Russia's War: Blood Upon the Snow (1997) s01e08 Episode Script
False Dawn
1 [Woman singing.]
[Ominous score.]
NARRATOR: The great victories of 1943 have raised the Red star to new heights.
As the year ends, the people of Moscow can afford a modest celebration.
But for many others Soviet citizens and their neighbors, still suffering under a brutal German occupation the waiting seems to be without end.
For some, without hope.
In Moscow, Joseph Stalin underlines his power with the peasant cruelty he most enjoys.
He requires the sad figure of Kalinin, the Soviet Union's nominal head of state, to read a New Year message.
[Speaking Russian.]
In government circles, it is well known that his wife is in a camp, arrested by Stalin seven years ago.
But Kalinin is Stalin's marionette, dancing for his master's amusement, nurturing his dreams.
But as the bell tolls the momentous new year of 1944, the Red Army is already giving substance to those dreams.
In the far north, new offensives launched against German positions during December and January leave little room for doubt.
The Red Army has the measure of the Wehrmacht.
And as they battle to rescue towns and villages from occupation, their objective is Leningrad, besieged for nearly 900 days through three bleak winters.
Since 1941, the extraordinary courage of the people of Leningrad has surmounted the agonies of bombardment, cold, and starvation, but at a cost of nearly two million lives.
And when the Red Army at last breaks the siege on the 19th of January, 1944, it sends a signal around the world.
This is the year of victories.
And for Stalin, the year of opportunity.
INTERPRETER: With God's aid, our sacred Russian Army has driven the fascist German Army from our holy motherland.
God help our troops and help them in their task ahead.
NARRATOR: Confidence, patriotism, grim determination now combine to galvanize the Soviet people for a final effort.
In the cities, where something like normal life returns as the threat of German air raids recedes, the rail stations hum with the throng of refugees going home to the hero city of Leningrad, home to a devastated town or village, to bury their dead.
Yet even as the Red Army pushes forward the line of liberation, striking towards the Baltic states in the north, retaking Zhytomyr in Ukraine, and encircling six German divisions at Korsun, the cause millions believe they are fighting for is being betrayed from within.
Joseph Stalin sees the liberation of new territory as no other mortal sees it.
Uppermost in his mind is the corroding fact that all these millions in the lands of Caucasia, in the Crimea, in Belorussia, and, above all, in Ukraine, have been in contact with the enemy, the foreigner, no matter that it was not their choice, no matter that the depth of the German advance was to a large extent the direct responsibility of Stalin himself.
All people who have suffered occupation are suspect, tainted.
In victory, Stalin now turns to a monstrous form of collective punishment, which he first used in the days just before the German attack.
Professor Naumov of the Committee for Victims of Political Repression.
INTERPRETER: The experimental use of this kind of operation against whole peoples first took place in the '30s.
Back in the '30s, the western frontiers were shifting all the time.
So were some of the eastern ones, mind you.
But, anyway, in the '30s, a Polish operation was carried out.
Tens of thousands of Poles from the border regions were forcibly resettled in the Irkutsk region.
And all the Koreans who had lived inside the Far Eastern frontiers were transported to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
In 1940-41, they deported tens of thousands of people from the Baltic states.
Now Stalin turns his attention to the Northern Caucasus, the home of people the Ingushi, the Balkars, and the Chechens.
They are people with their own distinctive mountain culture whose lifestyle and traditions have never fitted comfortably into the narrow concept of the Soviet state.
No doubt to many of these North Caucasian peoples, the arrival of German forces in the summer of 1942 was an opportunity to revert to their traditional pre-Soviet way of life, and undoubtedly some actively collaborated.
But with the return of the Soviet forces in 1944, the mountain peoples Ingushi, Balkars, and, above all, Chechens, are rounded up in dawn raids of new horror.
Mobile NKVD units are sent into the hills.
Whole peoples, uncomprehending of their guilt, are marked down for punitive deportation.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: Each of these actions would be carried out to coincide with some kind of state celebration Red Army Day, the 8th of March that kind of thing.
Well, on the eve of a public holiday, they would round up the men and send them to some kind of camp or holding unit.
They'd be escorted there under heavy guard.
The rest of the community the old men, women, and children would follow in different trains, with fewer guards.
The mortality rate was much higher in these second groups.
They were often transported to a different republic altogether.
For example, they might be taken to Kirghizia, Kazakhstan, and the Altai.
After they got there, it would be at least a few months, often a whole year or more before they would even start to reunite families.
Of course, the whole story is a tragedy.
NARRATOR: It is the tragedy of a small nation in the hands of a vast and ruthless state.
They're dragged from their homes, their lifestyle destroyed, leaving whole areas empty of any inhabitants.
And when German troops are driven from the Crimea in May, Stalin is convinced the Tatar people have been guilty of collaboration with the enemy.
He immediately dissolves the Muslim Autonomous Republic of the Crimean Tatars and punitively deports 400,000 people men, women, and children.
And beyond the misery of shocked and frightened people, the disregard for military needs.
This is a time when the Soviet forces need all the transport they can get Every truck they can muster to maintain the pursuit of the German Army at the front.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: If we examine all the atrocities committed by those former leaders in NKVD and the NKGB, even a fraction of what is known to us, it makes my blood run cold.
As for what they've done, I think there should be charges brought against them for all the crimes they've committed.
NARRATOR: Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of innocent refugees from the occupied territories will be transported to the Gulag after their liberation, contaminated by mere proximity to German authorities.
Yet, still, Stalin's phobias remain hidden by the fog of war.
Though his war economy is growing fast, Stalin still has need of the West.
These are America's Liberty Ships, built with mass-production methods, multiplying Allied shipping capacity.
The flow of aid to the Soviet Union remains a crucial source of supplies.
Weapons, of course, shells, and tanks.
But by 1944, Britain and America can't match the quality of Soviet tank design, and Stalin's real priorities are food to sustain his armies and trucks to deliver it in.
As long as the Allies have faith in the myth of Uncle Joe, of a leader in his people undivided, they will give all they possibly can.
Plagued by foul weather, icy water, U-boats, German bombers, the Arctic run costs the Allies dozens of ships and thousands of seamen's lives.
As they battle through to Murmansk or Archangel, how can these ordinary British and American seamen guess that Stalin fears them as carriers of forbidden ideas? They come in friendship, but Churchill has long suspected the truth "The Soviets fear our friendship," he says, "more than they fear our enmity.
" Valentina lvleva was one of those who had innocently had contact with foreigners.
INTERPRETER: I was 14 years old.
The war had already started, and the convoys started to arrive, or rather they announced that a convoy was going to arrive, and right away there was an air-raid warning, because the Germans weren't going to let that convoy through.
Of course, I was very interested to see a convoy, and I went to watch the first one.
It was near our house, which wasn't very far from the northern Dvina.
There was a tall ladder, so I climbed that ladder up to the attic, and I had a panoramic view of it all.
At first, they were maneuvering the ships in the warships that had escorted the convoy.
And, of course, we were the very first people to see a convoy.
When I was 15, I met Belrou.
He was a sub-lieutenant on the ship the Thomas Hartley.
He was 20, and we had a beautiful, sweet friendship.
He was teaching me English because I asked him to, and I was learning 10 words a day.
We began with the verb "to introduce," which is all about getting acquainted.
So just imagine how I felt when I found out he was leaving.
He told me we'd have to separate and that he's leaving forever.
Well, naturally, I told him I'd never love anybody else in my whole life.
And I also said I'd like to have his child.
Do you understand what I mean? And he said to me, "Valya.
Listen, Valya, what you are saying.
First of all, I don't want my child to be without a father.
Back home in the U.
S.
, they treat children like that very badly, and I don't ever want my child to be called a bastard.
" That's what he said to me.
"Besides," he said, "God will take care of us.
" He had strong religious beliefs.
And then the arrests began.
I was arrested in 1946 and accused of being an Anglo-American spy, though I was completely innocent.
I thought there must have been some kind of misunderstanding, that it would somehow suddenly stop.
A temporary hiccup.
Well, that temporary hiccup lasted for six whole years.
NARRATOR: Stalin has always felt himself surrounded by enemies.
And now as his ambitions inflate to match his gathering strength, his urge to oppress is given full rein.
But the struggle with Hitler's empire masks Stalin's true nature from the world.
Now as Red Army offensives strike all along the front, the world's attention is still focused on Hitler's crimes, many of them waiting to be uncovered on the roads through Belorussia and Ukraine.
Overstretched and overwhelmed, retreating German forces leave the Red Army to reclaim scorched wastelands and rescue people devastated by what they have experienced.
In the village of Markovnia in Belorussia, Valentina llkevich remembers.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: While they were driving her to the hut, children were being killed in front of their mother's eyes.
And all the time, the Germans were enjoying themselves.
This woman had five children, and one was a little toddler.
She kept him pressed to her.
I suppose she thought they could at least die together, that if they were burned alive, she could at least comfort him.
But one of the Germans sees this and makes signs to her, as if to say, "Toss this kid in the air.
I'll shoot him.
You toss him up, and I'll shoot him down.
" And she, to deny that pleasure, you see, she lifts up the child and smashes him to the ground herself.
And it was winter, so the ground was hard.
And, yes, she killed him her own little child.
I couldn't help in any way, couldn't shout out or even weep, because the enemy was all around.
I could only bite my hands when they herded people into a hut, poured petrol over it, and nailed the windows shut with boards.
I was thinking, "Who could possibly raise their hand to strike a match when it would burn so many people alive?" And those screams and moans still ring in my soul.
Even last night, I saw that very village Markovnia in my dreams.
NARRATOR: As if the stark facts are not enough to speak for themselves, survivors are filmed again and again.
INTERPRETER: There was a neighbor who came, told us that they had captured her daughter.
She didn't want to be transported away.
She begged them, "Don't take me away.
I'll sing you a song.
" But they took her, together with other children, behind the school and shot them.
NARRATOR: Across the occupied territories, evidence of the desperate daily brutality to which the war has sunk stirs deep hatred for the enemy.
The Red Army and the people are fighting for a dream of peace.
As yet, they are not asking whether it is the same dream as that of Joseph Stalin, but at least the war's end now comes one step closer.
As the Luftwaffe slides into irreversible decline, British and American bomber fleets have become colossal armadas of four-engine machines, protected by fast, long-range fighters.
It is a campaign of terror bombing which aims to destroy Hitler's empire from within.
Day and night, the raids strike major cities, but Stalin has always been openly dismissive of the Western bombing effort.
For two years, he's been demanding his allies launch a second front in France, taunting them for the delay.
The launch of Operation Overlord D-Day has been long awaited.
From June 6, 1944, Stalin finds it harder to justify his taunts, although it is true that Anglo-American troops who fight their way ashore at Normandy will still face only half the number of German divisions Hitler has committed to the Eastern Front.
But from the Normandy landings onwards, the Wehrmacht must defend the Reich against two massive armies approaching its frontiers from the west and east.
Now Zhukov initiates an ambitious plan for a massive offensive through Belorussia to the Polish border.
In an unusual nod to his Georgian ancestry, Stalin names the operation "Bagration," after the Georgian Napoleonic War general.
The massive 4-front offensive will thrust north and south of Vitebsk, with General Chernyakhovsky striking towards Minsk and Rokossovsky clearing the Pripet Marshes and driving towards Warsaw.
Massive troop concentrations back the planning, and Bagration is launched three years to the day after the Germans launch Barbarossa.
This is the defining moment in the military struggle.
After Bagration, the defeat of Hitler's armies will appear inevitable.
The Soviet Union and its allies have more men, more tanks, and more aircraft than its foe.
From Italy, France, and the Soviet borders, they press towards the Reich.
Behind the German lines, almost a million Soviet partisans wreak havoc with supply lines and communications.
They secure bridge heads across rivers so that regular troops can leapfrog natural obstacles before the Wehrmacht can turn them into lines of defense.
Minsk, capital of Belorussia.
The city has suffered the worst excesses of Nazi occupation, and now they must endure one last cataclysm, as the Wehrmacht fights for every street.
The city is liberated in early July.
No more than a few stragglers escape from Minsk to join German formations further west.
The rest are killed or captured.
And the lightning Soviet advance has taken a heavy toll in German weapons and vehicles, though the fate of Minsk itself stands as a stark reminder that the Wehrmacht still grants no easy victories.
And though its common soldiers still fight with a remarkable Germanic courage and tenacity, it is now clearly an army in decline.
In Moscow's Tverskaya Street, a parade like no others.
50,000 Germans on their way to work camps are displayed to their conquerors.
The people watch in silence.
Perhaps these vast columns of Hitler's humbled soldiery seem more human in defeat.
And when, symbolically, the street is cleaned of their passing footprint, the Moscow crowds stream as silently away while the Germans march on across Moscow's Crimea Bridge to the rail stations and the cattle cars that will take them to work camps across the Soviet Union.
Now Hitler's house of cards is crumbling.
For the Führer, 1944 is indeed the year of nemesis.
Faced with almost certain rejection in his pursuit of destiny, among the ruins of Germany's capital, Hitler finally loses the last vestiges of his fragile equilibrium and sinks into madness.
He refuses to recognize the seriousness of the year's military disasters.
He prefers horoscopes to military advice.
Despite stark evidence of impending catastrophe all around him in Berlin, he speaks only of total victory of the Thousand-Year Reich.
But if one single event is responsible for pushing Adolf Hitler beyond sanity it is the defection of the German officer class.
Now a member of one of its leading families, Count Klaus von Stauffenberg places a suitcase full of explosives in the conference hut at Hitler's Rastenburg headquarters.
The bomb explodes less than 4 meters from the Führer.
Certain that Adolf Hitler is dead, the plotters move quickly to seize control of Berlin.
But, incredibly, Hitler has survived the full force of the blast with barely visible injuries.
He is filmed at the hospital, visiting others from the conference room who were less lucky.
Proof to the German people of his extraordinary survival.
Proof in his mind that he is still destiny's instrument.
But he takes a savage revenge.
Hundreds of suspects are arrested and tortured by the Gestapo.
The trials, presided over by the notoriously rabid judge of the People's Court, Roland Freisler, are exercises in the propaganda of humiliation.
Before the court are some of the most highly respected figures in non-Nazi society Junkers.
[Shouting in German.]
Men like Adam Trott zu Solz and Count von Schulenburg, the ambassador who had, in other days, overseen the Soviet-German Pact.
[Shouting in German.]
Defendant after defendant is subjected to hysterical denunciation and then sentenced to death.
Hitler watches film of their executions.
Some are shot.
Others are guillotined or hung on meat hooks, strangled with piano wire.
The funeral of Field Marshal Rommel, the most senior officer implicated in the plot, is conducted with all the pomp and ceremony of the Third Reich.
He has been offered the choice between a certain death sentence and a state funeral with his wife left unharmed if he chooses suicide.
He has chosen to take the poison provided by the Führer's emissaries.
From the Kremlin, there is silence on the whole incident.
No dictator views an assassination attempt, even on an enemy dictator, with total equanimity.
Now, gathering momentum with the success of Bagration, the Red Army drives across the old borders of the Soviet Union into Romania into Bulgaria into Yugoslavia liberating Belgrade alongside Tito's independent partisan army.
Professor Semiryaga.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: The Balkan region had always been an important region for the great powers of Europe.
It had always been an object of political and economic interest to these countries.
So, of course, it's no surprise that before the Second World War, the Balkans preserved its importance for the warring factions as much for the Allies as for the Axis coalition.
It's well known that the British leader Churchill openly expressed the opinion that he would prefer the second front to be opened up in the Balkans.
NARRATOR: But Poland, as it has always been for Stalin, is the prize.
For the Polish people, Hitler's war has been an unrelieved nightmare.
Penned in behind the wall of the notorious Warsaw ghetto, Poland's Jewish population has been the victim of some of Nazi's ideology's most appalling racial experiments, target for its notions of ethnic cleansing.
After years of a tenuous existence inside the ghetto, survivors rose against Hitler's extermination program in 1943.
But after a month's fighting, the uprising was crushed by the S.
S.
With the utmost brutality and the ghetto cleared.
By the time the Red Army enters Poland in the summer of 1944, only a few dozen Jews remain in hiding in the capital.
And it is not only Poland's Jews who suffer.
Occupied and partitioned in 1939, Poland as an entity ceased to exist.
On its territory, Germany has established most of the notorious extermination camps where Europe's Jews, Gypsies, Russian prisoners are being efficiently gassed and burned.
Its national life continues only in its underground army and those forces fighting under the command of its exiled government in London.
Majdanek, eastern Poland, late July, 1944.
The first of the death camps is liberated, almost still operating, by the Red Army.
The full extent of Hitler's genocidal madness is now revealed to the world, and there is worse to come, as the Red Army goes on to liberate Sobibor, Treblinka, and, most terrible of all, the great killing complex at Auschwitz.
A reconnaissance paratrooper when she was captured behind German lines, Irina Kharina has survived in Auschwitz since April 1943.
Exposed to all its unique horrors, she remembers one moment above all others.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: Opposite us was Hut Number 11.
French women were being held there.
And one night, a lorry drove up, and every single one of them was forced into it and brought to the crematorium.
They knew that they were going to die.
They knew where they were being taken to.
And these doomed women, who were only a few hours from death, sang the "Marseillaise.
" They sang it loudly for the whole camp to hear, and we, locked up in our hut, could only cry.
It's something I will remember forever.
NARRATOR: As Soviet forces approached the camp, she and two friends were in the last column of Russian prisoners the S.
S.
Marched westwards.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: One night we decided to hide in a pile of hay in the barn.
In the morning, the other girls in our group began to call for us loudly by name, and that was extremely frightening, because that might have alerted the Germans to the fact that we were hiding somewhere.
Another terrifying moment was when the S.
S.
Soldiers came into the barn with guard dogs.
To us, the sound of their machine guns finishing off exhausted stragglers was as nothing in comparison to the sound of those dogs barking in that barn.
It was only years later that I discovered that dogs can't sniff people out when they're hiding in hay.
But that moment was the most frightening of my life.
So we waited till dark, left the barn, and set off to look for refuge in a peasant's house.
NARRATOR: Rescued by Soviet troops, she finds, to her horror, she is immediately taken by the NKVD back to Auschwitz, now being used as an interrogation center.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: We were interrogated about all that had happened to us, and the interrogations were very thorough because they even wanted to know what had specifically happened on a specific day.
But I have to say that Auschwitz had been full of all sorts of people.
For example, there had been some girls in Auschwitz who had collaborated with the Germans and had even betrayed us to the Gestapo when we had first arrived in Smolensk.
So I think it was quite right that we were all interrogated, but it didn't have to be quite so thorough.
It was very harrowing being interrogated every night, and the questions were always the same.
"When did this happen, and when did that happen?" What helped us a lot was the fact that there were three of us, and our evidence all coincided.
So we didn't have to make anything up because every single word of our evidence was the same.
But all the same, I just couldn't believe it when the final interrogator told me I was free to resume my studies at college.
I was convinced something else was going to befall me.
And they did actually set us free, although they didn't give us any money or clothes for our journey.
And finally, in September 1945, we got home, having hitched all the way there on good strains.
NARRATOR: As the advancing Soviet army clears the Germans from Poland's cities, the first massacres of political prisoners are discovered.
In this city, only six prisoners succeeded in hiding when the rest are shot down by their retreating guards.
But it is in the devastated city of Lublin that the most horrific prison massacre is found.
The great castle at Lublin has housed prisoners throughout the German occupation.
Now, as the Red Army enters the ruined city and Soviet units are welcomed on the streets, infantrymen break into the castle prison.
In the prison tailoring room, over 600 have been shot down.
The large proportion of women suggests they were machine-gunned while at work.
In the courtyard, many more.
Hitler as murderer.
Stalin as liberator.
It has been a familiar script and one that helps conceal Stalin's own crimes against the Polish people crimes like the killing of 20,000 Polish army officers in 1940, a massacre for which the Soviet dictator and the Soviet system have gone to great lengths to escape widespread blame.
When, in 1943, German authorities discovered and exposed over 4,000 officers' graves at Katyn Forest near Smolensk, there were few in the West who believed their claim that the NKVD was responsible.
The Western Allies, faced with Stalin's angry denials, accepted Soviet assertions of Nazi guilt despite the strength of filmed German evidence and despite horrified protests from the anti-communist Polish government exiled in London.
Stalin will never admit responsibility for Katyn.
After the war, he will hide behind the USSR's own film of the bodies made in 1947.
By then, the world will know the true Joseph Stalin and few will doubt his guilt.
But in the early summer of 1944, he can still wear the guise of Poland's and Eastern Europe's great liberator.
The first overt signal that Stalin comes not as liberator but as conqueror is seen in late July, as General Rokossovsky takes the eastern Polish city of Lublin.
Within hours of the red flag's appearance over the city, Stalin has installed a puppet communist government the Lublin Committee.
They are invited to Moscow, where they are met by Vishinsky.
Loud denunciations by nationalist Poles in London bring little response from the Allied corridors of power.
And the London Polish government is powerless to prevent this theft of its constituency.
But its cries will not long go unheeded.
Uncle Joe Stalin is about to drop his mask and show his true face to the world.
The Red Army is approaching Warsaw now the very heart of suffering in the Second World War.
On the 29th of July, Soviet Radio issues a general plea to the Polish resistance movement, the Home Army.
The carefully worded broadcast calls for active resistance to the occupying forces and gives the impression, without ever directly saying so, that the Red Army is about to storm the city.
The Home Army, though gathered for a rural campaign, answers what it sees as a clarion call from its ally in full measure.
And on the first of August, battle erupts once more on the streets of Warsaw.
At first, the rising takes the German garrison by surprise, and the insurgents seize large parts of the city.
But they need help before German reinforcements arrive.
Surely the Red Army can attack now or at least send much-needed weapons and supplies.
But the Red Army does not move from its positions just east of the city.
And Stalin, oblivious to mounting pressure from Western leaders, grimly rejects Churchill's request for the use of Soviet airfields for RAF planes dropping supplies.
Without help, the Poles are doomed.
S.
S.
Units, under General Bach-Zelewski are dispatched to Warsaw to put down the rising.
Hopelessly outgunned, the Home Army fights for every building, clings to every strongpoint, vainly awaiting salvation from the east.
The battle for the city rages all through August and into September, but gradually, inevitably, the Polish resistance movement is decimated.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: It was out of political considerations that Stalin did not want to help the uprising.
It was an uprising which was obviously in conflict with the interests of the Soviet Union and the so-called Lublin Committee of National Salvation.
But purely from a military point of view, the Warsaw insurgents were heroically and courageously fighting the Germans for the freedom of their homeland.
So in this sense, they were not our enemies but our allies.
However, from the political point of view, unfortunately, everything was the wrong way around.
But still, something could have been done if Stalin had only had the political will to do so.
NARRATOR: Stalin bows to international criticism only in September, when an increase in Soviet aid comes too late.
The last Home Army survivors surrender in early October.
By the time the Red Army finally occupies Warsaw's ruins in January 1945, 300,000 Poles had died in the city since August.
If Stalin's purpose has been to engineer the destruction of nationalist armed force in Poland, it has succeeded completely.
But events in Warsaw have set in motion a transformation of British and American attitudes towards their ally.
From now on, they will scrutinize Stalin's motives with new suspicion.
From now on, Stalin must fight yet another war this time a secret silent battle against his own allies.
It is a battle quickly joined on both sides.
British Prime Minister Churchill visits Moscow in October, and he has come to discuss the fate of Eastern Europe.
Churchill is already deeply suspicious of Stalin's postwar intentions, but he is a realist, too, and he knows that there is little that Britain or even the United States can do to stop a man whose ambitions are backed by Red Army occupation.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: Churchill's position was a most paradoxical one.
As one of the Allied leaders, he had won.
He was a winner.
But a winner with a disintegrating empire.
And as a serious and farsighted politician, he knew this.
And so the two leaders reach a pragmatic agreement.
Jotted down on a piece of scrap paper, it concedes Soviet control over Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania in return for Stalin's guarantee of nonintervention in Greek politics.
The future of Yugoslavia is left open, and Stalin refuses even to discuss Poland.
But the Polish question on which Britain went to war in 1939 will not go away.
And it dominates the next round of Stalin's secret struggle against his allies at Yalta in the Crimea in February 1945.
At Yalta, Stalin meets Roosevelt for the last time.
A sick man, close to death, the American president is determined to recruit Stalin to the war against Japan and dismisses Churchill's fear of Soviet expansionism.
Deliberately marginalizing the British leader, Stalin promises to fight Japan after Germany is beaten and is again able to deflect all attempts to solve the Polish problem.
While the conference proceeds to drafting a joint demand for Germany's unconditional surrender, the rest of Eastern Europe is hardly even discussed.
Now as Stalin takes his leave of Allied leaders, his smile is the smile of the tiger.
And as head of state, Kalinin pins on Stalin a self-awarded medal.
It is accompanied by a letter begging for his wife's release.
But she remains at forced labor.
Soviet troops are now firmly in place in several European states beyond the Soviet border in Romania, Bulgaria, and, most importantly, in Poland.
These are prizes Joseph Stalin will not forego, and there seems now little doubt that his allies, through impotence or indifference, will allow him freedom to take whatever he chooses.
[Ominous score.]
NARRATOR: The great victories of 1943 have raised the Red star to new heights.
As the year ends, the people of Moscow can afford a modest celebration.
But for many others Soviet citizens and their neighbors, still suffering under a brutal German occupation the waiting seems to be without end.
For some, without hope.
In Moscow, Joseph Stalin underlines his power with the peasant cruelty he most enjoys.
He requires the sad figure of Kalinin, the Soviet Union's nominal head of state, to read a New Year message.
[Speaking Russian.]
In government circles, it is well known that his wife is in a camp, arrested by Stalin seven years ago.
But Kalinin is Stalin's marionette, dancing for his master's amusement, nurturing his dreams.
But as the bell tolls the momentous new year of 1944, the Red Army is already giving substance to those dreams.
In the far north, new offensives launched against German positions during December and January leave little room for doubt.
The Red Army has the measure of the Wehrmacht.
And as they battle to rescue towns and villages from occupation, their objective is Leningrad, besieged for nearly 900 days through three bleak winters.
Since 1941, the extraordinary courage of the people of Leningrad has surmounted the agonies of bombardment, cold, and starvation, but at a cost of nearly two million lives.
And when the Red Army at last breaks the siege on the 19th of January, 1944, it sends a signal around the world.
This is the year of victories.
And for Stalin, the year of opportunity.
INTERPRETER: With God's aid, our sacred Russian Army has driven the fascist German Army from our holy motherland.
God help our troops and help them in their task ahead.
NARRATOR: Confidence, patriotism, grim determination now combine to galvanize the Soviet people for a final effort.
In the cities, where something like normal life returns as the threat of German air raids recedes, the rail stations hum with the throng of refugees going home to the hero city of Leningrad, home to a devastated town or village, to bury their dead.
Yet even as the Red Army pushes forward the line of liberation, striking towards the Baltic states in the north, retaking Zhytomyr in Ukraine, and encircling six German divisions at Korsun, the cause millions believe they are fighting for is being betrayed from within.
Joseph Stalin sees the liberation of new territory as no other mortal sees it.
Uppermost in his mind is the corroding fact that all these millions in the lands of Caucasia, in the Crimea, in Belorussia, and, above all, in Ukraine, have been in contact with the enemy, the foreigner, no matter that it was not their choice, no matter that the depth of the German advance was to a large extent the direct responsibility of Stalin himself.
All people who have suffered occupation are suspect, tainted.
In victory, Stalin now turns to a monstrous form of collective punishment, which he first used in the days just before the German attack.
Professor Naumov of the Committee for Victims of Political Repression.
INTERPRETER: The experimental use of this kind of operation against whole peoples first took place in the '30s.
Back in the '30s, the western frontiers were shifting all the time.
So were some of the eastern ones, mind you.
But, anyway, in the '30s, a Polish operation was carried out.
Tens of thousands of Poles from the border regions were forcibly resettled in the Irkutsk region.
And all the Koreans who had lived inside the Far Eastern frontiers were transported to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
In 1940-41, they deported tens of thousands of people from the Baltic states.
Now Stalin turns his attention to the Northern Caucasus, the home of people the Ingushi, the Balkars, and the Chechens.
They are people with their own distinctive mountain culture whose lifestyle and traditions have never fitted comfortably into the narrow concept of the Soviet state.
No doubt to many of these North Caucasian peoples, the arrival of German forces in the summer of 1942 was an opportunity to revert to their traditional pre-Soviet way of life, and undoubtedly some actively collaborated.
But with the return of the Soviet forces in 1944, the mountain peoples Ingushi, Balkars, and, above all, Chechens, are rounded up in dawn raids of new horror.
Mobile NKVD units are sent into the hills.
Whole peoples, uncomprehending of their guilt, are marked down for punitive deportation.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: Each of these actions would be carried out to coincide with some kind of state celebration Red Army Day, the 8th of March that kind of thing.
Well, on the eve of a public holiday, they would round up the men and send them to some kind of camp or holding unit.
They'd be escorted there under heavy guard.
The rest of the community the old men, women, and children would follow in different trains, with fewer guards.
The mortality rate was much higher in these second groups.
They were often transported to a different republic altogether.
For example, they might be taken to Kirghizia, Kazakhstan, and the Altai.
After they got there, it would be at least a few months, often a whole year or more before they would even start to reunite families.
Of course, the whole story is a tragedy.
NARRATOR: It is the tragedy of a small nation in the hands of a vast and ruthless state.
They're dragged from their homes, their lifestyle destroyed, leaving whole areas empty of any inhabitants.
And when German troops are driven from the Crimea in May, Stalin is convinced the Tatar people have been guilty of collaboration with the enemy.
He immediately dissolves the Muslim Autonomous Republic of the Crimean Tatars and punitively deports 400,000 people men, women, and children.
And beyond the misery of shocked and frightened people, the disregard for military needs.
This is a time when the Soviet forces need all the transport they can get Every truck they can muster to maintain the pursuit of the German Army at the front.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: If we examine all the atrocities committed by those former leaders in NKVD and the NKGB, even a fraction of what is known to us, it makes my blood run cold.
As for what they've done, I think there should be charges brought against them for all the crimes they've committed.
NARRATOR: Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of innocent refugees from the occupied territories will be transported to the Gulag after their liberation, contaminated by mere proximity to German authorities.
Yet, still, Stalin's phobias remain hidden by the fog of war.
Though his war economy is growing fast, Stalin still has need of the West.
These are America's Liberty Ships, built with mass-production methods, multiplying Allied shipping capacity.
The flow of aid to the Soviet Union remains a crucial source of supplies.
Weapons, of course, shells, and tanks.
But by 1944, Britain and America can't match the quality of Soviet tank design, and Stalin's real priorities are food to sustain his armies and trucks to deliver it in.
As long as the Allies have faith in the myth of Uncle Joe, of a leader in his people undivided, they will give all they possibly can.
Plagued by foul weather, icy water, U-boats, German bombers, the Arctic run costs the Allies dozens of ships and thousands of seamen's lives.
As they battle through to Murmansk or Archangel, how can these ordinary British and American seamen guess that Stalin fears them as carriers of forbidden ideas? They come in friendship, but Churchill has long suspected the truth "The Soviets fear our friendship," he says, "more than they fear our enmity.
" Valentina lvleva was one of those who had innocently had contact with foreigners.
INTERPRETER: I was 14 years old.
The war had already started, and the convoys started to arrive, or rather they announced that a convoy was going to arrive, and right away there was an air-raid warning, because the Germans weren't going to let that convoy through.
Of course, I was very interested to see a convoy, and I went to watch the first one.
It was near our house, which wasn't very far from the northern Dvina.
There was a tall ladder, so I climbed that ladder up to the attic, and I had a panoramic view of it all.
At first, they were maneuvering the ships in the warships that had escorted the convoy.
And, of course, we were the very first people to see a convoy.
When I was 15, I met Belrou.
He was a sub-lieutenant on the ship the Thomas Hartley.
He was 20, and we had a beautiful, sweet friendship.
He was teaching me English because I asked him to, and I was learning 10 words a day.
We began with the verb "to introduce," which is all about getting acquainted.
So just imagine how I felt when I found out he was leaving.
He told me we'd have to separate and that he's leaving forever.
Well, naturally, I told him I'd never love anybody else in my whole life.
And I also said I'd like to have his child.
Do you understand what I mean? And he said to me, "Valya.
Listen, Valya, what you are saying.
First of all, I don't want my child to be without a father.
Back home in the U.
S.
, they treat children like that very badly, and I don't ever want my child to be called a bastard.
" That's what he said to me.
"Besides," he said, "God will take care of us.
" He had strong religious beliefs.
And then the arrests began.
I was arrested in 1946 and accused of being an Anglo-American spy, though I was completely innocent.
I thought there must have been some kind of misunderstanding, that it would somehow suddenly stop.
A temporary hiccup.
Well, that temporary hiccup lasted for six whole years.
NARRATOR: Stalin has always felt himself surrounded by enemies.
And now as his ambitions inflate to match his gathering strength, his urge to oppress is given full rein.
But the struggle with Hitler's empire masks Stalin's true nature from the world.
Now as Red Army offensives strike all along the front, the world's attention is still focused on Hitler's crimes, many of them waiting to be uncovered on the roads through Belorussia and Ukraine.
Overstretched and overwhelmed, retreating German forces leave the Red Army to reclaim scorched wastelands and rescue people devastated by what they have experienced.
In the village of Markovnia in Belorussia, Valentina llkevich remembers.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: While they were driving her to the hut, children were being killed in front of their mother's eyes.
And all the time, the Germans were enjoying themselves.
This woman had five children, and one was a little toddler.
She kept him pressed to her.
I suppose she thought they could at least die together, that if they were burned alive, she could at least comfort him.
But one of the Germans sees this and makes signs to her, as if to say, "Toss this kid in the air.
I'll shoot him.
You toss him up, and I'll shoot him down.
" And she, to deny that pleasure, you see, she lifts up the child and smashes him to the ground herself.
And it was winter, so the ground was hard.
And, yes, she killed him her own little child.
I couldn't help in any way, couldn't shout out or even weep, because the enemy was all around.
I could only bite my hands when they herded people into a hut, poured petrol over it, and nailed the windows shut with boards.
I was thinking, "Who could possibly raise their hand to strike a match when it would burn so many people alive?" And those screams and moans still ring in my soul.
Even last night, I saw that very village Markovnia in my dreams.
NARRATOR: As if the stark facts are not enough to speak for themselves, survivors are filmed again and again.
INTERPRETER: There was a neighbor who came, told us that they had captured her daughter.
She didn't want to be transported away.
She begged them, "Don't take me away.
I'll sing you a song.
" But they took her, together with other children, behind the school and shot them.
NARRATOR: Across the occupied territories, evidence of the desperate daily brutality to which the war has sunk stirs deep hatred for the enemy.
The Red Army and the people are fighting for a dream of peace.
As yet, they are not asking whether it is the same dream as that of Joseph Stalin, but at least the war's end now comes one step closer.
As the Luftwaffe slides into irreversible decline, British and American bomber fleets have become colossal armadas of four-engine machines, protected by fast, long-range fighters.
It is a campaign of terror bombing which aims to destroy Hitler's empire from within.
Day and night, the raids strike major cities, but Stalin has always been openly dismissive of the Western bombing effort.
For two years, he's been demanding his allies launch a second front in France, taunting them for the delay.
The launch of Operation Overlord D-Day has been long awaited.
From June 6, 1944, Stalin finds it harder to justify his taunts, although it is true that Anglo-American troops who fight their way ashore at Normandy will still face only half the number of German divisions Hitler has committed to the Eastern Front.
But from the Normandy landings onwards, the Wehrmacht must defend the Reich against two massive armies approaching its frontiers from the west and east.
Now Zhukov initiates an ambitious plan for a massive offensive through Belorussia to the Polish border.
In an unusual nod to his Georgian ancestry, Stalin names the operation "Bagration," after the Georgian Napoleonic War general.
The massive 4-front offensive will thrust north and south of Vitebsk, with General Chernyakhovsky striking towards Minsk and Rokossovsky clearing the Pripet Marshes and driving towards Warsaw.
Massive troop concentrations back the planning, and Bagration is launched three years to the day after the Germans launch Barbarossa.
This is the defining moment in the military struggle.
After Bagration, the defeat of Hitler's armies will appear inevitable.
The Soviet Union and its allies have more men, more tanks, and more aircraft than its foe.
From Italy, France, and the Soviet borders, they press towards the Reich.
Behind the German lines, almost a million Soviet partisans wreak havoc with supply lines and communications.
They secure bridge heads across rivers so that regular troops can leapfrog natural obstacles before the Wehrmacht can turn them into lines of defense.
Minsk, capital of Belorussia.
The city has suffered the worst excesses of Nazi occupation, and now they must endure one last cataclysm, as the Wehrmacht fights for every street.
The city is liberated in early July.
No more than a few stragglers escape from Minsk to join German formations further west.
The rest are killed or captured.
And the lightning Soviet advance has taken a heavy toll in German weapons and vehicles, though the fate of Minsk itself stands as a stark reminder that the Wehrmacht still grants no easy victories.
And though its common soldiers still fight with a remarkable Germanic courage and tenacity, it is now clearly an army in decline.
In Moscow's Tverskaya Street, a parade like no others.
50,000 Germans on their way to work camps are displayed to their conquerors.
The people watch in silence.
Perhaps these vast columns of Hitler's humbled soldiery seem more human in defeat.
And when, symbolically, the street is cleaned of their passing footprint, the Moscow crowds stream as silently away while the Germans march on across Moscow's Crimea Bridge to the rail stations and the cattle cars that will take them to work camps across the Soviet Union.
Now Hitler's house of cards is crumbling.
For the Führer, 1944 is indeed the year of nemesis.
Faced with almost certain rejection in his pursuit of destiny, among the ruins of Germany's capital, Hitler finally loses the last vestiges of his fragile equilibrium and sinks into madness.
He refuses to recognize the seriousness of the year's military disasters.
He prefers horoscopes to military advice.
Despite stark evidence of impending catastrophe all around him in Berlin, he speaks only of total victory of the Thousand-Year Reich.
But if one single event is responsible for pushing Adolf Hitler beyond sanity it is the defection of the German officer class.
Now a member of one of its leading families, Count Klaus von Stauffenberg places a suitcase full of explosives in the conference hut at Hitler's Rastenburg headquarters.
The bomb explodes less than 4 meters from the Führer.
Certain that Adolf Hitler is dead, the plotters move quickly to seize control of Berlin.
But, incredibly, Hitler has survived the full force of the blast with barely visible injuries.
He is filmed at the hospital, visiting others from the conference room who were less lucky.
Proof to the German people of his extraordinary survival.
Proof in his mind that he is still destiny's instrument.
But he takes a savage revenge.
Hundreds of suspects are arrested and tortured by the Gestapo.
The trials, presided over by the notoriously rabid judge of the People's Court, Roland Freisler, are exercises in the propaganda of humiliation.
Before the court are some of the most highly respected figures in non-Nazi society Junkers.
[Shouting in German.]
Men like Adam Trott zu Solz and Count von Schulenburg, the ambassador who had, in other days, overseen the Soviet-German Pact.
[Shouting in German.]
Defendant after defendant is subjected to hysterical denunciation and then sentenced to death.
Hitler watches film of their executions.
Some are shot.
Others are guillotined or hung on meat hooks, strangled with piano wire.
The funeral of Field Marshal Rommel, the most senior officer implicated in the plot, is conducted with all the pomp and ceremony of the Third Reich.
He has been offered the choice between a certain death sentence and a state funeral with his wife left unharmed if he chooses suicide.
He has chosen to take the poison provided by the Führer's emissaries.
From the Kremlin, there is silence on the whole incident.
No dictator views an assassination attempt, even on an enemy dictator, with total equanimity.
Now, gathering momentum with the success of Bagration, the Red Army drives across the old borders of the Soviet Union into Romania into Bulgaria into Yugoslavia liberating Belgrade alongside Tito's independent partisan army.
Professor Semiryaga.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: The Balkan region had always been an important region for the great powers of Europe.
It had always been an object of political and economic interest to these countries.
So, of course, it's no surprise that before the Second World War, the Balkans preserved its importance for the warring factions as much for the Allies as for the Axis coalition.
It's well known that the British leader Churchill openly expressed the opinion that he would prefer the second front to be opened up in the Balkans.
NARRATOR: But Poland, as it has always been for Stalin, is the prize.
For the Polish people, Hitler's war has been an unrelieved nightmare.
Penned in behind the wall of the notorious Warsaw ghetto, Poland's Jewish population has been the victim of some of Nazi's ideology's most appalling racial experiments, target for its notions of ethnic cleansing.
After years of a tenuous existence inside the ghetto, survivors rose against Hitler's extermination program in 1943.
But after a month's fighting, the uprising was crushed by the S.
S.
With the utmost brutality and the ghetto cleared.
By the time the Red Army enters Poland in the summer of 1944, only a few dozen Jews remain in hiding in the capital.
And it is not only Poland's Jews who suffer.
Occupied and partitioned in 1939, Poland as an entity ceased to exist.
On its territory, Germany has established most of the notorious extermination camps where Europe's Jews, Gypsies, Russian prisoners are being efficiently gassed and burned.
Its national life continues only in its underground army and those forces fighting under the command of its exiled government in London.
Majdanek, eastern Poland, late July, 1944.
The first of the death camps is liberated, almost still operating, by the Red Army.
The full extent of Hitler's genocidal madness is now revealed to the world, and there is worse to come, as the Red Army goes on to liberate Sobibor, Treblinka, and, most terrible of all, the great killing complex at Auschwitz.
A reconnaissance paratrooper when she was captured behind German lines, Irina Kharina has survived in Auschwitz since April 1943.
Exposed to all its unique horrors, she remembers one moment above all others.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: Opposite us was Hut Number 11.
French women were being held there.
And one night, a lorry drove up, and every single one of them was forced into it and brought to the crematorium.
They knew that they were going to die.
They knew where they were being taken to.
And these doomed women, who were only a few hours from death, sang the "Marseillaise.
" They sang it loudly for the whole camp to hear, and we, locked up in our hut, could only cry.
It's something I will remember forever.
NARRATOR: As Soviet forces approached the camp, she and two friends were in the last column of Russian prisoners the S.
S.
Marched westwards.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: One night we decided to hide in a pile of hay in the barn.
In the morning, the other girls in our group began to call for us loudly by name, and that was extremely frightening, because that might have alerted the Germans to the fact that we were hiding somewhere.
Another terrifying moment was when the S.
S.
Soldiers came into the barn with guard dogs.
To us, the sound of their machine guns finishing off exhausted stragglers was as nothing in comparison to the sound of those dogs barking in that barn.
It was only years later that I discovered that dogs can't sniff people out when they're hiding in hay.
But that moment was the most frightening of my life.
So we waited till dark, left the barn, and set off to look for refuge in a peasant's house.
NARRATOR: Rescued by Soviet troops, she finds, to her horror, she is immediately taken by the NKVD back to Auschwitz, now being used as an interrogation center.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: We were interrogated about all that had happened to us, and the interrogations were very thorough because they even wanted to know what had specifically happened on a specific day.
But I have to say that Auschwitz had been full of all sorts of people.
For example, there had been some girls in Auschwitz who had collaborated with the Germans and had even betrayed us to the Gestapo when we had first arrived in Smolensk.
So I think it was quite right that we were all interrogated, but it didn't have to be quite so thorough.
It was very harrowing being interrogated every night, and the questions were always the same.
"When did this happen, and when did that happen?" What helped us a lot was the fact that there were three of us, and our evidence all coincided.
So we didn't have to make anything up because every single word of our evidence was the same.
But all the same, I just couldn't believe it when the final interrogator told me I was free to resume my studies at college.
I was convinced something else was going to befall me.
And they did actually set us free, although they didn't give us any money or clothes for our journey.
And finally, in September 1945, we got home, having hitched all the way there on good strains.
NARRATOR: As the advancing Soviet army clears the Germans from Poland's cities, the first massacres of political prisoners are discovered.
In this city, only six prisoners succeeded in hiding when the rest are shot down by their retreating guards.
But it is in the devastated city of Lublin that the most horrific prison massacre is found.
The great castle at Lublin has housed prisoners throughout the German occupation.
Now, as the Red Army enters the ruined city and Soviet units are welcomed on the streets, infantrymen break into the castle prison.
In the prison tailoring room, over 600 have been shot down.
The large proportion of women suggests they were machine-gunned while at work.
In the courtyard, many more.
Hitler as murderer.
Stalin as liberator.
It has been a familiar script and one that helps conceal Stalin's own crimes against the Polish people crimes like the killing of 20,000 Polish army officers in 1940, a massacre for which the Soviet dictator and the Soviet system have gone to great lengths to escape widespread blame.
When, in 1943, German authorities discovered and exposed over 4,000 officers' graves at Katyn Forest near Smolensk, there were few in the West who believed their claim that the NKVD was responsible.
The Western Allies, faced with Stalin's angry denials, accepted Soviet assertions of Nazi guilt despite the strength of filmed German evidence and despite horrified protests from the anti-communist Polish government exiled in London.
Stalin will never admit responsibility for Katyn.
After the war, he will hide behind the USSR's own film of the bodies made in 1947.
By then, the world will know the true Joseph Stalin and few will doubt his guilt.
But in the early summer of 1944, he can still wear the guise of Poland's and Eastern Europe's great liberator.
The first overt signal that Stalin comes not as liberator but as conqueror is seen in late July, as General Rokossovsky takes the eastern Polish city of Lublin.
Within hours of the red flag's appearance over the city, Stalin has installed a puppet communist government the Lublin Committee.
They are invited to Moscow, where they are met by Vishinsky.
Loud denunciations by nationalist Poles in London bring little response from the Allied corridors of power.
And the London Polish government is powerless to prevent this theft of its constituency.
But its cries will not long go unheeded.
Uncle Joe Stalin is about to drop his mask and show his true face to the world.
The Red Army is approaching Warsaw now the very heart of suffering in the Second World War.
On the 29th of July, Soviet Radio issues a general plea to the Polish resistance movement, the Home Army.
The carefully worded broadcast calls for active resistance to the occupying forces and gives the impression, without ever directly saying so, that the Red Army is about to storm the city.
The Home Army, though gathered for a rural campaign, answers what it sees as a clarion call from its ally in full measure.
And on the first of August, battle erupts once more on the streets of Warsaw.
At first, the rising takes the German garrison by surprise, and the insurgents seize large parts of the city.
But they need help before German reinforcements arrive.
Surely the Red Army can attack now or at least send much-needed weapons and supplies.
But the Red Army does not move from its positions just east of the city.
And Stalin, oblivious to mounting pressure from Western leaders, grimly rejects Churchill's request for the use of Soviet airfields for RAF planes dropping supplies.
Without help, the Poles are doomed.
S.
S.
Units, under General Bach-Zelewski are dispatched to Warsaw to put down the rising.
Hopelessly outgunned, the Home Army fights for every building, clings to every strongpoint, vainly awaiting salvation from the east.
The battle for the city rages all through August and into September, but gradually, inevitably, the Polish resistance movement is decimated.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: It was out of political considerations that Stalin did not want to help the uprising.
It was an uprising which was obviously in conflict with the interests of the Soviet Union and the so-called Lublin Committee of National Salvation.
But purely from a military point of view, the Warsaw insurgents were heroically and courageously fighting the Germans for the freedom of their homeland.
So in this sense, they were not our enemies but our allies.
However, from the political point of view, unfortunately, everything was the wrong way around.
But still, something could have been done if Stalin had only had the political will to do so.
NARRATOR: Stalin bows to international criticism only in September, when an increase in Soviet aid comes too late.
The last Home Army survivors surrender in early October.
By the time the Red Army finally occupies Warsaw's ruins in January 1945, 300,000 Poles had died in the city since August.
If Stalin's purpose has been to engineer the destruction of nationalist armed force in Poland, it has succeeded completely.
But events in Warsaw have set in motion a transformation of British and American attitudes towards their ally.
From now on, they will scrutinize Stalin's motives with new suspicion.
From now on, Stalin must fight yet another war this time a secret silent battle against his own allies.
It is a battle quickly joined on both sides.
British Prime Minister Churchill visits Moscow in October, and he has come to discuss the fate of Eastern Europe.
Churchill is already deeply suspicious of Stalin's postwar intentions, but he is a realist, too, and he knows that there is little that Britain or even the United States can do to stop a man whose ambitions are backed by Red Army occupation.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: Churchill's position was a most paradoxical one.
As one of the Allied leaders, he had won.
He was a winner.
But a winner with a disintegrating empire.
And as a serious and farsighted politician, he knew this.
And so the two leaders reach a pragmatic agreement.
Jotted down on a piece of scrap paper, it concedes Soviet control over Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania in return for Stalin's guarantee of nonintervention in Greek politics.
The future of Yugoslavia is left open, and Stalin refuses even to discuss Poland.
But the Polish question on which Britain went to war in 1939 will not go away.
And it dominates the next round of Stalin's secret struggle against his allies at Yalta in the Crimea in February 1945.
At Yalta, Stalin meets Roosevelt for the last time.
A sick man, close to death, the American president is determined to recruit Stalin to the war against Japan and dismisses Churchill's fear of Soviet expansionism.
Deliberately marginalizing the British leader, Stalin promises to fight Japan after Germany is beaten and is again able to deflect all attempts to solve the Polish problem.
While the conference proceeds to drafting a joint demand for Germany's unconditional surrender, the rest of Eastern Europe is hardly even discussed.
Now as Stalin takes his leave of Allied leaders, his smile is the smile of the tiger.
And as head of state, Kalinin pins on Stalin a self-awarded medal.
It is accompanied by a letter begging for his wife's release.
But she remains at forced labor.
Soviet troops are now firmly in place in several European states beyond the Soviet border in Romania, Bulgaria, and, most importantly, in Poland.
These are prizes Joseph Stalin will not forego, and there seems now little doubt that his allies, through impotence or indifference, will allow him freedom to take whatever he chooses.