Original subtitles

[narrator] Devastating wars.

Pitiless rulers...

in pursuit of power over centuries.

When Russia takes up arms, the world holds its breath.

[foreboding theme music playing]

[narrator] 1917 marks a new start in Russia.

In the October Revolution, Lenin and the Bolsheviks

have violently seized power.

But the situation is chaotic.

The country descends into civil war.

Great parts of this giant empire are in

the hands of the Bolsheviks' enemies:

"White" forces loyal to the czar, nationalists and separatists

now threaten the victory of the revolution.

The Russian Revolution becomes really one of the most terrible

and bloodthirsty events on the planet up to that date.

The horror of civil war is always awful.

[man] The violence of the civil war quite simply meant

that the country and its people suffered.

Murder and killing were the everyday reality.

[narrator] The Bolsheviks need a new army to hold onto power,

but most of the revolutionaries are industrial workers

and peasant farmers.

There are very few trained officers.

Building a new army seems a Herculean task.

And it falls to a civilian to turn the revolutionaries

into an effective army.

Lev Davidovich Bronstein,

known as Leon Trotsky.

[man 2] Trotsky was good-looking,

handsome, vain, flamboyant and loquacious,

but very bad at making friends

and actually didn't bother to cultivate a party.

He just thought he was a genius, and he would win everything.

He'd spent his life as an orator and a journalist.

He was an extremely good writer, but it turned out he was also

an extremely good strategist.

[narrator] Trotsky is a key member of the revolutionary inner circle.

In 1918, he's appointed the People's Commissar for War

and begins to build up the Red Army.

[Sebag Montefiore] Trotsky, it turned out,

was an extremely talented military commander.

And as Napoleon said,

war and prostitution are two professions that are often

done better by amateurs than by professionals.

[suspenseful music playing]

[narrator] In building the Red Army,

Trotsky soon ditches revolutionary ideas.

Instead of recruiting mainly volunteers, workers and peasants,

he integrates nearly 50,000 officers and 215,000 NCOs from the czar's army

to be the backbone of the new Red Army.

Trotsky's success in building up the Red Army

was based on principles he would have rejected as anti-socialist

just five years before.

Drastic measures and iron discipline.

Never mind a workers' army of volunteers.

He created an army that relied, as armies always had, on iron discipline.

Perhaps with the one difference.

That the discipline here was much harsher.

[narrator] Trotsky relies on unquestioning obedience and brutality.

He introduces the death penalty.

Political commissars are to execute any soldiers who try to retreat.

[Kusber] The principle of enforcing obedience in the army

by violence and threats was fully developed in the Red Army.

But that's not something Russian

soldiers weren't already familiar with.

The czar's army had already used such drastic measures

to force people to fight.

In the Red Army, Trotsky and his successors

perfected those techniques.

[crowd cheering]

[narrator] The Red Army grows at a furious pace.

Founded in 1918,

by 1919, it already numbers a million and a half men.

By 1920, there are five million Red Army soldiers.

The most modern weaponry is deployed in the civil war:

machine guns, rapid-fire artillery, armored trains and armored cars.

Aircraft, too, play an important role.

You could say that was Trotsky's great skill,

seeing what forms of combat,

what weapons made an army most effective.

For example, he used armored railway trains

that could advance to forward positions.

Those are the kinds of ideas he introduced,

with a form of professionalism completely unexpected in someone

who had never served in the military.

[narrator] The civil war takes a terrible toll in human life.

By the start of 1921,

Russian society and its economy are in a catastrophic state.

The whole country faces starvation.

One focus of opposition to the Bolsheviks is Kronstadt,

the naval base at the gates of St Petersburg.

At the beginning of 1921, sailors mutiny against Soviet despotism.

[Stadelmann] You have to remember that the sailors of Kronstadt

were actually the very first supporters of the Bolsheviks.

But when Moscow gets wind of events in Kronstadt

that don't fit with the Bolsheviks' plans,

none of that matters any more.

[narrator] 50,000 Red Army troops

crush the uprising in a merciless and savage campaign.

Survivors face summary execution.

Nothing must be allowed to get in the way of the Bolsheviks' hold on power.

In 1921, the Red Army finally defeats czarist forces in Crimea.

Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia fall to the Red Army too.

The civil war is over.

1922 marks the birth of the USSR,

the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

This gigantic empire covers more than 22 million square kilometers,

a sixth of the Earth's surface.

But the toll in human life is high.

Up to ten million people die in the Russian civil war.

In combat, through political purges, and starvation.

About two million are forced into exile.

[Sebag Montefiore] The Bolsheviks had come to power believing in terror.

They believed in the restructuring of society using violence.

They were also organized in a sort of vanguard,

in a very hierarchical, organized manner,

which was actually very well-suited to controlling Russia.

[narrator] With the founding of the Soviet Union,

Lenin has achieved his goal.

He becomes the first head of government

of this newly created country.

For him, the terror since the revolution

is the price to be paid for the victory of the Proletariat.

If you actually look at the history of

the Bolsheviks from the very beginning,

Lenin is a mass murderer and is a despicable character,

and starts this scale of escalation and scale of violence

that carries throughout the whole Soviet regime.

It becomes part of the DNA of the Soviet system.

[bells tolling]

[narrator] But in 1922,

the founding year of the Soviet Union, Lenin suffers a stroke.

Two years later, after a further series of strokes, he dies.

Behind the scenes,

there's a vicious struggle over the succession.

Besides Leon Trotsky,

Joseph Stalin is also determined to inherit Lenin's mantle.

[Stadelmann] Stalin builds his power-base

slowly from the end of the civil war in the early '20s,

and accelerates in the second half of that decade.

Stalin was no great orator who could appeal to the masses like Trotsky.

[narrator] For Trotsky, the Soviet Union is just the beginning.

He wants global revolution.

Stalin by contrast wants to achieve socialism in his own country,

in a strong Soviet Union.

[Stadelmann] There's often a suggestion that Stalin was just, say,

a crafty, ruthless yokel.

Not so. He was highly intelligent.

Trotsky had made himself a target for everyone.

He'd attacked everyone and always knew better.

He'd made himself unpopular.

Stalin, by contrast, worked in the background,

creating a giant network of people who became so dependent on him,

he ended up able to do whatever he liked with them.

That was his kind of political intelligence.

[narrator] In 1925, Stalin uses his extensive network

to have Trotsky dismissed as head of the Red Army.

In 1927, he has him thrown out of the Party.

Two years later, Trotsky is forced into exile.

Stalin is in sole control,

working to consolidate his power against all possible challenges.

At the end of the 1920s,

Stalin starts to transform his devastated country.

He plans to suppress private enterprise

and industrialize the Soviet Union as fast as possible.

[Sebag Montefiore]He tried to do this in a very short term, in five years.

To fund it, to fund the American technology...

most of the technology came from the United States

and Germany, of course.

He paid for it with grain.

And to do that, he had to send the grain abroad.

[somber music playing]

[narrator] Stalin dictates that agricultural yield must be increased.

Peasant farmers are to be gathered in great production units

known as "Kolchozes."

It's the start of forced collectivization.

Stalin had the suspicion, and he was right,

that the peasants weren't at all convinced by the new system.

They were opposed to it and were blocking it.

And this stubbornness was to be broken by collectivization.

Broken by force.

[narrator] Stalin declares war on his own people.

Peasant farmers who refuse to be

collectivized face drastic punishments.

Five to ten years in the notorious prison camps of the Gulag.

But the effects of forced collectivization are catastrophic.

There are fewer and fewer farmers to work the fields,

and fewer and fewer fields.

The yield of the harvests shrinks.

To make matters worse, each village now has to pay a tax in grain

that leaves them with almost nothing to eat.

In 1932 and 1933, there is a massive famine

in every wheat-producing region of the Soviet Union.

[Richie] The horror is that these millions of people

are deliberately starved to death as the production from their farms,

their agricultural production, is simply stolen from them.

And so, of course, this is a traumatic event,

and it's a traumatic event in world history.

[narrator] In spite of the famine,

Stalin insists on transforming the country

into an industrialized state.

It doesn't matter who suffers.

No one and nothing must stand in the way.

The export of grain continues.

In 1931, the Soviet Union exports 5.2 million tons of grain.

In the famine year of 1933,

1.7 million tons are still exported to Europe and the United States.

Ukraine is especially hard hit by the resulting famine.

Ukraine is an extremely fertile agricultural land.

There is a high proportion of peasant farmers in the population.

And that's obviously why such a disproportionate number of Ukrainians

became victims of the famine.

[narrator] To Ukrainians, this desperate

famine is known as the "Holodomor."

"Killing by starvation."

[Stadelmann] Holodomor is a word invented in Ukraine.

And the famine of 1932 and '33 has a particular meaning for Ukrainians.

Of the approximately seven million victims of the famine,

about half died in Ukraine.

Ukrainian historians see the Holodomor

as an attempted genocide of the Ukrainian people.

[narrator] While the population starves,

the Soviet Union continues to re-arm.

And everywhere Stalin sees enemies to be annihilated.

From the mid-1930s,

a wave of terror strikes every part of society.

This is the time of the Great Terror.

[Sebag Montefiore] Stalin's Great

Terror was one of the most extraordinary

political events of the 20th century.

Never has a great state, a great power,

mutilated and destroyed its own power, its own personnel,

to such an extent as Stalin did in the Great Terror from 1936 to '39.

[oppressive droning sounds]

But his idea was, first of all,

better to kill ten innocent men than to let one spy escape.

And by spy, he meant not someone who was actually betraying the country,

but someone who might one day think about betraying the country.

[narrator] The dreaded secret

political police crack down ruthlessly.

Those under suspicion for any reason fall into the hands of its agents.

They face show trials with verdicts decided in advance.

Between July 1937 and mid-November 1938,

one and a half million people are arrested.

700,000 are executed.

Most of the others land in the Soviet

punishment and work camps of the Gulag.

Lists are drawn up across the country of people to be killed.

Stalin personally signs hundreds of death lists.

Ironically, some of these groups of people

were the people who actually could have enhanced his power

much more than others.

And one of these groups of many were, for example, his own military.

[narrator] More than 30,000 officers, generals, and field marshals

fall victim to the purges.

[Neitzel] In 1937, Stalin is suffering from paranoia

and this is the moment when the great purges strike.

They take the most important members of the officer corps,

the thinkers, those who have experience of the civil war.

[narrator] Leon Trotsky's supporters are especially suspect.

He himself is in exile in faraway Mexico.

But Stalin still fears his old rival.

In 1940, he decides to eliminate him.

A Soviet agent murders Trotsky in Mexico City with an ice pick.

Nearly 300,000 line the streets for his funeral.

[bells tolling]

[Kusber] Trotsky certainly doesn't deserve to be admired.

He's responsible for a large part of the brutal system

that characterized not just the Red

Army, but really the whole Soviet Union.

Trotsky's idealization in Latin America

is down to the fact that Stalin's regime

turned the screw of brutality even further.

So Trotzky may seem the more harmless of the two.

But that doesn't make him in any sense a model to be followed.

[narrator] On paper, the Soviet Union is a federation of equal partners.

But giant Russia dominates the smaller Soviet Republics.

In the 1930s, a policy of Russification is introduced.

The Russian language supplants other national languages

like Ukrainian or Belarusian.

The idea of making the Soviet Union into a homogenous nation

is an impossible nonsense.

Basically, the Soviet Union is the successor

to the multi-ethnic Russian Empire, a confused mish-mash of peoples.

Stalin himself is the best example:

a Georgian who might have loved to be a Russian.

But he could never hide his heavy Georgian accent.

[narrator] But Stalin is still suspicious

of his empire's ethnic minorities.

One of the great fears was that

Ukrainians, Poles, Georgians, Armenians

would seek national independence or national autonomy from the centre.

And therefore, in 1937,

he launched the national operations to literally kill, by quota,

vast numbers of any of the national ethnic minorities.

[narrator] Soviet citizens of Polish origin

are among the countless victims of the National Operations.

Around 100,000 die in a campaign of mass murder.

Stalin is too afraid they could subvert the system.

He combines his nationalism with ambitions to become a global power.

An important milestone is the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact

of August 1939.

Soviet foreign minister Molotov and his German counterpart von Ribbentrop

sign the so-called Hitler-Stalin pact in Moscow.

A secret annex seals the fate of Poland,

divided between the two countries.

On September 1, 1939, Germany invades Poland:

the start of the Second World War.

Two weeks later, the Red Army marches into Poland from the East.

German and Russian troops stage a

joint military parade in Brest-Litovsk.

But there's more in the Hitler-Stalin pact than the division of Poland.

[Kusbar] In the secret annex,

Finland was allocated to the Soviet Union's sphere of influence.

So were the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

Under massive pressure, the three Baltic states

were forced to accept Soviet

garrisons, the Red Army, on their soil.

But the Finnish government rejected the same Soviet demand.

[narrator] At the end of November

1939, the Soviet Union invades Finland.

It's an unequal struggle.

The Red Army, attacking with heavy weapons,

is far bigger than its Finnish adversary.

[Sebag Montefiore] The Russians were extremely arrogant.

They were sure that the Finns would just simply collapse.

And instead, the Finns resisted efficiently and with amazing courage

to the extent that they killed over 130,000 Soviet troops.

[narrator] This campaign, soon known as the Winter War,

bears little similarity to conventional warfare.

The Finns counter the mighty Soviet army

with improvised, highly effective methods.

The broad, sparsely populated landscapes favor guerrilla tactics:

ambushes with small mobile units and critical use of snipers.

[Neitzel] The Finns are unbelievably brave and put up heroic resistance.

And the first assault by the great Red Army fails to defeat Finland.

[old-fashioned news fanfare]

[male newsreader] More pictures illustrating the wonderful fight

that Finland is putting up against Russia keep arriving

and here are some of the latest.

They show a Russian convoy after it had been trapped and put out of action

by the Finns.

[Neitzel] It was a serious embarrassment for the Soviet Union.

They didn't achieve their main goal,

they couldn't manage to defeat Finland.

[narrator] After regrouping, the Soviets

launch a new offensive with fresh troops.

They finally break through Finnish lines in February 1940.

But victory comes at a price.

130,000 Soviet troops are killed in the Winter War.

Finnish casualties are 70,000 dead and wounded.

Spring 1940.

In the peace treaty, Finland remains independent,

but gives up land to the Soviet Union.

This gives Stalin a buffer-zone around Leningrad,

as Saint Petersburg is now known.

In the summer of 1940,

Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are absorbed into the USSR.

Through his alliance with Hitler,

Stalin also has eastern Poland under his control.

Imperialism in the name of communism.

[suspenseful music playing]

[narrator] June 22nd, 1941. German armies invade Russia.

Hitler plans a war of annihilation

codenamed, "Operation Barbarossa."

Hitler has broken the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact.

[Neitzel] The Red Army doesn't have a proper defense plan.

It is completely taken by surprise

because Stalin refused to believe warnings of a German invasion

and banned any preparations.

In the very first weeks, the Red Army suffered horrendous losses.

By the end of 1941, the Red Army no

longer existed in the form it had in June.

Its soldiers were either dead or prisoners of war.

[narrator] Germany's surprise attack

has apparently been entirely successful.

Army groups north, center, and south have split the invasion between them,

from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

By the end of August the Baltic, Belarus and large parts of Ukraine

have been occupied.

[Richie] It's ironic that when Barbarossa begins

and the Germans arrive in villages and towns in Ukraine

or Belorussia or the Baltic states,

they're greeted with bread and salt and wreaths of flowers.

And people are so relieved,

because if you've just been through the Holodomor under Stalin

anybody is looking pretty good.

The Germans hadn't come to liberate them,

but to suppress them,

as the Ukrainians, the Belarusians and the Baltic peoples

soon have to recognize.

[narrator] In this war of annihilation

of Bolshevism, there are no more rules.

It's a manhunt:

of Soviet soldiers, civilians, and above all Jews.

Hitler makes it very clear that his war in the east

is not a war merely for territory.

It's a racial war. It's a war of extermination.

"Vernichtungskrieg."

It's a war that's going to completely change the ethnic map

of Central and Eastern Europe.

[narrator] German soldiers can commit crimes against civilians,

without any fear of facing a military court.

Red Army political commissars are not to be treated as prisoners of war,

but shot on sight.

The Germans deliberately let Soviet prisoners starve to death.

Approximately three million captured Soviet soldiers die

of hunger and disease.

[Neitzel] The remarkable thing is the enormous ability of the Red Army

to pick itself up and confront the enemy again and again,

always to carry on fighting.

No one expected that.

[narrator] To raise public morale, the struggle against Hitler's Germany

is dubbed the "Great Patriotic War."

The Soviet Union soon has five million soldiers under arms.

Hitler and his generals underestimate the quality of Soviet weaponry.

The appearance of the T-34 tank in the summer of 1941 is a huge shock.

It is soon recognized as a formidable opponent.

The Germans have enormous problems countering it.

It's superior to all their own tanks.

But a war isn't won by just one technology,

but usually through mass production.

The T-34 was simple to manufacture.

It had a diesel engine, it was suited to the terrain.

It became a symbol of victory.

Though of course that wasn't the only reason the Red Army won.

[narrator] The Red Army also uses unorthodox methods.

In autumn 1941,

a new night-bomber regiment comes into being,

consisting entirely of women.

They fly two-seater Po-2s, usually used for training and farming.

Sluggish biplanes of wood and canvas.

They take off at dusk, singly, at intervals of several minutes.

Close to the target, the pilots switch off their engines and glide in.

Since the night-attacks come without warning,

the Germans call them "night witches."

Darkness protects them from much faster German fighters.

The pilots become Soviet stars.

23 become "Heroines of the Soviet Union."

[Neitzel] The decisive factor

was the willingness of individual Soviet citizens to fight.

They didn't just say, "I've had enough, I'm not fighting for Stalin!"

Probably very few of them were fighting for Stalin.

They were fighting for their village,

for their connection to their homeland.

That was the decisive factor that stopped the Germans.

[narrator] In autumn and winter 1941, Germany's advance falters.

The troops are ill-equipped for the oncoming Russian winter.

Soon, more soldiers are dying from cold than from combat.

Meanwhile the Soviet Union is moving more and more efficiently

onto a war footing.

Stalin delegates military decisions to his generals.

One of them is Georgi Konstantinovich Zhukov.

With the other generals, he stems the German advance

using any means necessary.

Zhukov certainly plays a significant role as a leading general.

He's involved in almost all the important battles,

and he's one of the capable thinkers responsible

for stopping the German advance before Moscow.

He's presented as the great victorious figurehead, the great general,

the "Hannibal" of the Red Army.

Of course, he wasn't that.

Zhukov exemplifies the positive

and also the negative aspects of the Red Army.

He would walk over corpses, and he wasn't too worried about losses.

Zhukov also left his trail of blood.

[narrator] Zhukov is a product of the tough Soviet military ethos.

He deals mercilessly with deserters.

And he doesn't hesitate to throw more and more soldiers into battle.

1942: The Germans attack the city of Stalingrad.

They soon hold 90 percent of it.

But by autumn, Zhukov and other generals

have bottled up 300,000 German soldiers in the city.

A bitter struggle ensues.

The Red Army cuts all the German supply lines.

In January 1943, the German 5th Army surrenders.

[Neitzel] The battle for Stalingrad is a psychological turning point,

for the Soviets too.

For the first time, they prove they can mount a complex operation

to bottle up an entire German army.

Psychologically, that matters.

It gives them hope they can force the Germans back.

The big question is: at what price?

[narrator] About 150,000 German soldiers die at Stalingrad,

in combat, or from hunger and cold.

On the Soviet side, an estimated 400,000 die.

German losses at Stalingrad are lower than the Soviets'.

We believe 20,000 Red Army soldiers were shot as deserters alone.

They drown the German advance in their own soldiers' blood.

[narrator] Victory at Stalingrad is an important signal

for Great Britain and the USA,

the Soviet Union's two main allies in the fight against Hitler.

The Americans also help with supplies.

Via the agreements known as the "Lend-Lease Act,"

the Soviet Union receives weapons, vehicles and raw materials

worth more than eleven billion dollars.

They would have succeeded in halting the German advance

with their own resources,

maybe even pushed them back somewhat,

but they certainly couldn't have forced them back to Berlin.

Their offensive capabilities were based

on more than 400,000 American trucks,

on radio transmitters, uniforms, food supplies and so on.

[narrator] With support from the Western Allies,

the Red Army forces the Germans to withdraw further and further.

In February 1945, General Zhukov's forces win the Battle of Berlin,

bringing the Second World War in Europe to a close.

[Neitzel] When the Red Army raised the red flag

over the Reichstag on May 2, 1945,

it was partly thanks to logistics help from the USA and Britain.

[narrator] Roughly 24 million Soviet citizens

lose their lives in the Second World War.

13 million are soldiers.

Higher losses than any other nation.

Victory in the Great Patriotic War against Hitler's Germany

is the most celebrated achievement in the Soviet culture of remembrance.

It's the Nation's second founding myth,

even taking precedence over the October Revolution.

What inspired and moved people,

what spoke to their hearts...

It was this war, in which every family lost someone.

[faint cheering from the crowd]

[somber music playing]

[Stadelmann] This legend of the Great Patriotic War,

of the heroic victory.

It's one of the crucial ideas that has been carried over

since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

It has become part of the collective memory of the Russian people.

In Russia,

the May holidays, celebrating victory in the Second World War,

are the most important holidays of the year.

They still are. I'd say, more than ever.

[narrator] At the end of the Second World War,

the Soviet Union is stronger than ever.

It's now the world's second superpower, alongside the USA.

But soon, these allies are rivals.

The war is over.

At the Potsdam conference in the summer of 1945,

Great Britain, the USA and the Soviet Union

sit down to decide the post-war world order.

The anti-Hitler coalition collapses.

Now it's all about national self-interest.

Stalin, the communist, plays classic great power politics.

After the war, the Soviet Union creates a buffer zone

of communist satellite states.

Its military alliance, the Warsaw Pact, faces the western alliance:

NATO.

[Sebag Montefiore] Stalin had always believed in Marxism-Leninism.

And he was always convinced that, ultimately, there would be a struggle

with the capitalist West.

That was inbuilt into his world view already.

But first of all, he wanted to make sure

that the Soviet Union was as safe as possible.

And that led him to take control of Eastern Europe.

[narrator] But that met with opposition

in some Eastern European countries.

In October 1956, the Hungarian

population demanded democratic reforms.

Communist one-party dictatorship seemed to be over.

[Neitzel] Hungary in 1956 was especially dangerous,

because Hungary announced its withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact,

and the Hungarian army changed sides.

And they had to defeat this army.

[narrator] The Red Army brutally suppresses the struggle for freedom.

The hunger for democracy remains unfulfilled.

Hungary stays in the Eastern Block.

[Neitzel] It was very clear.

The Soviet Union was not going to allow any state along its buffer zone

to break rank.

There was no confusion.

Moscow decides it isn't going to be trifled with.

[narrator] The Soviet Union pursues its interests in many other countries.

In 1953, the Red Army helps crush an uprising in East Germany.

In 1968, Soviet troops march into Czechoslovakia,

putting a violent end to the Prague Spring.

And there are proxy wars around the world.

In the Korean War, Soviet military advisors and fighter pilots

fight on the side of the North.

In Vietnam, the communist north receives weapons and advice

in its war against the USA.

And in Africa, the Soviet Union supports

the socialists in the Angolan civil war.

[Neitzel] That's the logic of power blocks.

They support or install political

systems aligned with their own interests,

all over the world.

In that respect, the USA differs little from the Soviet Union.

It's simply a global struggle for influence.

[narrator] After 1949, the Soviets have nuclear weapons...

and threaten to use them.

An atomic arms race starts with the USA.

In 1961, the Soviets test a hydrogen bomb,

setting off the largest explosion the world has ever known.

[muffled explosion]

[narrator] The so-called "Czar-Bomb"

destroys everything in a radius of 35 kilometers.

It has a deterrent effect on both sides.

[Neitzel] I would argue that atomic weapons

led to a relatively stable balance of power,

because it was clear to everyone, or at least to heads of government,

that a nuclear war could never be fought,

so it must be avoided at all costs.

[narrator] And yet nuclear war threatens in the autumn of 1962,

when the Soviet Union secretly stations atomic weapons on Cuba.

American spy planes discover Soviet launching-pads on the island.

President Kennedy demands the missiles be removed

and threatens a nuclear response if they are fired.

But when Kennedy offers to withdraw US missiles stationed in Turkey,

Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev backs down,

and removes the missiles from Cuba.

I don't believe that either Kennedy or Khrushchev

were really prepared to see the destruction of their own country

in an argument over a Caribbean island.

[Krushcheva] The great resolution for the Cuban missile crisis in '62

between Kennedy and Khrushchev was that

we really cannot use nuclear weapons,

because if we do, then it's the end of the world.

[narrator] But the explosive arms race between East and West doesn't stop.

[muffled explosion]

[narrator] By 1990, the US has 21,000 nuclear warheads.

The Soviets have 33,000.

More than enough to destroy all of humanity.

One of the Cold War's most significant conflicts is in Afghanistan.

The Soviet Union's southern neighbor seems to be unstable.

Islamist and anti-communist tendencies are making the Soviet Union nervous.

The plan is to bring order and install a Soviet-friendly government.

And so in December 1979,

a KGB unit murders the Afghan president in his palace.

[crowd chanting]

[narrator] The Soviets appoint a puppet leader in his place.

[crowd cheering]

[Neitzel] The Soviet Union's great fear was that Islamists in Afghanistan

would take over the government.

And that radical Islamism could then leach into the southern Soviet Union.

[narrator] Afghanistan must at all costs

remain in the Soviet sphere of influence.

A few days later, 80,000 heavily armed Soviet troops

march into Afghanistan to stabilize the country.

[Kusber] They marched in to impose a "Sovietization" of the system,

believing there was a groundswell of popular approval for the government.

They thought the Soviet invasion would meet with a degree of acceptance.

They were wrong.

Allahu Akbar!

[narrator] It quickly becomes clear:

the Soviet intervention has no support among the Afghan people.

The invasion soon falters.

The Afghan Mujehaddin engage in a brutal struggle with Soviet forces.

[Neitzel] It's interesting that the Soviet Union

doesn't understand Afghanistan,

and above all they have no idea how to resolve the conflict politically.

They only have their military card, or rather a wrecking ball.

[narrator] Unmotivated Soviet troops fail

to bring Afghanistan under their control.

The Mujahideen disappear into the mountains

and harry the Russians with guerrilla tactics.

The USA intervenes,

supplying the Mujahideen with money and weapons.

That land over there is yours.

You'll go back to it one day,

because your fight will prevail

and you'll have your homes and your mosques back again.

Because your cause is right and God is on your side.

[crowd cheering]

The Americans equip the Mujahideen with very flexible weapons systems

that are particularly effective in this terrain.

Stinger missiles, for example, are ideal

for bringing down Soviet helicopters.

[narrator] In the process, the Americans

support a Mujahideen commander:

Osama bin Laden.

[Neitzel] Of course, the Americans say:

"We're giving the Soviets their Vietnam."

And it works.

The Americans don't have much in common

with radial Islamists like the Mujahideen,

but the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

[narrator] The war in Afghanistan lasts ten years.

The world's second-biggest military power is unable to win it.

In 1989, the Soviet Union pulls out,

militarily and politically humiliated.

Casualty estimates diverge.

Up to a million people may have been killed.

Seven million Afghans are displaced.

Official figures on the Soviet side:

15,000 soldiers killed, 50,000 wounded.

The Soviet withdrawal has a lot to do

with the new man at the head of the USSR:

Mikhail Gorbachev.

His policies of "Glasnost" and "Perestroika,"

"openness" and "restructuring,"

have far-reaching consequences for the whole of the Soviet Union.

[Kusber] The Afghan war plays an important role

in the fall of the Soviet Union,

because it strengthens the doubts in Soviet society,

in the different Soviet republics,

that the Soviet system can survive.

[Neitzel] Afghanistan was one factor in the fall of the Soviet Union,

but by no means the only one.

I would argue that the Soviet Union would have collapsed

even without the war in Afghanistan, perhaps three years later.

But the Soviet Union was forced by the West, by NATO, by the USA,

into an arms race.

And this arms race, this economic rivalry, was unsustainable.

[narrator] And so the end of the Afghan war

also heralds the end of the Cold War.

But against the hopes of many,

it will not usher in a lasting peace.