Josef Stalin: The Iron Fist Full Documentary

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Transcript

00:00:00The cult of personality was a defining feature of his dictatorship.

00:00:29Violence and the pursuit of violence had become part of the modern Soviet state.

00:00:37Ultimately Stalin will be remembered as one of the bloodiest dictators in history.

00:00:53You have 670,000 people arrested and you have 376,000 people executed.

00:01:03That is just horrific.

00:01:10In the Great Purge, 36% or so of the victims, over a third, were minorities.

00:01:16Only 1.6 of the Soviet Union's population consisted of these minorities.

00:01:20So you can see this was incredibly spiteful.

00:01:24It was as evil as anything Hitler had ever done.

00:01:50Joseph Stalin was a Georgian revolutionary, essentially.

00:02:05But he also would become the leader of the Soviet Union.

00:02:10He is one of the most titanic figures of the 20th century.

00:02:16Stalin was a thin young boy with a churlish temperament.

00:02:21And as the years developed, he became very power-hungry.

00:02:26He was quite malevolent.

00:02:28He was one to bear grudges and to want vengeance, really.

00:02:32He was also quite devious and manipulative and we can see those traits of his character

00:02:37being very important as he catapulted himself into absolute power.

00:02:46Stalin was a bit of a sickly child, frankly.

00:02:48I mean, he had quite a few health problems.

00:02:51Stalin had smallpox in his early years and was left with pockmarks.

00:02:56And then at the age of 12, he was really quite badly injured when he was hit by a carriage.

00:03:02And that is considered the cause of what was a lifelong disability in his left arm.

00:03:08These physical scars may have made him determined to overcompensate and that had an impact on

00:03:14the way that he wielded power in such an unyielding manner.

00:03:28Stalin came from quite humble origins.

00:03:31His mother was a washerwoman and his father was a shoemaker.

00:03:37Stalin's father was called Berserian and he was a shoemaker.

00:03:41And he worked in a workshop owned by someone else.

00:03:44Initially, everything was going quite well.

00:03:47The workshop was successful.

00:03:48But then it went into decline.

00:03:51And Stalin and his family found themselves in poverty.

00:03:55Berserian didn't handle this very well.

00:03:57He became an alcoholic, drunkenly would beat up his wife.

00:04:00He would beat up his son, Stalin.

00:04:02These beatings seem to have had the effect of toughening up or hardening Stalin.

00:04:08His father often in later life pursuing alcohol meant that Stalin was distrustful of his father

00:04:17and the father figures.

00:04:18He had a very doting mother and he greatly loved and admired his mother who would do

00:04:24all she could to ensure that Stalin got an education in his early years.

00:04:30It was a pretty rough and ready world that he grew up in.

00:04:34It was extremely poor.

00:04:36But I think he understood pretty early that effort and books and learning were a way out

00:04:45of the conditions in which he'd been raised as a child.

00:04:51He had early training in the seminary Russian Orthodox system.

00:04:57Whilst there, however, he would come across banned censored readings.

00:05:02From a really young age, Stalin devotes himself to Karl Marx's socio-political theory, which

00:05:07of course is called Marxism.

00:05:10And in Georgia, where Stalin was growing up, Marxism was kind of on the rise.

00:05:15But it was just one of the various forms of socialism that was kind of very much opposed

00:05:20to the rule of the Tsar and his authorities.

00:05:27At the end of the 19th century, Russia was still ruled by the Tsar.

00:05:33What had changed in 1917 was that in the previous period, the Tsar, Nicholas II, was seen as

00:05:41invincible, infallible, the father of the Russian people.

00:05:46There was no dispute or question about his rule.

00:05:50The Tsar decided in 1915 to dismiss his commander-in-chief of the army and to take that position.

00:05:58So this meant that when things went wrong in the war, or when there were massive casualties,

00:06:04then he was to blame.

00:06:06So really what happened during the First World War, in the Tsar's rule, is that for the first

00:06:12time he wasn't infallible or immune to blame anymore.

00:06:20The Tsarist system, by this point in time, is inherently based on clientism, it's inherently

00:06:25based on connections and who you know.

00:06:28And this leads to an inefficient but also a corrupt element within the economy.

00:06:34And gradually, over the years, this corruption becomes public knowledge.

00:06:40A Stalinist is someone who knows personally what it is like to grow up among the very

00:06:47impoverished labouring classes of the empire and the hatred of privileged Russia, of wealthy

00:06:57Russia.

00:06:58A great deal of what animates the revolution is this desire to overturn existing privileges.

00:07:05Coming from a poor background himself, Stalin was very impressed with the Russian social

00:07:10democratic movement and its determination to bring about revolution and all of its arguments

00:07:17about class struggle.

00:07:19He joined the Russian social democratic movement at the age of 18 and became very interested

00:07:25and engaged in its social revolutionary outlook and very determined to take part in its development

00:07:33and growth.

00:07:39Stalin's training in seminary is not unusual.

00:07:41There's a way in which the promise of the revolution sort of echoes the promise of salvation

00:07:49within Christian theology.

00:07:50So that sort of move from kind of seminary boy to committed Marxist is not as much of

00:07:59a jump as we might think.

00:08:07Stalin's childhood in poverty certainly impacted his beliefs later in life.

00:08:13He grew up in an impoverished environment.

00:08:16He grew up with a mother often having to support him on her own.

00:08:21He grew up in going to a school system where he often didn't have the materials that other

00:08:27children had.

00:08:29And he would forever hold a chip on his shoulder.

00:08:33He would forever believe that this ensured his proletarian credentials above others.

00:08:50Stalin was born in Georgia and some of his earliest encounters with radicals were Georgian

00:08:56nationalists.

00:08:58He soon turned against those Georgian nationalists and embraced Russian Marxism for its international

00:09:04revolutionary possibilities.

00:09:06He wanted to change not just Georgia, he wanted to change the world.

00:09:11In 1903 the Russian Social Democratic Party split into the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks.

00:09:19There were important differences between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks in terms of

00:09:25how they saw this revolution would take place.

00:09:31Some in the party believe that the job of the party should be to spread the gospel of

00:09:37socialism and to agitate among the workers, but ultimately it's the workers themselves

00:09:42who will take forward the revolution.

00:09:44There is an alternative strand, which was pioneered by Lenin, which says that the workers

00:09:48basically aren't really up to this on their own.

00:09:51They'll be too easily bought off by factory bosses.

00:09:54We need a professional group of revolutionaries who will devote themselves to the cause of

00:10:00revolution and they will take the lead in bringing it about.

00:10:04So most associated with Bolshevism was Lenin and the Mensheviks were most associated with

00:10:12Martov and with Trotsky.

00:10:16Stalin's earliest engagement with politics often came through the lens of the Mensheviks,

00:10:21who were dominant in Georgia at the time.

00:10:25However, he soon became very enamoured with Lenin and the Bolsheviks because they were

00:10:30hell-bent on implementing revolution, stoking revolution, as soon as they could.

00:10:42Stalin gets involved in the kind of rough and ready activities in which professional

00:10:48revolutionaries are engaged and that's everything from holding clandestine meetings, setting

00:10:54up illegal printing presses, robbing banks to pay for the activities of the movement.

00:11:01And so he sort of cuts his teeth as a revolutionary in this pretty rough and tumble world of the

00:11:09revolutionary underground in Georgia at the turn of the 20th century.

00:11:14As Stalin became more and more interested and engaged in revolutionary politics, he

00:11:29came to the attentions of the Tsarist authorities.

00:11:33He was arrested several times and eventually sent into exile in Siberia.

00:11:44Roman Malinovsky was a really prominent Bolshevik before the Russian revolution, while at the

00:11:59same time he was working as a secret agent, a really well-paid agent, for the Okhrana,

00:12:07the Tsarist secret police.

00:12:10There's this Bolshevik fundraising ball at which Stalin is arrested, which Malinovsky

00:12:15had persuaded him to attend, and had even gone and lent Stalin a suit and a nice silk

00:12:21tie or cravat, and Malinovsky was talking to Stalin when detectives took Stalin away

00:12:28and Malinovsky said, oh I'll free you Stalin, I'll free you, and in July 1913 he betrayed

00:12:36this plan for Sverdlov and Stalin to escape and actually warned the police chief in Torohansk.

00:12:44This I think feeds into a perception that many in the Bolshevik leadership have, most

00:12:51notably Stalin, but not only Stalin, that there are lots of sort of hidden enemies.

00:12:58Stalin is sent into exile in Siberia, but what he does is actually escapes, and then

00:13:03he's caught, and then he's sent back to Siberia, however this time he's sent to this hamlet

00:13:09called Kureika, and that's right on the edge of the Arctic Circle, it's a place where you

00:13:13don't want to be, and an escape frankly is basically impossible.

00:13:17As the years go by he has communications with key Bolsheviks, including Lenin, who are keen

00:13:24to monitor his health. At various points it seems his physical and mental health does

00:13:29suffer, but he remains a key Bolshevik.

00:13:32Lenin is suspecting one man to be an Okhrana spy in his circle, and that is Malinovsky,

00:13:38and that is confirmed to be absolutely correct many years later, and that is going to fuel

00:13:43Stalin's future distrust of his comrades, it's a distrust and a paranoia that he's going

00:13:49to take with him to his grave.

00:13:54Having suffered in his exile in Siberia, on grounds of health he asked to be moved out

00:14:00of Siberia towards the Urals. In this close proximity, as February 1917 takes place, he's

00:14:07able to then find his way back to St Petersburg, and ultimately becomes part of the 1917 revolutions.

00:14:15It seemed in this period after the century had turned, with prices of grain increasing

00:14:23and therefore prices of bread increasing, that unrest was coming to the fore, and we

00:14:30saw that in a revolution in 1905, and then the revolutions of 1917.

00:14:42So Stalin returns back to Petrograd in March 1917. He, initially alongside Kamenev, takes

00:14:49over the editorship of the main Bolshevik newspaper Pravda, and there he becomes a key

00:14:56leading Bolshevik in 1917.

00:15:00By 1917 the view is that Nicholas II is himself the problem, that his disastrous prosecution

00:15:07of the conflict is effectively driving Russia off a cliff, and what a lot of Russian elites

00:15:15hope is that if they can get rid of Nicholas, that will prevent a violent revolution from

00:15:20below. And of course the tragedy from their perspective is that forcing Nicholas to abdicate,

00:15:25and he's pressured into doing this, really just opens the floodgates to revolution rather

00:15:31than sort of, you know, holding them closed.

00:15:36So after the February Revolution, we have the struggle for who's going to lead a revolution

00:15:44and what that revolution is going to be. Initially you have a system of the provisional government

00:15:49taking over the higher executive offices of the state, with a Soviet system promising

00:15:56to represent the people at the bottom.

00:16:02Initially he's arguing for something of a compromised approach. He wants to allow the

00:16:07provisional government at the time some scope to develop control over the country. Lenin,

00:16:13in exile at the time, is pulling his hair out from what little hair remains, because

00:16:18he wants to push for socialist revolution here and now. So come October 1917, as the

00:16:27provisional government is floundering, as the Soviets are uncertain what to do, Lenin

00:16:33urges the seizure of power.

00:16:36So in the October Revolution, key buildings like telegraph offices and railway stations

00:16:43were taken over and controlled by the Bolsheviks.

00:16:47Lenin and the Bolsheviks have always said, all power to the Soviets. Peace, land and

00:16:52bread. Provide bread for the people, end the war, give the peasants some land.

00:16:58The Bolsheviks see themselves as the good guys. I mean, they believe that they are on

00:17:02the side of creating a future, just and secure society that will be free of kind of oppression

00:17:09and tyranny. And if you have to murder some individuals to get there, that's a price worth

00:17:14paying.

00:17:17The very next day, Lenin formed a government called the Council of People's Commissars,

00:17:23with himself as leader.

00:17:26And they appoint key persons in charge of what used to be called ministries, will now

00:17:30be called commissariats. And that's a new government taking place. That's a new red

00:17:36dawn, as they came to understand it.

00:17:52In the immediate wake of the October Revolution, as the various commissariat roles were being

00:17:56handed out, Stalin was perhaps viewed as the grey blur, the comrade card index, as Trotsky

00:18:03called him, not the intellectual powerhouse of Lenin or Trotsky, or the powerhouse that

00:18:09Bukharin would become. This is probably a disservice to Stalin, who had published on

00:18:16important issues, who was actually himself a revolutionary intellectual in his own right,

00:18:23but just not quite of the calibre of Lenin and Trotsky.

00:18:33So you've got these three figures who are Stalin's main political rivals. You've got

00:18:40Leon Trotsky. Now, he is the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the Russian Union.

00:18:48And then you've got Lenin's deputy chairman, a man called Lev Kamenev. And then you've

00:18:53got the chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, a man called Grigory Zinoviev.

00:18:59These three guys, Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev, they look down on Stalin. They think he's

00:19:04a bit of a hick. He's not very well educated. They think he's intellectually inferior. What

00:19:09they're doing is looking down on him, but as they do that, they're underrating him.

00:19:16So when Lenin was first made aware of Stalin, he was initially quite enthused. Here was

00:19:23a young man, a young revolutionary from Georgia who could speak to the multi-ethnic, multi-national

00:19:29nature of the Russian imperial system, of the Russian Empire. After 1917, infamously,

00:19:36their relationship became more tense.

00:19:39It seems that during this time, Lenin didn't particularly trust Stalin, and that situation

00:19:44didn't change.

00:19:46So initially, Stalin is made the general secretary. Now, we know this becomes a very

00:19:53powerful position in the coming years, but at this point in time, it is more of an organisational

00:19:58role.

00:19:59And of course, Stalin was disgruntled by that. So he wanted power, he wanted his share, and

00:20:07he was disappointed to see the others getting positions that he saw to be better.

00:20:13What Stalin very quickly learns is how to use this new office of his in order to gain

00:20:18lots of advantages over other people within the Communist Party. So what he's doing, he's

00:20:24preparing the agenda, he's directing the course of meetings, and also as general secretary,

00:20:29he's appointing new party leaders. So he's got a kind of network of people loyal to him.

00:20:35It's kind of patronage that he's established, and this is going to be really useful.

00:20:42The ability to command what the Bolsheviks are discussing, what issues are being raised,

00:20:48he can wield quite a bit of power.

00:20:49Crucially, I think by the time Lenin's in orbit and coming in, realise what a power

00:20:55Stalin is within the party, and much of that power comes from his position as general secretary,

00:21:03it's too late. So there'll be key meetings and debates in which the party comes together

00:21:08to decide policy, and Trotsky or Zinoviev, who were both very accomplished orators, will

00:21:15win all of the arguments, and then the people will vote with Stalin's clique because they

00:21:20all owe their positions to Stalin in the first place.

00:21:27So Lenin, after 1917, is in the ascendancy. It looks like he's going to have a few years

00:21:35to build his socialist revolution, to build what he wants to be a global revolution.

00:21:41On May the 25th, 1922, Lenin suffers a stroke while he's recovering from surgery that was

00:21:48attempting to remove a bullet that had been lodged in his neck after a failed assassination

00:21:54attempt made back in August 1918. Lenin was really debilitated after his stroke, and unsurprisingly

00:22:01he has to go into retirement or semi-retirement, and Stalin would visit him often, and he would

00:22:07kind of be acting as his intermediary with the outside world, which of course is going

00:22:12to put Stalin in a really powerful position.

00:22:16Stalin was the main communicator between Lenin and all other Bolsheviks, but understandably

00:22:23Lenin's wife, Krupskaya, was also communicating with fellow Bolsheviks, and Stalin told her

00:22:29not to do this, and did so in rather aggressive terms. And on this matter, Lenin blew up.

00:22:35He was deeply angered at how Stalin had treated his wife and a key Bolshevik in this moment in time.

00:22:46Lenin knows that he's on his way out, he knows he's going to die, and what he does is dictates

00:22:50a political testament, proposing changes to the whole structure of all the Soviet governing

00:22:57bodies, and what he also does is to criticise Bolshevik leaders like Zinoviev, Kamenev,

00:23:04Trotsky, Bakarin, Pyatikov, and Stalin. And then in a postscript he also suggests that

00:23:10Stalin should actually be removed from his position as General Secretary of the Russian

00:23:16Communist Party Central Committee. So this is a bad day for Stalin, make no mistake.

00:23:27Stalin was removed from his position as General Secretary of the Russian Communist Party Central Committee.

00:23:34Stalin was removed from his position as General Secretary of the Russian Communist Party Central Committee.

00:23:41Stalin obviously doesn't come out very well from this final testament. Stalin is criticised

00:24:01for his gruffness, his attitude towards Krupskaya in Lenin's final years, and also towards

00:24:06the potential dictatorial nature of how he uses his office. Stalin is obviously quite

00:24:13upset about this, but it's agreed that this will not be made public. And in not making

00:24:19it public, Stalin ultimately comes to benefit.

00:24:25This was suppressed and the document wasn't acted on by the party leadership, so it's

00:24:32not only Stalin who covers it up, but there was kind of a discussion. I think Stalin said,

00:24:37you know, that's not Lenin speaking, that's his illness.

00:24:42In March 23 Lenin has another stroke, it's his third stroke, and it's really debilitating.

00:24:48He's lost his ability to speak, and then that month he experiences partial paralysis on

00:24:54his right side, and, you know, he's clearly dying. And then on the 21st of January 1924

00:25:03Lenin falls into a coma, and later that day he dies.

00:25:07And there's then a great deal of sort of jockeying for position around Lenin's funeral and Lenin's

00:25:12funeral cortege, because it's all about sort of framing, you know, who are the legitimate

00:25:17successors of Lenin.

00:25:24The man who takes charge of Lenin's funeral is Joseph Stalin, and he's also one of the

00:25:29pallbearers of Lenin's coffin. And that was against the wishes of Lenin's widow. You know,

00:25:36Stalin's doing this to kind of bolster his image as a very dedicated and devoted Leninist.

00:25:42Stalin used his cunning and deviousness to take advantage of the death of Lenin by really

00:25:48putting himself in a position of leadership, and really making sure that his rivals, particularly

00:25:54Trotsky, but also some of the others, he played them off one against another in order to ensure

00:26:00the supremacy of his own position.

00:26:04Stalin is forging this tripartite, this triumvirate, with Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev. And

00:26:11that triumvirate is positioned against Trotsky. Because, you know, what Stalin's trying to

00:26:17do is to prevent Trotsky from succeeding Lenin in any forthcoming power struggle.

00:26:33Stalin's also in charge of the guest list at the funeral, and one of the invitations

00:26:38mysteriously gets lost, and that's the one to Leon Trotsky, Stalin's big potential rival.

00:26:44And this tarnished his reputation and just didn't look good.

00:26:54On Stalin's suggestion, Lenin's body was embalmed. Not all of the other leaders agreed with that,

00:26:59but he kind of persisted in this. Placed in a grand communist mausoleum on Red Square

00:27:06for members of the public to be able to file past and catch a glimpse of Lenin.

00:27:15On the eve of Lenin's funeral, Stalin made quite an important speech, talking about we

00:27:21communists being of a very special mould and a special type, and really trying to unify

00:27:27the party in a way that it simply wasn't. And Stalin was sort of saying, actually, if

00:27:32we're going to be the successors of this great comrade Lenin, we need to unify. And he was

00:27:40also calling for the party to be unified under himself.

00:27:45So by the end of 1929, Stalin had turned the position of General Secretary into the absolute

00:27:52centre of power of the party, and therefore the entire Soviet Union.

00:28:00Despite Lenin's last will and testament, Stalin had manoeuvred himself into a position of

00:28:07undisputed leader and ruler. And from that point on, the cult of the leadership that

00:28:13surrounded Stalin just continued to grow.

00:28:22In the 1930s, the Soviet economy was still backward compared to those of the time.

00:28:30Many of the fruits of industrialisation and urbanisation in the decades before 1917 have

00:28:39been destroyed in the First World War and the Civil War. So in some respects, the Russian

00:28:45economy in the 1920s is more backward than it was on the eve of the First World War.

00:28:51And Stalin was determined to turn that around. He wanted the Soviet economy not only to catch

00:28:55up, but maybe even to surpass or overtake that of other powers. To that end, he put

00:29:00into place policies of collectivisation and of industrialisation. And these had very significant

00:29:08effects on the population.

00:29:15Collectivisation was designed to make agriculture more efficient and also to do away with private

00:29:21land ownership.

00:29:22Collectivisation is the establishment of state-controlled farming.

00:29:26So peasants are forced into collective farms or collective farms are set up in their villages.

00:29:33All of their land and livestock is taken away from them and they are forced to work as the

00:29:39state would wish them to work.

00:29:41What Stalin's policies lead to is a major famine in the Soviet Union in 1932 and 1933,

00:29:49particularly in Ukraine. And you've got something like five to seven million people dying.

00:29:57The social and economic landscape of Russia between 1928 and 1938 is completely transformed.

00:30:06It's a very, very brutal experience of industrialisation that is forced on the population by the state

00:30:14using essentially wartime methods.

00:30:26The kulaks were the wealthier peasants who had resisted Stalin's drastic collectivisation

00:30:33measures.

00:30:34In Russian history, Soviet history, a kulak is a wealthy or prosperous peasant, a man

00:30:40who owns a relatively large farm, maybe several head of cattle, horses, who's financially

00:30:46capable of hiring labour and then actually renting land out.

00:30:51So obviously this didn't sit very well or fit very well with Stalin's collectivisation

00:30:55policy.

00:30:57As we approached the 30s, it became a dangerous label to be associated with. To be a kulak

00:31:02was to be a rich peasant, was to be someone that wasn't working with the state or on behalf

00:31:08of the state or in a collective farm, someone who was looking to profit off the state for

00:31:13their own self-interest, someone who wasn't part of the collective we, but part of the

00:31:18individual I.

00:31:26Stalin regarded the kulaks as a political threat too.

00:31:41Stalin looks at the kulaks and he's very suspicious of them. He thinks that they could form an

00:31:46alternative power base. He thinks that they could mount an insurrection against him.

00:31:55So what Stalin does is to try to basically neuter, if you like, the kulaks. And so he

00:32:01assigns them to three different categories. One is that category A, if you like, is those

00:32:08to be shot or imprisoned as decided by the local secret police. Then you've got the second

00:32:13category, like category B, if you like, and these were the kulaks who were going to be

00:32:17sent to Siberia or to the Arctic or to the Ural Mountains or all the way down to Kazakhstan

00:32:23after their property had all been confiscated. And then you've got a third category, category

00:32:27C, those to be evicted from their homes and then sent to labour colonies, labour camps

00:32:33within their own districts. There's no good place for these people to go.

00:32:38So when the collectivisation brigades are being sent into Russian villages to seize

00:32:43the livestock and seize grain from the peasants, any peasant, irrespective of how poor they

00:32:49are, is branded a kulak.

00:33:00Make no mistake, what we've got here is a policy ordered by Stalin to liquidate the

00:33:06kulaks as a class of people. And this is one of the very first legal orders issued by a

00:33:12state in human history, ordering the mass murder of some of its own citizens.

00:33:19To a large extent, the reason that Stalin never really faced a major popular uprising

00:33:25was the violent arm of the state had been extended, had been built up. Violence and

00:33:31the pursuit of violence had become part of the modern Soviet state.

00:33:49Ultimately, Stalin's wife, upon hearing the various details of forced collectivisation

00:34:05and the coming famine, she would ultimately take her life, commit suicide.

00:34:11On the morning of the 9th of November, Stalin's wife, she's alone in her room and she shoots

00:34:18herself in the heart. And of course, she dies instantly.

00:34:22And Stalin regarded this as an act of personal treachery.

00:34:25This has also been seen as a moment where Stalin's last connection to humanity was cut.

00:34:33Stalin becomes a much more irritable figure, a much more argumentative, quarrelsome figure.

00:34:38He's starting to become what we would say is a very tricky customer.

00:34:48Sergei Kirov was head of the Communist Party in Leningrad. And he was very popular, quite

00:35:07a cheerful figure. And he sort of fell out of favour with Stalin because in 1934, at

00:35:15the Party Congress, Kirov got a much more lengthy ovation or applause than Stalin did.

00:35:23And Stalin did not like this at all.

00:35:25Kirov makes this really powerful speech and Congress delegates these votes to elect the

00:35:30Central Committee. And in this vote, Kirov receives only three negative votes, which

00:35:35is far fewer than any other candidate, including actually Stalin himself. And of course, Stalin,

00:35:42ever suspicious, his moustache kind of bristling with suspicion. His views on Kirov go from,

00:35:48oh, this guy's a nice, loyal party member to thinking, actually, he's a potential rival.

00:35:55On the 1st of December 1934, Kirov is shot and he's killed by a man called Leonid Nikolaev

00:36:03at his offices in the Smolny Institute for reasons that were unknown.

00:36:08In fact, from that time onwards, when Stalin made public speeches or political speeches,

00:36:16people kept clapping for a very, very long time because they were fearful of how he would respond.

00:36:38Now, there's been lots of speculation about this assassination. What was Stalin's role,

00:36:53if anything? In reality, I think it's likely that it was a genuine volcanic assassination,

00:37:00if you will, and not necessarily led by Stalin. But Stalin certainly ensured that he benefited

00:37:06from it. Stalin is very effective and nimble at exploiting things like this for political

00:37:15advantage. After Kirov's been murdered, Stalin calls for a really kind of swift and brutal

00:37:22punishment of the traitors and those found negligent in Kirov's death. And what this does

00:37:29is it gives Stalin the perfect excuse to eliminate his political rivals.

00:37:34He accuses Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev and Prigozhin and all the others who had stood with

00:37:42Kirov in opposing Stalin of being what he calls morally responsible for Kirov's murder and

00:37:49therefore guilty of complicity. In much the same way that Hitler uses the Reichstag fire to move

00:37:56against his opponents, Stalin uses the Kirov assassination. You have these three big, widely

00:38:04publicised trials that successfully wipe out many of Stalin's rivals and critics. You've got

00:38:10several really high-ranking communists, including Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin, Rykov. They're all

00:38:18accused of treason, for conspiring with fascist powers, capitalist powers, to assassinate Stalin

00:38:26and other Soviet leaders. These of course are all trumped up, fabricated charges.

00:38:44Stalin is suspecting one man to be an Okhrana spy in his circle and that is Malinovsky.

00:38:51And that is confirmed to be absolutely correct many years later. And that is going to fuel

00:38:56Stalin's future distrust of his comrades. It's a distrust and a paranoia that he's

00:39:02going to take with him to his grave.

00:39:09By the mid-1930s, the view from the Kremlin is that they are encircled by hostile expansionist

00:39:19powers. The Nazis have come to power in Germany, there is a militarised Japanese

00:39:26empire which wants to expand its territory. So there is a kind of a fortress mentality

00:39:32in the Kremlin. They believe that they are under siege. Stalin used terror as a political weapon.

00:39:40And so the Great Terror is a term which is used to describe a kind of campaigns of arrests and

00:39:50executions that are launched in the summer of 1936 and do not wind down until the autumn of 1938.

00:40:01They needed to root out all enemies, in particular internal enemies.

00:40:05Ethnic Germans or ethnic Poles or ethnic Koreans or Finns whose loyalties are in

00:40:13question because when war comes there is the fear that they might support the other side.

00:40:24In the Great Purge, 36% or so of the victims, over a third, were minorities.

00:40:31And only 1.6% of the Soviet Union's population consisted of these minorities. So you can see

00:40:38this was incredibly spiteful and it was as evil as anything Hitler had ever done.

00:40:51You have 670,000 people arrested and you have about half of them, I mean over half of them,

00:40:58about 376,000 people executed. Okay, I mean that is just horrific.

00:41:06Millions are swept into the Gulag which is this network of forced labour camps that emerge in the

00:41:131930s. Which in itself could be a death sentence or the very least could be a long stretch of hard

00:41:20labour. As well as removing any potential political threats to Stalin, what he also

00:41:34does is to create an environment of fear frankly. And you know there's always this

00:41:40ever-existing threat of another purge and nobody is ever going to feel safe ever again.

00:41:53Although Stalin had been really very successful in his elimination of

00:41:58political rivals or people he thought were political rivals within the Soviet Union,

00:42:03there was still his biggest threat in his mind was still at large and that of course was Leon

00:42:09Trotsky. Stalin believed that Trotsky was his main political rival and so he took steps to

00:42:24first of all remove him from his position, to remove him from the party and ultimately to exile

00:42:29him. During the power struggle, as it initially starts to develop, Stalin's initial fear is that

00:42:37Trotsky will win out. But Stalin isn't alone in this fear. Many other leading Bolsheviks look to

00:42:44Trotsky as a potential leader. In October 1926 you have Stalin supporters voting Trotsky out of the

00:42:55Politburo. It's slightly behind the scenes, it's kind of conversations here and there, handshakes,

00:43:01promises of favours. He's very good at kind of bringing people on side so that when these big

00:43:07questions about the fate of the left opposition or the right opposition are debated,

00:43:14he has lots of supporters who are falling in behind him, partly because it's in their interest

00:43:20to do so, but partly because they've been persuaded of the merits of his arguments.

00:43:24So during the power struggle, as Stalin starts to remove his rivals, Trotsky has his various

00:43:31positions taken away from him and he is exiled outside the Soviet Union. And during his exile,

00:43:38Trotsky, he continues to oppose Stalin. Just because he's not in the Soviet Union doesn't mean

00:43:42that he still can't be noisy. Stalin's trial against me is built upon false confessions,

00:43:49extorted by modern inquisitorial methods in the interest of the ruling elite.

00:43:55There are no crimes in history more terrible in intention and execution than the Moscow trials

00:44:03of Zinoviev-Kamenev and of Petakov-Radek. His trials developed not from communism,

00:44:10not from socialism, but from Stalinism, that is from the irresponsible despotism of the bureaucracy

00:44:17of the people. I think Stalin felt genuinely threatened by Trotsky. Trotsky was this aloof

00:44:25intellectual powerhouse who often seemed to talk down to Stalin. I think this would have brought

00:44:31up some complicated emotions within Stalin about his position within the party and his sense of

00:44:37legitimacy, perhaps. So I think it probably did aggravate a chip on the shoulder, if you will.

00:44:44Trotsky remained a significant threat, or at least was perceived so by Stalin. Trotsky

00:44:50was hell-bent on advocating for his vision of what a revolution could and should be.

00:44:56He knew that his words would live on forever. He was writing, prolifically writing, to ensure

00:45:02that the truth would in one day out and that Stalin be removed and the revolution would get

00:45:08back on course. On the 28th of August 1940, Trotsky's in his study and in walks this

00:45:16Spanish-born NKVD agent, a man called Ramon Mercado, and he attacks Trotsky and he uses a

00:45:23kind of an ice pick or an ice axe and he basically kills Trotsky in his most

00:45:30violent and brutal fashion and he's been sent by none other than Stalin.

00:45:41With the death of Trotsky, Stalin's biggest rival in his head,

00:45:46this is going to now mark the end of the Great Terror.

00:45:50As the sheer number of arrests and executions begins to take a toll on the economy of the Soviet

00:45:55Union, you know, that's because of a lack of workers and low factory output, Stalin decides

00:46:01the internal enemies had been defeated. The effect of the Great Terror is devastating

00:46:06on Russian government, on almost all sectors of society. It's particularly damaging for the army,

00:46:14One of the last purges to take place during the Great Terror was the purge of the military in

00:46:21the Soviet Union. And, you know, the navy was particularly suspected because, you know, of all

00:46:26the contact that naval officers had with foreign people, so Stalin obviously thought that was

00:46:31immensely distrustful. And then you've got about 50 out of 57 of the Soviet Union's

00:46:37army corps commanders going 154 out of 186 division commanders. All army commissars,

00:46:52all 16 of them, and of the army corps commissars, 25 or 28 are purged.

00:46:58So, I mean, it's almost 100% purged in some ways.

00:47:02Stalin is a Marxist-Leninist, that's his philosophy, and what he does is to consider

00:47:06conflict between capitalist powers as being inevitable. And so after Nazi Germany annexes

00:47:12Austria and then part of Czechoslovakia in 1938, he thinks, you know what, there's a war on its way.

00:47:18And in this respect, he was absolutely right.

00:47:24As Britain and France clearly were unwilling to give up,

00:47:28as Britain and France clearly were unwilling to commit to an alliance with the Soviet Union,

00:47:33Stalin realised is actually he can forge a better deal with someone else,

00:47:37and that's with the Germans.

00:47:39From Stalin's point of view, keeping the peace with Germany for a bit longer would allow him to

00:47:45bring Soviet armaments up to a level that he could wage war.

00:47:51During the various meetings and negotiations between Nazi Germany and the Soviets,

00:47:58those held within the Soviet Union, Stalin would host, and at a banquet, he would occasionally

00:48:05raise a toast to key Jewish Bolsheviks and key Jewish Soviets at the table.

00:48:12This would force those Nazi delegates to raise a toast to Jewish representatives.

00:48:17I think Stalin is asserting his power, he's asserting his authority, he's telling Nazi

00:48:23Germany that you are negotiating with us, you are on our territory right now.

00:48:28It is a power game, a power move.

00:48:30And so in August 1939, you have the Soviet Union

00:48:34signing the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Germany, and this is a kind of non-aggression pact.

00:48:39And Stalin sees this as an opportunity, you know,

00:48:42both a territorial expansion and also a temporary peace with Nazi Germany.

00:48:53What the Purge also does is to have this really quite significant effect on German decision-making

00:48:58during the Second World War.

00:49:00And you've got many German generals opposing an invasion of Russia,

00:49:04but Hitler disagrees because he argues that the Red Army was far less effective

00:49:10after Stalin had purged its intellectual leadership.

00:49:14Stalin was taken by surprise and shocked in June 1941,

00:49:19when Hitler unleashed Operation Barbarossa, so the Nazi invasion of the USSR.

00:49:27That whole non-aggression pact goes out the window in June 1941,

00:49:31and this is going to start, you know, the most brutal war ever on the Eastern Front.

00:49:37And despite intelligence officers repeatedly telling him that Germany is going to invade,

00:49:43Stalin just ignored them, didn't believe it was true,

00:49:45and as a result was taken completely by surprise.

00:49:53In June 1942, the Germans begin a huge offensive in southern Russia.

00:49:58They want to punch their way down to get some oil fields,

00:50:02and what they're going to do is to threaten Stalingrad.

00:50:05Of course, that's a city named after the Soviet leader,

00:50:08and that's going to have a lot of propaganda value if Hitler can take it.

00:50:12I think as Nazi Germany invade the Soviet Union,

00:50:15that Stalin is again feeling betrayed by enemy forces,

00:50:21again betrayed by those that he's negotiating with.

00:50:24It stokes his sense of insecurity and mistrust.

00:50:28But what Stalin does is to order the Red Army to hold Stalingrad at all costs,

00:50:33and this becomes one of the most brutal urban combats in human history.

00:50:39I mean, really close quarters fighting, almost hand to hand.

00:50:43You've got direct assaults on civilians and air raids.

00:50:47It is just the most brutal form of urban warfare.

00:50:50Initially, of course, Stalin and Hitler had signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.

00:50:54They were allies.

00:50:55However, when Germany invades the Soviet Union,

00:50:58Stalin finds some new allies, and those, of course, are the UK and the US.

00:51:50During the Second World War, the Stalingrad is actually the deadliest battle to take place.

00:52:10And, you know, about two million people are lost.

00:52:14So it is one of the bloodiest battles ever in the history of mankind.

00:52:18Of the once 300,000 strong German Sixth Army,

00:52:24between 30,000 and 45,000 had been flown out wounded.

00:52:31Half of the size of the army was either killed or died of cold.

00:52:37And over 100,000 surrendered to the Russians as prisoners of war,

00:52:43of whom only some 6,000 survived their captivity to return to Germany.

00:52:51So this was an absolute rout for the German army.

00:53:02Stalingrad, in many ways, is a turning point in the war.

00:53:06The Soviet refusal to give up and to fight to the last man

00:53:10and to continue this brutal effort gives the Soviets ultimately the sense

00:53:16that they can withstand this Nazi invasion.

00:53:20It might mean that everything is razed to the ground,

00:53:23but they will not give in, they will not give up.

00:53:26And there's this sense of will to martyrdom

00:53:30that is inbred from that moment on within the Soviet psyche.

00:53:41Infamously, Stalin's son, who had been captured by Nazi forces,

00:53:45was offered in exchange for Nazi personnel,

00:53:49and Stalin refused to accept that exchange.

00:53:53It appears that Stalin is willing to accept

00:53:57that his son would potentially die in captivity rather than be exchanged.

00:54:02And this links to Stalin's wider policy of refusing the idea

00:54:08that his military forces, that his men and women, in some cases, fighting,

00:54:12should allow themselves to be captured.

00:54:15They should fight to the death.

00:54:17It would be an honour to become a Soviet martyr, if you will.

00:54:32I don't think we can overstate the importance of victory.

00:54:37Of winning the Second World War, or the Great Patriotic War,

00:54:42as it's known in the Soviet Union and still today in Russia.

00:54:46This victory had come at a huge cost.

00:54:50The human cost of the Soviet war effort has been estimated at over 20 million people.

00:54:58And so this huge effort, this huge sacrifice,

00:55:02becomes the new foundational event of the Soviet Union.

00:55:06Arguably just as important, to some perhaps more important than 1917 itself.

00:55:16Within the Soviet Union, I mean, Stalin is such a great hero.

00:55:20I mean, he's universally regarded as the kind of embodiment of victory and patriotism.

00:55:25He is kind of Mr Soviet Union.

00:55:30Victory in the Second World War only led to an increase in Stalin's popularity.

00:55:36So this was this great victory against fascism, against Nazi Germany and her allies.

00:55:45And the Soviet propaganda machine took advantage of this victory

00:55:49really to cultivate even more this cult of the leader that surrounded Stalin.

00:56:07With victory to you, my dear compatriots.

00:56:14Glory to our heroic Red Army,

00:56:18which defended the independence of our Motherland

00:56:22and won the victory over the enemies.

00:56:27Glory to our great people,

00:56:30the victorious people.

00:56:33Eternal glory to the heroes who fell in battle against the enemy

00:56:40and gave their lives for the freedom and happiness of our people.

00:56:49In the Allied countries, Stalin is now being increasingly depicted

00:56:54in this really positive light over the course of the war.

00:56:58In 1941, you have the London Philharmonic Orchestra performing a concert

00:57:02in his honour to celebrate his birthday.

00:57:05And Time magazine the following year even names him Man of the Year.

00:57:09And this is just essentially a few years after the Great Terror has ended.

00:57:14This man's a mass murderer.

00:57:26In the aftermath of the Second World War,

00:57:28what happens to the British Empire is it starts to decline

00:57:31and that's going to leave the United States and the Soviet Union

00:57:35becoming the two dominant world powers.

00:57:39The Soviets and, to a large extent, Imperial Russia before them

00:57:43often seemed to promote the idea or the need for a buffer zone.

00:57:48There was a fear of external threats coming their way.

00:57:54Stalin was very keen to make sure that the states of Eastern Europe

00:57:58would be friendly to him and to set up communist states in those lands.

00:58:03His policies to expand led to a reaction from the United States

00:58:08and in particular from the Truman government

00:58:11to contain the Soviet Union and to contain Stalin's policy of expansion.

00:58:17United in detesting communist slavery, we know that the cost of freedom is high

00:58:23but we are determined to preserve our freedom no matter what the cost.

00:58:28At the end of the Second World War, you have the Soviet Union

00:58:32occupying or controlling Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Poland and Eastern Germany.

00:58:39From Stepin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,

00:58:45an iron curtain has descended across the continent

00:58:49and all our subjects in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence

00:58:55but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow.

00:59:01On the 5th of March 1946, the former British Prime Minister and wartime leader Winston Churchill,

00:59:06he's speaking at a college called Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri

00:59:11and he's summing up the situation in Europe and he coins this very famous phrase in this speech

00:59:20because he says, from Stepin in the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic,

00:59:26an iron curtain has descended across the continent.

00:59:31Now that phrase, iron curtain, that metaphor is going to be used for decades to come

00:59:39and that speech may have been one of the first shots fired in the Cold War, if you like.

00:59:51In the immediate wake of the Second World War, it's become apparent to the West

00:59:56just how much strength the Soviet Union could draw on.

00:59:59The reality is it's greatly weakened and exhausted by its war effort

01:00:05but it's demonstrated itself capable of withstanding Nazi assault

01:00:10and pushing Nazi forces back to Berlin.

01:00:13Once Nazi Germany was defeated, the Grand Alliance broke down

01:00:18and the differences between the former allies became clearer.

01:00:32As soon as Stalin learns of the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki,

01:00:39he starts initiating a Soviet atom bomb project and he pursues it aggressively

01:00:45and it accelerates really rapidly and by the end of August 1949,

01:00:50the Soviet Union actually secretly conducts its first successful atomic weapon test.

01:00:57Now clearly this is a monumental moment in the Cold War.

01:01:02This is the Soviet Union developing themselves,

01:01:05thinking of themselves as a superpower equal in the status of America, equal to the West.

01:02:15So

01:02:24now

01:02:39ultimately Stalin will be remembered as one of the bloodiest dictators in history.

01:02:45By the time Stalin's health is failing in the early 50s,

01:02:50the Cold War isn't being directed by Stalin alone, it isn't being directed from above.

01:02:56To a large extent, the mechanisms and the structure of the Cold War are already in place.

01:03:01The points of tension, the points of competition are already laid bare

01:03:06and these things can develop without Stalin's daily input.

01:03:15In his later years, like so many of us, Stalin's in really poor health.

01:03:24He takes his increasingly long holidays and in 1950 and again in 1951,

01:03:29he spends almost about what five months having a holiday at his dacha, that's his holiday home.

01:03:35From 1946 until he dies, Stalin only gives three public speeches

01:03:41and two of them only last a few minutes.

01:03:43All right, Mr Vyshchensky, have you got any statement about President Trump's atomic bomb?

01:03:51Does Russia have the atomic bomb?

01:03:53What do you do?

01:03:57But by this point, you're dealing with a man that's

01:04:01but by this point, you're dealing with a man that's almost a living deity.

01:04:07You're dealing with someone whose sheer force of personality

01:04:12is at the centre of the party and you cannot be questioned.

01:04:17And so, to some extent, the Soviet Union is stuck in this position,

01:04:21unsure what's coming next and it has to adapt to Stalin's health.

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