Russia's War: Blood Upon the Snow (1997) s01e02 Episode Script
The Hour Before Midnight
1 [Military march plays.]
NARRATOR: In the world beyond the Soviet Union, these are years when Europe marches to the beat of Adolf Hitler's drum.
Already in 1936, just three years after he comes to power, Hitler has sent his as yet unprepared army to occupy the Rhineland, demilitarized by the Versailles Treaty, which concluded the Great War.
It is his first, most dangerous step, a moment when, for Adolf Hitler, everything teeters on the edge.
Even his position as Führer itself depends on the reaction of the Western Allies.
We know now that he has ordered an immediate German retreat if French forces oppose them.
He has taken a desperate risk to throw down an early challenge to Versailles, the treaty he came to power promising to break.
But in this vital test of nerve, Britain and France fail to act.
It is the first of many failures of wisdom learned.
Failures bound to give the leadership of the Soviet Union serious cause to reflect.
Worse is the news of a pact signed by Germany and Japan and later joined by Italy, a treaty which targets the Soviet Union.
To Stalin, there could be no stronger sign of the reckless speed with which Hitler intends to move.
In the Kremlin, the message is clear.
The Versailles Treaty, that whole rearrangement of frontiers imposed on Europe by the victorious Western Allies, has now no more than a few years to live.
There are too many disputed territories in Europe, too many claims and counterclaims.
[Applause.]
At home, Stalin's leadership is unchallengeable.
He relishes the title of "Great Leader.
" But the great leader is tainted with a fatal sickness.
His malady is not physical.
It resides in an unrivaled greed for power and festers with a paranoid distrust of every other human being.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: And as you know, he died alone in his own self-made prison.
He lived in a corridor in which there were three doors which led to three separate apartments, each with their own bedrooms.
And every morning, he would telephone for breakfast, lunch, or dinner.
And every day they would bring him three separate breakfasts, lunches, and dinners and place one by each door and then immediately leave, so that no one would know from which door he would take his breakfast.
And that is how he lived hateful and hated.
NARRATOR: The deathbed mourning of Lenin and Trotsky's denunciation of Stalin as "the gravedigger of the Revolution" have been chillingly justified in these years of arrest, murder, and enslavement of the Soviet people.
Stalin has one single solution for all opposition to his will, and he sees foreigners, Westerners in particular, as people with the power to infect Soviet citizens with a nameless plague.
For Stalin, this is reality.
A squadron of the United States Navy visits the Far East Russian port of Vladivostok.
Gregory Okunyev was Chief Political Officer of the Pacific Fleet.
His nephew, llya, was a small boy at the time.
[Speaking in Russian.]
INTERPRETER: My uncle's fate was tragic.
I, myself, was an involuntary witness of that unusual event in Vladivostok.
A squadron of American warships, consisting of one battle cruiser, Augusta, and four destroyers, was paying a visit of friendship.
The squadron was under the command of Admiral Yarnell.
The visit lasted four days.
American sailors roamed freely in the city, talking to the people, exchanging souvenirs, taking photographs.
The Americans allowed the locals free access to the cruiser, showing it to anyone who wanted to see.
I was there with my uncle.
And Admiral Yarnell met him personally.
The Admiral took me around and showed me the gun turrets and plane decks.
It was a mighty vessel.
When it came into the bay, our ships that were anchored there were bobbing up and down like floats.
NARRATOR: This is an official visit, sanctioned by the authorities, the sort of visit paid by navies all over the world.
We shall never know who brought it to Stalin's notice.
INTERPRETER: When the American squadron left Vladivostok, mass arrests of personnel in our Pacific Fleet began.
Sailors were accused of being recruited by American intelligence and becoming American spies.
Furthermore, when I managed with great difficulty to get hold of the 150-page file on Okunyev from the KGB, I saw that all the evidence was false because it had obviously been dictated to the prisoners by their interrogators.
I also obtained his death certificate.
It said that the cause of death was by shooting.
NARRATOR: Stalin's reckless savagery now leaves no area of Soviet life untouched.
Literature and even science must conform.
Nikolai lvanovich Vavilov is a world-renowned geneticist, but Stalin prefers the theories of Lysenko, a Marxist charlatan.
[Speaking in Russian.]
INTERPRETER: Stalin had made an appointment for 10:00 in the evening.
Father was there at the right time.
But he was made to wait two hours until midnight.
Stalin did not receive him for two hours.
At last, after midnight or even later, he was called.
He went in and greeted Stalin.
And Stalin started to ask him, "So, you are still busy with the flowers and berries and all that botany nonsense which is no use to anybody?" This prompted my father to deliver a lecture on the subject.
Stalin listened in silence and then said, "You may leave, Citizen Vavilov.
" And that was the end of the meeting.
It had a most sinister meaning.
We now know that they were already planning to arrest my father in 1939.
The trials of marshals Tukhachevsky and Yakir are followed with new arrests of high-ranking military figures.
Rokossovsky, later to be one of the war's outstanding generals, is thrown into Kresty prison and tortured as a Polish spy.
Marshals Blyukher and Yegorov are dragged from the Lubyanka, Blyukher with one eye torn out during torture, and put to death.
Marshal Yegorov's daughter remembers the day of his arrest.
[Speaking in Russian.]
INTERPRETER: They dragged him into the room, two or three of them.
Naturally, I rushed to him, started to tear at them and pull them away, shouting, "Don't touch my father!" I was thrown on the bed, and Father said, "Don't touch the child, you bastards!" They tied his hands.
He was a strong, well-built man, but they tied him up and took him away.
After that, I don't remember.
There's a gap in my memory.
I don't remember that period.
My next memory is a children's home.
He was shot on the 23rd of February, Red Army Day.
The army, which he actually created, along with Yakir, Blyukher, Tukhachevsky.
Those marshals created the army, didn't they? It's just something you cannot grasp.
NARRATOR: It is an unending litany of arrest, torture, confession, and execution.
In early 1938, Molotov proposes a list of new ministers to the Supreme Soviet.
[Speaking Russian.]
Within two years of their appointments, they are all under arrest, executed, or have disappeared.
Now Stalin turns back to the people he contemptuously calls "the little cogs," the broad masses of the Soviet peasantry.
In the countryside, age-old harvest celebrations are hijacked by the party and recorded in propaganda film to persuade peasants everywhere that life is good.
But peasants know the truth because they live it.
The new serfdom refuses them permission to move and demands peasants pay almost twice as much for basic necessities as the people in the towns.
And men like the young Khrushchev in Ukraine are bringing to the provinces an epidemic of terror no longer under control.
"I have sent you 18,000 enemies of the people," Khrushchev boasts in one cable to Stalin.
He signs it, "Loving you, Nikita Khrushchev.
" Among many, peasants and town-dwellers alike, feelings of explosive frustration build against the regime.
They know that they are impotent to act.
In some, it is a deadly rage against Stalin personally.
Vladimira Uborevich, whose father was shot during the first army purge INTERPRETER: It was my dream to kill Stalin.
I was a young girl of 18, a student at the Institute, and I used to walk along the street, dreaming of how I would kill Stalin.
I hated him with such bitterness.
The children of the people he had killed were growing up.
They were getting close to 20 years old.
They were dangerous.
NARRATOR: When Stalin lifts his head from the arrest warrants and execution orders that cover his desk, he finds abroad he faces more intractable problems.
In Spain, civil war rages between nationalist forces under Franco and the Republican government.
Communism and fascism.
The two totalitarian ideologies are in open confrontation.
Both dictatorships see the diversionary value of a Spanish war Hitler, to allow Germany to continue with its rearmament, Stalin, because, with a spotlight on Spain, his purges pass with less foreign notice.
Both dictators act swiftly.
Hitler sends 8,000 men of the Air-Land Condor Legion to supports Italy's massive aid to Franco.
Stalin will dispatch fighter pilots.
Nearly a thousand aircraft, tanks, and tank crews to fight on the Republican side.
The war becomes a weapons-testing ground for the two nations.
In the area over Madrid, Soviet and German pilots clash for the first time.
The military victory will go to Franco's side, but the Soviet propaganda victory is considerable.
Self-confident and myopic intellectuals in the West see only one dictator, Hitler.
Tens of thousands claim membership of the Communist party.
Others from a world of privilege, like Kim Philby, are recruited as agents by the NKVD.
In Spain, the NKVD is ever present as agents who accompany Stalin's aid.
Operating behind Republican lines, they extend his reign of terror, eliminating Trotskyites, anarchists, and anyone else who opposes Stalinist policy.
And when they return to Moscow, Stalin's ruthless pattern is repeated.
The NKVD men and most of the senior military advisors are executed in their turn.
The well-known Soviet journalist, Mikhail Koltsov, is one of the early victims.
The whole country has been following his reports from Spain, but he is suddenly called back to Moscow.
His brother, the cartoonist Boris Yefimov, describes Koltsov meeting with Stalin.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: In May of 1937, it was already 1937, he was summoned by Stalin.
Besides Stalin, there were four others Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, and Yezhov.
Stalin began to ask questions about the situation in Spain.
"How are things there?" "What is so-and-so doing?" But then, as my brother told me, Stalin began to behave strangely, in an affective manner.
He stood beside my brother, put his hand on his heart, and said, "How do they address you in Spanish, Mig-u-el or something?" Koltsov, my brother, answered, "Miguel, Comrade Stalin.
" So Stalin went on, "Don Miguel, we honorable Spaniards thank you for your excellent report.
" Koltsov said, "I serve the Soviet Union, Comrade Stalin.
" And that was that.
But when he was already by the door, Stalin suddenly called after him, "And do you own a revolver, Comrade Koltsov?" My brother was surprised and answered, "Yes, I do, Comrade Stalin.
" "And you are not planning to shoot yourself with it?" "No, Comrade Stalin.
I never even thought of it.
" "Well, that's excellent, Don Miguel.
All the best then, Comrade Koltsov.
" So Koltsov went.
That's the story.
It can be explained in different ways.
And I've got my own explanation.
My brother and I talked about it and thought about it, but we didn't take it seriously, thinking it was some sort of black joke or an eccentricity.
Mikhail Koltsov was arrested by the NKVD and sentenced to 10 years imprisonment.
When the cartoonist went to ask what his brother's 10-year-sentence really meant, the judge swore it meant exactly what it said, 10 years imprisonment.
So I asked, "Did you judge him personally?" He said, "Yes, I did.
" And then I asked, "How did he look?" He said, "Well, just as usual.
Perhaps a bit drawn.
" It was all pure mockery because my brother had already been shot by then.
At the League of Nations, Stalin tests the other course.
Maxim Litvinov, Soviet Foreign Minister, and Maisky, Russian ambassador in London, labor to bring the Soviet Union closer to Britain and France.
"Peace," Maisky warns the West, "is indivisible.
" But mistrust between Stalin and the West is great.
Now Germany, with a series of stunning military and diplomatic successes, changes the face of Europe.
In March, 1938, German troops enter Austria.
For Hitler, the Austrian, another stunning triumph.
He has returned as ruler to the country of his birth.
The country whose police files for the moment still record him as wanted for evading the draft.
It is Czechoslovakia's turn next.
Here, Hitler claims ethnic Germans in the Sudetenland area are being savagely persecuted.
With threats against Prague, he precipitates an international crisis.
[Speaking German.]
Before the year's end, France and Britain, with Italy mediating, have forced Czechoslovakia to concede the German-speaking part of its territory to the Reich.
To Chamberlain, it is a triumph.
"Peace for our time.
" To the Soviet Union, it is a measure of how far the Western Allies will go to placate Hitler.
Winston Churchill says, "The governments of France and Britain had to choose between shame and war.
" They have chosen shame, but they will reap war.
" Hitler returns in triumph to Berlin, after signing the Munich Agreement.
For Czechoslovakia, abandoned by her allies, the end comes quickly.
Before the fateful year of 1939 is three months old, Hitler, burning with reckless confidence, marches his army into the remainder of the country.
Czechoslovakia is declared no longer to exist.
As a minor postscript, no more than symbolic of Germany's new power, Lithuania immediately accedes to Hitler's demand for the return of the Baltic seaport of Memel.
In six years, he has dramatically redrawn the map of Central Europe.
The Versailles Treaty is now in tatters.
It is almost time for Hitler to look towards his second major object, the acquisition of Lebensraum, extra living space for Germany in the East.
But expansion eastwards must involve war with Poland.
And if the German border with Poland is to be reshaped, why should the Soviet border not be similarly altered? Both dictators therefore have an unacknowledged common interest in the destruction of Poland, though, in public, they flaunt their differences.
And the propaganda machines of the two adversaries, Hitler and Stalin, relentlessly denounce each other.
March, 1939.
In Moscow, delegates to the 18th Party Congress assemble.
Stalin hails a great achievement.
60% of the delegates to the last conference have been murdered.
Behind the high-profile deaths in Moscow, there is another deeper disaster.
In the last year, 1937-38, there have been between seven and eight million arrests, and at least one million executions.
At Kurapaty near Minsk, one secret NKVD burial site contains 30,000 bodies.
For the NKVD killing squads and the so-called "Boxers," thugs who specialize in torture and interrogation, communism is now no more than a cynical indulgence in sadism.
Now, on the fifth day, delegates to the Congress hear the stunning news of the German annexation of the rest of Czechoslovakia.
Abandoned by her Western allies, the Czech government has ordered its people not to resist.
The people of Europe are now haunted by the threat of war.
At the public rostrum, Hitler denies any aggressive intention.
The German armed forces will not attack, and above all, not invade, the territory or possessions of the following independent nations: Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, Belgium, Great Britain and Ireland, France, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, Russia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Iraq, Arabia, Syria, Palestine But it is not difficult to guess that Poland is Hitler's next objective.
Stalin's choice is stark.
If the spoils of the break-up of Versailles ought to be seized, logic demands that Stalin must share them with his avowed enemy.
The USSR will not obtain a piece of Poland by fighting alongside the West to defend Poland's borders.
It is a stunningly immoral idea.
But there is no doubt that it is in Joseph Stalin's mind.
As a first move, he allows Litvinov to make one final attempt to reassemble the idea of collective security in the certain knowledge that Poland, proud, stubborn, will refuse any joint declaration which allows Soviet troops to come on to their territory to give them aid.
While pressure mounts in the West, there is at least good news from the East where the Japanese have been prodding at the border of the Soviet Union.
INTERPRETER: After we had been camped for four days, we saw that the Japanese samurai were moving up on the border.
Lieutenant Makhalin ordered us to get ready.
The Japanese samurai crossed the border and opened fire with automatic weapons.
Lieutenant Makhalin led us into attack for Comrade Stalin and the Motherland.
NARRATOR: It is the first appearance on the international stage for the young, forthright, General Georgy Zhukov when he heavily defeats the Japanese Sixth Army at Khalkhin Gol and effectively secures the back door of the Soviet Union.
But in Europe, there is no breathing space in the lead-up to war.
German rearmament is displayed in parades and flypasts that culminate in Hitler's 50th birthday celebration in April of 1939.
As Stalin ponders which way to turn, France puts her faith in the Maginot Line, the gigantically costly string of concrete and steel forts facing Germany.
Great Britain and her fleet.
But Stalin is now ready to move forward with a realignment that will astound the world.
Pressure of events keeps the gestation period short.
At the 1939 May Day parade, sharp-eyed German diplomats record the fact that the Jewish and pro-Western foreign minister Maxim Litvinov is not on the podium.
When the following day Hitler is informed that Stalin has replaced Litvinov by Molotov as Foreign Minister, it is, he tells his generals, "Like a volley from a gun.
" The two dictators speak the same language.
In public, each system continues to condemn the other.
In private, the diplomats are beginning to hammer out a deal, a turnabout that will shock the world.
It is certain that at this point Stalin knows that Hitler has decided to invade Poland, equally certain that Stalin intends to share the spoils.
In July, Molotov tells the German ambassador to Moscow that the Soviet Union seeks better relations with Germany.
On August the 11th, an Anglo-French military mission arrives in Moscow to discuss cooperation.
They are three months too late.
Perhaps even three years too late.
Within days, Ribbentrop stresses speed as preliminary negotiations between Germany and the Soviet Union begin.
But Hitler is not prepared to invade Poland without a guarantee of support from the Soviet Union.
On August the 20th, the Führer shows his hand by intervening personally, cabling to Stalin the suggestion that Ribbentrop should come to Moscow in two days time.
Stalin agrees.
On August the 23rd at Moscow Airport, they await the momentous arrival of the German foreign minister.
But there is a long, worrying delay.
Only when Molotov, baffled, sends for information do they discover the reason.
The plane carrying the Germans to their momentous rendezvous has been forced down, fired on by Soviet border defenses.
Amid feasting and toasts, the Non-Aggression Pact is drawn up and signed immediately.
Stalin raises his glass to Germany's finest son, Adolf Hitler.
The two dictators have publicly clasped hands.
It is an extraordinary coup de théâtre.
A betrayal of millions.
But of course the world is not told all.
The Non-Aggression Pact has secret, deeply sinister protocols, clauses to divide Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union, to assign the Baltic states to Soviet rule.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: What do all the protocols contain? I'll run through them briefly.
The additional secret protocol on spheres of interest of Germany and the USSR, the interpretation of the supplementary protocol, the protocol on the possible resettlement of population, the secret protocol concerning possible changes, essentially how to divide the Baltic states, concerning suppression of descent on territory of divided Poland, the protocol on Germany's waiver of claims to Lithuanian territory.
We agreed to give 75 million dollars to Germany marks or dollars for that piece of Lithuania.
NARRATOR: A map, made on the next Ribbentrop visit, signed by Stalin himself, shows the division of spoils.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: These are obviously historic documents.
They have been kept in complete concealment since 1939 because they represent a final verdict on Soviet diplomacy which negotiated with the Western democracies for several months in 1939 and achieved nothing and then sealed a friendship agreement with the fascists in the space of two days.
Of course both the fascists and the Western democracies were using cunning.
It was a big game, diplomatic bargaining.
But the Soviet Union, Soviet diplomacy, Stalin and Molotov, they showed historic immorality, immorality to the utmost degree.
Stalin and Hitler, locked in hatred and envy, but at the same time, in a strange parallel admiration, have stunned the world.
This is not a pact to avoid war.
It is a treaty to make war.
In London, Paris, and Washington, there is consternation.
London at long last makes it clear that it has abandoned appeasement forever.
Within two days, Britain signs a treaty with Poland, binding Britain to go to war if she is attacked.
In the Soviet Union, there is an immediate cessation of anti-Hitler propaganda.
The word "fascist" is even banned in Stalin's labor camps as a term of abuse.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: Such acute changes of policy when the word "fascist" suddenly disappeared.
It was extraordinary.
And the next time we heard the word fascist was in Molotov's speech on the 23rd of June, the day after the invasion.
And it sounded strange when he said, "Those fascist rulers," and so on.
It was only then that we realized that fascism did exist after all.
NARRATOR: Soviet citizens are bemused but relieved that war with Germany has been avoided.
As yet, they know nothing of the secret protocol.
But the events of the next few days will allow the more astute to guess.
The ground has been prepared by Nazi propaganda as it was prepared in Czechoslovakia.
On the last day of August, Goebbels claims Poland has attacked German border forces.
The bodies are executed prisoners dressed in Polish uniform.
On a device of such transparent banality does the Second World War begin.
Hitler goes to the front at the town of Kulm to oversee his victory.
On the morning and early afternoon of September 3rd, Chamberlain in London honors his guarantee to Poland and declares war on Germany.
An announcement from Paris follows within hours.
Poland suffers the first blitzkrieg.
The Polish forces fight back with great courage against hopeless odds.
The Luftwaffe bombs Warsaw at will.
Soviet forces now move into eastern Poland.
There can be no resistance.
From Minsk, Stalin allows the Luftwaffe to fly missions against the Polish forces.
German and Soviet generals coordinate the action.
Within six weeks, it is all over.
Soviet and German troops march past before General Guderian and Soviet Colonel Krivoshein at the fortress of Brest.
In Poland, where ethnic Belarusians and Ukrainians have welcomed the Red Army with flowers, the hideous pattern of arrest and deportation begins.
Known anti-communists, priests, army officers it is now certain that this is the period of the great NKVD massacre of Polish officers at Katyn Forest near Smolensk.
Denied for so long by Soviet governments, there is no longer any doubt that the massacre was by NKVD troops.
Kazinsky Beck has lived near the site of the massacre since he was born in 1918.
INTERPRETER: This zone was closed, and no one was allowed to enter it.
It was only opened up three years ago.
At that time, we brought Poles here, and they were unloaded from the carriages and taken to Kozy Gory in the forest.
The guards took them down there.
The wagons were called ravens, "black ravens.
" The wagons were taken straight to the carriages, carriages with bars on the windows.
And from there, they were taken away, religious people, military people, even civilians with suitcases and bags, even dogs.
MAN: How long did it last? INTERPRETER: About a month.
A month, I reckon.
And they didn't bring them every day.
No, not every day.
MAN: Where from? INTERPRETER: I don't know.
MAN: Where there any rumors as to what happened to them? INTERPRETER: There were rumors that they were shot there, but nobody knows.
NARRATOR: Only now is the order to shoot the officers revealed.
Signed by Stalin, Molotov, Mikoyan, Voroshilov, and Beria, the exact number of deaths has never been established.
Some 4,000 corpses are eventually found in the forest out of a total of between 10,000 and 20,000 Polish officers who disappeared without trace from Soviet camps in the area.
Neither Hitler nor Stalin see good reason for Poland to exist.
While Hitler flies to Warsaw to review his troops, Stalin offers his congratulations and seizes what he takes to be an easy opportunity.
In November, he invades Finland to be met with an initial defeat at the hands of the small Finnish army.
The impact of Stalin's purges are now glaringly apparent for the world to see.
Stalin's onslaught on the army has rendered it barely able to fight even a local war.
To Hitler, the poor performance by the Red Army in Finland is further evidence of the inferiority of Slav to Aryan and of the vulnerability of the Soviet Union.
Meanwhile in public, the pivotal relationship blossoms.
As the year 1939 ends, Hitler cables Stalin, "I would like to extend my true, sincere greetings on your 60th anniversary.
" INTERPRETER: I propose we raise our glasses to Comrade Stalin who leads us along the bright road to communism.
Stalin replies without irony, "The friendship between us, sealed in blood, has every reason to be long-lasting.
" Soviet and Nazi hands are tightly clasped.
Russian raw materials flow westward.
At the border where the rail gauge changes, grain and oil are transferred to German wagons.
As a final act of abject appeasement, Stalin returns to the Gestapo German communists who have fled to Moscow.
On the vital Western front, the phony war continues.
Allied forces remain on the defensive, the French behind their unreachable Maginot Line.
Parcels from home relieved the boredom.
Hitler is content to fight on one front at a time.
In May, 1940, the Germans launch a spectacular Western offensive, invading the Low Countries and splitting the French and British armies with rapacious Panzer thrusts.
Goebbels proclaims, "Moscow gives us every support.
" As each of the small capitals of northwest Europe fall, Stalin closes down the Soviet embassies, a tacit recognition that might is right.
In London, Chamberlain is called on to resign.
Winston Churchill becomes Prime Minister and struggles to rally France and Britain against the specter of a devastating defeat.
But the German army is unstoppable.
Millions of civilians flee northern France.
The French government leave Paris amid scenes of chaos on the roads.
At Dunkirk, the British Navy evacuates 330,000 British and French soldiers under fire.
The prominent choreographer Moiseev recalls a concert in Moscow at this time when Stalin approached him and asked: INTERPRETER: Stalin said to me, "Can you put on a show depicting the defeat of Britain and France?" There was a deathly silence.
And everyone understood that the conversation had taken a new turn.
Stalin grinned and said nothing for a moment.
Then he said, "Okay, you just sit there," and went off.
And that was that.
But this episode surprised everybody.
And I immediately thought, "What is he talking about? If Britain and France are defeated, we will be left completely alone with Hitler.
" Paris falls.
And the French sign a punitive armistice.
At Hitler's insistence, the same rail carriage is brought to Compiègne where the French had taken Germany's surrender in the First World War.
It is a result Hitler has dreamed of since he was in the trenches.
Berlin celebrates the fall of France, where vast new industrial and agricultural riches have fallen under German control.
But there are spoils for Stalin, too.
In the north, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia are annexed, again, in accordance with the secret agreements made with Hitler.
In all, Stalin has gained 175,000 square miles of territory, and 20 million new inhabitants for the Soviet Union.
As the NKVD move in, thousands of his new subjects are shot.
Tens of thousands more are immediately arrested and transported to swell the work force in the Gulag.
But in the midst of foreign-policy triumph, Stalin can always spare time for old enmities.
Denied asylum in many countries of the West, Leon Trotsky, Stalin's old rival, is now safe, as he believes, in Mexico, far from the grasp of the NKVD.
He is nevertheless tracked down and murdered by a hired killer, Ramón Mercader.
An ice pick hit the victim's brain.
Yet, for the Soviet-German special relationship, there are already clouds on the horizon.
Molotov goes to Germany to discuss spheres of influence between Germany, the Soviet Union, Italy, and Japan.
In fact, as we now know, the Japanese foreign minister, Matsuoka, has already been told that Germany will expect Japan's involvement in any war against the Soviet Union, and that Hitler has already signed Instruction 18, ordering preparations for the attack on the Soviet Union to continue.
But the Japanese are not to be tempted.
Tokyo decides it would prefer to keep its own back door to the Soviet Union firmly locked.
Matsuoka therefore flies to Moscow to sign a treaty of neutrality.
There are more toasts and formal poses.
And Stalin accords Matsuoka the signal honor of a personal send off.
But Stalin now is a rabbit caught in headlights.
On the day that Stalin signs a pact of friendship with Yugoslavia, Hitler attacks in the Balkans.
Is this to be the last blitzkrieg, or will the Soviet Union be next? What is certain is that if Hitler follows Yugoslavia with an attack on the Soviet Union, Stalin's gamble to grab the spoils of a disintegrating Versailles will have failed disastrously.
It will have left the Soviet Union isolated without an ally in the world.
Stalin has made too many bitter enemies in the party and the army.
His own position as leader, his life is in the balance.
He cannot even admit the possibility that he has miscalculated, that Hitler is about to attack.
But details of German intentions are coming from all quarters.
Churchill, with the German high command code available to him, informs Stalin by secret cable.
Outstanding Soviet agents in Britain, the United States, and even in Germany itself confirm that there will be an attack.
The Soviet intelligence network in Switzerland gives June the 22nd as the attack date.
Richard Sorge, working from the German embassy in Tokyo, confirms it.
INTERPRETER: The Germans started to move troops and station them in Finland at strategic points close to the border with the Soviet Union.
NARRATOR: And even as German tanks assemble along the Soviet border, Stalin's monstrous echo, NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria, orders that secret agents who confirm news of the German attack are to be turned into prison dust for supplying systematic misinformation.
INTERPRETER: On the 16th of June, 1941, this agent came to a meeting.
He was very agitated and immediately informed me that Hitler's Germany would attack the Soviet Union in the next few days.
And he even told me the date.
NARRATOR: From Luftwaffe officer Schulze-Boysen at the heart of Goering's high command, a warning of an imminent attack is forwarded to the Kremlin.
But Stalin rejects the information in the crudest terms.
"This mother-loving swine is passing on disinformation.
J.
Stalin.
" This is now willful blindness, the blindness of desperation.
As the fateful hour approaches, Stalin rejects requests from Zhukov and Timoshenko to move the troops on the border to defensive positions.
Throughout the Soviet Union, young people celebrate at graduation parties.
At 11:00 p.
m.
On the night of June the 21st, a German deserter, Alfred Liskov, crosses to the Soviet side with the warning that the attack is coming in five hours time.
Like all other warnings, it is ignored.
The graduation parties continue deep into the night.
Drinking, dancing, talking flirting.
Despite all the evidence, the leader of the Soviet people dares not allow himself to believe that he has disastrously miscalculated.
On this night of all nights, Joseph Stalin, who has chosen to ignore all warnings, retires to bed at 3:00 a.
m.
, his usual time.
NARRATOR: In the world beyond the Soviet Union, these are years when Europe marches to the beat of Adolf Hitler's drum.
Already in 1936, just three years after he comes to power, Hitler has sent his as yet unprepared army to occupy the Rhineland, demilitarized by the Versailles Treaty, which concluded the Great War.
It is his first, most dangerous step, a moment when, for Adolf Hitler, everything teeters on the edge.
Even his position as Führer itself depends on the reaction of the Western Allies.
We know now that he has ordered an immediate German retreat if French forces oppose them.
He has taken a desperate risk to throw down an early challenge to Versailles, the treaty he came to power promising to break.
But in this vital test of nerve, Britain and France fail to act.
It is the first of many failures of wisdom learned.
Failures bound to give the leadership of the Soviet Union serious cause to reflect.
Worse is the news of a pact signed by Germany and Japan and later joined by Italy, a treaty which targets the Soviet Union.
To Stalin, there could be no stronger sign of the reckless speed with which Hitler intends to move.
In the Kremlin, the message is clear.
The Versailles Treaty, that whole rearrangement of frontiers imposed on Europe by the victorious Western Allies, has now no more than a few years to live.
There are too many disputed territories in Europe, too many claims and counterclaims.
[Applause.]
At home, Stalin's leadership is unchallengeable.
He relishes the title of "Great Leader.
" But the great leader is tainted with a fatal sickness.
His malady is not physical.
It resides in an unrivaled greed for power and festers with a paranoid distrust of every other human being.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: And as you know, he died alone in his own self-made prison.
He lived in a corridor in which there were three doors which led to three separate apartments, each with their own bedrooms.
And every morning, he would telephone for breakfast, lunch, or dinner.
And every day they would bring him three separate breakfasts, lunches, and dinners and place one by each door and then immediately leave, so that no one would know from which door he would take his breakfast.
And that is how he lived hateful and hated.
NARRATOR: The deathbed mourning of Lenin and Trotsky's denunciation of Stalin as "the gravedigger of the Revolution" have been chillingly justified in these years of arrest, murder, and enslavement of the Soviet people.
Stalin has one single solution for all opposition to his will, and he sees foreigners, Westerners in particular, as people with the power to infect Soviet citizens with a nameless plague.
For Stalin, this is reality.
A squadron of the United States Navy visits the Far East Russian port of Vladivostok.
Gregory Okunyev was Chief Political Officer of the Pacific Fleet.
His nephew, llya, was a small boy at the time.
[Speaking in Russian.]
INTERPRETER: My uncle's fate was tragic.
I, myself, was an involuntary witness of that unusual event in Vladivostok.
A squadron of American warships, consisting of one battle cruiser, Augusta, and four destroyers, was paying a visit of friendship.
The squadron was under the command of Admiral Yarnell.
The visit lasted four days.
American sailors roamed freely in the city, talking to the people, exchanging souvenirs, taking photographs.
The Americans allowed the locals free access to the cruiser, showing it to anyone who wanted to see.
I was there with my uncle.
And Admiral Yarnell met him personally.
The Admiral took me around and showed me the gun turrets and plane decks.
It was a mighty vessel.
When it came into the bay, our ships that were anchored there were bobbing up and down like floats.
NARRATOR: This is an official visit, sanctioned by the authorities, the sort of visit paid by navies all over the world.
We shall never know who brought it to Stalin's notice.
INTERPRETER: When the American squadron left Vladivostok, mass arrests of personnel in our Pacific Fleet began.
Sailors were accused of being recruited by American intelligence and becoming American spies.
Furthermore, when I managed with great difficulty to get hold of the 150-page file on Okunyev from the KGB, I saw that all the evidence was false because it had obviously been dictated to the prisoners by their interrogators.
I also obtained his death certificate.
It said that the cause of death was by shooting.
NARRATOR: Stalin's reckless savagery now leaves no area of Soviet life untouched.
Literature and even science must conform.
Nikolai lvanovich Vavilov is a world-renowned geneticist, but Stalin prefers the theories of Lysenko, a Marxist charlatan.
[Speaking in Russian.]
INTERPRETER: Stalin had made an appointment for 10:00 in the evening.
Father was there at the right time.
But he was made to wait two hours until midnight.
Stalin did not receive him for two hours.
At last, after midnight or even later, he was called.
He went in and greeted Stalin.
And Stalin started to ask him, "So, you are still busy with the flowers and berries and all that botany nonsense which is no use to anybody?" This prompted my father to deliver a lecture on the subject.
Stalin listened in silence and then said, "You may leave, Citizen Vavilov.
" And that was the end of the meeting.
It had a most sinister meaning.
We now know that they were already planning to arrest my father in 1939.
The trials of marshals Tukhachevsky and Yakir are followed with new arrests of high-ranking military figures.
Rokossovsky, later to be one of the war's outstanding generals, is thrown into Kresty prison and tortured as a Polish spy.
Marshals Blyukher and Yegorov are dragged from the Lubyanka, Blyukher with one eye torn out during torture, and put to death.
Marshal Yegorov's daughter remembers the day of his arrest.
[Speaking in Russian.]
INTERPRETER: They dragged him into the room, two or three of them.
Naturally, I rushed to him, started to tear at them and pull them away, shouting, "Don't touch my father!" I was thrown on the bed, and Father said, "Don't touch the child, you bastards!" They tied his hands.
He was a strong, well-built man, but they tied him up and took him away.
After that, I don't remember.
There's a gap in my memory.
I don't remember that period.
My next memory is a children's home.
He was shot on the 23rd of February, Red Army Day.
The army, which he actually created, along with Yakir, Blyukher, Tukhachevsky.
Those marshals created the army, didn't they? It's just something you cannot grasp.
NARRATOR: It is an unending litany of arrest, torture, confession, and execution.
In early 1938, Molotov proposes a list of new ministers to the Supreme Soviet.
[Speaking Russian.]
Within two years of their appointments, they are all under arrest, executed, or have disappeared.
Now Stalin turns back to the people he contemptuously calls "the little cogs," the broad masses of the Soviet peasantry.
In the countryside, age-old harvest celebrations are hijacked by the party and recorded in propaganda film to persuade peasants everywhere that life is good.
But peasants know the truth because they live it.
The new serfdom refuses them permission to move and demands peasants pay almost twice as much for basic necessities as the people in the towns.
And men like the young Khrushchev in Ukraine are bringing to the provinces an epidemic of terror no longer under control.
"I have sent you 18,000 enemies of the people," Khrushchev boasts in one cable to Stalin.
He signs it, "Loving you, Nikita Khrushchev.
" Among many, peasants and town-dwellers alike, feelings of explosive frustration build against the regime.
They know that they are impotent to act.
In some, it is a deadly rage against Stalin personally.
Vladimira Uborevich, whose father was shot during the first army purge INTERPRETER: It was my dream to kill Stalin.
I was a young girl of 18, a student at the Institute, and I used to walk along the street, dreaming of how I would kill Stalin.
I hated him with such bitterness.
The children of the people he had killed were growing up.
They were getting close to 20 years old.
They were dangerous.
NARRATOR: When Stalin lifts his head from the arrest warrants and execution orders that cover his desk, he finds abroad he faces more intractable problems.
In Spain, civil war rages between nationalist forces under Franco and the Republican government.
Communism and fascism.
The two totalitarian ideologies are in open confrontation.
Both dictatorships see the diversionary value of a Spanish war Hitler, to allow Germany to continue with its rearmament, Stalin, because, with a spotlight on Spain, his purges pass with less foreign notice.
Both dictators act swiftly.
Hitler sends 8,000 men of the Air-Land Condor Legion to supports Italy's massive aid to Franco.
Stalin will dispatch fighter pilots.
Nearly a thousand aircraft, tanks, and tank crews to fight on the Republican side.
The war becomes a weapons-testing ground for the two nations.
In the area over Madrid, Soviet and German pilots clash for the first time.
The military victory will go to Franco's side, but the Soviet propaganda victory is considerable.
Self-confident and myopic intellectuals in the West see only one dictator, Hitler.
Tens of thousands claim membership of the Communist party.
Others from a world of privilege, like Kim Philby, are recruited as agents by the NKVD.
In Spain, the NKVD is ever present as agents who accompany Stalin's aid.
Operating behind Republican lines, they extend his reign of terror, eliminating Trotskyites, anarchists, and anyone else who opposes Stalinist policy.
And when they return to Moscow, Stalin's ruthless pattern is repeated.
The NKVD men and most of the senior military advisors are executed in their turn.
The well-known Soviet journalist, Mikhail Koltsov, is one of the early victims.
The whole country has been following his reports from Spain, but he is suddenly called back to Moscow.
His brother, the cartoonist Boris Yefimov, describes Koltsov meeting with Stalin.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: In May of 1937, it was already 1937, he was summoned by Stalin.
Besides Stalin, there were four others Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, and Yezhov.
Stalin began to ask questions about the situation in Spain.
"How are things there?" "What is so-and-so doing?" But then, as my brother told me, Stalin began to behave strangely, in an affective manner.
He stood beside my brother, put his hand on his heart, and said, "How do they address you in Spanish, Mig-u-el or something?" Koltsov, my brother, answered, "Miguel, Comrade Stalin.
" So Stalin went on, "Don Miguel, we honorable Spaniards thank you for your excellent report.
" Koltsov said, "I serve the Soviet Union, Comrade Stalin.
" And that was that.
But when he was already by the door, Stalin suddenly called after him, "And do you own a revolver, Comrade Koltsov?" My brother was surprised and answered, "Yes, I do, Comrade Stalin.
" "And you are not planning to shoot yourself with it?" "No, Comrade Stalin.
I never even thought of it.
" "Well, that's excellent, Don Miguel.
All the best then, Comrade Koltsov.
" So Koltsov went.
That's the story.
It can be explained in different ways.
And I've got my own explanation.
My brother and I talked about it and thought about it, but we didn't take it seriously, thinking it was some sort of black joke or an eccentricity.
Mikhail Koltsov was arrested by the NKVD and sentenced to 10 years imprisonment.
When the cartoonist went to ask what his brother's 10-year-sentence really meant, the judge swore it meant exactly what it said, 10 years imprisonment.
So I asked, "Did you judge him personally?" He said, "Yes, I did.
" And then I asked, "How did he look?" He said, "Well, just as usual.
Perhaps a bit drawn.
" It was all pure mockery because my brother had already been shot by then.
At the League of Nations, Stalin tests the other course.
Maxim Litvinov, Soviet Foreign Minister, and Maisky, Russian ambassador in London, labor to bring the Soviet Union closer to Britain and France.
"Peace," Maisky warns the West, "is indivisible.
" But mistrust between Stalin and the West is great.
Now Germany, with a series of stunning military and diplomatic successes, changes the face of Europe.
In March, 1938, German troops enter Austria.
For Hitler, the Austrian, another stunning triumph.
He has returned as ruler to the country of his birth.
The country whose police files for the moment still record him as wanted for evading the draft.
It is Czechoslovakia's turn next.
Here, Hitler claims ethnic Germans in the Sudetenland area are being savagely persecuted.
With threats against Prague, he precipitates an international crisis.
[Speaking German.]
Before the year's end, France and Britain, with Italy mediating, have forced Czechoslovakia to concede the German-speaking part of its territory to the Reich.
To Chamberlain, it is a triumph.
"Peace for our time.
" To the Soviet Union, it is a measure of how far the Western Allies will go to placate Hitler.
Winston Churchill says, "The governments of France and Britain had to choose between shame and war.
" They have chosen shame, but they will reap war.
" Hitler returns in triumph to Berlin, after signing the Munich Agreement.
For Czechoslovakia, abandoned by her allies, the end comes quickly.
Before the fateful year of 1939 is three months old, Hitler, burning with reckless confidence, marches his army into the remainder of the country.
Czechoslovakia is declared no longer to exist.
As a minor postscript, no more than symbolic of Germany's new power, Lithuania immediately accedes to Hitler's demand for the return of the Baltic seaport of Memel.
In six years, he has dramatically redrawn the map of Central Europe.
The Versailles Treaty is now in tatters.
It is almost time for Hitler to look towards his second major object, the acquisition of Lebensraum, extra living space for Germany in the East.
But expansion eastwards must involve war with Poland.
And if the German border with Poland is to be reshaped, why should the Soviet border not be similarly altered? Both dictators therefore have an unacknowledged common interest in the destruction of Poland, though, in public, they flaunt their differences.
And the propaganda machines of the two adversaries, Hitler and Stalin, relentlessly denounce each other.
March, 1939.
In Moscow, delegates to the 18th Party Congress assemble.
Stalin hails a great achievement.
60% of the delegates to the last conference have been murdered.
Behind the high-profile deaths in Moscow, there is another deeper disaster.
In the last year, 1937-38, there have been between seven and eight million arrests, and at least one million executions.
At Kurapaty near Minsk, one secret NKVD burial site contains 30,000 bodies.
For the NKVD killing squads and the so-called "Boxers," thugs who specialize in torture and interrogation, communism is now no more than a cynical indulgence in sadism.
Now, on the fifth day, delegates to the Congress hear the stunning news of the German annexation of the rest of Czechoslovakia.
Abandoned by her Western allies, the Czech government has ordered its people not to resist.
The people of Europe are now haunted by the threat of war.
At the public rostrum, Hitler denies any aggressive intention.
The German armed forces will not attack, and above all, not invade, the territory or possessions of the following independent nations: Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, Belgium, Great Britain and Ireland, France, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, Russia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Iraq, Arabia, Syria, Palestine But it is not difficult to guess that Poland is Hitler's next objective.
Stalin's choice is stark.
If the spoils of the break-up of Versailles ought to be seized, logic demands that Stalin must share them with his avowed enemy.
The USSR will not obtain a piece of Poland by fighting alongside the West to defend Poland's borders.
It is a stunningly immoral idea.
But there is no doubt that it is in Joseph Stalin's mind.
As a first move, he allows Litvinov to make one final attempt to reassemble the idea of collective security in the certain knowledge that Poland, proud, stubborn, will refuse any joint declaration which allows Soviet troops to come on to their territory to give them aid.
While pressure mounts in the West, there is at least good news from the East where the Japanese have been prodding at the border of the Soviet Union.
INTERPRETER: After we had been camped for four days, we saw that the Japanese samurai were moving up on the border.
Lieutenant Makhalin ordered us to get ready.
The Japanese samurai crossed the border and opened fire with automatic weapons.
Lieutenant Makhalin led us into attack for Comrade Stalin and the Motherland.
NARRATOR: It is the first appearance on the international stage for the young, forthright, General Georgy Zhukov when he heavily defeats the Japanese Sixth Army at Khalkhin Gol and effectively secures the back door of the Soviet Union.
But in Europe, there is no breathing space in the lead-up to war.
German rearmament is displayed in parades and flypasts that culminate in Hitler's 50th birthday celebration in April of 1939.
As Stalin ponders which way to turn, France puts her faith in the Maginot Line, the gigantically costly string of concrete and steel forts facing Germany.
Great Britain and her fleet.
But Stalin is now ready to move forward with a realignment that will astound the world.
Pressure of events keeps the gestation period short.
At the 1939 May Day parade, sharp-eyed German diplomats record the fact that the Jewish and pro-Western foreign minister Maxim Litvinov is not on the podium.
When the following day Hitler is informed that Stalin has replaced Litvinov by Molotov as Foreign Minister, it is, he tells his generals, "Like a volley from a gun.
" The two dictators speak the same language.
In public, each system continues to condemn the other.
In private, the diplomats are beginning to hammer out a deal, a turnabout that will shock the world.
It is certain that at this point Stalin knows that Hitler has decided to invade Poland, equally certain that Stalin intends to share the spoils.
In July, Molotov tells the German ambassador to Moscow that the Soviet Union seeks better relations with Germany.
On August the 11th, an Anglo-French military mission arrives in Moscow to discuss cooperation.
They are three months too late.
Perhaps even three years too late.
Within days, Ribbentrop stresses speed as preliminary negotiations between Germany and the Soviet Union begin.
But Hitler is not prepared to invade Poland without a guarantee of support from the Soviet Union.
On August the 20th, the Führer shows his hand by intervening personally, cabling to Stalin the suggestion that Ribbentrop should come to Moscow in two days time.
Stalin agrees.
On August the 23rd at Moscow Airport, they await the momentous arrival of the German foreign minister.
But there is a long, worrying delay.
Only when Molotov, baffled, sends for information do they discover the reason.
The plane carrying the Germans to their momentous rendezvous has been forced down, fired on by Soviet border defenses.
Amid feasting and toasts, the Non-Aggression Pact is drawn up and signed immediately.
Stalin raises his glass to Germany's finest son, Adolf Hitler.
The two dictators have publicly clasped hands.
It is an extraordinary coup de théâtre.
A betrayal of millions.
But of course the world is not told all.
The Non-Aggression Pact has secret, deeply sinister protocols, clauses to divide Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union, to assign the Baltic states to Soviet rule.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: What do all the protocols contain? I'll run through them briefly.
The additional secret protocol on spheres of interest of Germany and the USSR, the interpretation of the supplementary protocol, the protocol on the possible resettlement of population, the secret protocol concerning possible changes, essentially how to divide the Baltic states, concerning suppression of descent on territory of divided Poland, the protocol on Germany's waiver of claims to Lithuanian territory.
We agreed to give 75 million dollars to Germany marks or dollars for that piece of Lithuania.
NARRATOR: A map, made on the next Ribbentrop visit, signed by Stalin himself, shows the division of spoils.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: These are obviously historic documents.
They have been kept in complete concealment since 1939 because they represent a final verdict on Soviet diplomacy which negotiated with the Western democracies for several months in 1939 and achieved nothing and then sealed a friendship agreement with the fascists in the space of two days.
Of course both the fascists and the Western democracies were using cunning.
It was a big game, diplomatic bargaining.
But the Soviet Union, Soviet diplomacy, Stalin and Molotov, they showed historic immorality, immorality to the utmost degree.
Stalin and Hitler, locked in hatred and envy, but at the same time, in a strange parallel admiration, have stunned the world.
This is not a pact to avoid war.
It is a treaty to make war.
In London, Paris, and Washington, there is consternation.
London at long last makes it clear that it has abandoned appeasement forever.
Within two days, Britain signs a treaty with Poland, binding Britain to go to war if she is attacked.
In the Soviet Union, there is an immediate cessation of anti-Hitler propaganda.
The word "fascist" is even banned in Stalin's labor camps as a term of abuse.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: Such acute changes of policy when the word "fascist" suddenly disappeared.
It was extraordinary.
And the next time we heard the word fascist was in Molotov's speech on the 23rd of June, the day after the invasion.
And it sounded strange when he said, "Those fascist rulers," and so on.
It was only then that we realized that fascism did exist after all.
NARRATOR: Soviet citizens are bemused but relieved that war with Germany has been avoided.
As yet, they know nothing of the secret protocol.
But the events of the next few days will allow the more astute to guess.
The ground has been prepared by Nazi propaganda as it was prepared in Czechoslovakia.
On the last day of August, Goebbels claims Poland has attacked German border forces.
The bodies are executed prisoners dressed in Polish uniform.
On a device of such transparent banality does the Second World War begin.
Hitler goes to the front at the town of Kulm to oversee his victory.
On the morning and early afternoon of September 3rd, Chamberlain in London honors his guarantee to Poland and declares war on Germany.
An announcement from Paris follows within hours.
Poland suffers the first blitzkrieg.
The Polish forces fight back with great courage against hopeless odds.
The Luftwaffe bombs Warsaw at will.
Soviet forces now move into eastern Poland.
There can be no resistance.
From Minsk, Stalin allows the Luftwaffe to fly missions against the Polish forces.
German and Soviet generals coordinate the action.
Within six weeks, it is all over.
Soviet and German troops march past before General Guderian and Soviet Colonel Krivoshein at the fortress of Brest.
In Poland, where ethnic Belarusians and Ukrainians have welcomed the Red Army with flowers, the hideous pattern of arrest and deportation begins.
Known anti-communists, priests, army officers it is now certain that this is the period of the great NKVD massacre of Polish officers at Katyn Forest near Smolensk.
Denied for so long by Soviet governments, there is no longer any doubt that the massacre was by NKVD troops.
Kazinsky Beck has lived near the site of the massacre since he was born in 1918.
INTERPRETER: This zone was closed, and no one was allowed to enter it.
It was only opened up three years ago.
At that time, we brought Poles here, and they were unloaded from the carriages and taken to Kozy Gory in the forest.
The guards took them down there.
The wagons were called ravens, "black ravens.
" The wagons were taken straight to the carriages, carriages with bars on the windows.
And from there, they were taken away, religious people, military people, even civilians with suitcases and bags, even dogs.
MAN: How long did it last? INTERPRETER: About a month.
A month, I reckon.
And they didn't bring them every day.
No, not every day.
MAN: Where from? INTERPRETER: I don't know.
MAN: Where there any rumors as to what happened to them? INTERPRETER: There were rumors that they were shot there, but nobody knows.
NARRATOR: Only now is the order to shoot the officers revealed.
Signed by Stalin, Molotov, Mikoyan, Voroshilov, and Beria, the exact number of deaths has never been established.
Some 4,000 corpses are eventually found in the forest out of a total of between 10,000 and 20,000 Polish officers who disappeared without trace from Soviet camps in the area.
Neither Hitler nor Stalin see good reason for Poland to exist.
While Hitler flies to Warsaw to review his troops, Stalin offers his congratulations and seizes what he takes to be an easy opportunity.
In November, he invades Finland to be met with an initial defeat at the hands of the small Finnish army.
The impact of Stalin's purges are now glaringly apparent for the world to see.
Stalin's onslaught on the army has rendered it barely able to fight even a local war.
To Hitler, the poor performance by the Red Army in Finland is further evidence of the inferiority of Slav to Aryan and of the vulnerability of the Soviet Union.
Meanwhile in public, the pivotal relationship blossoms.
As the year 1939 ends, Hitler cables Stalin, "I would like to extend my true, sincere greetings on your 60th anniversary.
" INTERPRETER: I propose we raise our glasses to Comrade Stalin who leads us along the bright road to communism.
Stalin replies without irony, "The friendship between us, sealed in blood, has every reason to be long-lasting.
" Soviet and Nazi hands are tightly clasped.
Russian raw materials flow westward.
At the border where the rail gauge changes, grain and oil are transferred to German wagons.
As a final act of abject appeasement, Stalin returns to the Gestapo German communists who have fled to Moscow.
On the vital Western front, the phony war continues.
Allied forces remain on the defensive, the French behind their unreachable Maginot Line.
Parcels from home relieved the boredom.
Hitler is content to fight on one front at a time.
In May, 1940, the Germans launch a spectacular Western offensive, invading the Low Countries and splitting the French and British armies with rapacious Panzer thrusts.
Goebbels proclaims, "Moscow gives us every support.
" As each of the small capitals of northwest Europe fall, Stalin closes down the Soviet embassies, a tacit recognition that might is right.
In London, Chamberlain is called on to resign.
Winston Churchill becomes Prime Minister and struggles to rally France and Britain against the specter of a devastating defeat.
But the German army is unstoppable.
Millions of civilians flee northern France.
The French government leave Paris amid scenes of chaos on the roads.
At Dunkirk, the British Navy evacuates 330,000 British and French soldiers under fire.
The prominent choreographer Moiseev recalls a concert in Moscow at this time when Stalin approached him and asked: INTERPRETER: Stalin said to me, "Can you put on a show depicting the defeat of Britain and France?" There was a deathly silence.
And everyone understood that the conversation had taken a new turn.
Stalin grinned and said nothing for a moment.
Then he said, "Okay, you just sit there," and went off.
And that was that.
But this episode surprised everybody.
And I immediately thought, "What is he talking about? If Britain and France are defeated, we will be left completely alone with Hitler.
" Paris falls.
And the French sign a punitive armistice.
At Hitler's insistence, the same rail carriage is brought to Compiègne where the French had taken Germany's surrender in the First World War.
It is a result Hitler has dreamed of since he was in the trenches.
Berlin celebrates the fall of France, where vast new industrial and agricultural riches have fallen under German control.
But there are spoils for Stalin, too.
In the north, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia are annexed, again, in accordance with the secret agreements made with Hitler.
In all, Stalin has gained 175,000 square miles of territory, and 20 million new inhabitants for the Soviet Union.
As the NKVD move in, thousands of his new subjects are shot.
Tens of thousands more are immediately arrested and transported to swell the work force in the Gulag.
But in the midst of foreign-policy triumph, Stalin can always spare time for old enmities.
Denied asylum in many countries of the West, Leon Trotsky, Stalin's old rival, is now safe, as he believes, in Mexico, far from the grasp of the NKVD.
He is nevertheless tracked down and murdered by a hired killer, Ramón Mercader.
An ice pick hit the victim's brain.
Yet, for the Soviet-German special relationship, there are already clouds on the horizon.
Molotov goes to Germany to discuss spheres of influence between Germany, the Soviet Union, Italy, and Japan.
In fact, as we now know, the Japanese foreign minister, Matsuoka, has already been told that Germany will expect Japan's involvement in any war against the Soviet Union, and that Hitler has already signed Instruction 18, ordering preparations for the attack on the Soviet Union to continue.
But the Japanese are not to be tempted.
Tokyo decides it would prefer to keep its own back door to the Soviet Union firmly locked.
Matsuoka therefore flies to Moscow to sign a treaty of neutrality.
There are more toasts and formal poses.
And Stalin accords Matsuoka the signal honor of a personal send off.
But Stalin now is a rabbit caught in headlights.
On the day that Stalin signs a pact of friendship with Yugoslavia, Hitler attacks in the Balkans.
Is this to be the last blitzkrieg, or will the Soviet Union be next? What is certain is that if Hitler follows Yugoslavia with an attack on the Soviet Union, Stalin's gamble to grab the spoils of a disintegrating Versailles will have failed disastrously.
It will have left the Soviet Union isolated without an ally in the world.
Stalin has made too many bitter enemies in the party and the army.
His own position as leader, his life is in the balance.
He cannot even admit the possibility that he has miscalculated, that Hitler is about to attack.
But details of German intentions are coming from all quarters.
Churchill, with the German high command code available to him, informs Stalin by secret cable.
Outstanding Soviet agents in Britain, the United States, and even in Germany itself confirm that there will be an attack.
The Soviet intelligence network in Switzerland gives June the 22nd as the attack date.
Richard Sorge, working from the German embassy in Tokyo, confirms it.
INTERPRETER: The Germans started to move troops and station them in Finland at strategic points close to the border with the Soviet Union.
NARRATOR: And even as German tanks assemble along the Soviet border, Stalin's monstrous echo, NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria, orders that secret agents who confirm news of the German attack are to be turned into prison dust for supplying systematic misinformation.
INTERPRETER: On the 16th of June, 1941, this agent came to a meeting.
He was very agitated and immediately informed me that Hitler's Germany would attack the Soviet Union in the next few days.
And he even told me the date.
NARRATOR: From Luftwaffe officer Schulze-Boysen at the heart of Goering's high command, a warning of an imminent attack is forwarded to the Kremlin.
But Stalin rejects the information in the crudest terms.
"This mother-loving swine is passing on disinformation.
J.
Stalin.
" This is now willful blindness, the blindness of desperation.
As the fateful hour approaches, Stalin rejects requests from Zhukov and Timoshenko to move the troops on the border to defensive positions.
Throughout the Soviet Union, young people celebrate at graduation parties.
At 11:00 p.
m.
On the night of June the 21st, a German deserter, Alfred Liskov, crosses to the Soviet side with the warning that the attack is coming in five hours time.
Like all other warnings, it is ignored.
The graduation parties continue deep into the night.
Drinking, dancing, talking flirting.
Despite all the evidence, the leader of the Soviet people dares not allow himself to believe that he has disastrously miscalculated.
On this night of all nights, Joseph Stalin, who has chosen to ignore all warnings, retires to bed at 3:00 a.
m.
, his usual time.