Russia: A Century of Suspicion A Timewatch Guide

Britain's relationship with Russia

has been marked by centuries of suspicion.

The British have always been afraid of the Russians.

In the last hundred years, they've been friend...

To the men of the Red Army.

..and foe.

This is how a war between the Soviet Union and the West would begin.

They've saved our skins

and terrified us with the thought of total annihilation.

'This will be the legacy of thermonuclear war.'

Britain would be in the bull's-eye of any Soviet attack.

At the outbreak of World War II, Winston Churchill famously

described Russia as a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

These words have almost come to define

Britain's view of Russia ever since -

an inscrutable power that always plays by its own rules.

In this film I'm going to examine how television has reflected

our ever-changing relationship,

from the tensions of the Cold War to the excitement of glasnost.

The West in general was a little bit naive.

And the Russian people who've lived through it all.

This is how arguably Britain's most complex international relationship

has played out on television.

This is the Timewatch Guide to Russia.

October 1st, 1939, a month into World War II.

Winston Churchill pondered on Russia's next move.

Would they keep to their non-aggression pact

with Nazi Germany or join the Allies?

The Soviet Union refused to fight against Hitler

and instead attempted to annex parts of Europe for themselves.

Churchill was quick to denounce them.

'Everyone can see how communism

'rots the soul of a nation,

'how it makes it abject and hungry in peace

'and proves it base and abominable in war.'

When Hitler turned his attentions to attacking Russia,

they joined the Allies in the fight against fascism.

The Red oppressor now suddenly became

our trusted partner in battle.

Now, a very different Russia was presented to Britons.

Newsreel praised the war effort of our Russian comrades.

'It does us good to see our Russian comrades at work.

'They and we are members of the free world, fighting and working

'to make the better way of life in which no man shall be exploited

'and every one of us shall carry his head high.'

Britain publicly celebrated the Red Army's 25th anniversary.

In Glasgow, Tory MPs, under Soviet iconography,

praised the communist power.

We shall have one debt after this war

and that is our debt of gratitude to the men of the Red Army.

To our comrades,

our grand salute to the men of the Red Army.

This is the story that doesn't get told.

This footage, as far as I'm aware, hasn't really been used

or analysed by historians.

We often focus on Russia as the enemy.

So you had a shift and a very profound change in the rhetoric,

from...from the Red Menace

and from a revolution that actually some feared could happen in the UK,

to Uncle Joe, our friend,

he's the man who's going to stop German troops,

and an encouraging of a much softer view of the Soviet Union.

MACHINE-GUN FIRE

In May 1945, the Nazi war machine was finally destroyed.

From the ashes of the most savage global conflict in human history,

the USSR would now emerge as a superpower.

As Germany was divided among the Allies,

the old political and cultural confrontation between the forces

of capitalism and communism were almost instantly resumed.

Britain and Russia were firmly back on opposing sides

of the political fence, and, by the 1960s

one fear loomed largest in the Western public's imagination -

nuclear war.

With Soviet missiles discovered installed in Cuba

and the Russians' test detonation of the largest-ever hydrogen bomb,

television captured the national mood in Britain.

With The War Game, the film-makers showed us in graphic detail

where our escalating tensions with Russia could ultimately lead.

We're shown an unprepared Britain

facing a full-scale Russian nuclear attack.

'Time, 9:13am.'

SIREN

Hurry, inside the house!

Move! Come on, come on! Quick!

'This family couldn't afford to build themselves a refuge.

'This could be the way the last two minutes of peace in Britain

'would look.'

Get all the children!

'9:16am,

'a single-megaton nuclear missile overshoots Manston Airfield in Kent

'and air-bursts six miles from this position.

EXPLOSION

SCREAMING

'At this distance, the heatwave is sufficient

'to cause melting of the upturned eyeball,

'third-degree burning of the skin and ignition of furniture.'

SCREAMING

'12 seconds later, the shock front arrives.

SCREAMING

DEEP RUMBLING SOUND

'These are the inhabitants of what was once a housing estate

'near Rochester in Kent.

'Following the explosion of three single-megaton missiles

'within this one county boundary, it's been estimated

'that each surviving doctor

'would be faced by at least 350 casualties,

'many suffering from severe second and third-degree burns.

'These will be the other casualties of a nuclear war.

'Physically unmarked,

'there will almost inevitably be thousands of people suffering from

'many complex states of fear and shock due to the things they've seen

'and the things that have happened to them.

'Many of these people will probably lapse

'into a state of permanent neurosis.

'This too will be the legacy of thermonuclear war.'

WHIMPERING AND CRYING

While the programme-makers in 1965 regarded this

as a legitimate portrayal of what could happen in World War III,

the BBC, after pressure from the Government, did not.

The film was banned for 20 years.

For people in Britain, the Cold War really moves,

as one historian has said, from the head to the gut.

It's when you feel it viscerally.

And of course it's in the '60s

that we have a big campaign for nuclear disarmament,

a feeling that this is an issue now which is so important

that people have to take to the streets in order to stop the growth

of nuclear weapons and the possibility of nuclear annihilation.

The superpower stand-off that was the Cold War

would grind on for over four decades from 1947.

The 1970s brought a welcome detente

but, secretly, the arms race continued.

The fear that the Cold War could spiral out of control

and into a full-scale global conflict was played out on the BBC.

SIREN

'This is how a war between the Soviet Union and the West

'would begin.

'For over 30 years, there has been an uneasy peace in Europe,

'preserved by a balance of military power.

'Is that balance tilting dangerously in favour of the Soviet Union?'

The trends have been adverse to the West over the past 15 years.

There is no question but that there has been a massive shift

in relative military power.

In 1977's The Writing On The Wall, retired British Army officer

and politician Lord Chalfont travels to Germany's East-West border,

the symbol of a world now split into two hostile camps.

'The land border between East and West runs for nearly 1,000 miles

'through divided Germany - a network of electrified fences,

'barbed wire, mines and machine-gun posts.

'As soon as I appeared with the camera crew,

'an East German patrol arrived on the other side,

'intensely interested in what we were up to.

'This elaborate system of fences, with its vicious little weapons,

'it designed mainly, of course,

'to keep East Germans in East Germany.

'It has no military significance at all.'

Nonetheless, the film is still keen to point out

the possibility of Russian aggression.

'If the Russian tanks came down to the wire and the gates were opened,

'they'd sweep through into West Germany, and then the question is,

'could we stop them getting to the Rhine?'

We are deeply suspicious because we don't have a true insight

into what the Soviets are thinking.

Historians were saying well into the 20th century

that one of the best sources they could get out of the Soviet Union

was rumour, because they had no access to documents,

they had no access to the inner thoughts of the Soviet leadership.

A year later, the Cold War took off into outer space.

The British public had flocked to see the intergalactic battle

between good and evil, Star Wars.

Meanwhile, back on Earth, things also had a hint of sci-fi,

as the USA and USSR planned a new generation of space laser weapons.

Exploring public fears of what would soon be dubbed the Evil Empire

made for some terrific viewing.

'Nothing now remains ridiculous in contemplating the real war in space.

'Weapons that would have earned the derision of Buck Rogers himself

'are today being researched and tested in laboratories

'in Russia and America.

'If the high-energy laser can be compared to focusing the rays

'of the sun through a giant magnifying glass,

'the devastating new particle-beam weapon

'can be compared to harnessing and controlling bolts of lightning.

'These weapons are already in an advanced state of research.

'They would work by converting colossal amounts of energy

'into subatomic particles.

'These are then shot through the atmosphere in space in the form

'of a beam, and they're shot with such force and at such speed

'that the beam effectively disembowels its target.

'By destroying all known matter,

'the particle beam is today's ultimate space weapon.'

Throughout the Cold War years, a balanced view of Russia

was generally absent from our screens.

Part of the problem was lack of access,

but material that supported our fear of Russia did make for gripping TV.

EXPLOSION

In 1985, everything changed.

Russia's economy was in decline.

A new reformist leader, Mikhail Gorbachev,

headed the Communist Party and the USSR was beginning to crumble.

Finally, the BBC felt it was safe to show The War Game,

which now was beginning to look comfortingly like history.

What's happened by 1985 is that we've lived through

a period of peaceful coexistence.

We're a little bit more certain of how the Soviets will respond

to certain situations, how they will manage their nuclear arsenal,

and we're presuming that they are capable

and sensible enough not to use the bomb.

Those were certainties that Britain simply didn't have in the '60s.

The climate of opinion by the '80s is different.

I think there is more of a sense of reality television.

There are a number of films in the early '80s

about the consequences of nuclear war.

I think the BBC and the media is also more open to discussing

alternative views of what's going on.

When Gorbachev rose to become leader of the USSR, his policy of glasnost,

or openness, was meant to aid desperately needed economic reform.

But it also meant that Soviet archives

hiding years of the regime's abuses

were finally opened for both Russians and the world to see.

British documentary TV played a major role in revealing

the true horror of the Soviet regime.

In the summer of 1988, in an audacious step,

history exams for Russian schoolchildren were cancelled.

It was decreed that their textbooks were full of Stalinist cover-ups

and lies.

In the same year, back in Britain, Timewatch began to reveal

some of these horrors in Bukharin And The Terror,

showing the shocking disparity in the 1930s

between Stalin's public persona, created through propaganda,

and the reality of his barbarism.

'One child whose life was profoundly affected by the terror

'was Engelsina Markizova.

'Aged seven, she attended one of Stalin's meetings in 1936

'with her father, a minor party official from Serbia.'

-TRANSLATION:

-I felt awfully bored.

I was sitting there with a huge bunch of flowers, two of them.

Then I got fed up, and during one of the speeches I just got up

and started off towards the platform.

Stalin turned round and picked me up.

That's the moment they printed the photo of.

I thought I was the happiest girl in the whole country.

Because when I came downstairs to the hotel lobby the next day,

I saw that all the papers had my photo in them -

a little girl and Stalin.

And I was very proud of that.

I told everyone, you know, "That's my picture. It's me, it's me."

And people started to invite me to visit them,

people who lived in the hotel.

And they gave me all sorts of presents,

because I had become very, very famous.

'A sculpture of Engelsina

'entitled Thank You, Comrade Stalin, For My Happy Childhood

'was erected in Moscow.

'On December the 11th, 1937,

'Engelsina's father disappeared.'

-TRANSLATION:

-That was shattering, of course,

because after such a placid life

I suddenly found myself the daughter of an enemy of the people.

Naturally, we wrote Stalin a letter,

because we certainly didn't link my father's arrest with Stalin.

Well, the response to the letter we sent to Stalin...

that's to say I wrote it and my mother dictated it...

..was the arrest of my mother.

'Stalin's reputation remained divorced from the terror

'until after his death in 1953.

'Such was his effect on ordinary people

'that no-one realised what he had done.'

What happened in the Soviet Union is when you allowed people

to begin speaking openly

you had almost an overwhelming outburst of new material -

archives, film, photographs,

that characterised all... all throughout the late 1980s.

And then of course by 1990-91

there was a kind of floodgate of discussion

at the point where the regime is falling apart.

As the communist regime entered its death throes,

we were being presented with some of the most heinous acts

it had committed on its own citizens.

'During the 1930s and '40s, tens of millions of people

'from all over the Soviet Union were arrested as enemies of the people.

'They disappeared into the Gulag, a network of labour camps

'that stretched to every corner of the Soviet Union.

'They were accused of spying, sabotage and treachery.

'The vast majority were innocent.'

At these camps in Kolyma,

in the remote corner of the Russian Far East,

prisoners were forced to mine for gold.

Even for those who managed to survive the Gulag system

and return home, the nightmare didn't end.

The testimonies of camp survivors were horrifying to us in the West

but perhaps even more shocking to the Russians themselves.

This was the thing that undermined the system I think more than anything else.

It was this...the flood of history.

Suddenly people said, well, if it was, you know, so many people died

and so many people were killed by this system,

you know, why is it legitimate?

Television revealed the truth about Soviet history to a wide audience

but it's notable that even post-glasnost

TV didn't always provide a rounded picture of Russia.

When we look at how we have presented Russia

on British television,

we can see that the things we choose to tell and show

often reflect more on our own preconceptions of Russia.

They often celebrate those most bloody and brutal aspects

of Russian history.

Digging deeper into history a decade later,

details of perhaps the darkest chapter of Russia's past

were revealed.

In the West, World War II is often portrayed as being won

on the beaches of Normandy and Iwo Jima,

while Russia's enormous sacrifice

has almost been airbrushed from history.

In 2002, Timewatch attempted to redress the balance.

In the summer of 1941, the Nazi juggernaut surged across Russia

and one of Hitler's top targets was the city of Leningrad -

the former tsarist capital, renamed for the founder of the Soviet state.

Aiming to capture the city

before the onset of the unforgiving Russian winter,

the first German artillery shell hit as September began.

But Stalin was as determined to defend Leningrad

as Hitler was to raze it to the ground.

The ensuing stand-off between the Wehrmacht and the Red Army

would last for nearly 900 days.

Caught in the middle, frozen and starved,

three million civilians.

-TRANSLATION:

-It's impossible to communicate that feeling of hunger.

It's the most terrible thing in the world.

You have the feeling that some sort of animal has climbed inside you.

Some savage beast.

And he's scratching you, gouging you with his claws,

tearing your insides, ripping everything.

He demands bread, bread.

Demands food. Demands to be fed.

'The temperature dropped to -30 degrees Celsius.

'The city had no more fuel, electricity

'or running water.

'With no strength to bury their dead in the frozen ground,

'bodies were left to lie in the streets.'

As the Red Army troops fought bravely to defend their city,

the lives of her people were reduced to unimaginable brutality.

What was also even more sinister taking place

was that murder for human meat

was...was occurring.

That there were cases of people who were simply waylaying others,

particularly children, because after all their meat would be tender,

and they were killing people for... for meat.

Stalin achieved his goal.

Leningrad was saved, but only at the cost

of what's estimated to be over one million lives.

More Russians died in the siege than the combined number

of Britons and Americans in the entire Second World War.

The siege of Leningrad, which was a spectacular, appalling disaster,

I mean, in which people resorted to cannibalism and eating rats

and chewing on floorboards, is not very well known in this country

and, of course, it wasn't the only such event

in the eastern half of the continent but it does show you what...

the level of suffering being something that actually in Britain was unknown.

This is a city that's still... it's proud of what it had done,

but still, in a sense, unable to speak about it.

Perhaps because the amount of suffering

is just too impossible to talk about.

It's on an astronomic scale.

Certainly nothing that we can comprehend properly

from our war experience.

Stretching right back to Ivan the Terrible in the 16th century,

Russia has time and again found itself under the control

of the autocratic strongman who dominates his era.

In the 20th century, British documentary television

has found its powerful figures endlessly intriguing.

Russian leaders have built up powerful personality cults

and we rely on historians and film-makers

to strip away the artifice.

In 1997, 80 years after he seized power in the October Revolution,

Timewatch took on the myth

surrounding the first communist leader - Lenin.

BELL CHIMES

Before glasnost, some on the British left had admired the ideology

of Lenin, but with newly released documentation, Timewatch revealed

the Bolshevik Party leader was not all that he seemed.

'Once they held mass rallies in Red Square.

'Today, Russia's Communist Party

'can muster only a few hundred old diehards.

'The polished-granite mausoleum behind them holds the mortal remains

'of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

'In the Soviet era, his image was preserved and embalmed

'with the same reverence as his body.

'The man who founded the perfect socialist society

'had to be depicted as perfect himself.

'That man represented a whole epoch.

'Everything that has been created and is being created

'in our Soviet land is connected with his name, with his plans.'

'In today's Russia, Lenin is becoming an unperson.

'His statue, which once had pride of place in the Kremlin,

'has been banished to a remote corner of the Gorki estate.

'Communists no longer have the power to shape history

'to suit the party line.

'In recent years, facts about Lenin long forgotten, long suppressed,

'have been coming to light.

'Until the collapse of communism, they lay buried here

'in the central party archives.

'Only a handful of trusted party historians were allowed access

'to Lenin's secret files.

'The secret archives have revealed a crueller and more violent side

'to Lenin's character.

-TRANSLATION:

-We know of several documented examples of this.

Some of these show that in the summer of 1918 in Nizhny Novgorod,

Lenin gave orders to hang a hundred kulaks in public

in order to force others to hand over their grain to the state.

"Hang no fewer than a hundred well-known rich peasants.

"Make sure that the hangings take place in full view of the people."

-TRANSLATION:

-Some people in our country have revised their judgment

of Lenin solely on the basis of new documents

which illustrate his brutality.

For example, his orders to hang and shoot people

and his statements that civilians should precede Red Army soldiers

when they went on the attack.

The respect that he'd been held in, at least on the left,

certainly on the far left, in Britain,

erm, even there it began to dissolve.

What we see with Lenin's secret files

are the fact that he was more than willing to order the execution

of his enemies, of his opponents, of those that opposed

the Russian revolution, or those that were simply holding it up.

We often think of the most brutal elements of the Soviet Union

as being the responsibility of Stalin.

Well, in some ways, Stalin had a good teacher when it came to Lenin.

In 1924, Lenin died.

Both Russia and the West expected him to be succeeded

by his right-hand man Leon Trotsky.

But the ill-educated and boorish general secretary of the party,

Joseph Stalin, schemed his way to the top.

In power, Stalin became a god-like figure.

A protector and a punisher.

The all-seeing, omnipresent, supreme being.

It seemed as though no thought or deed of a Russian

was beyond his control.

Although we needed him in World War II,

Stalin was a hate figure for many in the West.

But we were also fascinated by him.

It was only after glasnost, when witnesses began to speak up,

that Timewatch could reveal the hidden details

of his true contempt for even his most loyal subjects.

After the Red Army and ordinary citizens drove back the Nazis

in the siege of Leningrad,

Stalin feared he was losing his grip on the city.

As the loyal Leningraders prepared to take part

in his 70th-birthday celebrations, Stalin struck.

'On the basis of a series of bizarre allegations,

'most of the Leningrad party organisation,

'including their wives, parents and children, were arrested

'in what became known as the Leningrad Affair.

One by one, the heroes of the Leningrad siege,

from military leaders to party members,

were arrested, tortured, accused of treason

and either exiled

or executed.

'Even today, some of the truth about what happened

'is still hidden in the Russian archives.

'A number of the documents relating to the Leningrad Affair

'and Stalin's involvement in it

'are still classified.

'Lev Voznesensky is one of the few people who have been allowed

'behind the locked doors of the archive to study these documents.

'He was able to copy some of them by hand.'

-TRANSLATION:

-Comrade Stalin didn't always give orders

in the form of clear directives.

I don't think it was accidental.

It's what a person does

if he doesn't want to leave any clear tracks.

Stalin directly managed the Leningrad Affair.

When you become familiar with these documents,

you'll recognise the symbols Stalin used.

A little cross by a surname or an underlined phrase.

They show the full agreement of comrade Stalin,

whom he wants to be arrested, whom he wants to be tried.

Until his death, Stalin's grip on the Russian people never faltered.

In the 1940s, there was the so-called cult of personality

everywhere in the Soviet Union.

There were photographs of Stalin in every office building,

Stalin's birthday was celebrated with great fanfare,

there were clubs of children who were taught to sing songs

in praises of Stalin, Stalin's name was in all the history books.

You would have had trouble getting through the day, probably,

without hearing his name or seeing his picture.

So his presence was all-pervasive

and this had a very deep effect on people.

Some people did love him or feel that he somehow symbolised

their nation and some people were simply very, very afraid of him.

It wasn't just Stalin's persona that was so powerful

and shrouded in mystery,

but also his relationships with his inner circle.

In 2005, Timewatch and the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore

found new evidence that allowed them to make a rather unusual docudrama.

This was an investigation of a conspiracy theory

in which Stalin, for once, played the victim.

'The dictator Joseph Stalin,

'who's already killed 30 million Soviet citizens,

'suddenly falls into a coma.

'Those surrounding his bed each have a motive to want him dead.

'Svetlana, his estranged daughter.

'Vasily, his unbalanced, alcoholic son.

'Vyacheslav Molotov,

'Stalin's most trusted accomplice.

'Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin's fool.

'And Lavrentiy Beria,

'the secret policeman.

'New evidence suggests that someone in this room may have killed Stalin.

'Tonight we set out to find out who.'

In an Agatha Christie-style whodunnit,

Sebag Montefiore pulls together evidence to paint a picture

of exactly what happened at Stalin's deathbed

and enjoys revealing possible evidence of foul play

in hidden medical records.

'The archive now further raises the prospect of murder,

'undermining the idea that Stalin's illness was solely caused,

'as officially related, by a haemorrhage in the brain.'

5th of March, it's now midday in the dacha.

Around the bed, everyone's watching. There's quiet.

HE COUGHS

And suddenly, Stalin wretches

and then vomits blood.

And this is terribly significant. We knew nothing of this before.

Why was his stomach suddenly bleeding so heavily?

And the answer could well be that he had received some sort of poison

which caused his stomach to bleed.

'So could this be the result of poison administered earlier

'by the bodyguard on Beria's orders?

'The idea that the vomiting of blood was caused by poison

'gains greater weight when Simon looks at the version

'in the Soviet press.'

We're looking here at Pravda on the 6th of March,

the announcement of Stalin's death the next day, the next morning,

and one finds no mention whatsoever of stomach haemorrhaging.

No blood in the stomach, no vomiting of blood.

So what has happened between the public announcement

of Stalin's death and the conclusion of the doctors just hours earlier?

Well, someone has decided, and clearly it's Beria,

to drop this rather significant information

about the haemorrhaging of blood into Stalin's stomach. Why?

'At 9:50pm, March the 5th, Stalin was finally dying.

'Svetlana described his last act.'

Suddenly he lifted his hand as though he were pointing up above

and bringing down a curse on us all.

The gesture was full of menace.

'Vasily shouted...

'.."The bastards have murdered Father." '

Then came Beria's voice, the hint of triumph concealed.

"My car!"

And Svetlana's belief that Beria had secretly assassinated her father

is supported by one more compelling piece of evidence.

At Stalin's funeral, he whispered to Molotov and he said,

"I did you all a favour. I did him in."

But Sebag Montefiore remains unconvinced by the theory.

The stomach haemorrhage and the vomiting of blood could just be

the result of a sick old body packing up,

partly because he mistrusted medical advice.

And the leadership may have deleted these details

from the public announcement because Stalin's system of government

meant they were understandably frightened

of arousing any suspicion.

Every suspicious circumstance was the result of the terror

that Stalin himself inspired.

Alone and dying, it may be that people were simply too afraid

to come to his aid.

So if I had to point the finger at someone,

then I think, ironically,

I'd point the finger at Stalin himself.

Even decades after his death,

the horrific figure of Stalin still haunts our perception of Russia.

With Lenin and Stalin the towering titans of the early 20th century,

we could only investigate their political intrigues in retrospect.

But at the end of the 20th century, a new leader emerged,

and this time, through film-makers,

we've been able to watch his rise to power.

Back in 2001, BBC Correspondent was asking, who is Putin?

'As the new millennium starts,

'Russia, like the United States, has a new president.

'Vladimir Putin has been in charge for a year but he's still an enigma.

'A decade since the Cold War,

'should we fear new superpower confrontations?

'What has shaped this former spy and Kremlin bureaucrat?

'Where is this man taking Russia?

'Not long after his inauguration, he presided over a Red Square parade -

'the 55th anniversary of the end of the Second World War.

'The massive military display astonished Moscow.

'It was like being back in the Soviet Union.

'And Putin's speech was an unapologetic celebration

'of Soviet victories.'

-ALL:

-Ura!

'Words of enormous resonance for a nation whose international prestige

'had plummeted.'

Putin started as a...a reformer,

a nationalist reformer.

Erm, he's now often painted as a sort of second Hitler

or something like that, or with those kind of pretensions.

What we don't really understand, I think, and we've missed

is the sense of deep grievance in Russia

about the way that things have gone since the end of the Cold War.

Seven years later,

and after a series of high-profile assassinations of his critics...

I looked into Mr Putin's eyes and I saw three letters -

a K, a G and a B.

..Britain knew all too well who Putin was

and we were beginning to fear him like the Soviet leaders of old.

Panorama tried to get a grip on why Russians

would voluntarily support him.

'Oscar-winning director Nikita Mikhalkov

'is the most powerful man in Russia's film industry.

'He's also close to Vladimir Putin.

'He's in no doubt why his friend is so popular.'

-TRANSLATION:

-Because he answers questions.

Because he does not drink.

Because he looks good.

Because it is clear what he stands for.

Because he does not hide from problems.

You ask why do people like Putin.

Because he has given Russia her dignity back.

'But it's not just Putin's friends in high places

'who think a firm hand's needed.

'The wealth is starting to trickle down to a new middle class

'who shop at places like GUM, Moscow's answer to Harrods.

'They too love Putin.'

-TRANSLATION:

-We are not as civilised as we would like to be,

which is why we have pretty hard leaders.

For now there's no other way to rule us.

And maybe with us Russians you need to be tough.

'And no wonder, after the 1990s,

'Russia was reeling from financial and social chaos.

'Meanwhile, President Boris Yeltsin often appeared less than in control.

'The once-feared superpower was bankrupt and on its knees.

'Crime was rampant and contract hits common.'

-TRANSLATION:

-Putin is not so much a cause of something

but the product of a reaction to the national humiliation

and collapse and degradation that we saw here in the 1990s.

The country woke up again when Putin came.

It stopped washing its dirty linen abroad, telling everyone

how sick, drunk and incapable of a normal existence we are.

Putin gave us our nation back.

'So, that's the popular view in the capital.

'But Moscow is not Russia, the locals like to say.

'A hundred miles away, things look very different.

'But even here, where life is a struggle,

'it's not hard to find fans of Vladimir Putin.

'Take Larissa and her parents.

'She earns £250 a month and their pension is only £80 each.

'Capitalism has not been good to them.

'Mention Putin's name, however, and you will hear only praise.'

-TRANSLATION:

-Under Putin, of course things have become better.

'Before Putin became Prime Minister,

'most Russians wanted him to stay on as President.

'What do you think?'

-TRANSLATION:

-Of course it would have been better for him to stay

because during his time we saw no suffering.

Now, they pay our pensions and even raise them.

I think that we often look at Russians as somehow duped people,

that they've just naively accepted Putin's control

and that they don't know what's going on.

I think that's a dangerous perception to cultivate in Britain.

There's genuine opposition to Putin, there's genuine concern to Putin,

there's genuine support for Putin and there's everything in between.

It's also important not to forget that the democracy promised

in the glasnost era never quite materialised.

We often talk about Putin's poll numbers

but we don't talk about how one gets poll numbers.

Often these are phone calls and you will pick up the phone,

you'll be asked, what do you think of President Putin?

Well, if I were a Russian, I would think,

who's on the end of the line?

So I think sometimes the way that we present these things

is a little bit, erm, skewed.

Film-makers have captured the power games of the Cold War,

revealed the hidden horrors of Soviet rule

and explored the personas of Russia's leaders.

But when it comes to the Russian people,

their portrayal on TV has often been obscured by limited access

and the shadow of big history.

In 1975, programme-makers found it hard to separate Russians

from the regime they lived under.

In KGB - The Soviet Secret Police,

we're presented with an Orwellian nightmare version of Russia.

A society in which no-one can be trusted.

'From their earliest schooldays, children are instilled with

'the concept that loyalty to the state is the highest virtue

'and talebearers, far from being discouraged,

'are treated like little heroes.'

I would say that we are expected

to inform on our classmates.

'As a little girl, Alla Rusinek had a conventional Soviet education.

'She recently emigrated to Israel.'

Probably this was the result of the education.

And our heroes...

were Young Pioneers...

..who reported on their parents.

The famous hero

was Pavlik Morozov,

who reported his father

to the authorities

and his father then killed him for this.

So we were expected

to behave the same way.

This idea that they were willing to denounce their parents

or that there was a culture or a society

that was developing along those lines

was another example of otherness, of alienness.

'In recent years, there has been a calculated effort to improve

'the image of the KGB with the man in the street.

'To eradicate the nightmare memories

'of the secret police of Stalin's time,

'which subjected the entire country to 30 years

'of unrestrained lawlessness and terror.

'And for the ordinary Russian today,

'the KGB is synonymous with authority.

'This is what makes the KGB unique

'among the intelligence services of the world

'and makes it so powerful as a secret police organisation,

'for the Soviet citizen has to rely upon authority

'for almost everything in his life.

'For a start, his freedom of movement

'is controlled and kept in check through a complicated system

'of documentation and registration.

'The most important document is the internal passport.

'Everyone over the age of 16 is issued with one of these.

'He must produce it to the police on request

'and is meant to register with the authorities

'if he moves anywhere inside the Soviet Union or stays at a hotel.

'It does not entitle him to travel abroad.

'In addition, every citizen is registered in a house book,

'kept by the caretaker of the block of flats where he lives.

'If he is away for any length of time or has foreign visitors

'or behaves suspiciously in any way,

'this may be entered in the book or reported to the KGB.'

But with glasnost, it seemed that we would finally be able to build

a relationship and an understanding with Russia's people.

As the 1990s dawned, for the first time we could hear a cacophony

of Russian voices speaking out against the system.

RUSSIAN CHORAL SINGING

Welcome to this live programme from Moscow.

It's the fifth anniversary of the week in which Mikhail Gorbachev

became leader of the Soviet Union.

Here in Russia, where more than half the Soviet people live,

it's been election day today.

The first chance that they've had to choose the individuals

that they want to represent them in local and regional government

and in the Russian parliament itself.

There was a huge amount of hope in the West about Russia.

There was a hope that the Soviet Union would evolve into something,

erm, if not like us, then friendlier to us.

This would have been inconceivable five, four, even three years ago.

Individual Soviet citizens holding court in the street,

crowding round you in animated argument

about the state of the nation.

They debate glasnost and perestroika,

communism and the free market.

They argue about the demise of the party, ethnic conflict

and even the collapse of the Soviet Union.

THEY SPEAK RUSSIAN

After a long history in which silence has been imposed upon them,

it is still remarkable for the outsider to witness at first hand

the awakening of the Russian people.

No fears, no inhibitions, just the outpouring

of long-suppressed feelings and opinions.

If promising to listen and learn is a new experience for him,

it is no less remarkable for his audience.

And this is a new experience for everyone?

TRANSLATOR SPEAKS

Can any of you imagine voting one day for another party?

The kind of conversations that were seen on that film

of people on the streets talking openly about society

and change and so on, erm...

I think in Britain and in the West generally

there was a tendency to say, oh, great, finally they've seen sense,

they're going our way, they're going to become like us.

There's a sense that this could lead to genuine debate,

to something more akin to democracy.

Erm, I think also...Britain was also a little bit naive.

The West in general was a little bit naive.

This new age of optimism was not to last.

In the 1990s, Russia plunged into economic meltdown.

When she rose again a decade later, in the Putin era,

many in the West felt disturbed.

Russia now seemed alien and threatening yet again.

In the 21st century, we're now being presented with

a new type of Russian we haven't seen before.

The super-rich.

In 2008, Panorama squeezed into an exclusive Moscow party

celebrating the launch of the first Russian edition

of the society magazine Tatler.

Now joining those Western standards Hello and Vogue

on the Russian newsstands.

I have a feeling that almost all the country changed.

When I look at my first issues, I think, oh, my God,

this was the magazine done and tailor-made for a different country.

This was a Russia that had embraced capitalism with a vengeance.

In Britain, we're looking at the excesses of Russian capitalism

and almost turning our nose up,

almost thinking, oh, they might have money but they don't have class.

And there's a danger in that view.

There's a danger that we are not presenting the Russians fairly

and it's not to say that Russian capitalism is a pleasant thing,

it's not to say that rich oligarchs are particular nice people,

but there's also something unpleasant sometimes

around the way that the British media presents that.

And behind the glitz and glamour, another story was playing out.

When this programme was made in 2008,

Russian tanks had just rolled into neighbouring Georgia.

While the Russians felt besieged,

the West viewed them as provocatively aggressive.

'At events like this,

'the Russia of today looks more like the West than ever.

'These people are educated, sophisticated and travel abroad,

'but scratch the surface and, even here,

'people say we don't understand them.

'And nowhere more so than over the recent invasion of Georgia.

'Billionaire Alexander Lebedev is unusual.

'He's a vocal critic of the Kremlin

'but he too says Russia was unfairly treated over the action it took.'

I think there's too many wrong things said about Russia.

Everybody in the world

says this is the old, aggressive Soviet-style Russia

now attacking a small, democratic and very peaceful state.

So what do you think the war was actually about?

I think Russia had no other way but behave this way.

We mishandled it from the point of view of propaganda,

of explaining our position, but the West should be a bit more objective.

What is it that the West doesn't understand about Russia?

If I could tell it and specify it,

the issue would have been resolved in one minute,

and it hasn't been resolved for hundreds of years.

What happens is that sometimes people in the West think they know

and understand Russia and Russians

but they don't.

We didn't understand what the Soviet Union was during the Cold War

and arguably we still don't fully understand what Russia is today

because we like to look at a caricatured vision of Russia.

We will never penetrate Russia

in the way we can penetrate the United States mentally

because of the barrier of the language.

I don't think the media have particularly helped us

because they have tended to present the relationship with Russia

in an either-or situation.

Either a real threat and a problem,

so in the Stalin period or even now in the Putin period,

or else very cosy, very friendly,

as in the middle of the Second World War or in the Gorbachev era.

An attempt to really understand the complexities of Russia

is much rarer on the British media.

Now, nearly 80 years have passed since Winston Churchill

uttered his famous summation of Russia

as a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

Strangely, these words seem as true now as they did then.

British television may never be able to crack the mystery

of the largest country on Earth.

Despite the entangled history of our two nations,

a true understanding of Russia may be more distant now

than ever before.