 0:13:45 | 0:13:51 | |
Then he relaxed by listening to records of Rachmaninov, | 0:13:51 | 0:13:55 | |
or raping young women. | 0:13:55 | 0:13:57 | |
But Stalin liked Beria, because he was a coward who never challenged the boss. | 0:13:59 | 0:14:04 | |
Stalin had created an apparently unassailable position | 0:14:09 | 0:14:13 | |
at the pinnacle of an autocratic state. | 0:14:13 | 0:14:17 | |
But, of course, that system had a fundamental weakness. | 0:14:17 | 0:14:21 | |
It depended on one man - | 0:14:21 | 0:14:23 | |
on his strengths, but also on his whims and neuroses. | 0:14:23 | 0:14:28 | |
A serious misjudgement by Stalin | 0:14:28 | 0:14:30 | |
could plunge his servile regime into chaos, | 0:14:30 | 0:14:34 | |
and that's what happened with a vengeance | 0:14:36 | 0:14:38 | |
when war came in June 1941. | 0:14:38 | 0:14:41 | |
By June 26th 1941, just four days after Barbarossa began, | 0:14:50 | 0:14:55 | |
400,000 more Soviet soldiers were trapped as the Nazi pincers | 0:14:55 | 0:15:00 | |
closed around Minsk, a key stronghold on the route to Moscow. | 0:15:00 | 0:15:04 | |
EXPLOSIONS | 0:15:07 | 0:15:10 | |
Barbarossa had hardly come out of the blue. | 0:15:12 | 0:15:14 | |
Stalin, like everyone else, knew all about Hitler's demands | 0:15:14 | 0:15:18 | |
for 'lebensraum' - living space for Germany in Russia. | 0:15:18 | 0:15:22 | |
Stalin gambled on a deal with Hitler. In August 1939, | 0:15:33 | 0:15:37 | |
he signed a pact with Germany that would carve up eastern Europe. | 0:15:37 | 0:15:43 | |
Stalin got half of Poland and the Baltic states of Estonia, | 0:15:43 | 0:15:48 | |
Latvia and Lithuania. | 0:15:48 | 0:15:50 | |
He now expected Hitler to fight a long war for western Europe | 0:15:52 | 0:15:57 | |
against Britain and France. | 0:15:57 | 0:15:59 | |
-'Ja, der Englander ist getroffen.' -But then Germany sliced through France in a month in 1940. | 0:16:03 | 0:16:09 | |
Only Britain held out. | 0:16:09 | 0:16:11 | |
Stalin's gamble had backfired disastrously. | 0:16:17 | 0:16:21 | |
Victory in the west in 1940 left Hitler free to go east | 0:16:21 | 0:16:26 | |
for living space in 1941, | 0:16:26 | 0:16:28 | |
and now Stalin made another colossal error of judgement. | 0:16:28 | 0:16:33 | |
BELL TOLLS | 0:16:35 | 0:16:38 | |
In the spring of 1941, Hitler began massing his troops in Poland. | 0:16:45 | 0:16:50 | |
It was no secret. | 0:16:52 | 0:16:54 | |
The Kremlin accumulated a bulging intelligence dossier, | 0:16:54 | 0:16:56 | |
including clear warnings from German deserters and the British. | 0:16:56 | 0:17:00 | |
But Stalin, always suspicious about the capitalist West, | 0:17:02 | 0:17:05 | |
assumed that much of the intelligence had been fabricated by Britain, | 0:17:05 | 0:17:10 | |
with the aim of dragging him into its war with Hitler. | 0:17:10 | 0:17:14 | |
Stalin refused to go onto a war footing, telling his generals... | 0:17:14 | 0:17:20 | |
"Germany is busy up to her ears with the war in the West and I am certain | 0:17:22 | 0:17:26 | |
"that Hitler will not risk a second front by attacking the Soviet Union." | 0:17:26 | 0:17:31 | |
"Hitler is not such an idiot." | 0:17:31 | 0:17:33 | |
Stalin didn't grasp that Hitler was intoxicated | 0:17:37 | 0:17:41 | |
by a megalomaniac vision. | 0:17:41 | 0:17:44 | |
He assumed that Hitler would act like he did, | 0:17:44 | 0:17:47 | |
on hard-boiled calculations of national self-interest. | 0:17:47 | 0:17:52 | |
This was Stalin's fundamental mistake. | 0:17:52 | 0:17:56 | |
On June 29th, reports reached Moscow that the city of Minsk had fallen. | 0:18:01 | 0:18:07 | |
It was only a week since the German invasion had begun. | 0:18:11 | 0:18:13 | |
At this rate, the Germans expected to be in Moscow within a month. | 0:18:18 | 0:18:23 | |
Suddenly, Stalin seemed to grasp the enormity of the disaster. | 0:18:27 | 0:18:33 | |
He raged at his generals, | 0:18:33 | 0:18:35 | |
reducing even Zhukov, his Chief of Staff, to tears. | 0:18:35 | 0:18:39 | |
But then Stalin crumpled. | 0:18:39 | 0:18:43 | |
"Everything's lost", he groaned. | 0:18:43 | 0:18:46 | |
"I give up. Lenin founded our state, | 0:18:46 | 0:18:50 | |
"and we've screwed it up!" | 0:18:50 | 0:18:54 | |
Stalin was driven to his dacha on the outskirts of Moscow. | 0:19:06 | 0:19:10 | |
There, he slumped in shock. | 0:19:14 | 0:19:17 | |
PHONE RINGS | 0:19:20 | 0:19:23 | |
Next day, he didn't come in to the Kremlin, or respond to phone calls. | 0:19:23 | 0:19:28 | |
In the dictator's absence, no-one dared to take any decisions | 0:19:31 | 0:19:35 | |
or sign any documents. | 0:19:35 | 0:19:38 | |
Suddenly, there was a chilling vacuum at the heart of power. | 0:19:38 | 0:19:42 | |
Was this a sinister game? | 0:19:44 | 0:19:48 | |
The great actor testing the loyalty of his underlings, | 0:19:48 | 0:19:52 | |
like the man he called his teacher, Ivan the Terrible? | 0:19:52 | 0:19:56 | |
Waiting, watchful, ready to pounce on anyone who tried to seize power? | 0:19:56 | 0:20:01 | |
That's certainly possible, | 0:20:03 | 0:20:05 | |
but I think Stalin had really come close to a nervous breakdown, | 0:20:05 | 0:20:10 | |
because what he faced was not just military defeat, | 0:20:10 | 0:20:14 | |
but the collapse of everything he'd worked for within Russia. | 0:20:14 | 0:20:17 | |
PHONE RINGS | 0:20:17 | 0:20:20 | |
Stalin had revolutionised his country even more profoundly than Lenin. | 0:20:26 | 0:20:31 | |
In the late 1920s, he embarked on a frenzied campaign of modernisation. | 0:20:31 | 0:20:37 | |
The old Russia, dominated by a peasant mentality, | 0:20:37 | 0:20:42 | |
rooted in the Orthodox religion, would be swept away | 0:20:42 | 0:20:46 | |
to be replaced by five-year plans, | 0:20:46 | 0:20:50 | |
collective farms, mass production - | 0:20:50 | 0:20:52 | |
above all, gigantic steel works. | 0:20:52 | 0:20:56 | |
It was a steel crusade for the Man of Steel. | 0:21:00 | 0:21:06 | |
Stalin was determined that his communist state must match up to the capitalist West. | 0:21:06 | 0:21:11 | |
It was, he claimed, a matter of life or death. | 0:21:11 | 0:21:15 | |
"We are 50 or 100 years behind the advanced countries. | 0:21:17 | 0:21:21 | |
"We must make good this distance in ten years. | 0:21:21 | 0:21:24 | |
"Either we do so, or we shall go under." | 0:21:24 | 0:21:27 | |
Stalin's Russia did catch up. | 0:21:35 | 0:21:38 | |
During the 1930s, iron and steel output increased fourfold. | 0:21:38 | 0:21:44 | |
A country that produced only 700 trucks in 1928 | 0:21:44 | 0:21:50 | |
churned out more than 180,000 in 1938. | 0:21:50 | 0:21:55 | |
Stalin's Second Revolution dragged Russia into the 20th century. | 0:21:57 | 0:22:02 | |
But it couldn't have been accomplished without the utter ruthlessness that was his trademark. | 0:22:02 | 0:22:08 | |
Just as he had eliminated opponents within his inner circle, | 0:22:15 | 0:22:19 | |
Stalin simply swept away any of the wider Russian population | 0:22:19 | 0:22:24 | |
who resisted industrialisation. | 0:22:24 | 0:22:26 | |
Many were packed off to prison camps | 0:22:26 | 0:22:29 | |
in the Arctic wastes of Siberia. | 0:22:29 | 0:22:32 | |
This was the notorious Gulag, | 0:22:32 | 0:22:35 | |
where nearly two million Soviet citizens were incarcerated in 1941. | 0:22:35 | 0:22:40 | |
The forced collectivisation of agriculture was even more brutal. | 0:22:43 | 0:22:49 | |
Peasants often fought back against state seizure of their land and livestock. | 0:22:49 | 0:22:54 | |
As a last act of defiance, | 0:22:54 | 0:22:57 | |
many killed their own animals. | 0:22:57 | 0:23:00 | |
Half the Soviet Union's cattle were slaughtered. | 0:23:00 | 0:23:02 | |
In the famine that followed, an estimated five million people died. | 0:23:02 | 0:23:09 | |
PHONE RINGS | 0:23:15 | 0:23:18 | |
This was Stalin's revolution - | 0:23:22 | 0:23:26 | |
its triumph and its tragedy. | 0:23:26 | 0:23:28 | |
Now it was all falling apart, | 0:23:30 | 0:23:32 | |
and Stalin must have known that it was largely his fault. | 0:23:32 | 0:23:37 | |
On June 30th 1941, with German Panzers rolling towards Moscow, | 0:23:44 | 0:23:50 | |
the Politburo drove out to Stalin's dacha. | 0:23:50 | 0:23:54 | |
They found him sitting in an armchair. | 0:23:54 | 0:23:58 | |
Stalin looked up, haggard and nervous. | 0:24:01 | 0:24:06 | |
"Why have you come?" he asked, | 0:24:06 | 0:24:10 | |
apparently suspecting a coup. | 0:24:10 | 0:24:12 | |
But the men in suits were on a very different mission. | 0:24:12 | 0:24:17 | |
They wanted Stalin to return to take charge of a new State Defence Committee - | 0:24:17 | 0:24:24 | |
a sort of War Cabinet. | 0:24:24 | 0:24:26 | |
The relief on Stalin's face was transparent. | 0:24:26 | 0:24:31 | |
"But," he asked, | 0:24:31 | 0:24:34 | |
"can I lead the country to final victory?" | 0:24:34 | 0:24:38 | |
"There may be more deserving candidates." | 0:24:38 | 0:24:42 | |
His old crony Voroshilov spoke up - | 0:24:42 | 0:24:45 | |
"There is none more worthy." | 0:24:45 | 0:24:48 | |
Nodding, Stalin accepted his new role. | 0:24:50 | 0:24:54 | |
Even at the moment when Stalin had screwed it all up, | 0:24:54 | 0:25:00 | |
his yes men hadn't the guts to depose him. | 0:25:00 | 0:25:03 | |
Or, more exactly and more chilling, | 0:25:05 | 0:25:07 | |
after a decade in which they'd been both the agents and the victims of Stalinist terror, | 0:25:08 | 0:25:14 | |
they couldn't imagine Russia without him. | 0:25:14 | 0:25:18 | |
Now Stalin began to regain his nerve. | 0:25:23 | 0:25:27 | |
His prime task was to steady the country, dispelling the swirl of rumour and panic. | 0:25:27 | 0:25:34 | |
One old man in a Moscow street complained, | 0:25:34 | 0:25:37 | |
"Why hasn't anybody spoken to us on the radio? They should say something, good or bad. | 0:25:38 | 0:25:43 | |
"But we are completely in a fog." | 0:25:43 | 0:25:47 | |
On July 3rd, Stalin finally broke his silence, | 0:25:47 | 0:25:51 | |
with a speech relayed across the country through loudspeakers in factories and streets. | 0:25:51 | 0:25:59 | |
"Hitler's troops have succeeded in capturing Lithuania, | 0:25:59 | 0:26:03 | |
"the western part of Belorussia, part of Western Ukraine. | 0:26:03 | 0:26:08 | |
"A grave danger hangs over our country." | 0:26:08 | 0:26:12 | |
Stalin's delivery was as flat and toneless as ever. | 0:26:12 | 0:26:18 | |
His Georgian accent still grated. | 0:26:18 | 0:26:21 | |
But what he actually said was astounding. | 0:26:21 | 0:26:25 | |
He frankly admitted that most of the western Soviet Union had been lost. | 0:26:25 | 0:26:31 | |
He even addressed his people, not just as comrades, | 0:26:31 | 0:26:36 | |
but as brothers and sisters, and dear friends. | 0:26:36 | 0:26:40 | |
From the depths of the crisis, | 0:26:42 | 0:26:44 | |
Stalin was attempting to build a new relationship with his people. | 0:26:44 | 0:26:49 | |
But behind the soft soap was the old iron fist. | 0:26:49 | 0:26:53 | |
Stalin intended to terrorize his army into fighting. | 0:26:56 | 0:27:00 | |
He issued an order, drily known as number 270. | 0:27:00 | 0:27:05 | |
"Those falling into encirclement are to fight to the last. | 0:27:08 | 0:27:13 | |
"Those who prefer to surrender are to be destroyed by any available means, | 0:27:13 | 0:27:19 | |
"while their families are to be deprived of all state allowances and assistance." | 0:27:19 | 0:27:25 | |
This savage order was Stalin's handiwork, but he got his henchmen, | 0:27:25 | 0:27:29 | |
including Molotov and Voroshilov, to add their names at the bottom. | 0:27:29 | 0:27:35 | |
When Stalin's son Yakov was captured, Order 270 was applied to his family. | 0:27:35 | 0:27:40 | |
His wife Yulia, Stalin's daughter-in-law, | 0:27:40 | 0:27:43 | |
spent two years under arrest. | 0:27:43 | 0:27:47 | |
Yakov was later shot at a POW camp near Lubeck - | 0:27:47 | 0:27:51 | |
whether in an attempt to escape, or as deliberate act of suicide | 0:27:51 | 0:27:56 | |
has never been clear. | 0:27:56 | 0:27:58 | |
But flogging his own people was not enough. | 0:28:02 | 0:28:06 | |
Russia couldn't survive the German onslaught alone. | 0:28:06 | 0:28:10 | |
The only other power still fighting Germany | 0:28:10 | 0:28:13 | |
was one that had tried to crush the Russian Revolution. | 0:28:13 | 0:28:17 | |
Now in an extraordinary U-turn, | 0:28:17 | 0:28:19 | |
Stalin reached out to the old capitalist enemy. | 0:28:19 | 0:28:23 | |
Equally amazing, Britain's Prime Minister, a notorious Red-basher, | 0:28:30 | 0:28:35 | |
was ready to meet Stalin halfway. | 0:28:35 | 0:28:40 | |
CHURCHILL: 'I see the Russian soldiers guarding the fields | 0:28:40 | 0:28:44 | |
'which their fathers have tilled from time immemorial. | 0:28:44 | 0:28:48 | |
'I see, advancing upon all this in hideous onslaught, the Nazi War machine | 0:28:48 | 0:28:56 | |
'with its clanking, heel-clicking, dandified Prussian officers.' | 0:28:56 | 0:29:02 | |
It seemed as if Winston Churchill | 0:29:03 | 0:29:06 | |
was going back on everything he'd been saying in the last 20 years. | 0:29:06 | 0:29:11 | |
After the Russian Revolution, he even wanted British troops to help | 0:29:11 | 0:29:15 | |
stamp out what he called the "foul baboonery of Bolshevism". | 0:29:15 | 0:29:20 | |
By 1941, Churchill's view was changing. | 0:29:22 | 0:29:26 | |
In part, he recognised that Stalin's Russia was very different from Lenin's anarchic state. | 0:29:26 | 0:29:33 | |
But this was also a matter of political expediency now, | 0:29:33 | 0:29:37 | |
because the Soviet Union was his enemy's enemy. | 0:29:37 | 0:29:40 | |
The day Barbarossa began, | 0:29:40 | 0:29:43 | |
Churchill told an aide, | 0:29:43 | 0:29:45 | |
"If Hitler invaded Hell, I would at least make a favourable reference | 0:29:45 | 0:29:50 | |
"to the Devil in the House of Commons." | 0:29:50 | 0:29:53 | |
In telegrams to Stalin, Churchill promised tanks, planes and food. | 0:30:06 | 0:30:11 | |
But privately, the British didn't think the Russians would last a month | 0:30:16 | 0:30:20 | |
against the army that had smashed France. | 0:30:20 | 0:30:23 | |
Then Hitler would turn back on Britain. | 0:30:23 | 0:30:26 | |
CHURCHILL: 'His invasion of Russia is no more than a prelude | 0:30:31 | 0:30:36 | |
'to an attempted invasion of the British Isles. | 0:30:36 | 0:30:39 | |
'He hopes, no doubt, that all this may be accomplished before the winter comes.' | 0:30:39 | 0:30:44 | |
Today, we assume the Battle of Britain had been decided in 1940, | 0:30:47 | 0:30:53 | |
but that wasn't how Churchill saw things in 1941. | 0:30:53 | 0:30:57 | |
Just three days into the German assault on Russia, | 0:30:57 | 0:31:01 | |
he ordered that Britain's defences | 0:31:01 | 0:31:04 | |
must be at "concert pitch" for invasion from September 1st. | 0:31:04 | 0:31:09 | |
In September 1941, | 0:31:14 | 0:31:17 | |
it did indeed look as if Russia's big cities were doomed. | 0:31:17 | 0:31:22 | |
In the north, German troops laid siege to Leningrad - | 0:31:22 | 0:31:26 | |
the old Tsarist city of St Petersburg. | 0:31:26 | 0:31:29 | |
Hitler ordered it to be destroyed street by street, | 0:31:31 | 0:31:34 | |
and then razed to the ground. | 0:31:34 | 0:31:36 | |
Down south, German Panzers encircled Kiev - capital of the Ukraine. | 0:31:40 | 0:31:46 | |
Out of his depth, Stalin could only bluster and bully. | 0:31:48 | 0:31:52 | |
Hearing that Nikita Khrushchev, the local party boss, | 0:31:52 | 0:31:56 | |
was ready to surrender, | 0:31:56 | 0:31:58 | |
Stalin telephoned him in a rage. | 0:31:58 | 0:32:02 | |
"You should be ashamed of yourself! | 0:32:02 | 0:32:05 | |
"Do whatever it takes. If not, we'll make short work of you!" | 0:32:07 | 0:32:12 | |
Stalin rejected any retreat at Kiev, | 0:32:20 | 0:32:23 | |
thereby condemning over 600,000 Soviet troops | 0:32:23 | 0:32:27 | |
to German prisoner of war camps. | 0:32:27 | 0:32:30 | |
For most, that meant certain death. | 0:32:30 | 0:32:33 | |
After yet another disaster, | 0:32:41 | 0:32:43 | |
Stalin was in a state of panic. | 0:32:43 | 0:32:46 | |
He now sent Churchill an anguished appeal, written in his own hand, | 0:32:46 | 0:32:52 | |
urging Britain to mount a second front against Hitler, | 0:32:52 | 0:32:55 | |
a landing by some 30 divisions, several hundred thousand troops, | 0:32:55 | 0:32:59 | |
in the Balkans or France, before the end of the year. | 0:32:59 | 0:33:04 | |
But this was pure fantasy. | 0:33:04 | 0:33:07 | |
Churchill didn't have 30 useable divisions in the whole British Army. | 0:33:07 | 0:33:11 | |
With no help in sight, Stalin now faced the ultimate threat from Hitler, | 0:33:14 | 0:33:20 | |
who targeted Moscow itself in an offensive codenamed Operation Typhoon. | 0:33:20 | 0:33:25 | |
The name proved apt, because the Germans simply blew away the Red Army. | 0:33:25 | 0:33:30 | |
By October 5th, German tanks were only 80 miles from Moscow. | 0:33:45 | 0:33:50 | |
Stalin placed veteran general Georgi Zhukov in charge of the defence | 0:33:52 | 0:33:57 | |
of the Soviet capital, with one of his highly motivational pep talks. | 0:33:57 | 0:34:02 | |
"If Moscow falls... | 0:34:02 | 0:34:04 | |
"heads will roll." | 0:34:04 | 0:34:07 | |
The Germans were now approaching one of the sacred sites of Russian history, | 0:34:21 | 0:34:26 | |
renowned in literature, music and folk memory. | 0:34:26 | 0:34:29 | |
Stalin ordered a last stand here, | 0:34:31 | 0:34:33 | |
on what he called the Mozhaisk Line. | 0:34:33 | 0:34:36 | |
The Mozhaisk Line was largely a figment of Stalin's imagination, | 0:34:39 | 0:34:45 | |
but it was rooted in Russian history | 0:34:45 | 0:34:48 | |
because it ran across the old battlefield of Borodino. | 0:34:48 | 0:34:52 | |
Borodino was the epic battle between Napoleon's France and Tsarist Russia. | 0:34:55 | 0:35:00 | |
It was evoked in sound by Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, | 0:35:00 | 0:35:04 | |
and immortalised in words by Tolstoy in War and Peace, his classic novel, | 0:35:04 | 0:35:10 | |
which was being serialized on Radio Moscow. | 0:35:10 | 0:35:13 | |
Now Russian troops slugged it out with the Germans | 0:35:13 | 0:35:18 | |
around the very earthworks where their ancestors had fought Napoleon's Grand Army. | 0:35:18 | 0:35:24 | |
Yet whatever Stalin's wishful thinking, the Russians were driven from the field of Borodino, | 0:35:53 | 0:35:59 | |
as in 1812, back towards the western outskirts of Moscow. | 0:35:59 | 0:36:04 | |
This was a critical moment. | 0:36:12 | 0:36:14 | |
The fate of Moscow, the very outcome of the Second World War, | 0:36:14 | 0:36:19 | |
hung in the balance. | 0:36:19 | 0:36:21 | |
Now Stalin wrestled with the same terrible question faced in 1812 | 0:36:27 | 0:36:32 | |
by the Tsar's marshal, Mikhail Kutuzov - | 0:36:32 | 0:36:35 | |
whether to fight for Moscow, or abandon the city. | 0:36:35 | 0:36:39 | |
Here in 1812, Kutuzov decided to fall back and sacrifice Moscow, | 0:36:39 | 0:36:47 | |
in order to preserve his army and ultimately save Russia. | 0:36:47 | 0:36:53 | |
Now in 1941, Beria took a similar line, arguing, | 0:36:53 | 0:36:57 | |
"Moscow is not the Soviet Union. | 0:36:57 | 0:37:00 | |
"Defending Moscow is useless." | 0:37:00 | 0:37:04 | |
Zhukov, on the other hand, was sure Moscow could be held. | 0:37:04 | 0:37:09 | |
Stalin, torn between these conflicting views, | 0:37:09 | 0:37:14 | |
pored over a new biography of Kutuzov, underlining the sentence - | 0:37:14 | 0:37:20 | |
"Up to the last moment no-one knew what Kutuzov intended to do". | 0:37:20 | 0:37:26 | |
While Stalin dithered, his staff packed his belongings, | 0:37:38 | 0:37:42 | |
and made ready a special train. | 0:37:42 | 0:37:45 | |
Then, on the morning of October 15th, | 0:37:47 | 0:37:50 | |
Stalin authorised the government to prepare an evacuation to Kuibyshev, | 0:37:50 | 0:37:55 | |
500 miles east of Moscow. | 0:37:55 | 0:37:57 | |
According to minutes from the meeting, "Comrade Stalin himself | 0:38:00 | 0:38:04 | |
"will be evacuated tomorrow or later, depending on the situation". | 0:38:04 | 0:38:10 | |
Even at this, its most desperate moment, Stalin's regime | 0:38:10 | 0:38:16 | |
kept up its calculated yet gratuitous cruelty. | 0:38:16 | 0:38:20 | |
As the Soviet bureaucracy geared up to go, the jails were cleared out. | 0:38:20 | 0:38:26 | |
One victim was part of Stalin's inner circle. | 0:38:26 | 0:38:29 | |
Bronya, the wife of Alexander Poskrebyshev, | 0:38:31 | 0:38:34 | |
Stalin's secretary, the bald little gate-keeper of the Kremlin office. | 0:38:34 | 0:38:39 | |
Bronya had been imprisoned on trumped-up charges of treason. | 0:38:39 | 0:38:43 | |
Poskrebyshev was distraught, | 0:38:45 | 0:38:47 | |
but Stalin did nothing to help. | 0:38:47 | 0:38:50 | |
"Don't worry", he said sweetly. | 0:38:50 | 0:38:53 | |
"We'll find you another wife." | 0:38:53 | 0:38:55 | |
During the evacuation of Moscow, Bronya was executed. | 0:39:03 | 0:39:08 | |
Choking back his grief, | 0:39:08 | 0:39:09 | |
Poskrebyshev kept on working for Stalin round the clock. | 0:39:09 | 0:39:14 | |
"One death is a tragedy - | 0:39:17 | 0:39:19 | |
"a million deaths are a statistic." | 0:39:19 | 0:39:22 | |
That cliche is often attributed to Stalin. | 0:39:22 | 0:39:25 | |
Whether or not he actually said it, | 0:39:25 | 0:39:28 | |
that's certainly the way he did things - | 0:39:28 | 0:39:30 | |
inflicting cruelty on a mass scale, | 0:39:30 | 0:39:33 | |
but also at a personal level on close associates. | 0:39:33 | 0:39:37 | |
Poskrebyshev, Zhukov, Khrushchev, even his own family. | 0:39:37 | 0:39:42 | |
This was a man who, I think, | 0:39:44 | 0:39:48 | |
derived real sadistic pleasure | 0:39:48 | 0:39:50 | |
from playing with people's minds. | 0:39:50 | 0:39:55 | |
Stalin's own mind about evacuation was still undecided. | 0:40:01 | 0:40:06 | |
On October 16th 1941, the people of Moscow woke | 0:40:06 | 0:40:09 | |
to what seemed like a ghost town. | 0:40:09 | 0:40:12 | |
No buses, trams or even policemen. | 0:40:12 | 0:40:15 | |
Across the city, grey snowflakes were falling - | 0:40:20 | 0:40:24 | |
ashes from the burning of millions of official papers, | 0:40:24 | 0:40:28 | |
even party cards. | 0:40:28 | 0:40:30 | |
It seemed that Hitler would soon achieve his dream | 0:40:30 | 0:40:36 | |
of consigning Bolshevism to the rubbish heap of history. | 0:40:36 | 0:40:39 | |
Then suddenly, the city became infected with panic | 0:40:42 | 0:40:45 | |
as news of the evacuation spread. | 0:40:45 | 0:40:49 | |
Abandoned shops were looted. | 0:40:49 | 0:40:51 | |
Cars and trucks clogged the roads going east. | 0:40:51 | 0:40:55 | |
The game seemed to be up. | 0:40:55 | 0:40:58 | |
One man noted in his diary, | 0:40:58 | 0:41:00 | |
"Today Moscow is like an ant heap - people loaded down with goods | 0:41:00 | 0:41:04 | |
"going in all different directions. | 0:41:04 | 0:41:06 | |
"The Metro is closed, and people are saying it is to be blown up or flooded, | 0:41:06 | 0:41:10 | |
"and that the Germans will arrive tonight." | 0:41:10 | 0:41:14 | |
At an outlying railway siding, Stalin's train was ready. | 0:41:19 | 0:41:24 | |
According to one of his aides, the Soviet leader paced up and down | 0:41:24 | 0:41:29 | |
in his tattered greatcoat, weaving in and out of the steam, | 0:41:29 | 0:41:33 | |
still pondering. | 0:41:33 | 0:41:35 | |
Then he told his staff, | 0:41:35 | 0:41:37 | |
"No evacuation. | 0:41:37 | 0:41:39 | |
"We'll stay here until victory." | 0:41:39 | 0:41:42 | |
The evacuation order was revoked. | 0:41:45 | 0:41:47 | |
Hundreds of looters were shot, and the capital was placed under martial law. | 0:41:50 | 0:41:54 | |
No-one can really judge what tipped Stalin's decision. | 0:41:56 | 0:42:01 | |
Certainly he and Zhukov knew that fresh troops | 0:42:01 | 0:42:04 | |
were now being rushed west from Siberia. | 0:42:04 | 0:42:07 | |
But I think that Stalin's ego | 0:42:07 | 0:42:10 | |
and sense of history also played a part. | 0:42:10 | 0:42:14 | |
The outsider, the cobbler's son from faraway Georgia, | 0:42:14 | 0:42:19 | |
thought he could outdo Kutuzov, | 0:42:19 | 0:42:22 | |
one of the heroes of the Russian past. | 0:42:22 | 0:42:25 | |
He would save Russia AND save Moscow as well. | 0:42:25 | 0:42:30 | |
Stalin had now finally taken a grip on the crisis, and on himself. | 0:42:33 | 0:42:39 | |
His decision to stay in Moscow | 0:42:39 | 0:42:41 | |
and quell the panic was a critical turning point of World War II. | 0:42:41 | 0:42:46 | |
Despite appearances, all was not going Hitler's way. | 0:42:46 | 0:42:49 | |
Hitler had assumed that what he considered the Jew-ridden Bolshevik regime | 0:42:52 | 0:42:59 | |
would quickly collapse. | 0:42:59 | 0:43:01 | |
"You only have to kick in the door," he said, "and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down." | 0:43:01 | 0:43:06 | |
But when Hitler did kick in the door, | 0:43:09 | 0:43:12 | |
the Soviet Union, though tottering, did not fall. | 0:43:12 | 0:43:17 | |
And the Russian people, whom in racist contempt | 0:43:17 | 0:43:21 | |
he dubbed "the Slavic rabbit family", bit back. | 0:43:21 | 0:43:25 | |
Hitler and his generals underestimated the resilience of Stalin and his state. | 0:43:36 | 0:43:42 | |
Even more, they underestimated the tenacity of the Russian people. | 0:43:42 | 0:43:47 | |
An early demonstration of Russian bravery | 0:44:00 | 0:44:03 | |
had been the defence of Brest in the very first week of Barbarossa. | 0:44:03 | 0:44:08 | |
The citadel here is still commemorated, | 0:44:08 | 0:44:12 | |
even by the youth of the 21st century, as a Hero Fortress | 0:44:12 | 0:44:16 | |
of the Soviet Union. | 0:44:16 | 0:44:19 | |
The Germans expected to capture it on day one of Barbarossa. | 0:44:24 | 0:44:29 | |
In fact, a few hundred Russians held out for eight days | 0:44:29 | 0:44:33 | |
against a whole German infantry division with 10,000 combat troops. | 0:44:33 | 0:44:39 | |
The Russians battled on in appalling conditions with virtually no water. | 0:44:48 | 0:44:53 | |
The Germans tried everything - tanks, shells, bombing. | 0:44:55 | 0:45:00 | |
Eventually they had to winkle out the defenders room by room. | 0:45:00 | 0:45:04 | |
One Russian soldier, Georgi Karbuk, recalled - | 0:45:08 | 0:45:11 | |
"The Germans deployed flamethrowers. | 0:45:13 | 0:45:16 | |
"They simply poked the nozzles into cellar windows and burned everything. | 0:45:16 | 0:45:21 | |
"Even the bricks melted. | 0:45:21 | 0:45:24 | |
"Others threw grenades into cellars where families were hiding." | 0:45:24 | 0:45:28 | |
Ultimately, the German 45th Infantry Division | 0:45:32 | 0:45:35 | |
did conquer the fortress here at Brest. | 0:45:35 | 0:45:38 | |
But it had lost nearly 500 men in a week, | 0:45:38 | 0:45:42 | |
more than it lost in a whole month in France in 1940. | 0:45:42 | 0:45:47 | |
For the German army, as well as the Russian people, | 0:45:47 | 0:45:52 | |
Brest was a foretaste of horrors to come. | 0:45:52 | 0:45:55 | |
TRAIN WHISTLE BLOWS | 0:46:00 | 0:46:03 | |
The will to resist the invaders was just as strong behind the front line. | 0:46:07 | 0:46:12 | |
Much of Soviet industry lay west of Moscow. Easy pickings for Hitler. | 0:46:13 | 0:46:19 | |
So the Russians dismantled some 1,500 factories, put them on trains | 0:46:19 | 0:46:24 | |
together with workers and families | 0:46:24 | 0:46:26 | |
and then rebuilt them east of the Ural Mountains. | 0:46:26 | 0:46:29 | |
The scale was incredible. | 0:46:46 | 0:46:48 | |
Over a million railway wagons were needed. | 0:46:48 | 0:46:51 | |
Placed end to end, it was estimated that they would've stretched | 0:46:51 | 0:46:56 | |
right across the country from Poland to the Pacific. | 0:46:56 | 0:47:01 | |
What made ordinary Russians - soldiers and civilians, | 0:47:18 | 0:47:22 | |
struggle so tenaciously? | 0:47:22 | 0:47:25 | |
Here's one story, which I think captures the spirit of Russian resistance in 1941. | 0:47:28 | 0:47:33 | |
Fleeing the German onslaught on the road to Moscow, | 0:47:36 | 0:47:40 | |
the war correspondent Vasily Grossman was given shelter by an old peasant woman. | 0:47:41 | 0:47:46 | |
She used up her tiny stock of supplies, welcoming him | 0:47:46 | 0:47:50 | |
with a good meal and a roaring fire, | 0:47:50 | 0:47:53 | |
all the while singing songs. | 0:47:53 | 0:47:55 | |
She told Grossman of her son fighting at the front and of her nightmares. | 0:47:55 | 0:48:01 | |
"The Devil came to me last night, and sank his claws into my hand. | 0:48:03 | 0:48:09 | |
"I started to pray, but the Devil took no notice. | 0:48:09 | 0:48:13 | |
"So I told him to fuck off, and then he did disappear." | 0:48:13 | 0:48:17 | |
Grossman was very struck by this typically Russian mix | 0:48:21 | 0:48:26 | |
of generosity and bloody-mindedness. | 0:48:26 | 0:48:28 | |
"If we do win in this terrible, cruel war, | 0:48:30 | 0:48:34 | |
"it will be because there are such noble hearts in our nation. | 0:48:34 | 0:48:38 | |
"They illuminate all our people with a miraculous light." | 0:48:38 | 0:48:43 | |
For this old woman, and for millions of Russians, | 0:48:44 | 0:48:48 | |
their defiance was rooted | 0:48:48 | 0:48:50 | |
in a deeper sense of homeland, of Russia's history and faith, | 0:48:50 | 0:48:56 | |
that stretched back long before Lenin and Stalin. | 0:48:56 | 0:49:00 | |
One popular wartime poem tapped into this mood, | 0:49:08 | 0:49:13 | |
imagining the ghosts of the old religious Russia | 0:49:13 | 0:49:16 | |
coming to the aid of Stalin's godless communists. | 0:49:16 | 0:49:20 | |
"It was as if at the graves in each Russian village | 0:49:22 | 0:49:26 | |
"Guarding the living with the sign of the cross | 0:49:26 | 0:49:29 | |
"Our ancestors were gathering to pray | 0:49:29 | 0:49:32 | |
"For their grandsons who no longer believe in a God." | 0:49:32 | 0:49:36 | |
With customary opportunism, | 0:49:41 | 0:49:44 | |
Stalin responded to this resurgent sense of history, | 0:49:44 | 0:49:48 | |
and Russians, in turn, responded to Stalin, | 0:49:48 | 0:49:52 | |
or more precisely, to the heroic image of Stalin | 0:49:52 | 0:49:56 | |
projected by the regime. | 0:49:56 | 0:49:58 | |
The Man of Steel, the modern Tsar, | 0:49:58 | 0:50:01 | |
became a symbol for the Russian people of their determination | 0:50:01 | 0:50:06 | |
to resist the new invaders. | 0:50:06 | 0:50:09 | |
Stalin accelerated his transformation into nationalist leader. | 0:50:17 | 0:50:21 | |
His speech for the Revolution Day parade in November invoked Lenin, | 0:50:21 | 0:50:27 | |
but also the Russian heroes who had repulsed earlier invaders, | 0:50:27 | 0:50:31 | |
including the Tsarist general Kutuzov. | 0:50:31 | 0:50:35 | |
The troops paraded through Red Square and marched straight on to the front. | 0:50:41 | 0:50:46 | |
Moscow was now under almost nightly attack from the Luftwaffe. | 0:50:58 | 0:51:03 | |
The Kremlin's air-raid shelters had not yet been completed, | 0:51:08 | 0:51:11 | |
so for a few days Stalin shared the ordeal of ordinary Muscovites, | 0:51:11 | 0:51:16 | |
dossing down in his greatcoat alongside them | 0:51:16 | 0:51:19 | |
in one of the Metro stations. | 0:51:19 | 0:51:22 | |
By December 2nd 1941, German advance units | 0:51:32 | 0:51:35 | |
were only a dozen miles from the Kremlin. | 0:51:35 | 0:51:39 | |
Its domes and spires glinted in the pale sun. | 0:51:39 | 0:51:44 | |
One German medical officer reached a tram stop on the road into the city. | 0:51:47 | 0:51:52 | |
"There was an old wooden bin attached to the wall. | 0:51:55 | 0:51:58 | |
"I felt inside and dragged out a handful of old tram tickets. | 0:51:58 | 0:52:03 | |
"We picked out the Cyrillic letters, | 0:52:03 | 0:52:06 | |
"which by now we knew spelled 'Moskva'." | 0:52:06 | 0:52:10 | |
But there was to be no easy ride into Moscow for those German soldiers. | 0:52:10 | 0:52:15 | |
This vast replica of a tank trap | 0:52:15 | 0:52:17 | |
marks the end of the line for them - | 0:52:17 | 0:52:21 | |
the point where Barbarossa, once molten fire, literally froze up. | 0:52:21 | 0:52:27 | |
Temperatures were now 30 below. | 0:52:44 | 0:52:46 | |
Tank and plane engines had to be heated for hours before they could be started. | 0:52:48 | 0:52:53 | |
Many German soldiers lacked winter clothing, even proper gloves - | 0:52:53 | 0:52:58 | |
victims of Hitler's hubris about a quick victory. | 0:52:58 | 0:53:03 | |
Seizing their chance, Stalin and Zhukov now planned a dramatic counterattack. | 0:53:06 | 0:53:11 | |
Before dawn on December 5th, | 0:53:18 | 0:53:20 | |
Soviet troops ploughed into the frozen Nazi pincers around Moscow. | 0:53:20 | 0:53:25 | |
GUNFIRE | 0:53:25 | 0:53:29 | |
Although the Germans weren't routed, | 0:53:37 | 0:53:39 | |
they were driven back 100 miles. | 0:53:39 | 0:53:42 | |
At last for the Russians, after six months of defeat, a first victory. | 0:53:42 | 0:53:48 | |
But could they keep it up? | 0:53:48 | 0:53:50 | |
Zhukov knew the limits of his army. | 0:54:02 | 0:54:05 | |
He wanted a targeted strike to save Moscow. | 0:54:05 | 0:54:10 | |
But Stalin was now on a roll. | 0:54:10 | 0:54:13 | |
Though no general, he had apparently done what Kutuzov could not do - | 0:54:13 | 0:54:18 | |
save Russia without sacrificing Moscow. | 0:54:18 | 0:54:22 | |
And like Hitler when he launched Barbarossa, Stalin now believed his enemy to be ripe for destruction. | 0:54:22 | 0:54:30 | |
Pacing around his study in the Kremlin, Stalin told his generals, | 0:54:33 | 0:54:38 | |
"The Germans are taken aback by their defeat near Moscow. | 0:54:38 | 0:54:43 | |
"Now is just the time to mount a general offensive." | 0:54:43 | 0:54:47 | |
Zhukov protested that he hadn't the resources to advance | 0:54:47 | 0:54:51 | |
in this way, all along the front. | 0:54:51 | 0:54:54 | |
Stalin would have none of this. | 0:54:54 | 0:54:57 | |
"Our task is not to give the Germans a breathing space. | 0:54:57 | 0:55:01 | |
"We must drive them westwards without a halt. | 0:55:01 | 0:55:05 | |
"This will ensure the complete defeat | 0:55:05 | 0:55:09 | |
"of the Nazi forces in 1942." | 0:55:09 | 0:55:12 | |
According to Zhukov, nobody else spoke up. | 0:55:13 | 0:55:18 | |
The dictator had browbeaten his generals. | 0:55:18 | 0:55:22 | |
The all-out New Year offensive went ahead and Stalin, | 0:55:22 | 0:55:27 | |
with customary vindictiveness, crossed Zhukov's name off the list | 0:55:27 | 0:55:31 | |
of those to be honoured for saving Moscow. | 0:55:31 | 0:55:34 | |
'Along the whole front, the great Russian counter-offensive, | 0:55:37 | 0:55:42 | |
'which Stalin personally worked out in every detail, springs to life.' | 0:55:42 | 0:55:46 | |
British newsreels recorded Stalin's great offensive. | 0:55:46 | 0:55:50 | |
The heroic Russians seemed to be the only ones effectively fighting the Germans. | 0:55:50 | 0:55:55 | |
Britain was still on the back foot. | 0:55:59 | 0:56:01 | |
And America, though at last in the war, | 0:56:04 | 0:56:08 | |
was in disarray after Japan's surprise attack at Pearl Harbour. | 0:56:08 | 0:56:12 | |
Yet in early 1942, Stalin was sniffing victory, | 0:56:14 | 0:56:19 | |
and like Hitler, it went to his head. | 0:56:19 | 0:56:24 | |
Having lost eastern Europe in 1941, | 0:56:24 | 0:56:27 | |
he was now determined to get it back. | 0:56:27 | 0:56:30 | |
He told Britain and America that Russia's rewards for victory | 0:56:30 | 0:56:33 | |
should include eastern Poland and the Baltic states - | 0:56:33 | 0:56:38 | |
the very territories signed over to him in 1939 | 0:56:38 | 0:56:41 | |
as part of his pact with Hitler. | 0:56:41 | 0:56:45 | |
Now he wanted his allies to endorse the same dirty deal. | 0:56:45 | 0:56:50 | |
This obsessive haggling for territorial gain | 0:56:52 | 0:56:56 | |
may seem bizarrely premature to us now, | 0:56:56 | 0:57:00 | |
but I think it makes sense if we remember that Stalin, still on a high | 0:57:00 | 0:57:06 | |
from the success of the winter counter-offensives, | 0:57:06 | 0:57:08 | |
thought the war might be over within a few months. | 0:57:08 | 0:57:12 | |
So he was trying to strengthen his hand | 0:57:12 | 0:57:16 | |
for an upcoming peace conference. | 0:57:16 | 0:57:19 | |
Russian friendship was vital for Britain. | 0:57:20 | 0:57:24 | |
But handing over Poland and the Baltic states to the Soviets, | 0:57:24 | 0:57:28 | |
as Hitler had done, seemed utterly immoral. | 0:57:28 | 0:57:30 | |
After anguished debate, the British Government dug in. | 0:57:30 | 0:57:36 | |
So Stalin applied direct pressure. | 0:57:36 | 0:57:38 | |
He sent Molotov, his tough-guy foreign minister, to Britain, | 0:57:38 | 0:57:42 | |
to press Russia's case for territory. | 0:57:42 | 0:57:45 | |
'Early one morning in May, a powerful four-engined Soviet bomber came in to land at a northern aerodrome. | 0:57:46 | 0:57:52 | |
'Out of it stepped the Soviet people's Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Monsieur Molotov, | 0:57:52 | 0:57:56 | |
'clad in heavy fur-lined flying kit.' | 0:57:56 | 0:57:58 | |
In front of the newsreel cameras, it was all smiles, | 0:57:58 | 0:58:04 | |
but behind the scenes, Molotov did not prove an easy guest. | 0:58:04 | 0:58:08 | |
Conscious, perhaps, that 20 years earlier, | 0:58:14 | 0:58:17 | |
his host Churchill had tried to strangle Bolshevism in its cradle, | 0:58:17 | 0:58:23 | |
Molotov and his aides slept with revolvers under their pillows. | 0:58:23 | 0:58:28 | |
Their rooms were also guarded round the clock | 0:58:28 | 0:58:31 | |
by grim Russian matriarchs dressed in black. | 0:58:31 | 0:58:35 | |
Molotov was notorious for his hard-nosed negotiating style, | 0:58:42 | 0:58:47 | |
but he could not get his way on carving up eastern Europe. | 0:58:47 | 0:58:51 | |
Churchill would only offer a general treaty of alliance, | 0:58:51 | 0:58:55 | |
and no promises about territory. | 0:58:55 | 0:58:58 | |
Molotov cabled the British offer to Stalin contemptuously. | 0:59:00 | 0:59:05 | |
"We consider this treaty unacceptable | 0:59:05 | 0:59:08 | |
"as it is an empty declaration which the Soviet Union does not need." | 0:59:08 | 0:59:15 | |
Molotov assumed Stalin would agree, | 0:59:15 | 0:59:17 | |
but, back in the Kremlin, | 0:59:17 | 0:59:19 | |
the mood was changing, as bad news filtered in from the front. | 0:59:19 | 0:59:24 | |
Buoyed up by over-confidence, and once again riding roughshod over generals like Zhukov, | 0:59:31 | 0:59:36 | |
in May 1942, Stalin had ordered a reckless new assault | 0:59:36 | 0:59:41 | |
to recapture Kharkov, second city of the Ukraine. | 0:59:41 | 0:59:45 | |
After a week of fighting, Khrushchev phoned to report | 0:59:50 | 0:59:53 | |
that the Soviet forces at Kharkov had driven themselves into a trap, | 0:59:53 | 0:59:58 | |
and were being encircled by the Germans. | 0:59:58 | 1:00:01 | |
Stalin refused even to take the call. | 1:00:05 | 1:00:08 | |
"Put down the phone. | 1:00:08 | 1:00:10 | |
"As if he knows what he's talking about!" | 1:00:10 | 1:00:13 | |
It was like June 1941 all over again. | 1:00:33 | 1:00:37 | |
Only after a quarter of a million men were captured | 1:00:37 | 1:00:42 | |
and 1,200 tanks were written off did Stalin face the facts. | 1:00:42 | 1:00:47 | |
With his regime on the ropes once more, | 1:00:49 | 1:00:53 | |
Stalin called off the offensive, | 1:00:53 | 1:00:55 | |
and rethought the priorities of his diplomacy. | 1:00:55 | 1:00:59 | |
Stalin dropped his demands for territory. | 1:01:03 | 1:01:07 | |
What mattered now was getting the Allies to mount a second front - | 1:01:07 | 1:01:12 | |
a British and American assault on mainland Europe | 1:01:12 | 1:01:15 | |
to divert German forces from Russia. | 1:01:15 | 1:01:18 | |
Stalin cabled Molotov in London. | 1:01:18 | 1:01:21 | |
He told him to stop protesting, sign the treaty with Britain | 1:01:21 | 1:01:25 | |
and firm up the Allies' commitment to a second front. | 1:01:25 | 1:01:30 | |
Molotov was flabbergasted, but the man whom the British regarded as the hardliner | 1:01:30 | 1:01:36 | |
grovelled abjectly to his boss. | 1:01:36 | 1:01:39 | |
"I shall act in accordance with the directive. | 1:01:39 | 1:01:42 | |
"I believe that the new draft treaty can also have positive value. | 1:01:42 | 1:01:46 | |
"I failed to appreciate it at once." | 1:01:46 | 1:01:49 | |
'At the Foreign Office, the Grand Alliance was entered into | 1:01:49 | 1:01:53 | |
'as signatures were appended to the document by the representatives of the high contracting parties. | 1:01:53 | 1:01:57 | |
'Full understanding was also reached with regard to the creating this year of a second front in Europe.' | 1:01:57 | 1:02:03 | |
In mid-1942, Hitler resumed his offensive. | 1:02:07 | 1:02:11 | |
The new campaign was directed southeast to seize Russia's oil in the Caucasus. | 1:02:11 | 1:02:17 | |
But Stalin still assumed that Hitler's real goal was Moscow. | 1:02:19 | 1:02:22 | |
Thanks to Stalin's misplaced deployments, the German advance was even swifter than in 1941. | 1:02:27 | 1:02:32 | |
By the end of the summer, | 1:02:32 | 1:02:34 | |
the swastika was flying over the highest point in the Caucasus. | 1:02:34 | 1:02:39 | |
The Red Army had lost another 600,000 prisoners, | 1:02:39 | 1:02:43 | |
and thousands more tanks. | 1:02:43 | 1:02:46 | |
The pattern was the same as 1941 - | 1:02:55 | 1:02:59 | |
armoured pincers, and mass encirclements, | 1:02:59 | 1:03:02 | |
rants from Stalin about "not one step back", | 1:03:02 | 1:03:05 | |
and new orders for blocking units | 1:03:05 | 1:03:08 | |
to shoot those trying to flee. | 1:03:08 | 1:03:12 | |
In July 1942, with the Red Army collapsing, | 1:03:12 | 1:03:16 | |
Stalin was once again desperate for help. | 1:03:16 | 1:03:19 | |
Stalin now really needed Churchill | 1:03:25 | 1:03:26 | |
to deliver on the promise of a second front in Europe in 1942. | 1:03:26 | 1:03:32 | |
But nothing seemed to be happening. | 1:03:32 | 1:03:35 | |
Stalin sensed that he was being betrayed by the old enemy. | 1:03:35 | 1:03:40 | |
"Personal and Secret. | 1:03:40 | 1:03:42 | |
"Premier Stalin to Premier Churchill. | 1:03:42 | 1:03:45 | |
"In spite of the agreed communique concerning the urgent tasks | 1:03:45 | 1:03:49 | |
"of creating a second front in 1942, | 1:03:49 | 1:03:52 | |
"the British Government postpones this matter until 1943." | 1:03:52 | 1:03:57 | |
Relations between London and Moscow were reaching crisis point. | 1:03:59 | 1:04:03 | |
As the German juggernaut rolled east, rumours swirled around | 1:04:03 | 1:04:08 | |
about Soviet capitulation and peace talks. | 1:04:08 | 1:04:11 | |
A new Nazi-Soviet Pact would be a disaster for Britain. | 1:04:11 | 1:04:16 | |
For the British, Stalin's military blunders | 1:04:19 | 1:04:22 | |
opened up a terrifying scenario. | 1:04:22 | 1:04:25 | |
Churchill's Chief of Staff, Alanbrooke, noted in his diary... | 1:04:25 | 1:04:29 | |
"While we are talking, the Germans are walking through the Caucasus. | 1:04:29 | 1:04:35 | |
"Our defences in Iraq and Persia are lamentably weak." | 1:04:35 | 1:04:39 | |
If the Germans smashed through the Caucasus to Iraq and Persia, | 1:04:41 | 1:04:47 | |
they would grab most of Britain's oil. | 1:04:47 | 1:04:51 | |
Neutral Turkey would probably throw in its lot with Hitler, | 1:04:51 | 1:04:56 | |
perhaps even allowing a link-up with Rommel's army in Egypt, | 1:04:56 | 1:05:01 | |
now steam-rollering towards the Suez Canal. | 1:05:01 | 1:05:04 | |
The Germans might even join forces with the Japanese to threaten | 1:05:04 | 1:05:09 | |
India from the west as well as east. | 1:05:09 | 1:05:12 | |
Nightmares, perhaps, but all too vivid and real at the time. | 1:05:14 | 1:05:19 | |
In 1941, Russia's collapse threatened to expose the British Isles | 1:05:19 | 1:05:25 | |
to the Nazi war machine. | 1:05:25 | 1:05:28 | |
In 1942, the whole British Empire seemed at stake | 1:05:28 | 1:05:33 | |
because of Stalin's military bungling. | 1:05:33 | 1:05:37 | |
While Stalin felt betrayed by Churchill over the promise of a second front, | 1:05:41 | 1:05:45 | |
Churchill doubted Stalin's ability | 1:05:45 | 1:05:47 | |
to hold out against Hitler. | 1:05:47 | 1:05:50 | |
Without trust, the alliance was doomed. | 1:05:50 | 1:05:54 | |
Churchill felt that he and Stalin had to meet face-to-face. | 1:05:54 | 1:05:58 | |
In the middle of August 1942, | 1:06:01 | 1:06:03 | |
after a long flight dodging German fighters, | 1:06:03 | 1:06:08 | |
Churchill arrived in Moscow. | 1:06:08 | 1:06:10 | |
Churchill was excited to meet Stalin for the first time, | 1:06:10 | 1:06:13 | |
and keen to get the measure of the man. But he was also anxious. | 1:06:13 | 1:06:18 | |
He was about to give Stalin an update on the second front that wouldn't be welcome. | 1:06:20 | 1:06:24 | |
It was, he said, "Like carrying a large lump of ice to the North Pole." | 1:06:24 | 1:06:29 | |
At seven that evening, Churchill was ushered into Stalin's office. | 1:06:36 | 1:06:41 | |
First impressions were not flattering. | 1:06:41 | 1:06:44 | |
At the door was a nervous dwarf - | 1:06:44 | 1:06:47 | |
actually Poskrebyshev or "Bald Head" as one snooty British official called him. | 1:06:47 | 1:06:53 | |
And Stalin himself didn't look particularly impressive, | 1:06:53 | 1:06:57 | |
attired as usual in lilac tunic, | 1:06:57 | 1:07:00 | |
baggy trousers and long boots. | 1:07:00 | 1:07:04 | |
This was actually standard Communist Party dress, but to the British, | 1:07:04 | 1:07:07 | |
he looked a bit of a yokel. | 1:07:07 | 1:07:09 | |
For Stalin, a gangster from the Caucasus, used to manipulating cronies and underlings, | 1:07:14 | 1:07:20 | |
having to negotiate with a grandee from the West, | 1:07:20 | 1:07:25 | |
face-to-face and on equal terms, was a new experience. | 1:07:25 | 1:07:29 | |
A first test, if you like, of his ability to play in the premier league of international diplomacy. | 1:07:29 | 1:07:37 | |
And I think that the records of his meetings with Churchill | 1:07:37 | 1:07:41 | |
throw a revealing light on Stalin's effectiveness as a statesman, | 1:07:41 | 1:07:46 | |
as he learnt to manage Russia's wartime alliances for his own ends. | 1:07:46 | 1:07:52 | |
To start with, the meeting was heavy going. | 1:07:54 | 1:07:58 | |
Stalin admitted the news from the Caucasus was bad. | 1:07:58 | 1:08:02 | |
Churchill spoke defensively about all the problems | 1:08:02 | 1:08:05 | |
of mounting a second front in France that year. | 1:08:05 | 1:08:08 | |
Stalin looked grim. | 1:08:08 | 1:08:11 | |
"What about a smaller operation?" he asked. | 1:08:13 | 1:08:15 | |
"Like recapturing the Channel Islands?" | 1:08:15 | 1:08:18 | |
Churchill said it would be "a waste of seed-corn" | 1:08:18 | 1:08:22 | |
for the real harvest which would come in 1943. | 1:08:22 | 1:08:28 | |
Stalin, who was used to wasting tons of seed-corn, replied testily, | 1:08:28 | 1:08:34 | |
"A man who isn't prepared to take risks cannot win a war." | 1:08:34 | 1:08:40 | |
But then Churchill revealed that he and the American President Franklin Roosevelt | 1:08:40 | 1:08:45 | |
had a top secret plan which would be every bit as good as a second front offensive against mainland Europe. | 1:08:45 | 1:08:53 | |
He drew a sketch of a crocodile. | 1:08:53 | 1:08:56 | |
Northern France, he said, was Hitler's hard snout, | 1:08:56 | 1:09:01 | |
but the Mediterranean was his soft belly. | 1:09:01 | 1:09:06 | |
Churchill promised that in the autumn, British and American troops | 1:09:06 | 1:09:10 | |
would land in Morocco and Algeria. | 1:09:10 | 1:09:14 | |
If North Africa was won in 1942, he said, | 1:09:14 | 1:09:18 | |
we will launch a deadly attack on Hitler next year. | 1:09:18 | 1:09:23 | |
Stalin was now fully engaged. | 1:09:23 | 1:09:26 | |
He asked a lot of questions. | 1:09:26 | 1:09:29 | |
The meeting broke up after 3½ hours. | 1:09:30 | 1:09:33 | |
The British Prime Minister was driven back to the dacha he had been assigned. | 1:09:33 | 1:09:38 | |
Churchill was jubilant. | 1:09:42 | 1:09:45 | |
"My strategy was sound", he crowed. | 1:09:46 | 1:09:48 | |
First, he had given Stalin the bad news, | 1:09:48 | 1:09:52 | |
then he'd offered glad tidings. | 1:09:52 | 1:09:55 | |
Stalin, he said, ended enthusiastic, | 1:09:55 | 1:09:58 | |
in a glow. | 1:09:58 | 1:09:59 | |
Churchill declared that Stalin was just a peasant | 1:10:01 | 1:10:05 | |
whom he knew exactly how to handle. | 1:10:05 | 1:10:09 | |
Too late, Churchill was warned that the room had probably been bugged, | 1:10:09 | 1:10:14 | |
and that his comments might well be passed on to Stalin. | 1:10:14 | 1:10:18 | |
But Churchill wasn't cowed, stalking up to the likely location | 1:10:18 | 1:10:21 | |
of a microphone and shouting, | 1:10:21 | 1:10:24 | |
"The Russians, I have been told, are not human beings at all. | 1:10:24 | 1:10:30 | |
"They are lower in the scale of nature than the orang-utan. | 1:10:30 | 1:10:35 | |
"Now, let them take that down | 1:10:36 | 1:10:40 | |
"and translate it into Russian." | 1:10:40 | 1:10:43 | |
It was a strange echo of Churchill's spluttering 20 years earlier | 1:10:43 | 1:10:49 | |
about "Bolshevik baboonery". | 1:10:49 | 1:10:51 | |
Whether his bombast got back to Stalin, we don't know, | 1:10:51 | 1:10:55 | |
but the next meeting between the two leaders was very different. | 1:10:55 | 1:11:00 | |
Perhaps Stalin felt insulted by Churchill's taunts, or maybe | 1:11:02 | 1:11:07 | |
he had seen through the so-called second front in the Mediterranean. | 1:11:07 | 1:11:12 | |
The evidence isn't clear, but Stalin now played the hard man. | 1:11:12 | 1:11:16 | |
Sitting back in his chair, eyes half closed, puffing at his pipe, | 1:11:18 | 1:11:23 | |
he tore Churchill to shreds. | 1:11:23 | 1:11:26 | |
He dismissed North Africa as an irrelevance. | 1:11:26 | 1:11:31 | |
He accused Churchill of breaking a firm promise about the second front. | 1:11:31 | 1:11:37 | |
He even mocked Britain for cowardice. | 1:11:37 | 1:11:40 | |
"If the British Army had been fighting the Germans as much as the Russian Army, | 1:11:42 | 1:11:47 | |
"it wouldn't be so frightened of them." | 1:11:47 | 1:11:50 | |
Churchill was livid! | 1:11:50 | 1:11:53 | |
He shouted back, giving as good as he got. | 1:11:53 | 1:11:57 | |
The second meeting ended in icy deadlock. | 1:12:01 | 1:12:05 | |
Next day at the dacha, Churchill fumed in the garden, | 1:12:23 | 1:12:27 | |
safely out of range of the bugs. | 1:12:27 | 1:12:30 | |
"That man has insulted me! | 1:12:32 | 1:12:35 | |
"From now on, he will have to fight his battles alone. | 1:12:35 | 1:12:40 | |
"I represent a great country, | 1:12:40 | 1:12:42 | |
"and I am not submissive by nature." | 1:12:42 | 1:12:47 | |
This was no longer a policy dispute, | 1:12:51 | 1:12:54 | |
a row about the second front. | 1:12:54 | 1:12:57 | |
It was a clash of cultures | 1:12:57 | 1:13:00 | |
between two proud men | 1:13:00 | 1:13:02 | |
representing two proud nations. | 1:13:02 | 1:13:05 | |
Each desperately needed the other, | 1:13:05 | 1:13:09 | |
but there was a limit to how far either would bend. | 1:13:09 | 1:13:14 | |
Unlike Stalin, Churchill wasn't surrounded by lackeys. | 1:13:15 | 1:13:20 | |
The British Ambassador, Sir Archibald Clark Kerr, | 1:13:20 | 1:13:24 | |
talked back at Churchill hard. | 1:13:24 | 1:13:28 | |
In a letter later, he recalled how he asked Churchill bluntly | 1:13:28 | 1:13:33 | |
whether he intended to "flounce off home". | 1:13:33 | 1:13:37 | |
"All because you are offended. | 1:13:37 | 1:13:39 | |
"Offended by a peasant who didn't know any better. | 1:13:39 | 1:13:44 | |
"You are an aristocrat. | 1:13:44 | 1:13:46 | |
"They are rough and inexperienced, | 1:13:46 | 1:13:49 | |
"straight from the plough and the lathe. | 1:13:49 | 1:13:52 | |
"Don't let your pride blur your judgement." | 1:13:52 | 1:13:56 | |
Noblesse oblige - that was the message. | 1:13:56 | 1:14:00 | |
Clark Kerr urged Churchill to unbend | 1:14:00 | 1:14:03 | |
and ask Stalin for another talk. | 1:14:03 | 1:14:07 | |
But would Stalin unbend as well? | 1:14:07 | 1:14:12 | |
In fact, for Stalin, the ground was also shifting. | 1:14:15 | 1:14:19 | |
He had just learned that the Germans had routed Soviet troops | 1:14:19 | 1:14:23 | |
on the Don River. | 1:14:23 | 1:14:25 | |
Stalingrad, the great industrial city | 1:14:25 | 1:14:29 | |
named after the Man of Steel himself, was now in Hitler's sights. | 1:14:29 | 1:14:33 | |
Round three between Stalin and Churchill | 1:14:40 | 1:14:43 | |
began at seven in the evening in Stalin's office. | 1:14:43 | 1:14:47 | |
The two leaders had a polite and business-like final discussion | 1:14:50 | 1:14:54 | |
about various aspects of the war. | 1:14:54 | 1:14:57 | |
But as Churchill got up to say goodbye, | 1:14:57 | 1:15:00 | |
Stalin became Mr Nice Guy all of a sudden. | 1:15:00 | 1:15:04 | |
"Why don't you come back to my apartment in the Kremlin and have a little drink, hm?" | 1:15:06 | 1:15:11 | |
The "little drink" mushroomed into dinner with a dictator - | 1:15:17 | 1:15:21 | |
a six-hour feast washed down with endless bottles of choice wine. | 1:15:21 | 1:15:25 | |
Stalin introduced Churchill to his daughter Svetlana and watched his reaction with a twinkle in his eye, | 1:15:25 | 1:15:32 | |
as if to say, "You see, even we Bolsheviks have family life." | 1:15:32 | 1:15:37 | |
The mood became progressively more unreal | 1:15:40 | 1:15:43 | |
as conversation lurched from the present to the past. | 1:15:43 | 1:15:47 | |
Churchill boasted about the military genius of his ancestor the Duke of Marlborough. | 1:15:47 | 1:15:53 | |
Stalin, with an impish smile, | 1:15:55 | 1:15:59 | |
said he thought the Duke of Wellington was more talented, | 1:15:59 | 1:16:03 | |
because he crushed Napoleon, | 1:16:03 | 1:16:05 | |
who presented the greatest danger in history. | 1:16:05 | 1:16:09 | |
Then Stalin got on to the collective farms campaign, | 1:16:09 | 1:16:13 | |
and the criminal resistance of the peasants. | 1:16:13 | 1:16:17 | |
It was, he said, a terrible struggle. | 1:16:17 | 1:16:20 | |
Ten million people, all very bad and difficult, | 1:16:20 | 1:16:26 | |
but necessary. | 1:16:26 | 1:16:28 | |
He hacked at a pig's head, picking at the flesh with his fingers. | 1:16:35 | 1:16:40 | |
Churchill had a vivid image of millions of men and women | 1:16:40 | 1:16:44 | |
being blotted out forever, but he held his tongue. | 1:16:44 | 1:16:48 | |
"With the World War going on all around us, | 1:16:49 | 1:16:53 | |
"it seemed vain to moralise aloud." | 1:16:53 | 1:16:57 | |
This final meeting cemented the alliance. | 1:17:03 | 1:17:08 | |
Churchill left Moscow with a new confidence in Stalin. | 1:17:08 | 1:17:12 | |
On the plane home next morning, nursing a massive hangover, | 1:17:12 | 1:17:16 | |
he murmured, "I was taken into the family. We ended friends." | 1:17:16 | 1:17:21 | |
'Of Joseph Stalin the Prime Minister has brought back an excellent impression | 1:17:21 | 1:17:25 | |
'of a great rugged war chief, blunt of speech, with a saving sense of humour. | 1:17:25 | 1:17:30 | |
'The two formed a friendship which promises well for the victory of the united nations.' | 1:17:30 | 1:17:37 | |
In the course of the war, Churchill's view of the Soviet Union | 1:17:50 | 1:17:54 | |
and the threat of what he called "Russian barbarism" | 1:17:54 | 1:17:58 | |
would yo-yo up and down, | 1:17:58 | 1:18:00 | |
but he retained his faith that Stalin was a man with whom he could do business. | 1:18:00 | 1:18:06 | |
For his part, Stalin had played a shrewd game of hot and cold | 1:18:06 | 1:18:12 | |
with Churchill, knocking him off balance. | 1:18:12 | 1:18:14 | |
This was a routine Stalin ploy. | 1:18:14 | 1:18:17 | |
But I believe there was something more behind his Mr Nice Guy act | 1:18:19 | 1:18:24 | |
when he invited Churchill to his flat. | 1:18:24 | 1:18:28 | |
Stalin, I think, made a deliberate decision | 1:18:28 | 1:18:32 | |
to open up, to show a more human side. | 1:18:32 | 1:18:37 | |
The bruiser had to become a charmer. | 1:18:37 | 1:18:41 | |
He couldn't afford to let the meeting end on a sour note, | 1:18:41 | 1:18:46 | |
because Russia's military situation had gone critical. | 1:18:46 | 1:18:49 | |
The Caucasus and Russian oil fields now seemed within Hitler's grasp. | 1:18:54 | 1:18:59 | |
The decisive battle would be in the cauldron of Stalingrad, | 1:19:03 | 1:19:08 | |
where two million Soviet and German troops became locked in a struggle to the death. | 1:19:08 | 1:19:13 | |
Churchill's much-vaunted offensive in the Mediterranean, | 1:19:18 | 1:19:21 | |
landing 100,000 troops on the beaches of North Africa | 1:19:21 | 1:19:25 | |
was a mere sideshow to this horrific climax of the war. | 1:19:25 | 1:19:29 | |
Having failed to wipe Leningrad and Moscow off the map, | 1:19:32 | 1:19:36 | |
Hitler was now determined to erase Stalingrad. | 1:19:36 | 1:19:39 | |
His orders were stark - male population to be destroyed, | 1:19:41 | 1:19:45 | |
female to be deported. | 1:19:45 | 1:19:48 | |
Hitler was becoming ever more the control freak as Supreme Commander. | 1:19:57 | 1:20:03 | |
But Stalin, the Man of Steel, who'd bent towards Churchill, | 1:20:03 | 1:20:08 | |
was also learning to be less rigid in dealing with his generals. | 1:20:08 | 1:20:12 | |
Swallowing his old fear of Bonapartism in the army, | 1:20:15 | 1:20:20 | |
Stalin dismantled the system of political commissars - | 1:20:20 | 1:20:23 | |
the apparatchiks who could question officers' orders | 1:20:23 | 1:20:27 | |
on party or ideological grounds. | 1:20:27 | 1:20:30 | |
Now, commanders were allowed to take decisions for military reasons alone. | 1:20:30 | 1:20:35 | |
Party hacks like Voroshilov were demoted, | 1:20:36 | 1:20:40 | |
while Stalin promoted Zhukov to Deputy Supreme Commander. | 1:20:40 | 1:20:44 | |
Zhukov knew the fate of Stalin's generals. | 1:20:45 | 1:20:50 | |
At first he tried to refuse the promotion, | 1:20:50 | 1:20:54 | |
claiming their temperaments were incompatible. | 1:20:54 | 1:20:56 | |
But Stalin was insistent - | 1:20:56 | 1:20:58 | |
"Let us subordinate our temperaments to the interests of the Motherland." | 1:20:58 | 1:21:04 | |
Zhukov wasn't just a one-man band. | 1:21:06 | 1:21:09 | |
Around him he built a capable staff of intelligent, efficient planners. | 1:21:09 | 1:21:14 | |
This was a decisive moment - | 1:21:17 | 1:21:19 | |
a sign that Stalin had the essential flexibility to survive. | 1:21:19 | 1:21:23 | |
In 1941, Stalin had appealed to nationalism, not communism, | 1:21:27 | 1:21:31 | |
in order to galvanize his people for war. | 1:21:31 | 1:21:36 | |
In 1942, he compromised again, | 1:21:36 | 1:21:38 | |
scrapping the ideology of party control | 1:21:38 | 1:21:41 | |
to give his top generals the freedom to fight. | 1:21:41 | 1:21:47 | |
While Russian soldiers battled heroically in the ruins of Stalingrad, | 1:21:50 | 1:21:54 | |
Zhukov and his staff formulated a bold plan to relieve the city. | 1:21:54 | 1:22:00 | |
And Stalin let them do it, finally releasing the reserves | 1:22:00 | 1:22:03 | |
he had retained to protect Moscow and not pushing Zhukov this time | 1:22:03 | 1:22:09 | |
into a premature assault. | 1:22:09 | 1:22:11 | |
In November 1942, the pincers closed again. | 1:22:17 | 1:22:20 | |
But they were Russian pincers, slicing through weak divisions | 1:22:20 | 1:22:24 | |
that guarded the rear of Hitler's army in Stalingrad. | 1:22:24 | 1:22:29 | |
It was the Germans who were now encircled. | 1:22:30 | 1:22:33 | |
Their final surrender in January 1943 | 1:22:38 | 1:22:41 | |
coincided with the tenth anniversary of Hitler's seizure of power. | 1:22:41 | 1:22:46 | |
It was a devastating turn of fortune's wheel. | 1:22:48 | 1:22:52 | |
War correspondent Vasily Grossman witnessed the Russian victory. | 1:22:54 | 1:22:59 | |
"Prisoners move on and on in crowds, their mess tins rattling, | 1:23:00 | 1:23:05 | |
"belted with pieces of rope, or wire. | 1:23:05 | 1:23:08 | |
"Russian troops are marching. | 1:23:08 | 1:23:11 | |
"Their spirits are higher now. | 1:23:11 | 1:23:13 | |
"Ah, it would be great to get to Kiev." | 1:23:13 | 1:23:17 | |
Another man - "Ah, I'd like to get to Berlin." | 1:23:17 | 1:23:20 | |
The Red Army was now on the march. | 1:23:23 | 1:23:26 | |
So were the British and Americans by the end of 1942, | 1:23:26 | 1:23:30 | |
routing the Germans in North Africa as a springboard for control of the Mediterranean. | 1:23:30 | 1:23:36 | |
But it was the Eastern Front, | 1:23:36 | 1:23:38 | |
the great battles for Moscow and Stalingrad, | 1:23:38 | 1:23:42 | |
that turned World War Two, | 1:23:42 | 1:23:44 | |
beginning a fightback that would eventually entrench the Soviet Union | 1:23:44 | 1:23:49 | |
as a new superpower throughout Eastern Europe. | 1:23:49 | 1:23:52 | |
Not just Poland and the Baltic states, | 1:23:52 | 1:23:56 | |
but Hungary, Czechoslovakia and half of Germany itself. | 1:23:56 | 1:23:59 | |
The Second World War was a struggle | 1:24:06 | 1:24:10 | |
to defeat Hitler's genocidal imperialism. | 1:24:10 | 1:24:13 | |
Yet the man who gained most from victory was a dictator | 1:24:13 | 1:24:16 | |
as cruel and ruthless as his enemy. | 1:24:16 | 1:24:19 | |
The difference between victory and defeat was in large part, that Stalin eventually learned | 1:24:23 | 1:24:29 | |
from the mistakes that had cost millions of Russian lives, | 1:24:29 | 1:24:33 | |
whereas setbacks only made Hitler more unyielding in his fantasies. | 1:24:33 | 1:24:39 | |
Ultimately, Stalin, for all his Bolshevik ideology, | 1:24:41 | 1:24:45 | |
was a pragmatist with a keen eye for survival. | 1:24:45 | 1:24:49 | |
Although he was an outsider, his command over the Russian people | 1:24:49 | 1:24:54 | |
gained him an empire, bought with their blood, | 1:24:54 | 1:24:58 | |
that surpassed anything won by the Tsars. | 1:24:58 | 1:25:02 | |
So there was a ghastly moral compromise at the heart of the Allied victory. | 1:25:02 | 1:25:07 | |
In 1945, the defeat of one evil | 1:25:07 | 1:25:11 | |
helped entrench another evil across half of Europe | 1:25:11 | 1:25:15 | |
and in Russia itself. | 1:25:15 | 1:25:18 | |
Having learnt to loosen up his regime to win victory, | 1:25:23 | 1:25:27 | |
after the war, Stalin tightened his grip once again, | 1:25:27 | 1:25:32 | |
reverting to terror. | 1:25:32 | 1:25:34 | |
He put his generals back in their place, demoting the war hero Zhukov on charges of corruption, | 1:25:34 | 1:25:39 | |
and he clamped down on his people with renewed censorship | 1:25:39 | 1:25:43 | |
and another purge of the party. | 1:25:43 | 1:25:46 | |
In the 1950s, Vasily Grossman pondered the cost of victory, | 1:25:49 | 1:25:53 | |
reflecting on how the heroism of the war had saved Russia, | 1:25:53 | 1:25:58 | |
while also saving Stalin, and shoring up the Stalinist system. | 1:25:58 | 1:26:04 | |
His epic novel Life And Fate was modelled on Tolstoy's War and Peace. | 1:26:04 | 1:26:10 | |
At the fulcrum of his book, | 1:26:12 | 1:26:14 | |
Grossman evokes Stalin waiting anxiously for the start | 1:26:14 | 1:26:19 | |
of Zhukov's vital counter-offensive around Stalingrad. | 1:26:19 | 1:26:23 | |
The passage is pure fiction, | 1:26:23 | 1:26:26 | |
but also, I think, sublime poetic truth. | 1:26:26 | 1:26:30 | |
Grossman imagines the dictator recalling the shambles of 1941 - | 1:26:34 | 1:26:40 | |
his bumblings that nearly ruined Russia. | 1:26:40 | 1:26:43 | |
In his mind's eye, behind Hitler's tanks, | 1:26:44 | 1:26:47 | |
Stalin sees the millions of Russians he destroyed coming back to life. | 1:26:47 | 1:26:53 | |
The prisoners of the Arctic Gulag breaking up through the permafrost. | 1:26:53 | 1:26:57 | |
Emaciated peasants crawling out of the soil, all of them looking for him. | 1:26:59 | 1:27:04 | |
Then Zhukov's pincers close. | 1:27:08 | 1:27:12 | |
The Germans cannot escape. | 1:27:12 | 1:27:15 | |
Stalingrad will be remembered as a triumph, not a disaster. | 1:27:15 | 1:27:19 | |
Grossman now imagines Stalin's devoted secretary - | 1:27:19 | 1:27:24 | |
bald little Poskrebyshev, whose wife was one of Stalin's victims - | 1:27:24 | 1:27:28 | |
watching silent and motionless | 1:27:28 | 1:27:30 | |
as his boss sits back, | 1:27:30 | 1:27:33 | |
drinking in the wonderful news. | 1:27:33 | 1:27:36 | |
To the victor, the spoils. | 1:27:36 | 1:27:39 | |
"This was his hour of triumph. | 1:27:41 | 1:27:45 | |
"He'd not only defeated his current enemy, he'd defeated his past. | 1:27:45 | 1:27:50 | |
"In the villages, the grass would grow thicker over the tombs of 1930. | 1:27:50 | 1:27:56 | |
"The snow and ice of the Arctic Circle would remain dumb and silent. | 1:27:56 | 1:28:01 | |
"He knew better than anybody that no-one condemns a victor. | 1:28:01 | 1:28:07 | |
"Very slowly and gently, his eyes closed. | 1:28:07 | 1:28:11 | |
"He repeated the words of a song. | 1:28:11 | 1:28:14 | |
"You're caught in the net, my pretty little bird | 1:28:15 | 1:28:18 | |
"I won't let you go for anything in the world. | 1:28:18 | 1:28:23 | |
"Poskrebyshev looked at Stalin, at his grey, thinning hair, | 1:28:23 | 1:28:27 | |
"his pock-marked face, his closed eyes. | 1:28:27 | 1:28:31 | |
"Suddenly, he felt the ends of his fingers grow cold." | 1:28:33 | 1:28:38 | |
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd | 1:28:50 | 1:28:54 |