DR_MICHAEL_LYNCH MARTIN_MCCAULEY MICHAEL_MCCAULEY NARRATION PROF_DONALD_RAYFIELD PROF_JONATHAN_BRENT ROSAMOND_RICHARDSON SIMON_SEBAG_MONTEFIORE

NARRATION
For 30 years “the man of steel” - Joseph Stalin - ruthlessly dominated the Soviet Union.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE
He created a larger empire than any of the Tsars. He was probably the most successful ruler that Russian ever had.

PROF DONALD RAYFIELD
But he gets the prize as the most evil thing the human race has ever produced.
Rising from within a band of revolutionary zealots, this is the story of a man whose pursuit of absolute power transforms a nation.

ROSAMOND RICHARDSON
Stalin found Russia with the wooden plough, and he left it with atomic weapons.

NARRATION
But the blood crazed Soviet strongman’s tools for progress are famine, slavery and execution.

PROF DONALD RAYFIELD
People didn’t  count to him. They were no more than rats.

NARRATION
And yet to this day, some of his countrymen lionise him as the man who made Russia a super-power. For 300 years the autocratic Romanov dynasty have ruled the Russian empire with an iron fist. But a crushing defeat in the First World War and economic problems at home mean that the current ruler, Tsar Nicholas II, is losing his grip on power. The country is ripe for revolution when, in October, 1917, the communist Bolshevik Party storms the Winter Palace and takes over the country. Under revolutionary leader, Vladimir Lenin, a new Marxist government fights a civil war to maintain control.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE
The civil war was a time when the Bolshevik revolution was struggling to survive. It was surrounded and beleaguered on every side by enemies. The only way it was going to survive was by extremism, by terror, by ruthlessness. 

NARRATION
Among the men vying for a top position in Lenin’s regime is future Soviet dictator - Joseph Stalin.

PROF DONALD RAYFIELD
People wanted to be president, they wanted to be people’s commissar for this, for defence, for foreign affairs. They wanted the glorious jobs.

MARTIN MCCAULEY
What they didn’t realise was that Stalin was going to eliminate all of them.

Born Joseph Djugashvill, the man who will become Stalin isn’t even a Russian. He’s a Georgian, born in to poverty in 1878 on the wild frontiers of the Russian empire.

PROF JONATHAN BRENT
He was, I believe, 5 foot 4. He was short. And he didn’t like to be short, but he was short and he had a Napoleonic complex from day one. 

MARTIN MCCAULEY
He always wanted to be number one, and he never conceded he was wrong. He was always right. He had this self belief, this huge self belief.

NARRATION
Young Joseph gets the best education available at a Russian Orthodox seminary. His mother wants him to become a priest. But he has other ideas.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE
While he was at the seminary, Stalin first of all became an atheist. Then he started to study the works of Marx.

NARRATION
German social philosopher and author of the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx, is all the rage in radical European circles.

NARRATION
His writings open Stalin’s mind to the possibility of revolution against the Tsarist regime.

PROF JONATHAN BRENT
He was a bright young man who needed a cause. Not that different from those guys who are joining up to ISIS today. His cause became that of Communism.

NARRATION
When he is 20 years old, Stalin leaves the seminary to become a political activist in the illegal Georgian Marxist movement. 

NARRATION
But trying to topple the Tsar is a deadly game. His secret police - the Okrana - are on the lookout for subversives.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE
The life of an underground conspiratorial Marxist was a very strange one. You changed your name constantly, you moved house constantly, you had very quick love affairs with people and then never saw them again. You could trust nobody.

NARRATION
Full of idealism, Stalin adopts the codename ‘Koba’ after a Georgian Robin Hood, and begins to organise industrial workers to destabilise the Tsarist regime.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE
He went to Batumi, which was an oil terminus on the Black Sea, and there were thousands of workers worked  there, and Stalin immediately arranged a series of strikes.

NARRATION
It is here in Batumi that he gets his first real taste for blood.

NARRATION
In 1902 his strikers confront the authorities and the police open-fire on them, killing 15 and injuring many more.

NARRATION
Stalin gets away unscathed, but he does tend to the wounded.

NARRATION
The death toll does not worry him one bit. In fact, it teaches him a lesson he will never forget.

DR MICHAEL LYNCH
The strike was like an epiphany for him, that he saw in the act of violence the way forward. That is how you change Russia. That’s how you progress the revolutionary movement. Physical violence is of the essence.

NARRATION
Stalin’s activities get him noticed. He is invited to meet the great leader of the movement - Vladimir Lenin - the man he considers to be “the mountain eagle of the revolution”.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE
Lenin was really Stalin’s teacher in the practice of terror.

DR MICHAEL LYNCH
Lenin sees in Stalin a man of loyalty, a man committed to the cause, as Lenin defines it, and a man who’s prepared to do the dirty work.

NARRATION
Lenin gives Stalin a key mission - to raise money for the revolution. 

NARRATION
He goes to the booming port down of Baku, full of newly rich oil barons and comfortably far from the centre of Tsarist power. Here he becomes a mobster and sets about fleecing the capitalists.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE
Stalin ran a gang there that was called something like the “Outfit”. They were a pretty motley bunch. 

DR MICHAEL LYNCH
And he ran brothels, more than one.

PROF JONATHAN BRENT
He’s shaking people down, he is pushing people around.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE
And that meant bank robberies, piracy and protection rackets.

NARRATION
To Stalin the law does not matter. Lives do not matter.

PROF JONATHAN BRENT
You do what is necessary. This is the key Leninist principle. What is necessary at the moment, you do, regardless of consequences.
 
NARRATION
The only thing that matters is the revolution.

NARRATION
By now, Stalin is high up on the Tsarist’s secret police’s most wanted list. But he is not yet the murderous psychopath he will become.

NARRATION
He falls in love with Ekaterina Svanidze, the sister of a fellow communist and, in secret, they marry.

ROSAMOND RICHARDSON
She was what the Georgians call a Baba. She was the woman who was at home and just provided the creature comforts.

NARRATION
Katarina bears Stalin a son - Yakov.

NARRATION
But just months later she contracts typhus and dies.

ROSAMOND RICHARDSON
When Stalin’s first wife died he was absolutely shattered. He said that when she died all my feelings for people died with her. She melted my stony heart.

NARRATION
Now the shutters start to come down.

NARRATION
Stalin decides that no-one will be allowed in to his heart again. It’s a trait which will serve him well on his rise to power.

NARRATION
By 1906, Tsar Nicholas II’s regime is on the rocks after a wave of strikes, economic chaos and an attempted revolution.

NARRATION
In a small concession to democracy, he sets up a Parliament called the Duma. 

NARRATION
Lenin’s so-called Bolshevik Party wins seats there, though he continues his illegal struggled against the system.

NARRATION
Stalin is still a wanted man, spending years in prison and exile. But his friend, Roman Malinovsky, becomes the leader of the Bolsheviks in the Duma. 

NARRATION
In 1912, Stalin escapes from exile and heads for the capital, looking for a safe base of operations. 

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE
He immediately came to see his friend Malinovsky.

NARRATION
Stalin likes Malinovsky and trusts him. A big mistake.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE
Malinovsky was, in fact, a Tsarist secret agent. 

NARRATION
Malinovsky is the most highly paid double agent the Tsar’s Okrana secret police has ever had. 

NARRATION
He invites Stalin to a fundraising dinner, and Stalin agrees to go.

MARTIN MCCAULEY
Well, Malinovsky must have been a very, very good actor, because the Okrana would have set up the meeting and they would have told them what to say and how to proceed so that there would be no suspicions aroused in Stalin’s mind.

NARRATION
The dinner is a trap.

DR MICHAEL LYNCH
He’s betrayed by a party member, he’s betrayed by a fellow Bolshevik. He’s sentenced to exile. He takes with him this burning conviction that he’d given trust to someone who could not be trusted.

NARRATION
The betrayal has a colossal impact on Stalin. He starts to believe that even those who are closest to him, even the most loyal and committed communists, may be traitors.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE
The interesting thing about the Malinovsky story is it explains why later in Stalin’s life he distrusted everybody, because virtually anybody, even the leader of the Bolshevik Party in the Duma, could be a secret agent and a traitor.

NARRATION
Consumed with bitterness, Stalin is sent into exile in Siberia, on the edges of the Arctic Circle.

NARRATION
He is largely ignored by his communist colleagues who, this time, do not bother to help him escape.

MICHAEL MCCAULEY
In Stalin’s mind there must have been a lot of anger about the way he had been treated, the way his comrades had betrayed him. They didn’t give him his due. So they belittled him, if you like, and they put him down. So therefore all this would be stewing in Stalin’s mind, how can I take revenge on these people. I am a much more  important  person than they think, and I am going to show them that.

NARRATION
For four years Stalin is stuck in the frozen wasteland, his heart becoming as cold and hard as the wilderness around him.

DR MICHAEL LYNCH
Food was  in very short supply and it was said  every night the wolves gathered around looking for the bits of food that might be left.

NARRATION
The prowling wolves will haunt Stalin to the end of his days.

DR MICHAEL LYNCH
A common theme in his doodles was ravening wolves. And he put them around the page, the teeth bared, showing. Churchill later said there is something wolf-like about him and it may be that he wasn’t just a happy metaphor, there was actually was a wolverine element coming out in him.

NARRATION
So when the Bolsheviks seize power in 1917, Stalin returns to the capital ready to take his place in Lenin’s new communist government, bringing with him a brutal mindset born of years of struggle.

DR MICHAEL LYNCH
Violence is not merely a means to an end, it is the end in itself. You only win by smashing the enemy.

NARRATION
The budding tyrant abandons his birth name forever and becomes officially Joseph Stalin, meaning “man of steel”. 

NARRATION
He’s one of Lenin’s most trusted leaders and a member of the community party’s central commitment. But he is neither the most senior nor the most popular. 

NARRATION
When Lenin hands out the top jobs, Stalin’s rivals in the top tier of the party seem to get the best positions. 

ROSAMOND RICHARDSON
He didn’t have that particularly grain of academic intellectualism that Lenin and Trotsky had. And I think it made him feel inferior.

NARRATION
The charismatic Leon Trotsky, who snobbishly fails to recognise Stalin at a party meeting, gets Foreign Affairs and the Red Army.

PROF DONALD RAYFIELD
Trotsky made the great mistake of snubbing Stalin. Trotsky didn’t realise this, he was singled out to be set aside and destroyed.

NARRATION
Schoolteacher turned revolutionary, Lev Kamenev, gets to run Moscow and is made Lenin’s deputy.

PROF DONALD RAYFIELD
The conventional Marxist intellectuals looked at Stalin and they dismissed him. They just had no idea of how much Stalin could do.

NARRATION
Because he admires his organisational skills the job Lenin gives Stalin is an administrative role - the General Secretary of the Communist Party.

PROF DONALD RAYFIELD
Nobody else wanted the job of General Secretary. The General Secretary’s job seems quite a boring one.

NARRATION
While Trotsky and Kamenev struck the political stage, it seems Stalin is assigned menial paperwork. He is left working in the background while they take all the glory.

NARRATION
But it’s not long before he realises that, in reality, the General Secretary holds the key to power.

PROF DONALD RAYFIELD
A secretary decides who is going to come to the meeting, who’s going to be told about, what’s going to be on the agenda. 


NARRATION 
The new Soviet Union is run by committee. If you control the agenda you can control everything. 

MARTIN MCCAULEY
Gradually, he controlled appointments, and by controlling appointments he could put his people in to various committees. And if you could get a majority in the Central Committee you were the number one man. 

NARRATION
While Lenin and his top team are distracted by all the problems of running a country that has been downtrodden for years and just come through a civil war, Stalin builds his power base and bides his time.

NARRATION
All the while, he plots his revenge against the snobbish intellectuals who dismissed him.

PROF JONATHAN BRENT
If you made a point of humiliating Comrade Stalin, your days were numbered. There is no question about that.

NARRATION
In 1924, Lenin, the unquestioned leader of the revolution, dies of a cerebral haemorrhage. Stalin is among the party leaders carrying Lenin’s casket to its final resting place.

NARRATION
But one important person is not there  - Leon Trotsky, the General Secretary hasn’t invited him.

DR MICHAEL LYNCH
Stalin sends the wrong date deliberately to prevent Trotsky turning up at the funeral. And because he didn’t turn up what sort of Leninist could he be, this man who doesn’t turn up?

NARRATION
With Trotsky absent, it falls to Stalin to deliver the eulogy.

DR MICHAEL LYNCH
“To thee great Lenin we owe all that we have. To thee great Lenin we dedicate ourselves. To thee..” always “to thee great Lenin”, a way of saying “I am your heir.”

NARRATION
Stalin’s plan works. Though officially just the General Secretary, enough of his supporters are in place to help establish him as the heir to Lenin.

NARRATION
Now he can turn on his rivals.

NARRATION
First up - Leon Trotsky.

PROF DONALD RAYFIELD
Getting rid of Trotsky was a refined, delayed process. It was drawn out for his own pleasure.

NARRATION
It was suggested to Trotsky that he had no place in the capital. He was dragged kicking and screaming to the train.

NARRATION
Trotsky is forced to flee overseas, and ends up in Mexico.

NARRATION
Eventually, Stalin sends an assassin to pick him off.

NARRATION
By the time of his 50th birthday celebrations, five years after the death of Lenin, Stalin is firmly in charge. 

NARRATION
Though he has kept the humble title ‘General Secretary’, he is effectively the top man in the Soviet Union.

NARRATION
But despite a decade of communist rule, the country remains desperately backward.

NARRATION
Stalin decides that what it needs is a dose of his ruthless Marxist medicine.

NARRATION
The first area to fix is farming.

PROF DONALD RAYFIELD
Stalin was convinced that the Russian peasant was unproductive and could be replaced with tractors. And that led to the first of the really murderous acts of Stalin.

NARRATION
In December, 1929, he unleashes the poorest peasants against the landowning farmers - called Kulaks.

NARRATION
All such class enemies are to be exterminated.

PROF JONATHAN BRENT
The order that Stalin gave for the liquidation of the Kulaks as a class is the first legal order of a state for the mass murder of its own citizens.

PROF DONALD RAYFIELD
They were no more than rats. They had to be wiped out, they were vermin.

NARRATION
Then in the name of liberating them, Stalin forces the peasants to work on vast collective farms. 

NARRATION
To speed Russia’s rapid industrialisation he confiscates the grain using it to feed factory workers in the cities and to sell abroad.

NARRATION
Propaganda films portray the collective farms as a triumph.

NARRATION
But the truth is exactly the opposite.

NARRATION
Production collapses and famine breaks out across the Soviet Union.

PROF DONALD RAYFIELD
Stalin must have foreseen there would be a famine. He probably didn’t foresee that it would kill probably 10 million people.

NARRATION
By 1933 you had cannibalism all over Southern Russia. It was the most appalling man-made famine in history, and it was done deliberately.

NARRATION
Stalin does not care about the deaths in the countryside. It’s a price worth paying for his revolution.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE
Stalin once said the death of one man is a tragedy, the death of a million is a statistic. A Bolshevik like Stalin, and Stalin prided himself on this, could look at things harshly with toughness. And as he said to Lenin, my hand will not tremble.

NARRATION
In the cities, news of the famine is suppressed. But it starts to leak out.

NARRATION
One night  in the Kremlin Stalin is enjoying a dinner party with his second wife Nadya.

ROSAMOND  RICHARDSON
He didn’t want everybody, particularly his family, to know what was going on. They would have regarded this annihilation of peasant classes as a betrayal  of their ideals.

NARRATION
But Nadya has heard the rumours about the extent of the famine.

ROSAMOND RICHARDSON
And they sort of gazed at each other across the table and she got up and flounced out. She was very, very upset.

NARRATION
Later in her room, she writes a note condemning Stalin.

ROSAMOND RICHARDSON
She didn’t believe that anything Stalin was doing in his policies were the right policies. She couldn’t go along with collectivisation and the annihilation of the peasant classes. This was certainly such a challenge thrown down to Stalin that he was wrong.

NARRATION
Later that night, Nadya takes the only way out. To Stalin, her suicide is not a tragedy, it’s a betrayal.

ROSAMOND RICHARDSON
Nobody was allowed to say that anything he said or did was wrong, and she had made this ultimate gesture with her life to say what you are doing is wrong. So it made him completely furious. He was heard to say she went away as an enemy.

NARRATION
Nadya’s death is reported as due to appendicitis. 

NARRATION
With her female influence gone, Stalin become more isolated and more paranoid. 

NARRATION
The days of the Great Terror are about to begin.

NARRATION
In January, 1934, Joseph Stalin summons the supreme decision making body of the Soviet Union - the Party Congress.

NARRATION
It’s the largest meeting of Soviet leaders in four years. 

NARRATION
One of those summoned is his loyal supporter, Sergei Kirov.

NARRATION
Kirov thinks he is the closest thing Stalin has to a friend. 

NARRATION
The General Secretary himself gives Kirov the choice position of Leningrad Party boss.

NARRATION
But now the paranoid leader believes Kirov has become too popular among the party delegates. Popular enough that he can one day become a rival or betray the revolution, like Malinovsky. 

DR MICHAEL LYNCH
Kirov’s a threat. His very existence as a popular figure in the Party. There might be a rallying round Kirov in opposition to Stalin. Stalin need have no fear by 1934, but he did fear.

NARRATION
Friendship and loyalty do not matter to Stalin, not if someone is a potential threat to his power.

DR MICHAEL LYNCH
If Kirov is a threat then remove him. That’s the simple way it’s done in revolutionary terms.

NARRATION
On December 1st, 1934, Sergei Kirov walks in to his office in Leningrad. 

NARRATION
At the time, his death is an outrage and a mystery. What no-one realises is that Kirov’s murder is part of Stalin’s masterplan.

ROSAMOND RICHARDSON
The assassination of Kirov was the beginning of Stalin establishing himself as the absolute ruler.

NARRATION
The party leader decides to seize the opportunity and get rid of all his old rivals at once.

PROF JONATHAN BRENT
The best way to do it is a purge, and the best way to do that is to demonstrate that his arch enemies were responsible for the beloved Kirov’s death.

NARRATION
He begins by arresting Lenin’s old deputy, Lev Kamenev, and his supporters.

NARRATION
He accuses them of being traitors and of conspiring to murder Kirov.

NARRATION
The trouble is Kamenev is a party member with impeccable credentials - one of Lenin’s original team. 

DR MICHAEL LYNCH
He has to show to the Soviet people that the accusations are true, because it seems incredible that they could have been traitors, that they could have been anti-Socialist, anti-Marxist, anti-Leninist all along.

NARRATION
To make the absurd accusations credible, Stalin needs a confession. Kamenev and other top party leaders are taken from prison to the Kremlin, where he makes them an offer they cannot refuse.

DR MICHAEL LYNCH
If you accept your fate and say what the party requires of you then I can guarantee that your family will not suffer. Now is it worth your family’s suffering? And, of course, being committed to their families they back off.

NARRATION
With their confessions in the bag, Stalin put Kamenev and 15 other senior party members on trial.

NARRATION
Foreign press are invited to view the proceedings. 

PROF DONALD RAYFIELD
They attended the show trials and they expressed pleasure. The system was so perfect that the accused voluntarily confessed and they were listened to and treated very humanely.

NARRATION
Stalin’s plan works perfectly.

NARRATION
His old rival, Kamenev and the other alleged conspirators are shot. 

NARRATION
He stages two more show trials for the most senior party members. Others lower down are simply arrested and executed.

DR MICHAEL LYNCH
He wipes out over a 1,000 of the leading party members of that of the Congress. And of the committee, the Politburo, made up of 45 members, within two years only 11 of them are remaining.

NARRATION
The great purge wipes out anyone who might challenge Stalin’s power, including more than half of the army’s top brass.

MARTIN MCCAULEY
He was the only tree left standing in the forest after Lenin’s death. No-one could contradict his narrative about the revolution, the 1920s and the 1930s, no-one living. 

NARRATION
But even now, he does not feel secure. There are other witnesses to his failures as leader - the Soviet people.

NARRATION
Millions of them lived through the revolution and the years that followed. And they might remember the truth.

NARRATION
Now they must be forced to forget.

NARRATION
After the great purge he unleashes ‘The Great Terror’. 

NARRATION
Stalin’s dreaded secret police, the NKVD, predecessors of the KGB, are given the job of cleansing the country of what he says are traitors.

PROF DONALD RAYFIELD
He would set targets for arrests, they were called the limits, and every city, every province had its limits.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE
They didn’t care who they were, they wanted numbers killed because that’s how Bolshevik did things.

PROF DONALD RAYFIELD
5,000 here, 10,000 there, of whom about a quarter were to be shot straight-away.

NARRATION
Stalin personally signs the death warrants of those senior enough in the party structure.

PROF DONALD RAYFIELD
There are 44,000 names on which you have Stalin’s initials and ticks. He would add words like “scum”, “prostitute”, “deserves it”. He was enjoying it enormously. Stalin by that point is by any normal standards a psychopath, an incurable psychopath.

NARRATION
The Soviet tyrant doesn’t stop with the adult population. He wants to break down any loyalty that is not to him. To do that he attacks the most fundamental human social unit - the family.

DR MICHAEL LYNCH
Children were made to see themselves as children of Stalin first and of their parents second. And if their parents were suspect they were asked by their teachers to report back. And there scores, hundreds in the end, of stories of children actually betraying their own parents.

NARRATION
Soviet society collapses under Stalin’s relentless onslaught.

PROF JONATHAN BRENT
Fear is at the heart of it. You are putting fear, distrust in to the heart of society, and then you can achieve anything.

NARRATION
At least 700,000 people are executed.  Millions are sent to slave labour camps, known as the Gulag.

NARRATION
No-one in the country dares even to think of challenging Stalin’s leadership. He is now effectively the Tsar of the Soviet Union.

NARRATION
But outside the Soviet Union a new enemy is rising. 

NARRATION
Adolf Hitler is the only man who might match Stalin’s lack of empathy and disregard for humanity. He is hell bent on wiping out communism. 

NARRATION
Nevertheless, in 1939, Stalin cuts a deal with Hitler. They divide up Eastern Europe between them and agree that they will not attack each other.

MARTIN MCCAULEY
Stalin didn’t trust anyone, but he trusted Hitler, because he saw Hitler as a great leader, a very strong leader. And he had this belief that if the Soviet Union and Germany can work together then they can conquer the world.

NARRATION
Even after the Nazis take France in 1940, Stalin believes that the Soviet Union is safe because Hitler will not want to fight on two fronts. A big mistake.

PROF DONALD RAYFIELD
In summer 1941, Stalin had the first real big shock of his life. 

NARRATION
Hitler launches Operation Barbarossa and invades Russia. Nazi tanks plough towards Moscow in a devastating advance.

NARRATION
They capture more than 100,000 men in the first week. 

NARRATION
Suddenly, Stalin is facing the fight of his life.

NARRATION
Hitler’s panzer army is cutting through Russia like a knife through butter. 

NARRATION
Supreme leader, Joseph Stalin, is dumbfounded. 

NARRATION
He retreats to his country house - known as a dacha.

DR MICHAEL LYNCH
He sat in a chair looking at the wall, he sat in his dacha outside Moscow, and refused to comment when news came to him.

PROF DONALD RAYFIELD
It seemed to be an attack of depression. He did nothing for something like three weeks.

NARRATION
As the German tanks close in on Moscow, a delegation of Stalin’s deputies muster up the courage to go and find him.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE
He was extremely shaken. He said “Lenin built the state, we’re going to lose it.” And, you know, he was close to panic.

DR MICHAEL LYNCH
Had he stayed paralytic for another two, three days, refusing to allow proper response on the Soviet side, he may well have lost the war.

PROF JONATHAN BRENT
They said “Comrade Stalin, we need you, we need your leadership.” And he came back and he regained his vitality and he led the country after that.

NARRATION
Back in charge, Stalin tries to take full control of the war. 

PROF DONALD RAYFIELD
He would interfere, forbid generals to retreat, even when it made military sense to retreat.

NARRATION
Stalin is an expert at killing helpless people. But he knows nothing about how to run a real war.

PROF DONALD RAYFIELD
He lost army after army, division after division.

NARRATION
Hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers are slaughtered as the Nazis conquer vast stretches of Russia.

PROF DONALD RAYFIELD
It wasn’t for a year or two that Stalin finally learnt that you leave the army to get on with the job and you concentrate on supplying them with tanks.

NARRATION
One thing that Stalin does not relinquish is his hardness. 

NARRATION
His first born son, Yakov, is fighting at the front. In July, 1941, he’s captured by the Germans.

PROF DONALD RAYFIELD
The Germans thought they had a trophy, so they negotiated to get some German generals back in exchange for Yakov. 

NARRATION
The man of steel shows Hitler how ruthless he really is. 

PROF DONALD RAYFIELD
And Stalin said I don’t swap generals for a soldier. That, of course, impressed the Germans enormously.

ROSAMOND RICHARDSON
And Yakov eventually threw himself on the electrified barbed wire and died.

NARRATION
Yakov is one of more than 20 million Soviet citizens who give their lives in the fight against the Nazis. To their leader, they’re just another statistic.

NARRATION
Despite his early interference, a combination of winter and the extraordinary bravery of the troops turns the tide of war.

PROF DONALD RAYFIELD
All invaders of Russia, except the Mongols, have made one mistake, they don’t believe the weather reports. Napoleon wouldn’t believe it, Hitler wouldn’t believe it, so General January, General February are the biggest generals in the Russian army.

NARRATION
The Soviet army slowly pushes the Nazis back, mile by bloody mile, through Eastern Europe.

NARRATION
Hitler’s forces are broken.

NARRATION
On May 2nd, 1945, Russian troops overwhelm Berlin.

NARRATION
The war is over. 

NARRATION
But a new conflict is about to begin.

NARRATION
In the summer of 1945, Stalin meets US President Truman and British Prime Ministers Churchill and then Attlee to discuss the details of the peace.

NARRATION
Western leaders are hoping for a golden era and an end to all war. 

NARRATION
But Stalin will later reveal his hand.

NARRATION
No-one will ever be able to invade the Soviet Union again, because he is going to keep every inch of the territory his army has taken.

NARRATION
After five long years of war the West doesn’t have the stomach to oppose him.

PROF DONALD RAYFIELD
He would agree to democratic elections, of course, but as Stalin said, it’s not important who votes it’s important who counts the votes, and that was something he was going to do himself.

NARRATION
Stalin builds the Iron Curtain. 90 million people who thought they would be free are now yoked to Stalin’s brutal ideology.

NARRATION
The Cold War begins.


NARRATION
By the time of Stalin’s 70th birthday celebrations, his shadow has fallen across an empire from Eastern Europe to Kamchatka.

NARRATION
Along with 180 million people in the Soviet Union, a further 90 million in conquered Eastern Europe are now forced to live in servitude to Stalin. 

NARRATION
If anyone objects the Great Terror is repeated  across country after country.

PROF JONATHAN BRENT
Stalin had total power. He probably had more power than any individual in the world up to that point.

NARRATION
The Cold War will run for almost half a century.

NARRATION
But by now, the Soviet dictator has cardiac problems and his health is declining.

PROF JONATHAN BRENT
In old age he could not be as active. He could not control things as well. He’s just losing it, you know. And that’s the way life is, and he hadn’t figured on that.

NARRATION
He spends more and more time at his dachas, gardening. But he’s still paranoid and looking for new threats.

NARRATION
He starts to focus on a new enemy.

ROSAMOND RICHARDSON
Towards the end of his life, of course, he becomes more and more anti-Semitic, violently anti-Semitic. 

NARRATION
The hated traitor, Trotsky, originally Bronshtein, had been a Jew. And Lev Kamenev had a Jewish father.

PROF DONALD RAYFIELD
Well, there was one thing that Stalin shared with Hitler - suspicion of Jews, because they don’t owe loyalty to one country, they could easily be spies in Stalin’s view.

NARRATION
In January, 1953, Stalin launches another purge. He arrests the country’s top medical men, accusing them of treachery and conspiring to destroy the Soviet leadership in what has become known as the “Doctor’s Plot”. Most of the accused are Jewish. They’re taken and tortured for confessions.

PROF JONATHAN BRENT
Stalin goes “beat them, beat them, beat them with death blows. I want those confessions.” One  of the doctors had to be carried into interrogations on a stretcher because he had been beaten so badly he couldn’t walk.

NARRATION
Some scholars believe that Stalin may have been planning a massive purge of Soviet Jews.

PROF JONATHAN BRENT
Stalin had already approved the building of four major new concentration camps in the Far East. The speculation is that these concentration camps were being built for the Jews.

NARRATION
But Stalin’s last purge will never happen.

NARRATION
On March 1st, 1953, the Father of the Nation is alone in his room.

DR MICHAEL LYNCH
He was sitting on a sofa. He was well oiled, he’d drunk a lot. He appeared to have had a heart attack, and he fell over on one side and made burbling noises for an hour or two.

NARRATION
The most feared man in Russia lies alone for almost a day. Absolutely no-one dares to enter the room.

NARRATION
Finally, his deputies gain the courage to come in. They find Stalin lying a pool of his own urine. But still they don’t dare touch the body.

DR MICHAEL LYNCH
They’re standing around in terror looking at this body, as it may be, and a little cleaning lady comes in and she pushed a way between people and said “get out of my way”, and she looked down and said “oh, he’s dead, come, on, let me..” And she starts to hoover underneath.

NARRATION
When the news is revealed, the Soviet Union is convulsed with grief. Many find it hard to believe that Joseph Stalin, the beloved father  of the nation for 30 years, is dead.

NARRATION
For three days the tyrant’s body is displayed in Moscow, while millions file past to pay their respects.

PROF DONALD RAYFIELD
The feeling at Stalin’s funeral was that the strong man that held this country together has gone, and he’s left us with a number of ghastly incompetents who will fight and rip the country apart.

NARRATION
Despite 30 million deaths and decades of savage brutality, at the time Stalin’s propaganda has cemented him in the public imagination as the embodiment of all that is good in Soviet Russia.

DR MICHAEL LYNCH
All the press, all the media is directed to elevate and exalt Stalin’s name. And every textbook that is published, every play that’s written, whatever the theme has to have some reference to the greatness of Stalin.

MICHAEL MCCAULEY
He projected himself as a sun. The State was Stalin and Stalin was the State. Stalin was the Soviet Union. Without him the Soviet Union would fail.

ROSAMOND RICHARDSON
Stalin had in some ways transplanted. The religion he had been brought up in, he transferred that to socialism and he had become the God of that so-called paradise, which he had built up over nearly 30 years.

DR MICHAEL LYNCH
The name Stalin becomes in itself almost a prayer and people chant it.

NARRATION
What no-one is told is that even in death Stalin is a powerful destructive force.

NARRATION
500 people are crushed to death by the crowds of hysterical mourners.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE
Stalin’s brutality does make him one of the  most terrifying people in history. I think he was an evil man. I think for him, you know, human liberty and human life was worth very little.

PROF DONALD RAYFIELD
Stalin got away with it in the sense that the system that he created basically went on for another 50 years.

DR MICHAEL LYNCH
Even now you’ll still hear people in Russia who can remember his time, who say that for all his failings he made the Soviet Union an achievement which it could have got by no other means.

PROF JONATHAN BRENT
There are many elements of Stalinist thinking that are still alive in this world. And if we don’t understand how precious our liberal democracy is, yes, there will be another Joseph Stalin.
 


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