All language subtitles for Vertigo Years 1900 to 1914 Series 1 1of3 Behind the Scenes 1080p

The time before 1914 is usually seen

as the time before the First World War.

But of course, people then did not know

there would be a First World War.

(dramatic music)

Forget that a world war broke out in 1914.

Forget all the stories of the good old days.

(dramatic music)

For people living between 1900 and 1914,

it was a time of terrific upheaval.

Things they'd been sure of yesterday

seemed to have changed overnight.

And that was frightening.

Millions of urban dwellers were starting to see themselves

in a completely new way.

Women were demanding their rights.

Men were becoming less sure of themselves

and looking for a new masculinity.

The old monarchies still clung to power.

Art and science were shattering the old world view.

And like today, all Europe was in the throes of change.

(car engine roaring)

The traditional against the modern.

The biggest challenge for people living then

was to survive and manage this raging transformation.

Imagine you could see the years before 1914

with all their contradictions and with their open future.

Imagine you could see them

as people back then experienced them.

These are the vertigo years.

(dramatic music)

1900 to 2013 seems a very short period

considering the long time span.

(dramatic music)

It was the century of women.

(dramatic music)

The beginning of the century promised so much.

(dramatic music)

Paris, 1900.

The World's Fair reveals

the new possibilities of electricity

to millions of visitors.

Machines from many countries are competing with one another,

and progress and technology explode into the world.

The 20th century begins with the flick of a switch.

(machinery whirring)

Paris provided the stately backdrop

for the World Exhibition.

It was visited by more than 50 million people.

The main entrance alone was designed

to admit 60,000 people an hour.

(dramatic music)

Behind the traditional style facades

of the national pavilions,

it was clear that a revolutionary new era had already begun.

Every hall was filled with new machines and inventions,

gleaming, rotating and vibrating.

New technologies were beginning to change

every aspect of life.

Telephone operators were kept busy

connecting cities and continents.

(dramatic music)

Ferdinand Porsche presented the first electric car

at the exhibition.

His patent fell into oblivion.

Among the millions of tourists

was a German schoolmaster Jean Sauvage.

(dramatic music)

When the Berlin school teacher, Jean Sauvage,

bought a hat in a Paris hat shop,

he didn't want to be recognized as a German in the streets,

not by the tour guides, who would pursue him

and ask him for money,

and not by the Parisians

who would see him as part of the nation

that had won a war against France only 30 years before.

Sauvage wanted to go around unrecognized,

discover the technological miracles of the Paris exhibition

which he had come here to visit,

so that he could tell his students in Berlin all about it.

(machinery hissing)

You gaze at this giant machine with admiration

and a certain frisson of excitement.

A shudder grips you when you see the huge wheel

spinning on its axis in a terrific whirl,

and you behold its unearthly strength.

It would smash a puny human being to atoms

if ever its bonds were loosened.

Everything was overshadowed

by those gigantic dynamos softly humming.

Another victory for German technology.

The softly humming dynamos were delivering electricity

for 50,000 light bulbs in the Palace of Electricity

and also for mechanical walkways

going at three different speeds.

The old world was on the move.

Stable structures were beginning to break down.

All certainties were beginning to waiver.

Artists and scientists were making this process clear.

The German doctor, Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen,

even worked out how to look behind the facade

of the human body.

In 1901, he was awarded the Nobel prize

for his discovery of x-rays.

Radioactive equipment used during those days

is still being held in a basement

underneath the Paris Technical University.

Electrical apparatuses and x-rays

changed the ways in which people saw the world,

but in this room,

which is really nothing more than a decent kitchen,

someone changed the way

in which matter itself was perceived.

Marie Curie came from Poland,

and as a woman and as a foreigner,

she was an outsider twice over in science.

In a drafty little shed, under life-threatening conditions,

Marie Curie and her husband, Pierre, labored at discoveries

that would change the world.

The element uranium possessed an energy

that was identified for the first time as radioactivity.

Her immense persistence and her scientific intelligence

allowed her not only to unravel the secrets of radium

but also to enjoy a career that ended in two Nobel prizes.

But despite her great achievements,

the French remained hostile

to the brilliant foreigner among them.

For many of them, the new century

was a time of uncertainty and even threat.

Their defeat in the war against Prussia in 1871

was still an open wound.

Since then, industrialization and immigration

had altered their once-familiar cities.

So much rapid change was frightening.

The great World Exhibition was also a temporary distraction

from a long and deep crisis in France itself.

The country was split into monarchists and republicans,

reactionaries and modernists.

(speaking in French)

France was undergoing a transformation.

It was a conservative society

with a strong monarchical tradition,

a tradition of aristocratic elites.

And then there was a great change,

with the ideas of human rights

and the rights of the citizen.

But then this process came to a halt

and nationalism began to take hold again.

And why?

Because it was a time of bitter rivalry with the Germans.

Germany had beaten France in 1871.

France had lost Alsace and Lorraine.

She wanted to get it back and get her revenge.

The view over the Rhine alarmed the French.

While their own population was static,

German families were having more children,

more potential soldiers and workers.

Germany had become their great rival in Europe.

(energetic music)

Germany, an empire since 1871,

was the fast-beating heart of the continent.

(energetic music)

In the rural area, new towns sprang up

faster than anywhere else.

In little more than a generation,

the region had become a gigantic industrial metropolis.

Chemical works, machine tool factories, blast furnaces,

car manufacturers, and arms factories,

formed the backbone of German success.

(guns blasting)

Germany's official image was stamped

by the pomp of the Prussian army.

The victory against France had finally united the nation.

Berlin burst on the scene as the capital of the new empire.

Within just 30 years,

more than a million people had moved to the city,

making it the fifth largest metropolis in the world.

Kaiser Wilhelm II had enlarged the city

with splendid new buildings

along the Boulevard Unter den Linden

and a new residence of his own, the Palais in Potsdam.

As head of the Protestant church,

the Kaiser also brought about the construction

of Berlin Cathedral, a solid world made of stone,

at least mimicking stability.

But in the Berlin suburb of Caputh,

Einstein was shaking this apparent certainty.

In his general theory of relativity, he showed

that there was no fixed dimension to space and time.

The so-called Einstein Tower was constructed

to test the theory empirically.

Physicist Max Planck had made

a further astounding discovery.

Depending on how it was observed,

light could behave either as wave or as particles,

the so-called quantum of action.

A new branch of physics had emerged.

If we're talking about quantum physics,

it has the most enormous consequences.

Practically the whole of modern high technology

depends on quantum physics.

Modern computers and semiconductors

work on principles of quantum physics.

Lasers work on principles of quantum physics,

and so on and so forth.

(perky music)

Germany was being propelled

by a breathtaking technical and scientific revolution.

Universities, fundamental research, Nobel prize winners,

Germany was beating all its international competitors

in every field.

(perky music)

The impulsive young kaiser, constantly on the move

and rushing from one meeting to the next,

symbolized this new Germany.

(rhythmic music)

The latecomer nation was running

an unprecedented race of catch-up

with the other European powers.

Germany's neighbors were apprehensive.

The impulsive young kaiser was capable of anything.

His most earnest wish was

to impress his grandmother, Queen Victoria.

(water swishing)
(ship's horn blasting)

During Wilhelm's birth,

it appears that his body got caught.

It was a breech birth, and it was very hard to deliver him,

and so an obstetrician arrived, but very late,

and sort of had to force him out,

and his left arm seems to have become dislocated,

or something happened,

and so subsequently, it never really developed properly,

and he couldn't use it.

And there was, I think, a very strong feeling

in the royal family in Prussia, in Germany,

that a man who wasn't fully a man,

who wasn't completely able

to ride and shoot and be athletic

could really be a good kaiser for Germany.

(perky music)

The most absurd methods were used

in an attempt to heal his crippled arm.

The terrorized child was bathed in hare's blood

and clamped in stretching machines.

(dramatic music)

The German army was incredibly important to Wilhelm.

I mean, it was very important in Germany, anyway, obviously.

It was, in a country that had only recently been unified,

it became almost the sole symbol of the collective Germany.

Wilhelm always wore military uniforms

as if to prove how incredibly tough and hard he was.

And he was fascinated by that.

I think partly, perhaps, because of the withered arm.

The painter discreetly concealed little William's arm

behind flounces,

but his mother, the daughter of Queen Victoria,

was appalled by her child's disability.

For the past two decades, the British Empire

had been ruled not from London,

but from Osborne House on the Isle of Wight.

Queen Victoria had had this country residence built

in happier days with her German husband, Prince Albert.

Now she returned to it to rest from the official duties

and the tiresome reverence of her subjects,

and to escape the popeyed vulgarity

of her eldest son, Prince Edward.

(solemn music)

From a little writing desk surrounded by knick-knacks,

she ruled a vast empire.

(solemn music)

(rhythmic music)

Great Britain was the richest and most powerful nation

in the world.

(perky music)

But even the greatest power on earth

couldn't stop the rush of modernity.

Here, too, centuries-old structures collapsed

within the space of a few years.

Until 1900, Great Britain had been the engine

of the global economy.

It was not the meek but the British

who had inherited the earth.

The strands of power were woven together

in the drawing rooms of a few London clubs.

For Great Britain, the Victorian era

had been a time of colossal achievement.

(ceremonious music)

God looked at this mighty empire and saw that it was good.

No nation could compete with Great Britain

with its possessions, with its navy, with its glory.

(birds cawing)

But at the heart of this magnificent success

lay a deceptive idyll.

(dogs barking)

For centuries, the British aristocracy

had managed to defend their position of power.

Now the revolution was coming, not from the cannon's mouth

or the savage swish of the guillotine,

but quite peacefully, from overseas,

accompanied by a gentle drone.

Refrigerator ships were bringing meat from Australia

and wheat from Canada,

and these imports struck British agriculture

with enormous force.

(machinery swishing)

By 1905, the island kingdom was importing 60% of its meat

and 80% of its grain

at much lower prices than local farmers could ask.

Globalization had begun.

(energetic music)

For the aristocrats and landed gentry, this was a disaster.

Prices for agricultural products fell by as much as 60%,

and soon, 14,000 country estates were mortgaged.

Those who still had money speculated.

The stock exchange boomed.

From now on, real power was wielded in the city of London,

where vast sums of money were moved about

and trade deals turned around an empty space

like a solar system.

Nothing was solid anymore.

At the University of Cambridge, Ernest Rutherford discovered

that even solid matter wasn't really solid at all.

He had observed radioactive waves passing

through gold leaf

with only a few particles appearing

to bounce off the surface.

As a physicist, he knew that there was only one explanation.

Atoms were not what they'd been thought to be.

An atom was not like a big cake

with electrons scattered about like sultanas.

Instead, it was like a solar system,

mostly made up of empty space,

with its mass concentrated in a kernel,

and the electrons circling the kernel like planets.

The discovery spelled the end of matter

in the conventional sense.

Rutherford had demonstrated

that matter was neither fixed nor static,

but rather a state of energy constantly in movement.

(Geiger counter clicking)

The new scientific discoveries and theories

made a deep impression on artists.

(sirens wailing)

Hearing of Rutherford's results,

the painter, Wassily Kandinsky, noted:

The discovery struck me with a terrific power,

as if the end of the world had come.

All things had become transparent,

without solidity or certainty.

The hurtling emptiness of modernity

had motivated the young Kandinsky to withdraw

from what was going on around him,

and to turn instead to the old folk rituals

of Russia's Komi people,

He was fascinated by the animistic symbols

on everyday objects he found.

The path to modernity led Kandinsky and other artists

back to a pre-Christian era, back to forms

which spoke to an earlier collective memory

and whispered of a world without electric light,

or cars, or even cities.

With artists like Kandinsky seeking a new art,

and scientists shaking the foundations

of matter and the cosmos,

Great Britain symbolically reached the end of an era.

(ceremonious music)

When Queen Victoria died on the 22nd of January, 1901,

her grandson, Kaiser Wilhelm II, was at her side.

The story is true that she died in his arms,

or rather his arm,

because (chuckles) he only had one that worked.

But yes, it's certainly true that he was the one

who was holding her when she died.

And I think he felt it was a very important moment,

that in a way, somehow, her status

as the sort of grandmother of Europe,

was going to pass directly to him.

But of course, that ignored the fact

that he had his uncle, Edward,

who was actually Queen Victoria's heir,

to contend with.

(cannons blasting)
(ceremonious music)

Behind the gun carriage rode her son, Edward,

and representatives of every kingdom in Europe.

Europe wouldn't be the same without Victoria.

And as at Windsor, they bore the widow

to her last resting place,

there were many who wondered, fearful of change,

unsure of the future, unsure of themselves.

When Victoria had died at Osborne house,

Henry James noted in his diary,

"The wild waters are upon us now,"

but what came upon the British Empire

was Edward VII, Edward the Caresser.

Short, fat and vulgar,

he was only interested in his own pleasure,

and his first act of state, as it were,

was to waddle through Windsor Castle

and to destroy the statues of his mother,

her papers, her photographs,

and to make crystal clear,

the Victorian era has ended, the Edwardian age has begun.

No one sees this.

I'll show it to you today, but normally

it's hidden in the storeroom, and no one sees it,

even if they ask to see it.

London was preparing for Edward's coronation,

the first in 65 years.

This piece was made by Soubrier

at the end of the 19th century

for a famous establishment,

a brothel called Le Chabanais,

a place for the upper echelons

of the amusement seekers of Paris.

It was the place to come to,

and this piece was made to Edward VII's specifications.

At the time, he was still Prince of Wales,

(speaking in French)

and you can see for yourself,

I think it was made for several people at the time.

It's not for me to tell you how it was used,

but the possibilities are endless.

Edward was crowned in 1902,

in a splendidly decked out Westminster Abbey,

and to the strains of Elgar's "Pomp and Circumstance",

watched by his present and former mistresses.

Among Edward's set, there was a feeling

that you could pretty much do whatever you wanted,

as long as you weren't found out.

And the main thing was never to be found out,

because if you went public with anything,

the rest of society could criticize you, and also question

why you had this exalted position in the first place.

(solemn music)

In Vienna, the double moral standards prevailing

in aristocratic and bourgeois circles

were particularly strongly marked.

Doctor Sigmund Freud made it his mission

to analyze the effects of this double standard.

It's no coincidence that psychoanalysis

was developed in Vienna.

The dangerous national feelings of different peoples

were welling up in all the provinces,

and could be suffocated only under the mantle

of the almighty House of Hapsburg.

The facades of the Ringstrasse in Vienna,

the capital of the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy,

were escapism in stone,

a petrified determination on the part of the Viennese

to flee the problems of their own time.

Politically stagnant and culturally torn,

Vienna was a place of bitter controversy.

Sigmund Freud succeeded in looking

behind the facades of this society.

(speaking in foreign language)

With a combination of medicine and psychology,

Freud was able to fulfill his ambitions and realize a dream

that would influence an entire century.

In 1900,

he published "The Interpretation of Dreams".

Freud had finished the book before 1900.

It was already at the printers,

but the publishers wanted to delay publication

until they could stamp it with the historic date of 1900.

That's how "The Interpretation of Dreams"

became the book of the century.

(men speaking in foreign language)

Freud's analysis of his patients' dreams

was the raw material of his therapy.

The poet Hofmannsthal once said

the two most important tasks that young Vienna set itself

were to dissect its own soul and to dream.

(dreamy music)

Maurice Ravel's "La Valse"

was originally supposed to be called "Vienna".

The piece captures the city's atmosphere in music.

Ravel describes an imperial residence

and dancing couples whirling around,

but the piece ends in dissonance and chaos.

(chaotic music)

The end of the dual monarchy was already in the air.

The different nationalities within the empire

had nothing in common, but the figure of the emperor

peering down upon them

from hundreds of thousands of portrait photographs.

In this way, every Hapsburg subject became a little Oedipus,

trying to overcome and perhaps kill his almighty father.

Since 1848, the emperor Franz Joseph had ruled

over German-speaking Austrians, Hungarians,

Czechs, Poles, Slovenes, Jews, Italians,

Serbo-Croats, Bosnians, Romanians and other minorities

living not so much with one another as against one another.

On the whole, the imperial government seemed to think

that it could triumph simply by surviving,

by wielding a longer arm than history itself.

The emperor himself was only happy

going off in his lederhosen on hunting trips to Bad Ischl

or visiting his mistress, the actress, Katharina Schratt.

Like everything else in his empire,

this affair lasted for decades

without ever reaching a climax.

I think it was just the length of time.

When you reign so long that people can even say

their grandparents were born under the same emperor.

then it's very hard to stay flexible,

very hard to react to changing developments.

And the emperor had come to the throne

just after the 1848 revolution.

It was a different world,

and he'd continued on into these modern times

that had taken off so rapidly.

The empire burrowed itself in for good,

extending the Hofburg palace with a vast new wing.

Behind the splendid facade with its columns and statues,

the construction of the building itself revealed the reality

of the new industrial age.

(dreamy music)

Behind the scenes, steel and technology ruled.

(perky music)

Directly opposite the Hofburg's neo-baroque entrance,

Adolf Loos showed what modern architecture

could really look like.

Commissioned by an exclusive gentleman's tailoring business,

he designed a very new building indeed.

In the immediate vicinity

of the august presence of his majesty,

Loos erected a building of aggressive functionality,

a building without ornament,

in fact, without a facade at all.

for Loos, dishonesty and decoration

were two sides of the same coin.

"Ornament," he wrote, "is crime."

The evolution of culture is synonymous

with the removal of ornament from the object of utility.

We have transcended ornament.

We have brought ourselves to a state of being

without ornament.

The time is nigh, fulfillment awaits us.

Soon, the city streets will gleam like white walls,

like the holy city of Zion, the shining city of heaven.

Then all will be fulfilled.

When the scaffolding came down

from the house without eyebrows,

there was a huge scandal

because the building was a manifesto against historicism.

The disgusted emperor ordered all curtains

on this side of the Hofburg palace to be closed,

and with the falling of the curtains, the curtains also fell

for the future of the house of Hapsburg.

(loud applause)

(men speak in foreign language)

To find such another

quarreling, unhinged family,

you'd have to go into Greek mythology.

The Habsburgs' many tragedies provided raw material

for films, books, and stage plays.

Even before Romy Schneider's famous impersonation,

a romantic aura hung about the Empress Elisabeth,

known as Sisi.

Her life wasn't much more than a succession

of temper tantrums, attacks of anorexia,

and long Mediterranean journeys

in search for the elixir of eternal youth.

(whimsical music)

But the reputation of this mostly absent

and deeply unpopular empress

was rescued for posterity by an assassin.

In Geneva, in 1898, he thrust a file into her heart

and turned her into a martyr.

(dramatic music)

(gentle music)

It was the second violent death in the family

in less than a decade.

(somber music)

The first tragedy had befallen Crown Prince Rudolf

and his mistress, Mary Vetsera,

The brilliant crown prince realized

that he had no chance of succeeding to the throne.

For one thing, his ideas were too liberal.

For another, he was suffering from syphilis.

The emperor knew that a dreadful end awaited his son.

In 1889, Crown Prince Rudolph,

together with Mary Vetsera,

had shot himself in Mayerling.

If you look at Austria,

you have enormous numbers of Hapsburgs

who turned out to be cross-dressers, or completely mad.

France Joseph's youngest brother, Ludwig Viktor,

had a palace built for himself on the Ring.

From there, it was only a step

to the central bath house, today's Kaiserbruendl,

where the prince was fondly known as Lutzi-Wutzi.

(jaunty music)

Ludwig Viktor's escapades in women's clothes and gay clubs

were legendary.

(jaunty music)

But when he approached an imperial officer

in the central bath house,

a brawl broke out.

(jaunty music)

Ludwig Viktor got away with no more than a black eye,

but it was too much for his stern brother,

and Ludwig was exiled to Salzburg.

(dramatic music)

The emperor let none of this come to public attention.

In the dual monarchy, concealing the obvious

was a fundamental principle.

(hooves clattering)
(jaunty music)

But one group of Vienna artists

wasn't prepared to play this game.

Gustav Klimt revealed the emotions beneath the surface.

In Klimt's hands, "Nuda Veritas", the naked truth,

the slogan of the secession movement,

unfolded it's subversive power.

His new goddesses confronted the observer

with his own desires, and worse,

with the desires and fantasies of the women themselves.

When Klimt received the commission

to decorate the Ceremonial Hall of Vienna University

with three large wall paintings,

women were still forbidden to study there.

The fascinating thing about Klimt

is the conflict with the soul, the unconscious,

with the human libido, weakness, human infirmity.

Everything is placed in a wider context.

Klimt presented his paintings in 1902.

The professors were appalled.

Today, only reproductions survive,

"Philosophie", with the enigmatic sphinx,

"Jurisprudence", with the accused helpless before her,

"Medicine", with her longing for eternal life, and lust.

Perhaps the Senate of Vienna University felt

that Klimt's paintings had shown them

too much about themselves.

In any case, they rejected the works,

which enraged the artist so much that he withdrew them.

Vienna was not ready for its own avant garde,

and in the political world,

there were controversies everywhere.

Vienna waltz, as Karl Kraus had said,

an experimental station for the apocalypse.

(somber music)

In 1905, it looked as if the apocalypse of the old world

would begin in Russia.

(somber music)

Russia's cities, too, were on the path to the 20th century.

(somber music)

But in the countryside, little had changed

since the middle ages.

In 1905, the Russian photographer, Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky,

built a camera that could capture images in color.

People being photographed had only to keep perfectly still.

The resulting 700 plates left us

a wonderfully bright picture of the Czarist empire,

but the reality on the land was much less colorful.

(somber music)
(dogs barking)

In the villages, several generations lived

under the same roof.

Only one in every five children went to the village school.

Justice was dispensed by village courts

without the benefit of formal laws.

Those condemned might be whipped, castrated,

branded, or hacked to death with sickles.

Everyday life, too, was marked by extreme violence,

especially towards women,

who were unprotected by any law

from the whim and will of their husbands.

With the onset of industrialization,

hundreds of thousands of peasants,

driven by hunger and poverty,

arrived in the factory slums

of Moscow and Saint Petersburg.

In Saint Petersburg ruled Czar Nicholas II.

Isolated from the social and political realities

of the empire,

he did everything that lay in his almost unlimited power

to crush every impulse towards democracy or free thinking.

Czar Nicholas saw himself as guardian of the mystical union

between the Russian people and divine providence.

His authority came directly from above,

and all those seeking social reforms

couldn't hope for a sympathetic ear.

To him, industrialization was only a means to the end

of financing his medieval vision of Russia.

(somber music)

One doctor described the living conditions

and the urban underworld from his own observations.

These people aren't living they're rotting.

Down there, the people believe in nothing.

They love no one, nothing impresses them.

Through his competence as an engineer

and through hard work,

Sergei Witte had climbed the ladder

from provincial official to prime minister.

He described the czar from close proximity.

Nicholas II

is like an average guards officer from a good family,

amiable, but totally ineffective and unrealistic.

His wife, the German, Alexandra Feodorovna,

with her blunt, self-serving character,

has a strong influence on the effeminate monarch.

She would be suitable for a czar with backbone,

but unfortunately, this czar has no will of his own.

Nicholas did see the death

of his grandfather, Alexander II.

He bled to death after being hit by a bomb, basically,

in front of his grandson,

and it was obviously the most tremendous traumatic event

in his life.

I think it did make him feel

that the forces of revolt and change were obviously evil.

Even today, it remains difficult

to bring about democratic change in Russia.

(speaking in foreign language)

In our country, there is a tradition

of fundamental mistrust on the part of the citizens

towards those in power.

So to have a better claim to their own authority

in the eyes of the people,

they use the church

as a kind of transcendental force from God, the father,

that confirms their own power.

(people singing)

In Moscow's Red Square, government representatives,

together with the Orthodox Church,

celebrate their 1025th anniversary

of Russia's Christianization.

(speaking in foreign language)

They manipulate the national faith in the Orthodox Church

so that the people don't just believe in God,

but also in Putin, for example.

In some Russian churches, there are Putin icons now.

At that time, the czar was worshiped like a God.

The modern factory surfs gathered together

in workers' unions.

Their leader was the charismatic Orthodox priest,

Father Gapon.

When he began to campaign for four workers,

140,000 people went on strike.

A peaceful procession to the czar was organized

to request his support against the exploiters.

On the 9th of January, 1905, Sergei Witte stepped out

onto the balcony of his city palace.

He'd heard noises.

What he saw was a sea of heads,

more than 100,000 workers with holy icons and flags,

on their way to present a petition to Nicholas II.

Their Little Father knew nothing

of their miserable living conditions, they were convinced.

If only they could tell him, he would help them.

(somber music)

(guns firing)

Amid the hail of shots and saber thrusts,

disillusion struck the demonstrators

more bitterly than any bullet.

"There is no czar, there is no God," shouted Father Gapon,

as those around him fell to the snow-covered ground,

wounded or dead.

It's true that the Romanovs have been canonized, yes.

And there is now a church on the spot

where they were murdered in Ekaterinburg,

and it's described as being on the blood,

and that's a sort of traditional phrase

for a martyr, basically.

So yes, they are now saints.

In the year 2000, Nicholas II,

together with his wife,

became saints of the Russian Orthodox Church

in Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior.

(group singing)

That's why we performed

in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior,

because it's an important place in our country.

The Russian Orthodox Church meddles in national politics

and dictates which laws are to be adopted and which are not,

which the church shouldn't do in a secular state.

That is absolutely not correct at all.

That's why we went to the Cathedral of Christ the Savior,

because it's a central symbol

for the Russian Orthodox Church and for its new power,

and also for the Putin regime.

(somber music)

The unrest continued.

In December, 1905, in Saint Petersburg alone,

418,000 workers went on strike.

Interior Minister Bulygin tried to persuade the monarch

that he must make concessions.

Nicholas II answered, "One would think you were afraid

of a revolution."

"Majesty," said the minister,

"the revolution has already begun."

From the electricity of the universal exhibition

to the little Russian revolution of 1905,

gigantic tensions were being released.

Nothing was as it had been before,

and the course of history

appeared to be accelerating by the day.

People looked into their future with exhilaration,

but also with fear.

Max Weber wrote that it was like sitting in a speeding train

and not knowing where the points were set.

(dramatic music)