Russia's Wars (2023) s01e02 Episode Script
The Soviet Union
1
Devastating wars.
Pitiless rulers
in pursuit of power
over centuries.
When Russia takes up arms,
the world holds its breath.
1917 marks a
new start in Russia.
In the October revolution, Lenin and the
Bolsheviks have violently seized power.
But the situation is chaotic.
The country
descends into civil war.
Great parts of this giant empire
are in the hands of the Bolsheviks'
enemies, "White" forces loyal to
the Czar, nationalists and separatists
now threaten the
victory of the Revolution.
The Russian Revolution becomes
really one of the most terrible and bloody
and bloodthirsty events
on the planet up to that date.
The horror of civil
war is always awful.
The violence of the Civil War,
quite simply meant that the
country and its people suffered.
Murder and killing were
the everyday reality.
The Bolsheviks need a
new army to hold on to power,
but most of the revolutionaries are
industrial workers and peasant farmers.
There are very
few trained officers.
Building a new army
seems a Herculean task.
And it falls to a civilian to turn the
revolutionaries into an effective army.
Lev Davidovich Bronstein,
known as Leon Trotsky.
Trotsky was good looking,
handsome, vain, flamboyant
and loquacious, but very bad at making friends
and actually didn't bother to cultivate a party.
He just thought he was a genius
and he would win everything.
He'd spent his life as
an orator and a journalist.
He was an extremely good writer, but it turned
out he was also an extremely good strategist.
Trotsky is a key member of
the revolutionary inner circle.
In 1918, he's appointed the People's Commissar
for War and begins to build up the Red Army.
Trotsky, it turned out, was an
extremely talented military commander.
And as Napoleon said, war and
prostitution are two professions that
are often done better by
amateurs than by professionals.
In building the Red Army, Trotsky
soon ditches revolutionary ideas.
s and volunteers, workers and peasants,
he integrates nearly 50,000 officer
215,000 NCOs from the Czar's army to
be the backbone of the new Red Army.
Trotsky's success in building up the
Red Army was based on principles he
would have rejected as
anti-socialist just five years before.
Drastic measures
and iron discipline.
Never mind a worker's
army of volunteers.
He created an army that relied, as
armies always had on iron discipline.
Perhaps with the one difference that
the discipline here was much harsher.
Trotsky relies on unquestioning
obedience and brutality.
He introduces the death penalty.
Political commissars are to
execute any soldiers who try to retreat.
The principle of enforcing
obedience in the army by violence
and threats was fully
developed in the Red Army.
But that's not something Russian
soldiers weren't already familiar with.
The Czar's army had already used such
drastic measures to force people to fight.
In the Red Army, Trotsky and his
successors perfected those techniques.
CROWD CHEERING
The Red Army grows
at a furious pace.
Founded in 1918, by 1919, it already
numbers a million and a half Men.
By 1920, there are 5
million Red Army soldiers.
The most modern weaponry
is deployed in the Civil War.
Machine guns, rapid fire artillery,
armored trains and armored cars,
aircraft too play
an important role.
You could say that was Trotsky's
great skill, seeing what forms
of combat, what weapons
made an army most effective.
For example, he used
armored railway trains
that could advance
the forward positions.
Those are the kinds of ideas he introduced
with a form of professionalism, completely
unexpected in someone who
had never served in the military
The civil war takes a
terrible toll in human life.
By the start of 1921, Russian society and
its economy are in a catastrophic state.
The whole country
faces starvation.
One focus of opposition to
the Bolsheviks is Kronstadt,
the naval base at the
gates of Saint Petersburg.
At the beginning of 1921, sailors
mutiny against Soviet despotism.
You have to remember
that the sailors of Kronstadt
were actually the very first
supporters of the Bolsheviks.
But when Moscow gets
wind of events in Kronstadt
that don't fit with
the Bolsheviks' plans,
none of that matters anymore.
50,000 Red Army troops crushed the uprising
in a merciless and savage campaign.
Survivors face
summary execution.
Nothing must be allowed to
get in the way of the Bolsheviks
hold on power.
In 1921, the Red Army finally
defeats Czarist forces in Crimea.
Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia fall to
the Red Army too, the Civil War is over.
1922 marks the birth of the USSR,
the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
This gigantic empire covers
more than 22,000,000 square
kilometers, a sixth
of the Earth's surface.
But the toll in
human life is high.
Up to 10 million people
die in the Russian civil war,
in combat, through political
purges and starvation.
About 2 million
are forced into exile.
The Bolsheviks had come
to power believing in terror.
They believed in the restructuring
of society using violence.
actually vanguard, in a very
hierarchical, organized manner, which was
very well suited to
controlling Russia.
With the founding
of the Soviet Union,
Lenin has achieved his goal.
He becomes the first head of
government of this newly created country.
t. revolution is the price to be
paid for the victory of the Proletaria
Well, if you actually look at
the history of the Bolsheviks from
the very beginning,
Lenin is a mass murderer
and a despicable character and starts this
scale of this escalation and scale of violence
that carries throughout
the whole Soviet regime.
It becomes part of the
DNA of the Soviet system.
But in 1922, the founding
year of the Soviet Union,
Lenin suffers a stroke.
Two years later, after a
further series of strokes, he dies.
Behind the scenes, there's a
vicious struggle over the succession.
Besides Leon Trotsky, Joseph Stalin is
also determined to inherit Lenin's mantle.
Stalin builds his power base slowly from the
end of the civil war in the early '20s and
accelerates in the
second half of that decade.
Stalin was no great orator who could
appeal to the masses like Trotsky.
For Trotsky, the Soviet
Union is just the beginning.
He wants global revolution.
Stalin, by contrast, wants to achieve socialism
in his own country in a strong Soviet Union.
There's often a suggestion
that Stalin was just, say,
a crafty, ruthless yokel.
Not so. He was
highly intelligent.
Trotsky had made himself
a target for everyone.
He'd attacked everyone
and always knew better.
He'd made himself unpopular.
pendent on background, creating a
giant network of people who became so de
him he ended up able to do
whatever he liked with them.
That was his kind of
political intelligence.
In 1925 Stalin uses his extensive network to
have Trotsky dismissed as head of the Red Army.
In 1927, he has him
thrown out of the party.
Two years later, Trotsky
is forced into exile.
Stalin is in sole control, working to consolidate
his power against all possible challenges.
At the end of the 1920s, Stalin starts
to transform his devastated country.
He plans to suppress private enterprise and
industrialise the Soviet Union as fast as possible.
gy. term, in five years to fund
it, to fund the American technolo
Most of the technology came from
the United States and Germany,
of course.
He paid for it with grain
and to to do that, he had
to send the grain abroad.
Stalin dictates that agricultural
yield must be increased.
Peasant farmers are to be gathered in
great production units known as Kolchozes.
It's the start of
forced collectivisation.
Stalin had the suspicion
and he was right that the peasants
weren't at all convinced by the new system.
They were opposed to
it and were blocking it.
And this stubbornness was to be broken
by collectivization, broken by force.
Stalin declares war
on his own people.
Peasant farmers who refused
to be collectivized faced drastic
punishments, 5 to 10 years in the
notorious prison camps of the Gulag.
But the effects of forced
collectivization are catastrophic,
there are fewer and fewer farmers to
work the fields and fewer and fewer fields.
The yield of the
harvest shrinks.
To make matters worse, each
village now has to pay a tax in grain
that leaves them with
almost nothing to eat.
In 1932 and 33, there is a massive famine in
every wheat producing region of the Soviet Union.
The horror is that these millions
of people are deliberately starved
to death as the
production from their
farms of their agricultural
production is simply stolen from them.
And so, of course, this is a traumatic event
and it's a traumatic event in world history.
insists on transforming the
country into an industrialized state.
It doesn't matter who suffers.
No one and nothing
must stand in the way.
The export of grain continues.
In 1931, the Soviet Union
exports 5.2 million tons of grain.
million tons are still exported
to Europe and the United States.
Ukraine is especially hard
hit by the resulting famine.
Ukraine is an extremely
fertile agricultural land.
There's a high proportion of
peasant farmers in the population.
And that's obviously why such a
disproportionate number of Ukrainians
became victims of the famine.
To Ukrainians this desperate famine is known
as the Holodomor, killing by starvation.
Hlodomor is a word invented in
Ukraine and the famine of 1932 and
33 has a particular
meaning for Ukrainians.
Of the approximately 7
million victims of the famine,
about half died in Ukraine.
Ukrainian historians see the Holodomor as an
attempted genocide of the Ukrainian people.
While the population starves,
the Soviet Union
continues to rearm.
And everywhere Stalin sees
enemies to be annihilated.
From the mid 1930s, a wave of
terror strikes every part of society.
This is the time
of the Great Terror.
Stalin's great terror was one of the most
extraordinary political events of the 20th century.
power, mutilated and destroyed
its own power, its own personnel
to such an extent as Stalin did in
the great terror from 1936 to '39.
But his idea was, first of all, I'm better to
kill ten innocent men than to let one spy escape.
And by spy, he meant not someone who was actually
betraying the country, but someone who might
one day think about
betraying the country.
The dreaded secret political
police cracked down ruthlessly.
Those under suspicion for any
reason fall into the hands of its agents.
They face show trials with
verdicts decided in advance.
Between July 1937 and mid-November
1938, 1.5 million people are arrested.
700,000 are executed.
Most of the others land in the Soviet
punishment and work camps of the Gulag.
Lists are drawn up across the
country of people to be killed.
Stalin personally signs
hundreds of death lists.
Ironically, some of these groups of
people were the people who actually
could have enhanced his
power, much more than others.
And one of these groups of many
were, for example, his own military.
More than 30,000 officers, generals and
field marshals fall victim to the purges.
In 1937, Stalin is suffering from paranoia, and
this is the moment when the great purges strike.
They take the most important
members of the officer corps, the thinkers,
those who have
experience of the Civil War.
Leon Trotsky supporters
are especially suspect.
He himself is in exile
in far away Mexico.
But Stalin still
fears his old rival.
In 1940, he decides
to eliminate him.
A Soviet agent murders Trotsky
in Mexico City with an ice pick.
Nearly 300,000 lined
the streets for his funeral.
CHURCH BELLS TOLL
Trotsky certainly doesn't
deserve to be admired.
He's responsible for a large part of
the brutal system, that characterized
not just the Red Army, but
really the whole Soviet Union.
Trotsky's idealization in Latin
America is down to the fact that
Stalin's regime turned a
screw of brutality even further
So Trotsky may seem the
more harmless of the two,
but that doesn't make him, in
any sense, a model to be followed.
On paper, the Soviet Union is
a federation of equal partners,
but giant Russia dominates
the smaller Soviet Republics.
In the 1930s a policy of
Russification is introduced.
The Russian language supplants other national
languages like Ukrainian or Belorussian.
The idea of making the Soviet Union into a
homogenous nation is an impossible nonsense.
Basically, the Soviet Union is the
successor to the multi-ethnic Russian
empire, a confused
mishmash of peoples.
Stalin himself is
the best example.
A Georgian who might
have loved to be a Russian,
but he could never hide
his heavy Georgian accent.
But Stalin is still suspicious of
his empire's ethnic minorities.
One of the great fears
was that Ukrainians,
Poles, Georgians,
Armenians would seek national
independence or national
autonomy from the center.
And therefore, in 1937, he launched
the national operations to literally
kill by quota vast numbers of
any of the national ethnic minorities.
Soviet citizens of Polish origin are among the
countless victims of the national operations.
Around 100,000 die in a
campaign of mass murder.
Stalin is too afraid they
could subvert the system.
He combines his nationalism with
ambitions to become a global power.
An important milestone is the
Nazi-soviet non-aggression pact
of August 1939.
Soviet Foreign Minister
Molotov and his German counterpart, Von
Ribbentrop, signed the so-called Hitler-Stalin Pact
in Moscow.
A secret annex seals the fate of
Poland, divided between the two countries.
On September the 1st 1939, Germany invades
Poland, the start of the Second World War.
Two weeks later, the Red Army
marches into Poland from the East.
German and Russian troops stage
a joint military parade in Brest-litovsk.
But there's more in the Hitler-Stalin
pact than the division of Poland.
In the secret annex, Finland was allocated
to the Soviet Union's sphere of influence.
So were the Baltic states of
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
Under massive pressure, the three Baltic
states were forced to accept Soviet garrisons,
the Red Army on their soil.
But the Finnish government
rejected the same Soviet demand
At the end of November 1939,
the Soviet Union invades Finland.
It's an unequal struggle.
The Red Army attacking with heavy weapons
is far bigger than its Finnish adversary.
The Russians were
extremely arrogant.
y and with just simply collapse, and
instead the Finns resisted efficientl
amazing courage to the extent that
they killed over 130,000 Soviet troops.
This campaign, soon known as the Winter War,
bears little similarity to conventional warfare.
The Finns counter the mighty Soviet army
with improvised, highly effective methods.
The broad, sparsely populated
landscapes favour guerrilla tactics,
ambushes with small mobile
units, and critical use of snipers.
The Finns are unbelievably
brave and put up heroic resistance.
And the first assault by the Great
Red Army fails to defeat Finland.
sia illustrating the wonderful fight
that Finland is putting up against Rus
keep arriving and here
are some of the latest.
They show a Russian convoy after it had been
trapped and put out of action by the Finns.
It was a serious embarrassment
for the Soviet Union.
They didn't achieve
their main goal.
They couldn't manage
to defeat Finland.
After regrouping, the Soviets launched
a new offensive with fresh troops.
They finally break through
Finnish lines in February 1940.
But victory comes at a price.
130,000 Soviet troops
are killed in the Winter War.
Finnish casualties are
70,000 dead and wounded.
. Finland remains independent
but gives up land to the Soviet Union
This gives Stalin a buffer zone around
Leningrad, as Saint Petersburg is now known.
In the summer of 1940, Estonia, Latvia
and Lithuania are absorbed into the USSR.
Through his
alliance with Hitler,
Stalin also has eastern
Poland under his control.
Imperialism in the
name of Communism.
June 22nd, 1941. German
armies Invade Russia.
Hitler plans a war of annihilation
codenamed Operation Barbarossa.
EXPLOSIONS
Hitler has broken the
Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact.
The Red Army doesn't
have a proper defence plan.
It's completely taken by surprise
because Stalin refused to believe
warnings of a German invasion
and banned any preparations.
In the very first weeks, the Red
Army suffered horrendous losses.
By the end of 1941, the Red Army no
longer existed in the form it had in June.
Its soldiers were either
dead or prisoners of war.
Germany's surprise attack has
apparently been entirely successful.
ack Sea. have split the invasion
between them from the Baltic to the Bl
By the end of August, the Baltic, Belarus and
large parts of Ukraine have been occupied.
r begins and the Germans arrive
in villages and towns in Ukraine o
Belorussia or the Baltic states,
they're greeted with bread
and salt and wreaths of flowers.
And people are so relieved
because if you've just been through the
Holodomor under Stalin,
anybody's looking pretty good.
The Germans hadn't come to
liberate them, but to suppress them.
In this war of
annihilation of Bolshevism,
there are no more rules.
It's a manhunt
of Soviet soldiers, civilians,
and above all, Jews.
ory. war in the East is not a
war for territory, merely for territ
It's a racial war.
It's a war of extermination.
against civilians without any
fear of facing a military court.
Red Army political commissars are not to be
treated as prisoners of war, but shot on sight.
The Germans deliberately let
Soviet prisoners starve to death.
Approximately 3 million captured
Soviet soldiers die of hunger and disease.
emy ability of the Red Army to
pick itself up and confront the en
again and again, always
to carry on fighting.
No one expected that.
To raise public morale,
the struggle against Hitler's Germany
is dubbed the Great Patriotic War.
The Soviet Union soon has
5 million soldiers under arms.
Hitler and his generals underestimate
the quality of Soviet weaponry.
The appearance of the T34 tank in
the summer of 1941 is a huge shock.
It's soon recognized as
a formidable opponent.
The Germans have enormous
problems countering it.
It's superior to all
their own tanks.
But a war isn't won by just one technology,
but usually through mass production.
The T34 was simple
to manufacture.
It had a diesel engine.
It was suited to the terrain.
It became a symbol of victory, though of course,
that wasn't the only reason the Red Army won.
The Red Army also
uses unorthodox methods.
In autumn, 1941, a new night bomber regiment
comes into being consisting entirely of women.
They fly two seater PO-2s,
usually used for training and farming.
Sluggish biplanes
of wood and canvas.
They take off at dusk, singly,
at intervals of several minutes.
Close to the target the pilots
switch off their engines and glide in.
Since the night attacks
come without warning,
the Germans call
them night witches.
Darkness protects them from
much faster German fighters.
The pilots become Soviet stars.
23 become heroines
of the Soviet Union.
The decisive factor was the willingness
of individual Soviet citizens to fight.
They didn't just say,
"I've had enough,
I'm not fighting for Stalin"
and probably very few of
them were fighting for Stalin.
They were fighting for their village,
for their connection to their homeland.
That was the decisive factor
that stopped the Germans.
In autumn and winter, 1941.
Germany's advance falters.
The troops are ill equipped for
the oncoming Russian winter.
Soon, more soldiers are dying
from cold than from combat.
Meanwhile, the Soviet Union is moving more
and more efficiently onto a war footing.
Stalin delegates military
decisions to his generals.
One of them is Georgi
Konstantinovich Zhukov.
With the other generals
he stems the German advance
using any means necessary.
Zhukov certainly plays a
significant role as a leading general.
le important battles, and he's one
of the capable thinkers responsib
for stopping the German
advance before Moscow.
He's presented as the great
victorious figurehead, the great
general, the Hannibal
of the Red Army.
Of course, he wasn't that.
Zhukov exemplifies the positive and
also the negative aspects of the Red Army.
He would walk over corpses and
he wasn't too worried about losses.
Zhukov also left
his trail of blood.
Zhukov is a product of the
tough Soviet military ethos.
He deals mercilessly
with deserters,
and he doesn't hesitate to throw
more and more soldiers into battle.
1942, the Germans
attack the city of Stalingrad.
They soon hold 90% of it.
But by autumn, Zhukov and other generals have
bottled up 300,000 German soldiers in the city.
A bitter struggle ensues.
The Red Army cuts all
the German supply lines.
In January 1943, the
German 5th Army surrenders.
The battle for Stalingrad is a psychological
turning point, for the Soviets too.
rmy. can mount a complex operation
to bottle up an entire German a
Psychologically, that matters.
It gives them hope they
can force the Germans back.
The big question
is at what price?
About 150,000 German soldiers
die at Stalingrad, in combat
or from hunger and cold.
On the Soviet side, an
estimated 400,000 die.
German losses at Stalingrad
are lower than the Soviets.
We believe 20,000 Red Army
soldiers were shot as deserters alone.
They drown the German
advance in their own soldiers blood.
Victory at Stalingrad is an important
signal for Great Britain and the USA.
The Soviet Union's two main
allies in the fight against Hitler.
The Americans also help with supplies via
the agreements known as the Lend-Lease Act.
vehicles and raw materials
worth more than 11 billion dollars.
They would have succeeded in halting the
German advance with their own resources.
but they certainly couldn't
have forced them back to Berlin.
Their offensive capabilities were
based on more than 400,000 American
trucks on radio transmitters,
uniforms, food supplies and so on.
With support from the Western
allies, the Red Army forces
the Germans to withdraw
further and further.
In February 1945, General Zhukov's
forces win the Battle of Berlin,
bringing the Second World
War in Europe to a close.
When the Red Army raised the red
flag over the Reichstag on May 2nd, 1945
it was partly thanks to logistics
help from the USA and Britain.
Roughly 24 million Soviet citizens
lose their lives in the Second World War.
13 million are soldiers.
Higher losses than
any other nation.
Victory in the Great Patriotic War
against Hitler's Germany is the most
celebrated achievement in the
Soviet culture of remembrance.
It's the nation's second founding myth, even
taking precedence over the October revolution.
What inspired and moved
people, what spoke to their hearts,
it was this war in which
every family lost someone.
This legend of the Great
Patriotic War and the heroic victory.
It's one of the crucial ideas that
has been carried over since the
collapse of the Soviet Union.
It has become part of the collective
memory of the Russian people.
CHEERING
In Russia, the May holidays celebrating
victory in the Second World War
are the most important
holidays of the year.
They still are, I'd
say more than ever.
At the end of the Second World War,
the Soviet Union is stronger than ever.
It's now the world's second
superpower alongside the USA.
But soon, these
allies are rivals.
The war is over.
At the Potsdam Conference in the
summer of 1945, Great Britain, the
USA and the Soviet Union sit down
to decide the post-war world order.
The anti-Hitler
coalition collapses.
Now it's all about
national self-interest.
Stalin, the communist, plays
classic great power politics.
After the war the Soviet Union creates a
buffer zone of communist satellite states.
Its military alliance,
The Warsaw Pact, faces
the Western alliance, NATO.
Stalin had always believed in Marxist
Leninism, and he was always convinced
that ultimately there would be a
struggle with the capitalist West.
That was inbuilt into
his world view already.
But first of all, he wanted to make
sure that the Soviet Union was as
safe as possible, and that led him
to take control of Eastern Europe.
But that met with opposition in
some Eastern European countries.
In October 1956, The Hungarian
population demanded democratic reforms.
Communist one party
dictatorship seemed to be over.
Hungary in 1956 was especially
dangerous because Hungary announced
its withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact
and the Hungarian army changed sides.
And they had to
defeat this army.
The Red Army brutally
suppresses the struggle for freedom.
The hunger for democracy
remains unfulfilled.
Hungary stays in
the Eastern Bloc.
k rank was not going to allow any
state along its buffer zone to brea
There was no confusion.
Moscow decides it isn't
going to be trifled with.
The Soviet Union pursues its
interests in many other countries.
In 1953, the Red Army helps
crush an uprising in East Germany.
In 1968, Soviet troops march into Czechoslovakia,
putting a violent end to the Prague Spring.
And there are proxy
wars around the world.
In the Korean War, Soviet military advisers and
fighter pilots fight on the side of the north.
In Vietnam, the communist North receives
weapons and advice in its war against the USA.
And in Africa, the Soviet Union supports
the socialists in the Angolan Civil War.
That's the logic of power blocs.
They support or install political systems aligned
with their own interests all over the world.
In that respect, the USA differs
little from the Soviet Union.
It's simply a global
struggle for influence.
After 1949, the Soviets have nuclear
weapons and threaten to use them.
An atomic arms race
starts with the USA.
In 1961, the Soviets
test a hydrogen bomb
setting off the largest explosion
the world has ever known.
The so-called Czar bomb destroys
everything in a radius of 35km.
It has a deterrent
effect on both sides.
I would argue that atomic weapons led
to a relatively stable balance of power.
never be or at least to heads of
government, that a nuclear war could
fought, so it must be
avoided at all costs.
And yet nuclear war threatens
in the autumn of 1962, when the Soviet Union
secretly stations atomic weapons on Cuba.
American spy planes discover
Soviet launching pads on the island.
ed. missiles be removed and
threatens a nuclear response if they're fir
chev US missiles stationed in
Turkey, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrush
backs down and removes
the missiles from Cuba.
eir own or Khrushchev were really
prepared to see the destruction of th
country in an argument
over a Caribbean island.
The great resolution for
the Cuban Missile crisis
in 62 between Kennedy and
Khrushchev was that we really
cannot use nuclear
weapons, because if we do,
then it's the end of the world.
But the explosive arms race
between East and West doesn't stop.
By 1990, the US has
21,000 nuclear warheads.
The Soviets have 33,000.
More than enough to
destroy all of humanity.
One of the Cold War's most
significant conflicts is in Afghanistan.
The Soviet Union's southern
neighbour seems to be unstable.
Islamist and anti-communist tendencies
are making the Soviet Union nervous.
The plan is to bring order and
install a Soviet friendly government.
And so in December 1979, a KGB unit
murders the Afghan president in his palace.
The Soviets appoint a
puppet leader in his place.
CLAPPING AND CHEERING
The Soviet Union's great fear was that Islamists
in Afghanistan would take over the government,
and that radical Islamism could then
leech into the southern Soviet Union
Afghanistan must at all costs,
remain in the Soviet sphere of influence.
A few days later, 80,000
heavily armed Soviet troops
march into Afghanistan
to stabilize the country.
They marched in to impose
a Sovietization of the system,
believing there was a groundswell of
popular approval for the government.
They thought the Soviet invasion
would meet with a degree of acceptance.
They were wrong.
It quickly becomes clear the Soviet intervention
has no support among the Afghan people.
The invasion soon falters.
The Afghan Mujahideen engage in
a brutal struggle with Soviet forces.
It's interesting that the Soviet Union
doesn't understand Afghanistan.
And above all, they have no idea
how to resolve the conflict politically.
They only have their military
card or rather a wrecking ball.
Unmotivated Soviet troops fail to
bring Afghanistan under their control.
The Mujahideen disappear into the mountains
and harry the Russians with guerrilla tactics.
The USA intervenes, supplying the
Mujahideen with money and weapons.
That land over there is yours.
You'll go back to it one day
because your fight will prevail and you
will have your homes and
your mosques back again.
Because your cause is
right and God is on your side.
The Americans equipped the Mujahideen
with very flexible weapons systems
that are particularly
effective in this terrain.
Stinger missiles, for example, are
ideal for bringing down Soviet helicopters.
In the process, the Americans support a
Mujahideen commander, Osama bin Laden.
Of course, the Americans say
we're giving the Soviets their Vietnam
and it works.
The Americans don't have much in common
with radical Islamists like the Mujahideen.
But the enemy of my
enemy is my friend.
The war in Afghanistan
lasts ten years.
The world's second biggest
military power is unable to win it.
In 1989, the Soviet Union pulls
out, militarily and politically humiliated.
Casualty estimates diverge.
Up to a million people
may have been killed.
7 million Afghans are displaced.
Official figures
on the Soviet side.
15,000 soldiers killed.
50,000 wounded.
with the new man at the head
of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev.
His policies of Glasnost and Perestroika,
openness and restructuring have far reaching
consequences for the
whole of the Soviet Union.
The Afghan war plays
an important role in the fall
of the Soviet Union because
it strengthens the doubts in
Soviet society, in the
different Soviet republics
that the Soviet
system can survive
Afghanistan was one factor in the fall of the
Soviet Union, but by no means the only one.
I would argue that the Soviet Union
would have collapsed even without
the war in Afghanistan,
perhaps three years later.
But the Soviet Union was forced by the West,
by NATO, by the USA, into an arms race.
And this arms race, this
economic rivalry was unsustainable.
And so the end of the Afghan war
also heralds the end of the Cold War,
but against the hopes of many,
it will not usher in a lasting peace.
Devastating wars.
Pitiless rulers
in pursuit of power
over centuries.
When Russia takes up arms,
the world holds its breath.
1917 marks a
new start in Russia.
In the October revolution, Lenin and the
Bolsheviks have violently seized power.
But the situation is chaotic.
The country
descends into civil war.
Great parts of this giant empire
are in the hands of the Bolsheviks'
enemies, "White" forces loyal to
the Czar, nationalists and separatists
now threaten the
victory of the Revolution.
The Russian Revolution becomes
really one of the most terrible and bloody
and bloodthirsty events
on the planet up to that date.
The horror of civil
war is always awful.
The violence of the Civil War,
quite simply meant that the
country and its people suffered.
Murder and killing were
the everyday reality.
The Bolsheviks need a
new army to hold on to power,
but most of the revolutionaries are
industrial workers and peasant farmers.
There are very
few trained officers.
Building a new army
seems a Herculean task.
And it falls to a civilian to turn the
revolutionaries into an effective army.
Lev Davidovich Bronstein,
known as Leon Trotsky.
Trotsky was good looking,
handsome, vain, flamboyant
and loquacious, but very bad at making friends
and actually didn't bother to cultivate a party.
He just thought he was a genius
and he would win everything.
He'd spent his life as
an orator and a journalist.
He was an extremely good writer, but it turned
out he was also an extremely good strategist.
Trotsky is a key member of
the revolutionary inner circle.
In 1918, he's appointed the People's Commissar
for War and begins to build up the Red Army.
Trotsky, it turned out, was an
extremely talented military commander.
And as Napoleon said, war and
prostitution are two professions that
are often done better by
amateurs than by professionals.
In building the Red Army, Trotsky
soon ditches revolutionary ideas.
s and volunteers, workers and peasants,
he integrates nearly 50,000 officer
215,000 NCOs from the Czar's army to
be the backbone of the new Red Army.
Trotsky's success in building up the
Red Army was based on principles he
would have rejected as
anti-socialist just five years before.
Drastic measures
and iron discipline.
Never mind a worker's
army of volunteers.
He created an army that relied, as
armies always had on iron discipline.
Perhaps with the one difference that
the discipline here was much harsher.
Trotsky relies on unquestioning
obedience and brutality.
He introduces the death penalty.
Political commissars are to
execute any soldiers who try to retreat.
The principle of enforcing
obedience in the army by violence
and threats was fully
developed in the Red Army.
But that's not something Russian
soldiers weren't already familiar with.
The Czar's army had already used such
drastic measures to force people to fight.
In the Red Army, Trotsky and his
successors perfected those techniques.
CROWD CHEERING
The Red Army grows
at a furious pace.
Founded in 1918, by 1919, it already
numbers a million and a half Men.
By 1920, there are 5
million Red Army soldiers.
The most modern weaponry
is deployed in the Civil War.
Machine guns, rapid fire artillery,
armored trains and armored cars,
aircraft too play
an important role.
You could say that was Trotsky's
great skill, seeing what forms
of combat, what weapons
made an army most effective.
For example, he used
armored railway trains
that could advance
the forward positions.
Those are the kinds of ideas he introduced
with a form of professionalism, completely
unexpected in someone who
had never served in the military
The civil war takes a
terrible toll in human life.
By the start of 1921, Russian society and
its economy are in a catastrophic state.
The whole country
faces starvation.
One focus of opposition to
the Bolsheviks is Kronstadt,
the naval base at the
gates of Saint Petersburg.
At the beginning of 1921, sailors
mutiny against Soviet despotism.
You have to remember
that the sailors of Kronstadt
were actually the very first
supporters of the Bolsheviks.
But when Moscow gets
wind of events in Kronstadt
that don't fit with
the Bolsheviks' plans,
none of that matters anymore.
50,000 Red Army troops crushed the uprising
in a merciless and savage campaign.
Survivors face
summary execution.
Nothing must be allowed to
get in the way of the Bolsheviks
hold on power.
In 1921, the Red Army finally
defeats Czarist forces in Crimea.
Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia fall to
the Red Army too, the Civil War is over.
1922 marks the birth of the USSR,
the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
This gigantic empire covers
more than 22,000,000 square
kilometers, a sixth
of the Earth's surface.
But the toll in
human life is high.
Up to 10 million people
die in the Russian civil war,
in combat, through political
purges and starvation.
About 2 million
are forced into exile.
The Bolsheviks had come
to power believing in terror.
They believed in the restructuring
of society using violence.
actually vanguard, in a very
hierarchical, organized manner, which was
very well suited to
controlling Russia.
With the founding
of the Soviet Union,
Lenin has achieved his goal.
He becomes the first head of
government of this newly created country.
t. revolution is the price to be
paid for the victory of the Proletaria
Well, if you actually look at
the history of the Bolsheviks from
the very beginning,
Lenin is a mass murderer
and a despicable character and starts this
scale of this escalation and scale of violence
that carries throughout
the whole Soviet regime.
It becomes part of the
DNA of the Soviet system.
But in 1922, the founding
year of the Soviet Union,
Lenin suffers a stroke.
Two years later, after a
further series of strokes, he dies.
Behind the scenes, there's a
vicious struggle over the succession.
Besides Leon Trotsky, Joseph Stalin is
also determined to inherit Lenin's mantle.
Stalin builds his power base slowly from the
end of the civil war in the early '20s and
accelerates in the
second half of that decade.
Stalin was no great orator who could
appeal to the masses like Trotsky.
For Trotsky, the Soviet
Union is just the beginning.
He wants global revolution.
Stalin, by contrast, wants to achieve socialism
in his own country in a strong Soviet Union.
There's often a suggestion
that Stalin was just, say,
a crafty, ruthless yokel.
Not so. He was
highly intelligent.
Trotsky had made himself
a target for everyone.
He'd attacked everyone
and always knew better.
He'd made himself unpopular.
pendent on background, creating a
giant network of people who became so de
him he ended up able to do
whatever he liked with them.
That was his kind of
political intelligence.
In 1925 Stalin uses his extensive network to
have Trotsky dismissed as head of the Red Army.
In 1927, he has him
thrown out of the party.
Two years later, Trotsky
is forced into exile.
Stalin is in sole control, working to consolidate
his power against all possible challenges.
At the end of the 1920s, Stalin starts
to transform his devastated country.
He plans to suppress private enterprise and
industrialise the Soviet Union as fast as possible.
gy. term, in five years to fund
it, to fund the American technolo
Most of the technology came from
the United States and Germany,
of course.
He paid for it with grain
and to to do that, he had
to send the grain abroad.
Stalin dictates that agricultural
yield must be increased.
Peasant farmers are to be gathered in
great production units known as Kolchozes.
It's the start of
forced collectivisation.
Stalin had the suspicion
and he was right that the peasants
weren't at all convinced by the new system.
They were opposed to
it and were blocking it.
And this stubbornness was to be broken
by collectivization, broken by force.
Stalin declares war
on his own people.
Peasant farmers who refused
to be collectivized faced drastic
punishments, 5 to 10 years in the
notorious prison camps of the Gulag.
But the effects of forced
collectivization are catastrophic,
there are fewer and fewer farmers to
work the fields and fewer and fewer fields.
The yield of the
harvest shrinks.
To make matters worse, each
village now has to pay a tax in grain
that leaves them with
almost nothing to eat.
In 1932 and 33, there is a massive famine in
every wheat producing region of the Soviet Union.
The horror is that these millions
of people are deliberately starved
to death as the
production from their
farms of their agricultural
production is simply stolen from them.
And so, of course, this is a traumatic event
and it's a traumatic event in world history.
insists on transforming the
country into an industrialized state.
It doesn't matter who suffers.
No one and nothing
must stand in the way.
The export of grain continues.
In 1931, the Soviet Union
exports 5.2 million tons of grain.
million tons are still exported
to Europe and the United States.
Ukraine is especially hard
hit by the resulting famine.
Ukraine is an extremely
fertile agricultural land.
There's a high proportion of
peasant farmers in the population.
And that's obviously why such a
disproportionate number of Ukrainians
became victims of the famine.
To Ukrainians this desperate famine is known
as the Holodomor, killing by starvation.
Hlodomor is a word invented in
Ukraine and the famine of 1932 and
33 has a particular
meaning for Ukrainians.
Of the approximately 7
million victims of the famine,
about half died in Ukraine.
Ukrainian historians see the Holodomor as an
attempted genocide of the Ukrainian people.
While the population starves,
the Soviet Union
continues to rearm.
And everywhere Stalin sees
enemies to be annihilated.
From the mid 1930s, a wave of
terror strikes every part of society.
This is the time
of the Great Terror.
Stalin's great terror was one of the most
extraordinary political events of the 20th century.
power, mutilated and destroyed
its own power, its own personnel
to such an extent as Stalin did in
the great terror from 1936 to '39.
But his idea was, first of all, I'm better to
kill ten innocent men than to let one spy escape.
And by spy, he meant not someone who was actually
betraying the country, but someone who might
one day think about
betraying the country.
The dreaded secret political
police cracked down ruthlessly.
Those under suspicion for any
reason fall into the hands of its agents.
They face show trials with
verdicts decided in advance.
Between July 1937 and mid-November
1938, 1.5 million people are arrested.
700,000 are executed.
Most of the others land in the Soviet
punishment and work camps of the Gulag.
Lists are drawn up across the
country of people to be killed.
Stalin personally signs
hundreds of death lists.
Ironically, some of these groups of
people were the people who actually
could have enhanced his
power, much more than others.
And one of these groups of many
were, for example, his own military.
More than 30,000 officers, generals and
field marshals fall victim to the purges.
In 1937, Stalin is suffering from paranoia, and
this is the moment when the great purges strike.
They take the most important
members of the officer corps, the thinkers,
those who have
experience of the Civil War.
Leon Trotsky supporters
are especially suspect.
He himself is in exile
in far away Mexico.
But Stalin still
fears his old rival.
In 1940, he decides
to eliminate him.
A Soviet agent murders Trotsky
in Mexico City with an ice pick.
Nearly 300,000 lined
the streets for his funeral.
CHURCH BELLS TOLL
Trotsky certainly doesn't
deserve to be admired.
He's responsible for a large part of
the brutal system, that characterized
not just the Red Army, but
really the whole Soviet Union.
Trotsky's idealization in Latin
America is down to the fact that
Stalin's regime turned a
screw of brutality even further
So Trotsky may seem the
more harmless of the two,
but that doesn't make him, in
any sense, a model to be followed.
On paper, the Soviet Union is
a federation of equal partners,
but giant Russia dominates
the smaller Soviet Republics.
In the 1930s a policy of
Russification is introduced.
The Russian language supplants other national
languages like Ukrainian or Belorussian.
The idea of making the Soviet Union into a
homogenous nation is an impossible nonsense.
Basically, the Soviet Union is the
successor to the multi-ethnic Russian
empire, a confused
mishmash of peoples.
Stalin himself is
the best example.
A Georgian who might
have loved to be a Russian,
but he could never hide
his heavy Georgian accent.
But Stalin is still suspicious of
his empire's ethnic minorities.
One of the great fears
was that Ukrainians,
Poles, Georgians,
Armenians would seek national
independence or national
autonomy from the center.
And therefore, in 1937, he launched
the national operations to literally
kill by quota vast numbers of
any of the national ethnic minorities.
Soviet citizens of Polish origin are among the
countless victims of the national operations.
Around 100,000 die in a
campaign of mass murder.
Stalin is too afraid they
could subvert the system.
He combines his nationalism with
ambitions to become a global power.
An important milestone is the
Nazi-soviet non-aggression pact
of August 1939.
Soviet Foreign Minister
Molotov and his German counterpart, Von
Ribbentrop, signed the so-called Hitler-Stalin Pact
in Moscow.
A secret annex seals the fate of
Poland, divided between the two countries.
On September the 1st 1939, Germany invades
Poland, the start of the Second World War.
Two weeks later, the Red Army
marches into Poland from the East.
German and Russian troops stage
a joint military parade in Brest-litovsk.
But there's more in the Hitler-Stalin
pact than the division of Poland.
In the secret annex, Finland was allocated
to the Soviet Union's sphere of influence.
So were the Baltic states of
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
Under massive pressure, the three Baltic
states were forced to accept Soviet garrisons,
the Red Army on their soil.
But the Finnish government
rejected the same Soviet demand
At the end of November 1939,
the Soviet Union invades Finland.
It's an unequal struggle.
The Red Army attacking with heavy weapons
is far bigger than its Finnish adversary.
The Russians were
extremely arrogant.
y and with just simply collapse, and
instead the Finns resisted efficientl
amazing courage to the extent that
they killed over 130,000 Soviet troops.
This campaign, soon known as the Winter War,
bears little similarity to conventional warfare.
The Finns counter the mighty Soviet army
with improvised, highly effective methods.
The broad, sparsely populated
landscapes favour guerrilla tactics,
ambushes with small mobile
units, and critical use of snipers.
The Finns are unbelievably
brave and put up heroic resistance.
And the first assault by the Great
Red Army fails to defeat Finland.
sia illustrating the wonderful fight
that Finland is putting up against Rus
keep arriving and here
are some of the latest.
They show a Russian convoy after it had been
trapped and put out of action by the Finns.
It was a serious embarrassment
for the Soviet Union.
They didn't achieve
their main goal.
They couldn't manage
to defeat Finland.
After regrouping, the Soviets launched
a new offensive with fresh troops.
They finally break through
Finnish lines in February 1940.
But victory comes at a price.
130,000 Soviet troops
are killed in the Winter War.
Finnish casualties are
70,000 dead and wounded.
. Finland remains independent
but gives up land to the Soviet Union
This gives Stalin a buffer zone around
Leningrad, as Saint Petersburg is now known.
In the summer of 1940, Estonia, Latvia
and Lithuania are absorbed into the USSR.
Through his
alliance with Hitler,
Stalin also has eastern
Poland under his control.
Imperialism in the
name of Communism.
June 22nd, 1941. German
armies Invade Russia.
Hitler plans a war of annihilation
codenamed Operation Barbarossa.
EXPLOSIONS
Hitler has broken the
Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact.
The Red Army doesn't
have a proper defence plan.
It's completely taken by surprise
because Stalin refused to believe
warnings of a German invasion
and banned any preparations.
In the very first weeks, the Red
Army suffered horrendous losses.
By the end of 1941, the Red Army no
longer existed in the form it had in June.
Its soldiers were either
dead or prisoners of war.
Germany's surprise attack has
apparently been entirely successful.
ack Sea. have split the invasion
between them from the Baltic to the Bl
By the end of August, the Baltic, Belarus and
large parts of Ukraine have been occupied.
r begins and the Germans arrive
in villages and towns in Ukraine o
Belorussia or the Baltic states,
they're greeted with bread
and salt and wreaths of flowers.
And people are so relieved
because if you've just been through the
Holodomor under Stalin,
anybody's looking pretty good.
The Germans hadn't come to
liberate them, but to suppress them.
In this war of
annihilation of Bolshevism,
there are no more rules.
It's a manhunt
of Soviet soldiers, civilians,
and above all, Jews.
ory. war in the East is not a
war for territory, merely for territ
It's a racial war.
It's a war of extermination.
against civilians without any
fear of facing a military court.
Red Army political commissars are not to be
treated as prisoners of war, but shot on sight.
The Germans deliberately let
Soviet prisoners starve to death.
Approximately 3 million captured
Soviet soldiers die of hunger and disease.
emy ability of the Red Army to
pick itself up and confront the en
again and again, always
to carry on fighting.
No one expected that.
To raise public morale,
the struggle against Hitler's Germany
is dubbed the Great Patriotic War.
The Soviet Union soon has
5 million soldiers under arms.
Hitler and his generals underestimate
the quality of Soviet weaponry.
The appearance of the T34 tank in
the summer of 1941 is a huge shock.
It's soon recognized as
a formidable opponent.
The Germans have enormous
problems countering it.
It's superior to all
their own tanks.
But a war isn't won by just one technology,
but usually through mass production.
The T34 was simple
to manufacture.
It had a diesel engine.
It was suited to the terrain.
It became a symbol of victory, though of course,
that wasn't the only reason the Red Army won.
The Red Army also
uses unorthodox methods.
In autumn, 1941, a new night bomber regiment
comes into being consisting entirely of women.
They fly two seater PO-2s,
usually used for training and farming.
Sluggish biplanes
of wood and canvas.
They take off at dusk, singly,
at intervals of several minutes.
Close to the target the pilots
switch off their engines and glide in.
Since the night attacks
come without warning,
the Germans call
them night witches.
Darkness protects them from
much faster German fighters.
The pilots become Soviet stars.
23 become heroines
of the Soviet Union.
The decisive factor was the willingness
of individual Soviet citizens to fight.
They didn't just say,
"I've had enough,
I'm not fighting for Stalin"
and probably very few of
them were fighting for Stalin.
They were fighting for their village,
for their connection to their homeland.
That was the decisive factor
that stopped the Germans.
In autumn and winter, 1941.
Germany's advance falters.
The troops are ill equipped for
the oncoming Russian winter.
Soon, more soldiers are dying
from cold than from combat.
Meanwhile, the Soviet Union is moving more
and more efficiently onto a war footing.
Stalin delegates military
decisions to his generals.
One of them is Georgi
Konstantinovich Zhukov.
With the other generals
he stems the German advance
using any means necessary.
Zhukov certainly plays a
significant role as a leading general.
le important battles, and he's one
of the capable thinkers responsib
for stopping the German
advance before Moscow.
He's presented as the great
victorious figurehead, the great
general, the Hannibal
of the Red Army.
Of course, he wasn't that.
Zhukov exemplifies the positive and
also the negative aspects of the Red Army.
He would walk over corpses and
he wasn't too worried about losses.
Zhukov also left
his trail of blood.
Zhukov is a product of the
tough Soviet military ethos.
He deals mercilessly
with deserters,
and he doesn't hesitate to throw
more and more soldiers into battle.
1942, the Germans
attack the city of Stalingrad.
They soon hold 90% of it.
But by autumn, Zhukov and other generals have
bottled up 300,000 German soldiers in the city.
A bitter struggle ensues.
The Red Army cuts all
the German supply lines.
In January 1943, the
German 5th Army surrenders.
The battle for Stalingrad is a psychological
turning point, for the Soviets too.
rmy. can mount a complex operation
to bottle up an entire German a
Psychologically, that matters.
It gives them hope they
can force the Germans back.
The big question
is at what price?
About 150,000 German soldiers
die at Stalingrad, in combat
or from hunger and cold.
On the Soviet side, an
estimated 400,000 die.
German losses at Stalingrad
are lower than the Soviets.
We believe 20,000 Red Army
soldiers were shot as deserters alone.
They drown the German
advance in their own soldiers blood.
Victory at Stalingrad is an important
signal for Great Britain and the USA.
The Soviet Union's two main
allies in the fight against Hitler.
The Americans also help with supplies via
the agreements known as the Lend-Lease Act.
vehicles and raw materials
worth more than 11 billion dollars.
They would have succeeded in halting the
German advance with their own resources.
but they certainly couldn't
have forced them back to Berlin.
Their offensive capabilities were
based on more than 400,000 American
trucks on radio transmitters,
uniforms, food supplies and so on.
With support from the Western
allies, the Red Army forces
the Germans to withdraw
further and further.
In February 1945, General Zhukov's
forces win the Battle of Berlin,
bringing the Second World
War in Europe to a close.
When the Red Army raised the red
flag over the Reichstag on May 2nd, 1945
it was partly thanks to logistics
help from the USA and Britain.
Roughly 24 million Soviet citizens
lose their lives in the Second World War.
13 million are soldiers.
Higher losses than
any other nation.
Victory in the Great Patriotic War
against Hitler's Germany is the most
celebrated achievement in the
Soviet culture of remembrance.
It's the nation's second founding myth, even
taking precedence over the October revolution.
What inspired and moved
people, what spoke to their hearts,
it was this war in which
every family lost someone.
This legend of the Great
Patriotic War and the heroic victory.
It's one of the crucial ideas that
has been carried over since the
collapse of the Soviet Union.
It has become part of the collective
memory of the Russian people.
CHEERING
In Russia, the May holidays celebrating
victory in the Second World War
are the most important
holidays of the year.
They still are, I'd
say more than ever.
At the end of the Second World War,
the Soviet Union is stronger than ever.
It's now the world's second
superpower alongside the USA.
But soon, these
allies are rivals.
The war is over.
At the Potsdam Conference in the
summer of 1945, Great Britain, the
USA and the Soviet Union sit down
to decide the post-war world order.
The anti-Hitler
coalition collapses.
Now it's all about
national self-interest.
Stalin, the communist, plays
classic great power politics.
After the war the Soviet Union creates a
buffer zone of communist satellite states.
Its military alliance,
The Warsaw Pact, faces
the Western alliance, NATO.
Stalin had always believed in Marxist
Leninism, and he was always convinced
that ultimately there would be a
struggle with the capitalist West.
That was inbuilt into
his world view already.
But first of all, he wanted to make
sure that the Soviet Union was as
safe as possible, and that led him
to take control of Eastern Europe.
But that met with opposition in
some Eastern European countries.
In October 1956, The Hungarian
population demanded democratic reforms.
Communist one party
dictatorship seemed to be over.
Hungary in 1956 was especially
dangerous because Hungary announced
its withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact
and the Hungarian army changed sides.
And they had to
defeat this army.
The Red Army brutally
suppresses the struggle for freedom.
The hunger for democracy
remains unfulfilled.
Hungary stays in
the Eastern Bloc.
k rank was not going to allow any
state along its buffer zone to brea
There was no confusion.
Moscow decides it isn't
going to be trifled with.
The Soviet Union pursues its
interests in many other countries.
In 1953, the Red Army helps
crush an uprising in East Germany.
In 1968, Soviet troops march into Czechoslovakia,
putting a violent end to the Prague Spring.
And there are proxy
wars around the world.
In the Korean War, Soviet military advisers and
fighter pilots fight on the side of the north.
In Vietnam, the communist North receives
weapons and advice in its war against the USA.
And in Africa, the Soviet Union supports
the socialists in the Angolan Civil War.
That's the logic of power blocs.
They support or install political systems aligned
with their own interests all over the world.
In that respect, the USA differs
little from the Soviet Union.
It's simply a global
struggle for influence.
After 1949, the Soviets have nuclear
weapons and threaten to use them.
An atomic arms race
starts with the USA.
In 1961, the Soviets
test a hydrogen bomb
setting off the largest explosion
the world has ever known.
The so-called Czar bomb destroys
everything in a radius of 35km.
It has a deterrent
effect on both sides.
I would argue that atomic weapons led
to a relatively stable balance of power.
never be or at least to heads of
government, that a nuclear war could
fought, so it must be
avoided at all costs.
And yet nuclear war threatens
in the autumn of 1962, when the Soviet Union
secretly stations atomic weapons on Cuba.
American spy planes discover
Soviet launching pads on the island.
ed. missiles be removed and
threatens a nuclear response if they're fir
chev US missiles stationed in
Turkey, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrush
backs down and removes
the missiles from Cuba.
eir own or Khrushchev were really
prepared to see the destruction of th
country in an argument
over a Caribbean island.
The great resolution for
the Cuban Missile crisis
in 62 between Kennedy and
Khrushchev was that we really
cannot use nuclear
weapons, because if we do,
then it's the end of the world.
But the explosive arms race
between East and West doesn't stop.
By 1990, the US has
21,000 nuclear warheads.
The Soviets have 33,000.
More than enough to
destroy all of humanity.
One of the Cold War's most
significant conflicts is in Afghanistan.
The Soviet Union's southern
neighbour seems to be unstable.
Islamist and anti-communist tendencies
are making the Soviet Union nervous.
The plan is to bring order and
install a Soviet friendly government.
And so in December 1979, a KGB unit
murders the Afghan president in his palace.
The Soviets appoint a
puppet leader in his place.
CLAPPING AND CHEERING
The Soviet Union's great fear was that Islamists
in Afghanistan would take over the government,
and that radical Islamism could then
leech into the southern Soviet Union
Afghanistan must at all costs,
remain in the Soviet sphere of influence.
A few days later, 80,000
heavily armed Soviet troops
march into Afghanistan
to stabilize the country.
They marched in to impose
a Sovietization of the system,
believing there was a groundswell of
popular approval for the government.
They thought the Soviet invasion
would meet with a degree of acceptance.
They were wrong.
It quickly becomes clear the Soviet intervention
has no support among the Afghan people.
The invasion soon falters.
The Afghan Mujahideen engage in
a brutal struggle with Soviet forces.
It's interesting that the Soviet Union
doesn't understand Afghanistan.
And above all, they have no idea
how to resolve the conflict politically.
They only have their military
card or rather a wrecking ball.
Unmotivated Soviet troops fail to
bring Afghanistan under their control.
The Mujahideen disappear into the mountains
and harry the Russians with guerrilla tactics.
The USA intervenes, supplying the
Mujahideen with money and weapons.
That land over there is yours.
You'll go back to it one day
because your fight will prevail and you
will have your homes and
your mosques back again.
Because your cause is
right and God is on your side.
The Americans equipped the Mujahideen
with very flexible weapons systems
that are particularly
effective in this terrain.
Stinger missiles, for example, are
ideal for bringing down Soviet helicopters.
In the process, the Americans support a
Mujahideen commander, Osama bin Laden.
Of course, the Americans say
we're giving the Soviets their Vietnam
and it works.
The Americans don't have much in common
with radical Islamists like the Mujahideen.
But the enemy of my
enemy is my friend.
The war in Afghanistan
lasts ten years.
The world's second biggest
military power is unable to win it.
In 1989, the Soviet Union pulls
out, militarily and politically humiliated.
Casualty estimates diverge.
Up to a million people
may have been killed.
7 million Afghans are displaced.
Official figures
on the Soviet side.
15,000 soldiers killed.
50,000 wounded.
with the new man at the head
of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev.
His policies of Glasnost and Perestroika,
openness and restructuring have far reaching
consequences for the
whole of the Soviet Union.
The Afghan war plays
an important role in the fall
of the Soviet Union because
it strengthens the doubts in
Soviet society, in the
different Soviet republics
that the Soviet
system can survive
Afghanistan was one factor in the fall of the
Soviet Union, but by no means the only one.
I would argue that the Soviet Union
would have collapsed even without
the war in Afghanistan,
perhaps three years later.
But the Soviet Union was forced by the West,
by NATO, by the USA, into an arms race.
And this arms race, this
economic rivalry was unsustainable.
And so the end of the Afghan war
also heralds the end of the Cold War,
but against the hopes of many,
it will not usher in a lasting peace.