Russia's War: Blood Upon the Snow (1997) s01e10 Episode Script
The Cult of Personality
[Woman singing.]
[Ominous music.]
NARRATOR: Hitler is dead, Germany utterly defeated.
[Choir sings.]
As Soviet veterans officers and men take the long road home, memories of prewar days are purged by the magnitude of victory.
"Slava"glory.
"Glory to Stalin," the banner proclaims.
Stalin's omnipotence is accepted, applauded, celebrated, merged with the victory of the people and army in a great parade a gigantic display of military and political power.
The cult of personality is born.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: He was not just a cunning man.
I think there isn't a single Shakespearean villain who even comes close to him in terms of guile and the organization of Machiavellian deeds.
NARRATOR: His road to power has been a bloody one.
He has murderously trampled opposition wherever it might arise inventing and exploiting a system of forced labor which engulfs millions.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: In my opinion, he was the greatest czar in the history of Russia, if one can use the word "czar.
" And Stalin considered himself a czar.
It's only natural.
At the end of the day, it doesn't matter what title he gave himself or what title other people put on him.
The fact still remains that he was the greatest czar this country has ever known.
NARRATOR: But today nobody approaches him in the Soviet people's affections except perhaps Georgy Zhukov, the military architect of victory who now leads the parade.
Stalin does not appreciate rivals for his people's regard, but Zhukov is too popular to dismiss.
Instead, his reputation will be allowed to wither, his talents buried in a distant posting.
[Music and shots.]
It will be some time before the term "superpower" is coined.
But on June 24th, 1945, these marching columns publicly present the Soviet Union's claim to military predominance.
The climax of the parade resounds with symbolism.
A battalion of heroes of the Soviet Union hurl the banners of the defeated enemy at Stalin's feet.
These days and weeks following the victory over Germany have a character all their own.
It is a time when far-reaching options can be discussed.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: At one of the meetings after the war, some of our generals suggested that we just keep our tanks rolling to the English Channel, Marshal Budenny, one of the most zealous proponents of this idea.
But Stalin interrupted him rudely and said, "And who would feed them?" By "them," he meant the Western Europeans.
Nevertheless, in the east, in the Magadan area, there was an airborne army, stationed ready at any moment to attack Alaska, and if Comrade Stalin so desired, so they could have moved towards New York or Washington.
[Missiles fire.]
NARRATOR: But, first, Stalin turns east.
In fulfillment of the Soviet Union's obligation to its allies, Stalin is to declare war on Japan.
He would not be Joseph Stalin without a concealed agenda.
He plans a landing on the island of Hokkaido and annexation or political control of almost one-third of the national area of Japan.
He is deterred by the flight of a lone aircraft the Enola Gay and the bomb it carries.
The devastation at Hiroshima and, a few days later, at Nagasaki, leaves the world aghast and generals with the realization that a new military order has come into being.
On the day the Nagasaki bomb is dropped, Stalin formally declares war on Japan.
His forces strike into Manchuria and Korea, where the Japanese army north of the 38th parallel will surrender to the Soviet commander.
But the landing on Hokkaido never takes place.
Until he acquires his own bomb, Stalin must restrain any further imperial ambitions.
And it is time to turn his attention to the state of the nation the condition of the Soviet Union after four years of war.
Belorussia, Ukraine, and western parts of Russia lie in ruins.
2,000 towns and thousands upon thousands of villages are devastated.
Over 25 million people without real homes.
For millions, life takes on the ring of prehistory.
Hovels and dugouts provide shelter.
Plows are hauled by women and old men.
But amongst the abandoned impedimenta of the German armies, at home, Soviet citizens and, above all, women begin the long fight back.
Perhaps again, as he did in 1941, Stalin misjudges the spirit of his people.
They have concluded a great war, avid for change, eager to work for the future, certain that Stalin will bring a new life to them.
But Stalin understands only compulsion.
To be late for work incurs a one-year sentence to forced labor, and there is a frightening arbitrary quality, too, in the punishments awarded.
The fate of Ukrainian girls returning from German forced labor during the war is recalled by Professor Semiryaga.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: And I know for a fact that millions of Ukrainian girls who wanted to go home were sent straight to the mines in the Donbass region as a punishment for being in Germany and working for the enemy.
After two years, when the mines were operating normally and when the men had come back from the army after demobilization, only then were the girls finally released to go home.
Can you believe that? Women sent to the mines? NARRATOR: But on thousands of work sites like these throughout the country, people come voluntarily to perform the harshest labor.
Massive efforts are put into rebuilding what the Germans have destroyed.
But as reconstruction gets under way, the credit will all go to the Party and to Stalin.
In Moscow, Stalin is the spider at the center of the web.
His correspondence file carries reports from Malenkov and Beria about events in all parts of the vast country.
No item is too trivial for his attention traffic violations by children of ministers, details of the illicit distillation of vodka.
It is in this file that a document sets the term for the return of German prisoners of war at January 1st, 1949, although it will be another five years before all surviving German prisoners are returned.
The labor of the over one million German prisoners in Soviet hands is beyond and apart from the Gulag system.
By comparison with Soviet prisoners within the Gulag, their life is modestly privileged.
They wear their own uniforms, are commanded by their own officers, and are allowed to write letters home.
Acutely conscious of how his own people can be tainted by foreign contact, perhaps Stalin feels that these Germans, when they finally return to Germany, will spread the word.
Willing Germans are put through a period of Communist indoctrination.
Some no doubt are genuinely convinced.
For others, it is more the attraction of better living conditions than of Marxist teachings.
It is as politic now for them to proclaim their loyalty to Stalin as it had been a few years earlier to obey Adolf Hitler.
But for those Germans judged guilty of war crimes and for Soviet citizens condemned as traitors, there is no mercy.
The last public execution in Russia took place in the 18th century.
Now the spectacle is revived in town squares in the western Soviet Union.
Sometimes, to the bereaved, it provides some satisfaction.
To everybody present, it provides a warning.
In the cities, even as the prewar terror returns, there is an air of normality, despite the knowledge that NKVD informers are active in every public place.
But the maintenance of this veneer of normality is necessary for many people to preserve their sense of human dignity.
People like Olga Simakova, who show in prison that indomitable spirit which sustained so many during the war.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: We were all young, and there was a group of us at our college.
We were all studying at the teacher-training college, and there was one guy in our class who always seemed to be hanging around with us.
He didn't seem to have any other friends at all.
We used to tell jokes and talk about all sorts of things.
Well, it happened.
We never even suspected that there could be anyone who could stoop so low as to inform on us.
So they started watching us.
We got to know some French pilots.
They were in a squadron called Normandie, who were based here in Russia in Orel, and I fell in love with a captain.
Well, we all had boyfriends at the time French, Americans, British good lads, all of them.
I was 23 at the time.
I was arrested at home.
They came for me at night.
One of them was in civilian clothing, and the other was a major.
We only had two rooms, and they came into the room where I used to sleep.
They didn't even give me a chance to get changed.
So I got up from my bed, and they were still looking at me.
So I asked them to turn away.
"We aren't allowed to do that," they answered.
"Well, I'm still a woman, aren't I? What do you mean, you're not allowed? That you don't have the right?" I asked.
"You don't have the right to stare at me while I'm changing.
" I didn't understand then that this was all part of the process.
We were all registered and processed by men, just to humiliate us, to take away our human dignity, you see.
We were all processed by men.
They shaved us all over, stripped us down naked.
My most terrible recollections are of Krasnaya Presnya prison, where they kept us in the same cells as the most hardened criminals.
They would keep up to 100 people in one cell without anything not even plank beds.
We slept on the floor.
And very soon, we were covered in lice.
So I kicked up a row.
I was screaming that I wanted to speak to the prison chief, that I would not resign myself to these conditions, and that they had no right to keep us political prisoners in the same cells as hardened criminals.
And this guard said to me, "Get away from the door!" And I said, "How dare you speak to me like that!" And I lost my temper and gave the door an almighty kick.
Well, believe it or not, the door wasn't even locked.
And you know how heavy those iron-plated prison doors are.
Well, this one hit the guard right here.
He burst into the cell, covered in blood, and then I became really frightened.
He had a pair of those heavy, hobnail boots on, and he started kicking me all over.
I was in complete shock.
There wasn't an inch of my body that hadn't been kicked.
So they took me to a doctor, and the doctor examined me and asked who had done this to me.
When I told him that it was a prison guard, he immediately told me not to tell a soul.
And I replied, "You mean to tell me that after they have nearly beaten me to death, you want me to keep my mouth shut?" So they put us all into these cattle carriages, so effectively we had been sent to be exterminated.
It was more like a torture than a railway journey.
When we arrived at Vorkuta, the cold and frost was terrible, and we were in light summer boots and coats.
Then, I was shifted from one camp to another for almost 10 years.
Some places were better than others.
We did everything with our bare hands loading, unloading, constructing roads.
The mosquitos and black fly would eat us alive.
And the guards would taunt and do whatever they liked with us.
Many people died.
There was terrible malnutrition.
They would just fall down and die where they lay.
The conditions were appalling.
We were not treated like human beings there.
To them, we were just cattle.
[Cheers and applause.]
NARRATOR: But the screams from the Gulag are not always drowned by applause for Joseph Stalin.
The Baltic states, devastated by war, are forcibly joined by Stalin to his empire.
Commissars arrive to introduce Soviet reality.
Land is expropriated and goods commandeered.
Weapons acquired from both German and Soviets are turned by partisan groups against the new occupying army.
But these are small peoples no match for the Soviet forces ranged against them.
In this region where the terrain is not favorable to partisan warfare, the nationalists are unable to resist the NKVD troops for long.
So the peoples of the Baltic states join so many others in Stalin's dance of death.
[Music plays.]
One of the numerous reports of those days.
It records the exile to timber enterprises in Siberia of 300 Lithuanian families accused of anti-Soviet underground activities.
Many thousands more will follow them into forced labor in the Far East as the revolts are suppressed.
There is also unrest in the western Ukraine.
A Ukrainian NKVD report about the operations against nationalist forces.
In one month alone, over 2,000 people are killed and over 3,000 arrested.
For many long years to come, these camps will become filled with Ukrainian nationalists who carry on the struggle in the forests of the western Ukraine with the forces of the Communist regime.
This bitter, protracted struggle by the Ukrainian nationalists' insurgency army against Stalin's regime is brutally suppressed.
[Music plays.]
Only Stalin will decide what national characteristics will remain only folk dances or songs.
[Singing in Ukrainian.]
But the only songs that were allowed were propaganda songs, which painted the people's lives in the most positive light.
[Singing in Ukrainian.]
Like the words of this song, urging the people, "Good health and live prosperously in this prosperous land.
" But the people themselves knew in what conditions they were living.
[Singing in Ukrainian.]
In these first postwar summers, Soviet reconstruction has the weather to fight, too.
In Ukraine and other fertile, grain-growing areas of southern Russia, the year 1946 brings first drought, then crop failure.
There are no reserves.
In the high summer of that year, famine once again visits the whole country.
Throughout the country, millions of children are at risk.
Many thousands of babies die before their first birthday.
It is a further cross for the already overburdened peasantry to bear.
Nikolai Minushkin was a peasant farmer during those days.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: Life wasn't at all easy.
They made us work a lot, and there was very little food.
Well, you've got to eat, so we had to get it where we could and eat whatever we could find.
Conditions were such that you had to steal from the collective farm or somewhere else to survive.
If you got away with it, you were lucky.
But if you were caught, then it's straight to the prison with you.
NARRATOR: They worked on the land they loved, as their ancestors had worked before them.
They had the right to work but no other rights, above all, no rights to the fruits of their labors.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: One day, one of the women went to pick mushrooms with her young son.
Well, on the way to the forest, she started just casually picking one or two ears of wheat or rye in the field.
Well, she was spotted by the guard and was immediately sentenced to five or six years in prison.
How many ears could she have picked? It couldn't have been more than one or two.
It's not as if she could have picked a bushel of it.
Can you believe it? You'd have been arrested even for one ear of grain if they saw you.
NARRATOR: At the top was Stalin.
Below him, a hierarchy of mini Stalins the local bosses who supervised the peasants.
Their function to deliver the peasants' crop to the state.
Targets are increased every year, and any boss failing to reach the new targets will be considered an enemy of the people and mysteriously disappear.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: Well, the authorities are the authorities.
They had all the privileges.
They were provided for.
They were entitled to 16 kilos of flour.
They used to get everything brought and given to them.
The chairman of the village Soviet, the Party secretary, the teacher we used to call them the hogs the hogs were given everything flour, sugar, kerosene.
And us ordinary collective farmers, what did we get? Well, a lot of man-hours in the field, for a start.
But that was about all we got.
Apart from that, absolutely nothing else.
We'd been working the whole year, and then they would come and take everything.
Oats, wheat, rye, everything went.
The granaries were left completely empty.
NARRATOR: To feed the illusion of peace, prosperity, and plenty, the workers are filmed taking their produce to Moscow for a festival.
This is not gesture made of their own free will.
They did not have internal passports, and without papers, it is impossible to leave their villages.
They are chained to the land.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: We were very frightened all the time.
You might be sitting with me with a glass or two, and you might let slip something about the farm leadership or the government or about Stalin.
By the time you got back home, they'd already be waiting for you.
Well, you would get back home and, sure enough, there they'd be, saying, "Right, come along, you.
" Then, off we'd go right away to the carriage, to the cattle truck, under lock and key, with one guard in one corner and the other one in the other corner.
And off you go.
Where to? Well, you'd know soon enough when you got there.
Well, I don't think anyone would want the life I've had.
My youth is over, and I can't say I've seen anything good in this world.
I've been a slave all my life, you know.
NARRATOR: Stalin, the provider of spectacle.
Stalin, the showman of genius, the illusionist of conviction.
And the everyday intensity of the illusion is now changing the way people think, creating two types of reality that depicted by the state and a different, everyday reality what people see and know around them.
Truth and falsehood become inextricably mixed.
Nothing is more characteristic of this savage world of make-believe than historian Galina lvanova's strange story of certain border operations carried out by the NKVD.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: I must point out that these places are completely documented.
Also, there are a lot of eyewitnesses to the existence of these fictitious border posts all along the Soviet border.
The lengths that the NKVD went to were completely unprecedented.
They were inundated with false cases and were getting increasingly criticized by the judiciary for the flimsiness of their evidence.
So a whole fictitious border complex would be created with a bogus Soviet border outpost on one side and on the other, a bogus Manchurian border picket, complete with bogus Chinese border guards played by Soviet convicts of Chinese origin.
And all this was built on our Soviet territory.
Then, they would take a Soviet citizen under interrogation in prison and give him a choice.
Either you spy for us, or we'll send you to the Gulag.
Naturally, when faced with this choice, the majority of these poor fellows chose the former.
Well, as soon as these unwilling spies crossed this fictitious border, these bogus Chinese border guards would be waiting for them, and the beatings and torture would begin.
They would try to beat information about the Soviet Union out of them.
So, eventually, this poor person would agree to work as a double agent, signing the necessary incriminating documents to that effect.
And on their return, they would immediately go and report what had happened to the NKVD, saying, "I was captured by the Chinese intelligence service and confessed everything to them.
You can do whatever you like with me.
" The best that they could hope for was 25 years in the camps.
But for most, it was the firing squad.
NARRATOR: Voting procedures are diligently carried out, but they can mean nothing because the results are preordained.
An absurd ritual has become a political system.
And it is not only the Soviet people on whom Stalin inflicts his own image of reality.
To be among his closest associates is to live the life of a schizophrenic.
Foreign Minister Molotov, his wife under arrest.
One of Stalin's most long-serving cronies, Marshal Voroshilov, will be accused by Stalin of spying for the British.
Kaganovich his brother arrested and shot.
In Stalin's own family, the devastation is almost literally beyond belief.
Anna Alliluyeva, Stalin's wife's sister, mistakenly wrote a book of memoirs and received a 10-year prison sentence.
Redens, her husband, is shot.
The wife of Stalin's son Yakov is arrested.
Kapler, his daughter's first love, is sent to forced labor.
Neither family ties nor the flattery of the great diverts him from plundering the liberty of his countrymen, sacrificing their lives.
Desperate to keep Stalin's displeasure at bay, the scientific and artistic establishment sign an adulatory address to the leader.
Shostakovich signs and all composers and leading members of the artistic world.
But though Stalin needs adulation, it will not protect the intelligentsia in these early postwar days from a denunciation, a hint, a word in Stalin's ear.
It is a witch hunt conducted by Zhdanov and Beria.
It aims to reinforce that supervision of press and radio which is a characteristic of the regime that excising of any wider Western influence from Soviet life.
When the great poet Akhmatova is condemned, it is for her sensitivity to Western influence.
She is arraigned as part nun, part harlot.
With Zoshchenko, she is one of the star victims of Zhdanov's purge.
Figures from the world of entertainment are taken, some to the most notorious prison in Moscow Butyrskaya, normally reserved for the most dangerous criminals.
[Singing in Russian.]
The popular singer Lidia Ruslanova, whose songs were played from dawn to dusk across the Soviet Union, is sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment.
It is like arresting a Vera Lynn, a Piaf, an Ella Fitzgerald.
[Singing in Russian.]
And Zoya Fyodorova, once the dictator's favorite actress, winner of the coveted Stalin Award.
But, in 1947, she falls out of favor and receives a 25-year prison sentence for falling in love with an American.
When the film director Eisenstein shows the second part of his film lvan the Terrible, Stalin recognizes himself in the portrait of a bloody and callous tyrant.
He makes his reaction plain.
Only a fatal heart attack saves Eisenstein from Stalin's wrath.
In this world, the prison is, more than a threat, a symbol.
For thousands in the Zhdanov years and after, it is the first step on the road to Stalin's reality.
In the world outside the Soviet Union, Winston Churchill makes a speech at Fulton, USA.
Here he first uses the term "Iron Curtain.
" "An Iron Curtain," he proclaims, "has descended between Stettin, on the Baltic, and Trieste, on the Adriatic.
" If not the birth, it is the public christening of the Cold War.
Stalin responds.
He makes one of his utterly unexpected telephone calls.
They are, to some men, the most frightening moments in their life.
The cartoonist Yefimov was working on a cartoon of Eisenhower.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: All of a sudden, I got this phone call, and this voice announced, "Comrade Stalin will now speak with you.
" Well, I was immediately out of my chair, almost standing to attention.
He would never greet or say good-bye to anyone.
He'd always get straight down to business.
So I heard this slight cough and then, "You over there! Now, you're drawing a cartoon of someone.
Do you know who I'm talking about?" "Yes, Comrade Stalin.
" "Well, this person has to be shown armed to his teeth tanks, planes, guns, the lot.
Do you understand?" "Yes, I understand, Comrade Stalin.
" Well, in short, I managed to get it done with just minutes to spare and even managed to write a note to the effect that, "As far as the cartoon itself is concerned, everything is ready, but the caption is really the responsibility of Comrade Stalin.
" And, first, he wrote the caption in red pencil.
"Eisenhower is on the defensive.
" Then, probably, his pencil broke, because there's only half a word here.
Then he wrote in black pencil, "Alaska, Canada, the North Pole," and then wrote, "This is the place where the threat to American liberty is coming from.
" It was all written in his handwriting.
It was, I believe, a rather quaint way of declaring the Cold War.
Quite frankly, I was within a hairsbreadth of death because if I hadn't fulfilled my task to Comrade Stalin's liking, then he, as was his wont, would have wasted little time in having me investigated, and I'm sure our NKVD friends in the Lubyanka would have had little difficulty in proving that I had been deliberately not doing my job properly on the orders of the CIA or something like that.
NARRATOR: But for Stalin, there can be no Cold War on equal terms until atomic parity is achieved.
The result on the 25th of September, 1949, is a portentous announcement from Moscow.
The news agency TASS announces the successful testing of the first Soviet atomic bomb.
It is achieved by Russian scientists already far advanced towards producing the A-bomb, supported by Soviet intelligence agents in the United States and Britain.
The Soviet bomb is a powerful, if not yet a highly sophisticated, weapon, but other tests follow, and the West knows that the Soviet Union has definitely entered the nuclear age.
It is a present for Joseph Stalin's 70th birthday a birthday celebrated on a gigantic scale.
[Band music plays.]
A new figure is present at Stalin's side during the celebrations in December, 1949.
Only two months earlier, Mao Tse-tung has led his Communist army to victory.
He is now the unchallenged leader of the new People's Republic of China.
It is potentially a vast access of power to the Communist World.
But as Stalin watches the massive birthday displays arranged in his honor, he has no way of knowing how independent a force China will be.
During the celebrations, Mao and Kim II Sung of North Korea press Stalin to endorse a North Korean attack on the south.
With expansion westward blocked by the formation of NATO, Stalin cautiously agrees.
Within six months, American pilots are in aerial combat with Russian planes over Korea.
To Stalin's surprise, the U.
S.
Has reacted rapidly and under the banner of the United Nations.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: In one of his cables to Mao Tse-tung, Stalin stated, "A prolonged war will be profitable for us.
I think we should let it last for another two or three years.
It is true that the Koreans will suffer a lot as a result, but they are doing it for the world proletariat revolution, because the longer we can drag out the war, the more exhausted the Americans will become.
" But he was quickly forced into negotiations when there was talk of using nuclear weapons.
We had only a few nuclear bombs, and they were nothing like as powerful as those available to the Americans, and so ended this infamous war.
NARRATOR: At the 19th Party Congress, he delivers a derisive lecture on the nature of Western liberties.
It is impossible to know whether he recognizes in it an accurate description of the state he himself has built.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: Their so-called personal freedom is nonexistent.
Human rights are granted only to those with capital.
Everyone else in their society is just considered as raw human material.
All rights are reserved for the exploiting minority, and civil rights are denied to the exploited majority.
The banner of bourgeois democratic liberties has been thrown out of the window.
It is for us, the true representatives of humane democratic parties, to pick this banner up and carry it on further.
If you want the majority of the people to be gathered around you, there is no one else who we can turn to, to pick it up.
NARRATOR: Stalin's true state of mind in these days will perhaps now never be known.
Yellow-eyed and watchful, Stalin can turn his terrible suspicions against anyone, however senior, however impressive their loyalty in the past.
At a party plenary session, Professor Volkogonov recounts INTERPRETER: Stalin pounced on Voroshilov, Mikoyan, and Molotov, accusing them of being British spies.
It was, of course, beyond any normal kind of reasoning, and everyone sort of shrank back.
There was a dead silence.
NARRATOR: In these last months of his life, Stalin now turns on the medical profession and especially the Kremlin's specialists, many of whom are Jewish.
In what will become known as the Doctors' Plot, he arrests Vinogradov, an eminent specialist.
He is one of the first of many doctors, mostly Jewish, to hear the creak on the stair, the midnight knock, to be arrested and tortured, to confess a plot to poison members of the government.
The patent absurdity of the accusations shocks everyone in the Kremlin milieu.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: Stalin became extremely mistrustful, capricious, and unpredictable.
Everyone felt and I think their presentment was correct that the case of the doctors was to be the signal of a new, gigantic wave of purges in the country and that if he did not die, then we will have even worse purges than we had had in the '30s.
NARRATOR: Stalin's dacha.
In Moscow government circles, all eyes are turned towards the unpredictable leader.
Now in the Soviet state, nobody is safe, however eminent, as siege mentality reigns.
Throughout the country, the fear is of spies and of denunciation for spying.
Alexey Rybin was one of Stalin's bodyguards.
He has collected the reports surrounding Stalin's death.
[Speaking Russian.]
Well, at first, everything seemed to be going smoothly enough.
But it was already 1:00, and Stalin hadn't called for anybody yet.
At 2:00, there was no call.
Then again, at 3:00, nothing.
What could all this mean? Stalin's sleeping routine had been completely ruined.
That was the problem.
Well, at approximately 6:30 p.
m.
, a light came on in the big hall, so everybody relaxed a little.
Now he's bound to call somebody.
But there was still no call.
Then, the mail from the Central Committee arrived, and the chief guard took that as a pretext to look for Stalin and find out where he was.
And when he went in, there was a terrible sight.
Stalin was lying on the carpet.
NARRATOR: The guards lifted him onto the sofa and placed a rug over him.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: Chief guard Starostin immediately phoned Malenkov because he was the second in command, next to Stalin.
He mumbled something incomprehensible in the receiver and hung up.
The other guard, Logachev, remained there, keeping watch over the ailing Stalin.
Then Malenkov called for a second time.
Can you imagine the nerve of the man? "Go and find Beria yourself.
I can't find him.
" If he couldn't find Beria, his own friend, then how were we simple guards to know where that devil of a man might be and with what kind of woman he might be sleeping with? At last, some 40 minutes later, Beria finally phones, saying, "Don't tell anybody about Comrade Stalin's death," and then just hung up the phone.
The comrades-in-arms finally arrived at 3:00 a.
m.
Beria came in wearing a pince-nez, throwing back his head and making a racket.
He was pretty boorish in general.
So, he noisily came into the hall where Stalin was lying.
Malenkov had a new pair of boots, which were squeaking, so he took them off in the anteroom, in the corridor, put them under his arm, and came in his socks.
Well, the comrades-in-arms stood around for a while, and then Stalin began to wheeze.
So Beria said, "Logachev, what did you raise such a scare for? Can't you see that Comrade Stalin is just asleep? Stop worrying us, and don't disturb him further.
" NARRATOR: But Joseph Stalin was not simply sleeping.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: Finally, the doctors came.
Their hands were shaking so much, they couldn't even cut his shirt off him.
Well, just imagine their state of mind.
Not only were they confronted with the sight of Stalin dying before their very eyes, but also they had that butcher Beria looking over their shoulder the whole time, saying, "Can you guarantee Comrade Stalin's life? Go ahead with emergency surgery.
But I warn you, if he dies, the doctor responsible would be shot.
" NARRATOR: He dies during the night.
[Accordion plays.]
A shocked nation hears the awesome news the following day.
The sorrow of millions is sincere.
The deep sense of shock is evident.
It is as if the protection of an autocratic father has been withdrawn.
He is buried with the greatest imaginable pomp.
Many millions have suffered and know that, ultimately, he must have been responsible.
But Joseph Stalin's death dissolved a partnership which no other leader in the Soviet Union would ever enjoy again.
It was a partnership forged in the people's suffering in the great war they had so courageously fought and won under his leadership the war that cost over 20 million Soviet lives.
Now, only as the years peel back the layers of deception, do we learn the full extent of that other war Joseph Stalin conducted the parallel war against his own people.
If his life remains a grim warning for the future, his death embodied the hope of a better world for millions.
The miracle is that the people of the Soviet Union, by their unequaled resilience, survived not only the most savage war in history, launched against them by a foreign tyrant, but also the human losses of a quarter of a century of devastation called down upon them by their own leader.
[Ominous music.]
NARRATOR: Hitler is dead, Germany utterly defeated.
[Choir sings.]
As Soviet veterans officers and men take the long road home, memories of prewar days are purged by the magnitude of victory.
"Slava"glory.
"Glory to Stalin," the banner proclaims.
Stalin's omnipotence is accepted, applauded, celebrated, merged with the victory of the people and army in a great parade a gigantic display of military and political power.
The cult of personality is born.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: He was not just a cunning man.
I think there isn't a single Shakespearean villain who even comes close to him in terms of guile and the organization of Machiavellian deeds.
NARRATOR: His road to power has been a bloody one.
He has murderously trampled opposition wherever it might arise inventing and exploiting a system of forced labor which engulfs millions.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: In my opinion, he was the greatest czar in the history of Russia, if one can use the word "czar.
" And Stalin considered himself a czar.
It's only natural.
At the end of the day, it doesn't matter what title he gave himself or what title other people put on him.
The fact still remains that he was the greatest czar this country has ever known.
NARRATOR: But today nobody approaches him in the Soviet people's affections except perhaps Georgy Zhukov, the military architect of victory who now leads the parade.
Stalin does not appreciate rivals for his people's regard, but Zhukov is too popular to dismiss.
Instead, his reputation will be allowed to wither, his talents buried in a distant posting.
[Music and shots.]
It will be some time before the term "superpower" is coined.
But on June 24th, 1945, these marching columns publicly present the Soviet Union's claim to military predominance.
The climax of the parade resounds with symbolism.
A battalion of heroes of the Soviet Union hurl the banners of the defeated enemy at Stalin's feet.
These days and weeks following the victory over Germany have a character all their own.
It is a time when far-reaching options can be discussed.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: At one of the meetings after the war, some of our generals suggested that we just keep our tanks rolling to the English Channel, Marshal Budenny, one of the most zealous proponents of this idea.
But Stalin interrupted him rudely and said, "And who would feed them?" By "them," he meant the Western Europeans.
Nevertheless, in the east, in the Magadan area, there was an airborne army, stationed ready at any moment to attack Alaska, and if Comrade Stalin so desired, so they could have moved towards New York or Washington.
[Missiles fire.]
NARRATOR: But, first, Stalin turns east.
In fulfillment of the Soviet Union's obligation to its allies, Stalin is to declare war on Japan.
He would not be Joseph Stalin without a concealed agenda.
He plans a landing on the island of Hokkaido and annexation or political control of almost one-third of the national area of Japan.
He is deterred by the flight of a lone aircraft the Enola Gay and the bomb it carries.
The devastation at Hiroshima and, a few days later, at Nagasaki, leaves the world aghast and generals with the realization that a new military order has come into being.
On the day the Nagasaki bomb is dropped, Stalin formally declares war on Japan.
His forces strike into Manchuria and Korea, where the Japanese army north of the 38th parallel will surrender to the Soviet commander.
But the landing on Hokkaido never takes place.
Until he acquires his own bomb, Stalin must restrain any further imperial ambitions.
And it is time to turn his attention to the state of the nation the condition of the Soviet Union after four years of war.
Belorussia, Ukraine, and western parts of Russia lie in ruins.
2,000 towns and thousands upon thousands of villages are devastated.
Over 25 million people without real homes.
For millions, life takes on the ring of prehistory.
Hovels and dugouts provide shelter.
Plows are hauled by women and old men.
But amongst the abandoned impedimenta of the German armies, at home, Soviet citizens and, above all, women begin the long fight back.
Perhaps again, as he did in 1941, Stalin misjudges the spirit of his people.
They have concluded a great war, avid for change, eager to work for the future, certain that Stalin will bring a new life to them.
But Stalin understands only compulsion.
To be late for work incurs a one-year sentence to forced labor, and there is a frightening arbitrary quality, too, in the punishments awarded.
The fate of Ukrainian girls returning from German forced labor during the war is recalled by Professor Semiryaga.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: And I know for a fact that millions of Ukrainian girls who wanted to go home were sent straight to the mines in the Donbass region as a punishment for being in Germany and working for the enemy.
After two years, when the mines were operating normally and when the men had come back from the army after demobilization, only then were the girls finally released to go home.
Can you believe that? Women sent to the mines? NARRATOR: But on thousands of work sites like these throughout the country, people come voluntarily to perform the harshest labor.
Massive efforts are put into rebuilding what the Germans have destroyed.
But as reconstruction gets under way, the credit will all go to the Party and to Stalin.
In Moscow, Stalin is the spider at the center of the web.
His correspondence file carries reports from Malenkov and Beria about events in all parts of the vast country.
No item is too trivial for his attention traffic violations by children of ministers, details of the illicit distillation of vodka.
It is in this file that a document sets the term for the return of German prisoners of war at January 1st, 1949, although it will be another five years before all surviving German prisoners are returned.
The labor of the over one million German prisoners in Soviet hands is beyond and apart from the Gulag system.
By comparison with Soviet prisoners within the Gulag, their life is modestly privileged.
They wear their own uniforms, are commanded by their own officers, and are allowed to write letters home.
Acutely conscious of how his own people can be tainted by foreign contact, perhaps Stalin feels that these Germans, when they finally return to Germany, will spread the word.
Willing Germans are put through a period of Communist indoctrination.
Some no doubt are genuinely convinced.
For others, it is more the attraction of better living conditions than of Marxist teachings.
It is as politic now for them to proclaim their loyalty to Stalin as it had been a few years earlier to obey Adolf Hitler.
But for those Germans judged guilty of war crimes and for Soviet citizens condemned as traitors, there is no mercy.
The last public execution in Russia took place in the 18th century.
Now the spectacle is revived in town squares in the western Soviet Union.
Sometimes, to the bereaved, it provides some satisfaction.
To everybody present, it provides a warning.
In the cities, even as the prewar terror returns, there is an air of normality, despite the knowledge that NKVD informers are active in every public place.
But the maintenance of this veneer of normality is necessary for many people to preserve their sense of human dignity.
People like Olga Simakova, who show in prison that indomitable spirit which sustained so many during the war.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: We were all young, and there was a group of us at our college.
We were all studying at the teacher-training college, and there was one guy in our class who always seemed to be hanging around with us.
He didn't seem to have any other friends at all.
We used to tell jokes and talk about all sorts of things.
Well, it happened.
We never even suspected that there could be anyone who could stoop so low as to inform on us.
So they started watching us.
We got to know some French pilots.
They were in a squadron called Normandie, who were based here in Russia in Orel, and I fell in love with a captain.
Well, we all had boyfriends at the time French, Americans, British good lads, all of them.
I was 23 at the time.
I was arrested at home.
They came for me at night.
One of them was in civilian clothing, and the other was a major.
We only had two rooms, and they came into the room where I used to sleep.
They didn't even give me a chance to get changed.
So I got up from my bed, and they were still looking at me.
So I asked them to turn away.
"We aren't allowed to do that," they answered.
"Well, I'm still a woman, aren't I? What do you mean, you're not allowed? That you don't have the right?" I asked.
"You don't have the right to stare at me while I'm changing.
" I didn't understand then that this was all part of the process.
We were all registered and processed by men, just to humiliate us, to take away our human dignity, you see.
We were all processed by men.
They shaved us all over, stripped us down naked.
My most terrible recollections are of Krasnaya Presnya prison, where they kept us in the same cells as the most hardened criminals.
They would keep up to 100 people in one cell without anything not even plank beds.
We slept on the floor.
And very soon, we were covered in lice.
So I kicked up a row.
I was screaming that I wanted to speak to the prison chief, that I would not resign myself to these conditions, and that they had no right to keep us political prisoners in the same cells as hardened criminals.
And this guard said to me, "Get away from the door!" And I said, "How dare you speak to me like that!" And I lost my temper and gave the door an almighty kick.
Well, believe it or not, the door wasn't even locked.
And you know how heavy those iron-plated prison doors are.
Well, this one hit the guard right here.
He burst into the cell, covered in blood, and then I became really frightened.
He had a pair of those heavy, hobnail boots on, and he started kicking me all over.
I was in complete shock.
There wasn't an inch of my body that hadn't been kicked.
So they took me to a doctor, and the doctor examined me and asked who had done this to me.
When I told him that it was a prison guard, he immediately told me not to tell a soul.
And I replied, "You mean to tell me that after they have nearly beaten me to death, you want me to keep my mouth shut?" So they put us all into these cattle carriages, so effectively we had been sent to be exterminated.
It was more like a torture than a railway journey.
When we arrived at Vorkuta, the cold and frost was terrible, and we were in light summer boots and coats.
Then, I was shifted from one camp to another for almost 10 years.
Some places were better than others.
We did everything with our bare hands loading, unloading, constructing roads.
The mosquitos and black fly would eat us alive.
And the guards would taunt and do whatever they liked with us.
Many people died.
There was terrible malnutrition.
They would just fall down and die where they lay.
The conditions were appalling.
We were not treated like human beings there.
To them, we were just cattle.
[Cheers and applause.]
NARRATOR: But the screams from the Gulag are not always drowned by applause for Joseph Stalin.
The Baltic states, devastated by war, are forcibly joined by Stalin to his empire.
Commissars arrive to introduce Soviet reality.
Land is expropriated and goods commandeered.
Weapons acquired from both German and Soviets are turned by partisan groups against the new occupying army.
But these are small peoples no match for the Soviet forces ranged against them.
In this region where the terrain is not favorable to partisan warfare, the nationalists are unable to resist the NKVD troops for long.
So the peoples of the Baltic states join so many others in Stalin's dance of death.
[Music plays.]
One of the numerous reports of those days.
It records the exile to timber enterprises in Siberia of 300 Lithuanian families accused of anti-Soviet underground activities.
Many thousands more will follow them into forced labor in the Far East as the revolts are suppressed.
There is also unrest in the western Ukraine.
A Ukrainian NKVD report about the operations against nationalist forces.
In one month alone, over 2,000 people are killed and over 3,000 arrested.
For many long years to come, these camps will become filled with Ukrainian nationalists who carry on the struggle in the forests of the western Ukraine with the forces of the Communist regime.
This bitter, protracted struggle by the Ukrainian nationalists' insurgency army against Stalin's regime is brutally suppressed.
[Music plays.]
Only Stalin will decide what national characteristics will remain only folk dances or songs.
[Singing in Ukrainian.]
But the only songs that were allowed were propaganda songs, which painted the people's lives in the most positive light.
[Singing in Ukrainian.]
Like the words of this song, urging the people, "Good health and live prosperously in this prosperous land.
" But the people themselves knew in what conditions they were living.
[Singing in Ukrainian.]
In these first postwar summers, Soviet reconstruction has the weather to fight, too.
In Ukraine and other fertile, grain-growing areas of southern Russia, the year 1946 brings first drought, then crop failure.
There are no reserves.
In the high summer of that year, famine once again visits the whole country.
Throughout the country, millions of children are at risk.
Many thousands of babies die before their first birthday.
It is a further cross for the already overburdened peasantry to bear.
Nikolai Minushkin was a peasant farmer during those days.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: Life wasn't at all easy.
They made us work a lot, and there was very little food.
Well, you've got to eat, so we had to get it where we could and eat whatever we could find.
Conditions were such that you had to steal from the collective farm or somewhere else to survive.
If you got away with it, you were lucky.
But if you were caught, then it's straight to the prison with you.
NARRATOR: They worked on the land they loved, as their ancestors had worked before them.
They had the right to work but no other rights, above all, no rights to the fruits of their labors.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: One day, one of the women went to pick mushrooms with her young son.
Well, on the way to the forest, she started just casually picking one or two ears of wheat or rye in the field.
Well, she was spotted by the guard and was immediately sentenced to five or six years in prison.
How many ears could she have picked? It couldn't have been more than one or two.
It's not as if she could have picked a bushel of it.
Can you believe it? You'd have been arrested even for one ear of grain if they saw you.
NARRATOR: At the top was Stalin.
Below him, a hierarchy of mini Stalins the local bosses who supervised the peasants.
Their function to deliver the peasants' crop to the state.
Targets are increased every year, and any boss failing to reach the new targets will be considered an enemy of the people and mysteriously disappear.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: Well, the authorities are the authorities.
They had all the privileges.
They were provided for.
They were entitled to 16 kilos of flour.
They used to get everything brought and given to them.
The chairman of the village Soviet, the Party secretary, the teacher we used to call them the hogs the hogs were given everything flour, sugar, kerosene.
And us ordinary collective farmers, what did we get? Well, a lot of man-hours in the field, for a start.
But that was about all we got.
Apart from that, absolutely nothing else.
We'd been working the whole year, and then they would come and take everything.
Oats, wheat, rye, everything went.
The granaries were left completely empty.
NARRATOR: To feed the illusion of peace, prosperity, and plenty, the workers are filmed taking their produce to Moscow for a festival.
This is not gesture made of their own free will.
They did not have internal passports, and without papers, it is impossible to leave their villages.
They are chained to the land.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: We were very frightened all the time.
You might be sitting with me with a glass or two, and you might let slip something about the farm leadership or the government or about Stalin.
By the time you got back home, they'd already be waiting for you.
Well, you would get back home and, sure enough, there they'd be, saying, "Right, come along, you.
" Then, off we'd go right away to the carriage, to the cattle truck, under lock and key, with one guard in one corner and the other one in the other corner.
And off you go.
Where to? Well, you'd know soon enough when you got there.
Well, I don't think anyone would want the life I've had.
My youth is over, and I can't say I've seen anything good in this world.
I've been a slave all my life, you know.
NARRATOR: Stalin, the provider of spectacle.
Stalin, the showman of genius, the illusionist of conviction.
And the everyday intensity of the illusion is now changing the way people think, creating two types of reality that depicted by the state and a different, everyday reality what people see and know around them.
Truth and falsehood become inextricably mixed.
Nothing is more characteristic of this savage world of make-believe than historian Galina lvanova's strange story of certain border operations carried out by the NKVD.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: I must point out that these places are completely documented.
Also, there are a lot of eyewitnesses to the existence of these fictitious border posts all along the Soviet border.
The lengths that the NKVD went to were completely unprecedented.
They were inundated with false cases and were getting increasingly criticized by the judiciary for the flimsiness of their evidence.
So a whole fictitious border complex would be created with a bogus Soviet border outpost on one side and on the other, a bogus Manchurian border picket, complete with bogus Chinese border guards played by Soviet convicts of Chinese origin.
And all this was built on our Soviet territory.
Then, they would take a Soviet citizen under interrogation in prison and give him a choice.
Either you spy for us, or we'll send you to the Gulag.
Naturally, when faced with this choice, the majority of these poor fellows chose the former.
Well, as soon as these unwilling spies crossed this fictitious border, these bogus Chinese border guards would be waiting for them, and the beatings and torture would begin.
They would try to beat information about the Soviet Union out of them.
So, eventually, this poor person would agree to work as a double agent, signing the necessary incriminating documents to that effect.
And on their return, they would immediately go and report what had happened to the NKVD, saying, "I was captured by the Chinese intelligence service and confessed everything to them.
You can do whatever you like with me.
" The best that they could hope for was 25 years in the camps.
But for most, it was the firing squad.
NARRATOR: Voting procedures are diligently carried out, but they can mean nothing because the results are preordained.
An absurd ritual has become a political system.
And it is not only the Soviet people on whom Stalin inflicts his own image of reality.
To be among his closest associates is to live the life of a schizophrenic.
Foreign Minister Molotov, his wife under arrest.
One of Stalin's most long-serving cronies, Marshal Voroshilov, will be accused by Stalin of spying for the British.
Kaganovich his brother arrested and shot.
In Stalin's own family, the devastation is almost literally beyond belief.
Anna Alliluyeva, Stalin's wife's sister, mistakenly wrote a book of memoirs and received a 10-year prison sentence.
Redens, her husband, is shot.
The wife of Stalin's son Yakov is arrested.
Kapler, his daughter's first love, is sent to forced labor.
Neither family ties nor the flattery of the great diverts him from plundering the liberty of his countrymen, sacrificing their lives.
Desperate to keep Stalin's displeasure at bay, the scientific and artistic establishment sign an adulatory address to the leader.
Shostakovich signs and all composers and leading members of the artistic world.
But though Stalin needs adulation, it will not protect the intelligentsia in these early postwar days from a denunciation, a hint, a word in Stalin's ear.
It is a witch hunt conducted by Zhdanov and Beria.
It aims to reinforce that supervision of press and radio which is a characteristic of the regime that excising of any wider Western influence from Soviet life.
When the great poet Akhmatova is condemned, it is for her sensitivity to Western influence.
She is arraigned as part nun, part harlot.
With Zoshchenko, she is one of the star victims of Zhdanov's purge.
Figures from the world of entertainment are taken, some to the most notorious prison in Moscow Butyrskaya, normally reserved for the most dangerous criminals.
[Singing in Russian.]
The popular singer Lidia Ruslanova, whose songs were played from dawn to dusk across the Soviet Union, is sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment.
It is like arresting a Vera Lynn, a Piaf, an Ella Fitzgerald.
[Singing in Russian.]
And Zoya Fyodorova, once the dictator's favorite actress, winner of the coveted Stalin Award.
But, in 1947, she falls out of favor and receives a 25-year prison sentence for falling in love with an American.
When the film director Eisenstein shows the second part of his film lvan the Terrible, Stalin recognizes himself in the portrait of a bloody and callous tyrant.
He makes his reaction plain.
Only a fatal heart attack saves Eisenstein from Stalin's wrath.
In this world, the prison is, more than a threat, a symbol.
For thousands in the Zhdanov years and after, it is the first step on the road to Stalin's reality.
In the world outside the Soviet Union, Winston Churchill makes a speech at Fulton, USA.
Here he first uses the term "Iron Curtain.
" "An Iron Curtain," he proclaims, "has descended between Stettin, on the Baltic, and Trieste, on the Adriatic.
" If not the birth, it is the public christening of the Cold War.
Stalin responds.
He makes one of his utterly unexpected telephone calls.
They are, to some men, the most frightening moments in their life.
The cartoonist Yefimov was working on a cartoon of Eisenhower.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: All of a sudden, I got this phone call, and this voice announced, "Comrade Stalin will now speak with you.
" Well, I was immediately out of my chair, almost standing to attention.
He would never greet or say good-bye to anyone.
He'd always get straight down to business.
So I heard this slight cough and then, "You over there! Now, you're drawing a cartoon of someone.
Do you know who I'm talking about?" "Yes, Comrade Stalin.
" "Well, this person has to be shown armed to his teeth tanks, planes, guns, the lot.
Do you understand?" "Yes, I understand, Comrade Stalin.
" Well, in short, I managed to get it done with just minutes to spare and even managed to write a note to the effect that, "As far as the cartoon itself is concerned, everything is ready, but the caption is really the responsibility of Comrade Stalin.
" And, first, he wrote the caption in red pencil.
"Eisenhower is on the defensive.
" Then, probably, his pencil broke, because there's only half a word here.
Then he wrote in black pencil, "Alaska, Canada, the North Pole," and then wrote, "This is the place where the threat to American liberty is coming from.
" It was all written in his handwriting.
It was, I believe, a rather quaint way of declaring the Cold War.
Quite frankly, I was within a hairsbreadth of death because if I hadn't fulfilled my task to Comrade Stalin's liking, then he, as was his wont, would have wasted little time in having me investigated, and I'm sure our NKVD friends in the Lubyanka would have had little difficulty in proving that I had been deliberately not doing my job properly on the orders of the CIA or something like that.
NARRATOR: But for Stalin, there can be no Cold War on equal terms until atomic parity is achieved.
The result on the 25th of September, 1949, is a portentous announcement from Moscow.
The news agency TASS announces the successful testing of the first Soviet atomic bomb.
It is achieved by Russian scientists already far advanced towards producing the A-bomb, supported by Soviet intelligence agents in the United States and Britain.
The Soviet bomb is a powerful, if not yet a highly sophisticated, weapon, but other tests follow, and the West knows that the Soviet Union has definitely entered the nuclear age.
It is a present for Joseph Stalin's 70th birthday a birthday celebrated on a gigantic scale.
[Band music plays.]
A new figure is present at Stalin's side during the celebrations in December, 1949.
Only two months earlier, Mao Tse-tung has led his Communist army to victory.
He is now the unchallenged leader of the new People's Republic of China.
It is potentially a vast access of power to the Communist World.
But as Stalin watches the massive birthday displays arranged in his honor, he has no way of knowing how independent a force China will be.
During the celebrations, Mao and Kim II Sung of North Korea press Stalin to endorse a North Korean attack on the south.
With expansion westward blocked by the formation of NATO, Stalin cautiously agrees.
Within six months, American pilots are in aerial combat with Russian planes over Korea.
To Stalin's surprise, the U.
S.
Has reacted rapidly and under the banner of the United Nations.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: In one of his cables to Mao Tse-tung, Stalin stated, "A prolonged war will be profitable for us.
I think we should let it last for another two or three years.
It is true that the Koreans will suffer a lot as a result, but they are doing it for the world proletariat revolution, because the longer we can drag out the war, the more exhausted the Americans will become.
" But he was quickly forced into negotiations when there was talk of using nuclear weapons.
We had only a few nuclear bombs, and they were nothing like as powerful as those available to the Americans, and so ended this infamous war.
NARRATOR: At the 19th Party Congress, he delivers a derisive lecture on the nature of Western liberties.
It is impossible to know whether he recognizes in it an accurate description of the state he himself has built.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: Their so-called personal freedom is nonexistent.
Human rights are granted only to those with capital.
Everyone else in their society is just considered as raw human material.
All rights are reserved for the exploiting minority, and civil rights are denied to the exploited majority.
The banner of bourgeois democratic liberties has been thrown out of the window.
It is for us, the true representatives of humane democratic parties, to pick this banner up and carry it on further.
If you want the majority of the people to be gathered around you, there is no one else who we can turn to, to pick it up.
NARRATOR: Stalin's true state of mind in these days will perhaps now never be known.
Yellow-eyed and watchful, Stalin can turn his terrible suspicions against anyone, however senior, however impressive their loyalty in the past.
At a party plenary session, Professor Volkogonov recounts INTERPRETER: Stalin pounced on Voroshilov, Mikoyan, and Molotov, accusing them of being British spies.
It was, of course, beyond any normal kind of reasoning, and everyone sort of shrank back.
There was a dead silence.
NARRATOR: In these last months of his life, Stalin now turns on the medical profession and especially the Kremlin's specialists, many of whom are Jewish.
In what will become known as the Doctors' Plot, he arrests Vinogradov, an eminent specialist.
He is one of the first of many doctors, mostly Jewish, to hear the creak on the stair, the midnight knock, to be arrested and tortured, to confess a plot to poison members of the government.
The patent absurdity of the accusations shocks everyone in the Kremlin milieu.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: Stalin became extremely mistrustful, capricious, and unpredictable.
Everyone felt and I think their presentment was correct that the case of the doctors was to be the signal of a new, gigantic wave of purges in the country and that if he did not die, then we will have even worse purges than we had had in the '30s.
NARRATOR: Stalin's dacha.
In Moscow government circles, all eyes are turned towards the unpredictable leader.
Now in the Soviet state, nobody is safe, however eminent, as siege mentality reigns.
Throughout the country, the fear is of spies and of denunciation for spying.
Alexey Rybin was one of Stalin's bodyguards.
He has collected the reports surrounding Stalin's death.
[Speaking Russian.]
Well, at first, everything seemed to be going smoothly enough.
But it was already 1:00, and Stalin hadn't called for anybody yet.
At 2:00, there was no call.
Then again, at 3:00, nothing.
What could all this mean? Stalin's sleeping routine had been completely ruined.
That was the problem.
Well, at approximately 6:30 p.
m.
, a light came on in the big hall, so everybody relaxed a little.
Now he's bound to call somebody.
But there was still no call.
Then, the mail from the Central Committee arrived, and the chief guard took that as a pretext to look for Stalin and find out where he was.
And when he went in, there was a terrible sight.
Stalin was lying on the carpet.
NARRATOR: The guards lifted him onto the sofa and placed a rug over him.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: Chief guard Starostin immediately phoned Malenkov because he was the second in command, next to Stalin.
He mumbled something incomprehensible in the receiver and hung up.
The other guard, Logachev, remained there, keeping watch over the ailing Stalin.
Then Malenkov called for a second time.
Can you imagine the nerve of the man? "Go and find Beria yourself.
I can't find him.
" If he couldn't find Beria, his own friend, then how were we simple guards to know where that devil of a man might be and with what kind of woman he might be sleeping with? At last, some 40 minutes later, Beria finally phones, saying, "Don't tell anybody about Comrade Stalin's death," and then just hung up the phone.
The comrades-in-arms finally arrived at 3:00 a.
m.
Beria came in wearing a pince-nez, throwing back his head and making a racket.
He was pretty boorish in general.
So, he noisily came into the hall where Stalin was lying.
Malenkov had a new pair of boots, which were squeaking, so he took them off in the anteroom, in the corridor, put them under his arm, and came in his socks.
Well, the comrades-in-arms stood around for a while, and then Stalin began to wheeze.
So Beria said, "Logachev, what did you raise such a scare for? Can't you see that Comrade Stalin is just asleep? Stop worrying us, and don't disturb him further.
" NARRATOR: But Joseph Stalin was not simply sleeping.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: Finally, the doctors came.
Their hands were shaking so much, they couldn't even cut his shirt off him.
Well, just imagine their state of mind.
Not only were they confronted with the sight of Stalin dying before their very eyes, but also they had that butcher Beria looking over their shoulder the whole time, saying, "Can you guarantee Comrade Stalin's life? Go ahead with emergency surgery.
But I warn you, if he dies, the doctor responsible would be shot.
" NARRATOR: He dies during the night.
[Accordion plays.]
A shocked nation hears the awesome news the following day.
The sorrow of millions is sincere.
The deep sense of shock is evident.
It is as if the protection of an autocratic father has been withdrawn.
He is buried with the greatest imaginable pomp.
Many millions have suffered and know that, ultimately, he must have been responsible.
But Joseph Stalin's death dissolved a partnership which no other leader in the Soviet Union would ever enjoy again.
It was a partnership forged in the people's suffering in the great war they had so courageously fought and won under his leadership the war that cost over 20 million Soviet lives.
Now, only as the years peel back the layers of deception, do we learn the full extent of that other war Joseph Stalin conducted the parallel war against his own people.
If his life remains a grim warning for the future, his death embodied the hope of a better world for millions.
The miracle is that the people of the Soviet Union, by their unequaled resilience, survived not only the most savage war in history, launched against them by a foreign tyrant, but also the human losses of a quarter of a century of devastation called down upon them by their own leader.