All language subtitles for 1922 - 1991; The Complete History Of The Soviet Union (1080p_25fps_H264-128kbit_AAC).English

in 1922 the Soviet Union was formed a

new nation that would have a profound

impact on the entire Globe it would

emerge from the remnants of the Russian

Empire after a long and bloody Civil

War Russia in the aftermath of the bolic

Revolution was a country in absolute

turmoil a brutal and bloody Clash of

arms trying to wipe out this new regime

before it can take control of the

country the Bolsheviks finally succeeded

in about 1922 and then came the hard

work of trying to create for the first

time ever a new socialist

country from out of nowhere Vladimir

Lenin had become the leader of the

largest Nation on Earth and was now

imposing his will Lenin won the war

Lenin won the revolution Lenin's one of

those amazing figures who really are

decisive in history once's got to

understand that Lenin was an autocratic

character who really didn't want anyone

to succeed him that's true of most

autocratic characters in history but

Lenin would have a successor who proved

to be the most ruthless of all figures

when dealing with both his own people

and his foreign

enemies they realized after the

revolution that the Soviet Union was

surrounded by enemies didn't have a

friend in the world they felt that way

and they were probably right and the

only defense was to build an enormous

army with a lot of tanks and a lot of

aircraft and a lot of ships which they

did in the aftermath of World War II the

Soviet Union emerged as a new Global

superpower that matched the once Mighty

Russian Empire of

old all of us who were then young we

were seeing great achievements by the

Soviet Union they launched the Sputnik

satellite fantastic scientific

achievement they put the first man into

space Yuri gagari fantastic achievement

and so people were saying they saw the

Soviet Union as a genuine comparable

competitor with the United

States now a century from its formation

the Soviet Union seems to define the

whole of the 20th century

[Music]

in 1917 the romanof dynasty fell and

Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks had

managed to seize power in the Russian

Revolution this new government signed

the Treaty of breast lovk with the

Central Powers bringing an end to

Russian involvement in World War I but

despite an end to the conflict with

foreign governments the battle for

Russia itself would continue for

years in the beginning it seemed fairly

simple it seemed to be the Red Army

which was an army of Soldiers with

hardly any officers and the other Army

is the white Army which you could say

was an army of officers with hardly any

soldiers who wanted to put Russia back

to what it had been before the first

world war and possibly continue that war

to to a victory and then it got

complicated for really the better part

of two three years this struggle is

taking place for control of this vast

and completely turbulent country at the

same time other things are going on

there is a famine there's a war going on

between Russia and Poland at the same

time and there are endless mutinies

rebellions taking places notably the

konat Mutiny where the sailors of the of

the fleet rebel against the new bulit

government so not only is the bulvik

government fighting for its very

survival but it's fighting against

powerful and desperate forces all of

whom have one goal and that is destroy

it various National groups formed their

own armies the ukrainians uh the

Georgians and and they all fought uh

there was an anarchist Army which fought

all sides sometimes allying with one so

basically red and white with various

other factions and of course from

1919 the Japanese the French the British

uh and the Americans all thought they

might intervene and save something from

the situation so there were at least

five or six foreign armies also mostly

fighting the Bolsheviks uh and trying to

help the whites uh but in the and giving

up because the presence of foreign

soldiers only made the Red Army stronger

could increase National feeling Among

The Peasants and and the workers but

while Lenin as the overall leader of the

Bolshevik and Trotsky as the leader of

the Red Army wound up victorious in the

Russian Civil War it was another figure

who truly established himself during the

fighting Lon and try are now firmly in

power the Cher is abolished in its place

comes the

ogpu or political police and to check on

the ogpu there is Rob cream the workers

and peasants inspection group whose

Chief is one Joseph banovic

J party name

stallion Stalin was uh born in Georgia

one of the the national areas of of the

Russian Empire he was uh the son of a

Shoemaker uh and initially he was

intended to go into the the church uh he

attended a seminary he joined the

Bolsheviks uh at a young age and he

became known for his practical work uh

working in the underground

organizing uh bank robberies and and

political

demonstrations he was never he spent a

few years abroad but he he was mainly an

inside guy and in the course of the

Civil War he became in charge of uh all

of the buvik cadres the organization and

he developed a a patronage Network in

that way so then he became obviously one

of the potential successors to Lenin

everyone underestimated him because he

pretended to be not as clever as he was

he pretended not to know foreign

languages he pretended not to have read

anything so they thought this is a

useful gopher he'll do as a sort of

Chief whip to get others into

organization and when they uh founded a

Central Committee they thought well

what's the most boring job on a

committee it's a

secretary uh but the point is uh that

the secretary if they have enough

personality and power and ruthlessness

is a person who determines what the

agenda is who is going to receive that

agenda who's going to be notified at the

meeting and who's going to be allowed to

speak and who writes the notes and uh

and so on so as a result of that right

to the end of the Soviet Union the most

powerful person was the first Secretary

of the Central Committee not the

president not the chairman and that was

Stalin's doing

one of Stalin's key tasks in the

Bolshevik party had been how the issue

of the nationalities that made up the

Russian Empire would be handled by this

new

regime you know his interest in the

nationalities and the creation of the

Soviet Union was that Lenin appointed

him in 1911 1912 to be his nationalities

expert and Starling went to Vienna and

lived there for a few months and wrote

his his his his paper on the

nationalities question which him and

Lenin worked out what to do with the

nationalities you've got to understand

that the Russian Empire was a

multi-ethnic Empire it contained

something like a hundred tiny ethnic

groups but obviously a handful of big

ones the biggest them of course was the

Russians themselves Orthodox Russians

but then there were um Poes who were

catholic fins who were Protestant

Georgians who had their own church

Aeries and and Chin who were Muslim so

the big question um in the Russian

Empire was how do we overthrow thear and

how do we make how do we liberate these

peoples the problem of national

minorities had been a thorny one

throughout Europe woodro Wilson decided

the solution was to allow National

groups to self-determine themselves and

create Nations if they wanted to Russia

was a multinational Empire so so the

problem was how to organize the

different nationalities uh and Lenin

decided that nationalities should have

their own homelands that the Soviet

Union would be socialist in content

nationalist in form and so the republics

were formed along these National

lines so he'd retaken and reconquered

Ukraine and Bellar Russia he'd retaken

the Caucasus including Georgia Stalin's

Homeland but he' lost the baltics states

which became independent he'd lost

Finland and he'd lost Poland so how does

he manage the rest of this Empire what

does he do with these nationality

because the Bolsheviks have supported

their right to freedom and all of them

have their own nationalist movements now

and all of them would you know really

like to be independent that was the big

question what do we do what kind of new

country do we create to keep these these

territories within our new Soviet

Bolshevik State and yet give them

freedom and that's the million Ruble

question in December of 1922 the

solution that the Bolsheviks enacted was

the creation of a federal system of

republics known as the

USSR the name comes from the Union of

Soviet Socialist republics it was a

union of uh quazi independent nominally

independent republics it was Soviet

because the the political form was

elected councils the Russian word for

Council is Soviet it was socialist

because the uh the state owned the means

of production to begin with they had the

Russian federal republic which still

exists there was a Ukrainian Republic

once they'd entered Ukrainian

Independence which lasted until about

1920 and there was a Caucasian Republic

which later split into Georgia Armenia

aaban Central Asia was still uh in chaos

till

1924 and the present stands K kakan

Tajikistan usbekistan Kyan they didn't

really emerge until middle of the 1920s

uh when they'd been

pacified there were great differences

between Lenin and Stalin about this new

Union of socialist republics Lenin saw

it as a decentralized system with each

socialist republic having considerable

power over their own Affairs Stalin saw

it very differently he wanted it ruled

from the center he wanted Russia as the

dominant Force Moscow as the center of

power and preferably himself running the

thing it was quite surprising given that

he himself was

Georgian at the same time as this new

state was being established its leader

was falling into a terrible state of

health a series of Strokes would render

Lenin unable to speak and a new leader

would soon be needed one man had long

been plotting for the position and he

would eventually become one of the most

powerful and feared figures in the whole

world

in January 1924 Vladimir Lenin died the

battle for succession of leadership in

the Soviet Union was now truly underway

with one man Stalin determined to come

out on

top and then on January 21st 1924 the

moon-faced balding dictator left the

scene as abruptly as he had appeared he

literally died overwork his funeral was

a monstrous Affair hundreds of thousands

chewed up in the streets in 25° below

zero weather it seemed that everyone

wanted to pay their last

respects Stalin removed his Rivals

systematically with Incredible Ingenuity

and in such a way they didn't know it

was happening Lenin's great fear I think

was that Stalin would develop a

personality cult a cult that had already

developed around Lenin himself and in

fact Salin EXP exped this he built up

the cult of Lenin when Lenin died he

took charge of the funeral arrangements

he wanted to have complete control of

what happened to Lenin's Legacy it was

Stalin who wanted Lenin's body to be

embed much against the wishes of Lenin's

Widow and once Lenin was dead this

personality cult was transferred onto

Stalin himself and this would become one

of the Hallmarks of his entire Reign of

Power in the Soviet

Union Darin was was left as the sort of

leading member of the leadership along

with Trotsky and there were other there

were other major figures um zenov and KF

and younger ones like bukar and as well

and ROV who was who who were also key

figures but the the leading two

contenders were Stalin and Trotsky and

even though it's always this is always

presented as one of the great sort of

struggles and it was an amazing thing

that Stalin won this won this succession

struggle actually he'd really already

won it by the time Lenin died he was

already the leading figure in the regime

and you know somebody had to do

something pretty radical to stop him he

already controlled the Party Machine and

the party controlled the country so

Trotsky was actually his ideal

competitor trosky was very arrogant and

so famous and so preeminent and so

pleased with himself that he really

believed that he didn't need to do much

organizing and he would simply be given

the leadership

the first thing he did was to tell

trosky he needed a rest and suggested

that trosky go to the Caucasus and trosy

who although a very powerful figure

could be at times hysterical and have

fainting fits and feel suddenly

psychosomatically ill trosky consented

and he went pheasant shooting and the

instructions Stalin sent to the locals

was he is not to meet anybody he was not

to receive any telegrams or letters so

trosky missed Lenin's funeral and you

know people who Miss funerals miss the

will reading and miss the distribution

of the

spoils Stalin's Maneuvers during Lenin's

funeral would be the beginning of the

end for Leon trotsky's role in the newly

formed USSR and the beginning of

Stalin's radical plans for the

nation Stalin zenov and KV Force trosky

into Exile then Stalin overrules his two

Associates and ends the New Economic

Policy in its place come three

successive 5-year plans all designed to

emphasize productive capacity especially

heavy industry and power

output from 1928 to 1941 Russia's

industrial capacity Rises nearly 300%

after the Civil War Lenin had promoted a

policy of compromise economic compromise

the New Economic Policy which allowed

quite a lot of Market forces to delay

communism because the country was so

impoverished and of course in the

Communist party there was a wide variety

of views about which way they should go

whether they should allow some some Mar

some Market forces or whether they

should have a strict communism with

collectivization but at the same time uh

another big issue was industry and

bazaars had begun to industrialize

Russia in the 1890s but of course that

had all been destroyed in the war and so

now they look towards America the rising

power and they saw this extraordinary

industrial miracle that was happening in

America um with mass production and they

wanted it

too but while the Soviet Union wanted to

emulate the industrialization witnessed

in countries like the United States of

America it remained very wary of its

precarious place in international

Affairs well the bolik party which

became the Communist party was was split

in its foreign policy th those on the

left believed that a revolution in one

country could not survive only by itself

so they they believe that only a world

revolution could bring real socialism so

they they believe that Britain Germany

France United States also needed to

become socialist in order to make the

revolution succeed uh and so part of the

part policy was to uh organize and

support foreign communist parties to

undermine governments and to carry out

this revolution but at the same time the

Soviet Union needed to survive in the

world that existed so they were also

engaging in diplomatic relations with

these Powers trying to arrange uh trade

deals so that they could borrow

technology in order to develop their own

economy so there was this two-prong

policy on the one hand they were being

nice to to capitalist countries and on

the other hand they were trying to

undermine them with their local

communist

parties the foreign policy you know

changed and he was extremely um flexible

with the foreign policy but the

essential thing was just to strengthen

the Soviet Union wherever possible by

any means possible and in that sense you

know he was actually quite he was he was

very radical internally he was

incredibly murderous internally but out

outside in foreign policy he was you

know very much a traditional

Statesman making alliances you know

winning friends trying to win territory

in order to make the USSR grade the

early years of the Soviet Union both

Lenin and Stalin after him really craved

foreign recognition they wanted this new

uh revolutionary state to be recognized

by countries across the world one of the

first Nations to enter into negotiations

was Great Britain and you get the Anglo

Soviet trade agreement and then get

diplomatic recognition happen soon after

afterwards and eventually America itself

in the early 1930s will recognize this

new state and send an ambassador to

Moscow and soon after that the Soviet

Union is recognized by the League of

Nations in 1934 this is a key moment for

the Soviet Union at last it's been

recognized as an official country on the

world

stage while the USSR would eventually be

officially recognized on the world stage

it continued to have extremely tense

relationships with foreign powers but

one of the ussr's surprising

opportunities for Industrial Development

in this time was with the country it had

been in direct conflict with just a few

years prior during World War I

Germany Germany after the first world

war was a parah state it wasn't allowed

to have an army wasn't allowed to have

tanks or airplanes so it came to a ment

with another prior State the Soviet

Union and they developed submarines

tanks and aircraft in uh various sites

on the

vulga well this was the first socialist

country in the world so it was a a

tremendous experiment in transforming an

economic system modernized the country

to build hydroelectric dams to build the

economy the Soviet economic Elite

decided that centralized economic

planning would be the most efficient way

to mobilize resources so targets were

set for every sector of the economy by

the center uh and orders were given to

all parts of the economy to fulfill

their parts of the plan so initially

they recognized they needed to build

infrastructure and heavy Industries

Transportation uh energy sector and

machine

manufacturing uh in order to provide the

the capacity to then develop the economy

further into uh consumer goods uh and

and and a broad based economy but

everything was mobilized uh toward this

this the

plan and so Stalin in the end embraced

the extreme leftist view of Communism

which was collectivize eliminate all

property but also to make this into a

great power and to promote

industrialization and the best way to do

that was to collectivize the fields and

the farms and then sell the grain abroad

and buy Tech technology to industrialize

the country and that was the policy he

decided on so it was a radical policy

and by 19 about 1928 he he decided that

that was the only way to go to make the

Soviet Union a great power and to and to

and to ensure the survival of the USSR

and that was what he decided to do and

he would do it at any

cost the economic policy enacted by

Joseph Stalin in the late 1920s would

lead to a widescale famine across the

whole of the

USSR he did it by first of all

introducing a policy of collective Farms

they had been tried briefly in the 1920s

and found that peasants didn't want to

have their horses owned collectively and

rebelled against it and that was quickly

abandoned and then he tried again in

1929 and this time

it was organized with the help of the

Red Army and it is said for the first

time in Russian history peasants at all

the meat they wanted to because rather

than hand over their pigs and sheep and

cows they just had an enormous feast and

ate as much as they could one of both

Lenin's policies and Stalin's policies

was the destruction of the wealthy

farming class the yman farmers if you

like these are farmers who had quite a

lot of land and produced a lot of

produce which they would then sell on

this was deemed unacceptable to the

bolik regime and they were to be

liquidated and other Farmers the smaller

peasant farmers were to be gathered into

Collective farms and produce grain and

supplies for the benefit of the state

this was an absolute disaster because on

the one hand Stalin had wiped out the

one class of farmers that produced a

surplus and there was no longer any

incentive for the rest of the peasant

Farmers to produce any food that was

going to be taken from them anyway what

happens next is the Great Famine of the

early

1930s the regime would not listen to

signals from below they wouldn't listen

to the fact that there was no seed to

plant and they insisted on high quotas

anyway uh and this led to an even worse

harvest the next year with loss of life

uh and Devastation mostly in Ukraine

because this was the the main grain

growing area uh but it would also

affected parts of Southern Siberia and

uh Eastern Russia as well so historians

who have looked very closely at this

don't believe this was a deliberate

attack on Ukrainian nationalism or

Ukrainian Independence it was just a

terribly tragic manifestation of of the

of mistakes made in economic planning

and an unwillingness to collect unbiased

information but rather trying to uh

believe the most Rosy predictions and

reports rather than the actual reports

records weren't kept properly but we

know how many people died simply because

of the census report that in

1937 there are about 12 million people

missing from the

population well they shot the people who

took the sensus and they had a new

census which was faked and the problem

with this famine was that there was a

depression going on all over Europe and

so on and there wasn't much demand for

buying grain from the Soviet Union so

the price wasn't good they had to sell

more and more in order to finance their

industrialization so that famine killed

an enormous number of people between 10

million and perhaps 15 million because

it happened not only to ukrainians it

happened to russian Farmers uh there was

a sort of insanity about it um the

agriculture policy and the workers I

think got party workers got quite

cynical they realized their job was to

destroy so Vineyards were torn up and uh

Farms destroyed uh animals destroyed the

grain wasn't even stored properly it

rotted in great Railway

sidings so it was a form of Madness but

it did solve one problem it got rid of

the peasantry as as a force they were

those who survive were

cowed but it was not just the peasantry

that was terrorized the very leadership

of the government and the original

bulvik revolutionaries would also be

targeted he would take his old Bolshevik

comrades many of whom had helped him

maneuver him into the position of

absolute power and he would proceed to

liquidate them in these show trials that

took place in Moscow men like cev like

zinovev were put on trial on trumped up

charges and there was never any doubt

that they were going to be found guilty

and he really went through many of his

old bck comrades they were put on trial

they were found guilty and they they

were executed was absolutely brutal

these are also the years of the Great

executions called yova in honor of

Stalin's executioner n iov how many

people are permanently removed from

circulation no one knows in some

provinces as much as 4% of the

population

vanishes Kev and zinovev who helped

Stalin seiz power are quickly disposed

of to have been a friend of either one

of them is now a crime for this and

related activity

well over half of the top communist

leadership and thousands of lesser

officials vanish as do most of the army

officers well the show trials were U

masterpieces of propaganda uh they were

meant to be public displays of Crime and

Punishment and they were carefully

rehearsed they were carefully prepared

those that were sentenced in these

trials their confessions were scripted

hundreds of people were invited to

witness them they were covered by the

media and they were an attempt to

prove to the people at large that there

were enemies uh in the country and and

that Stalin was doing a good job of

finding them and rooting them out it was

also a demonstration to foreign

governments that the Soviet Union was

was intent on on preserving its

integrity and Stalin was helped by his

chief of police at the time who was a

decadent poet and who had a lot to do

with the theater and if you know the

stanislowski method of acting which

still survives today the sanaty method

of acting is very destructive for the

actor because it tells the actor you've

got to be whoever you are and prisoners

when arrested and interrogated were

trained just as sanasi trained actors

they were their trial rehearsed so when

they appeared in court they would say

yes I'm terribly guilty I've been a

Japanese spy all my life and they would

then of course make mistakes saying

they'd met somebody in a hotel which

hadn't existed for 40 years a lot of

foreigners are convinced quite

influential foreigners historians like

Christopher Hill Bernard Shaw people who

you thought had more brains were

convinced oh he says he's guilty he must

be guilty a very few of y's victims are

given trials some of the trials are

remarkable for example several

defendants are convicted of conspiring

with trosky in 1936 in the hotel Bristol

in

Copenhagen an actual fact in 1936 the

hotel was no longer in business

next case in 1938 yov himself is purged

together with many purged judges labor

camp operators and the

like his basic plan was you know when he

looked at when he looked at the Soviet

Union he saw there was disloyalty in the

party a lot of people wanted to get rid

of him a lot of people weren't happy

with his collectivization policy and the

suffering of the peasants you know there

was disloyalty in his own family and you

know also the bosses had become like

little princes running their own

territories so he decided the way to

deal with this was by Bloodshed by

Terror quite deliberately and he

launched a great Terror in in 1935 36 in

which over a million people basically

innocent were

executed this is also a time when

there's a great expansion of the gulags

these are these uh prison camps often in

Far Far flung places in in uh Siberia

mild from anywhere where political

prisoners troublemakers or anyone deemed

to be hostile to the regime would be

sent off there often walking there under

unspeakable conditions and they'd be

simply locked away and they'd have to

work they were forced labor camps they

were fed uh very little food they were

held in the most primitive conditions uh

you know in the depths of winter in

Siberia it was freezing cold and

millions maybe 1 and a half million 2

million people died in these camps but

it meant that by the the end of the

1930s Stalin was absolute Master of the

Soviet Union he had simply wiped out

anyone who could challenge his

leadership some 2,000 delegates who were

at the

1934 uh Communist Party Congress

two-thirds of them would would have lost

their lives by the end of the great

Terror so the leadership was

disproportionately targeted but there

are many other victims as well other

whole groups of victims were members of

national minorities who who could be

suspected of disloyalty in case of war

came so there was a German minority uh

in Russia that had been there for 200

years it was feared they would be

disloyal so they were rounded up

unexecuted uh polls living on the

Borderlands between the Soviet Union and

Poland it was feared that they would

turn on the Soviet Union in case of a

war so they were also targeted uh and

victimized not for anything they did but

just for the the language that they

spoke basically

so it was a completely cynical thing it

went on for about 18 months and then

there were several incidents which even

Stalin realized made it impossible to go

on for instance there was a low

temperature laboratory in Moscow and

they'd arrested so many of the

scientists that it was about to explode

and destroy a large amount of the new

Russian uh underground that was being

built and so uh they decided to reverse

things the little chief of police Nick

kof had become a drunk completely drunk

and stopping to turn up for work and

Stalin decided to get rid of him so the

great Terror came to a fairly sudden end

towards the end of

1938 and 1939 became a sort of Almost

Paradise here in which you could write

what you like you could walk the streets

you could say what you like and nobody

seemed to be bothered it didn't last

long but it was an extraordinary period

1939 if you look at the books that were

published then and you can see Stalin

start relaxing after the great Terror he

was in some ways morally

exhausted it maybe that he realized that

it couldn't gone that he'd be left with

no population to

rule by the late 1930s the changing

nature of Europe refocused Stalin and

the ussr's attention on global rather

than Internal

[Music]

Affairs the great hope at the outset of

the buic reol Revolution was this would

spread to other countries notably

Germany which was seen as ripe for a b a

similar sort of bolic Revolution but it

didn't happen and events uh change

rapidly in the 1930s Germany becomes the

dominant power in Europe Hitler is the

dominant personality in Europe and

Stalin recognizes

this Stalin wanted to safeguard the

Soviet Union as much as possible he

regarded Hitler as his first enemy but

he also regarded the Western democracies

France and Britain and America as

capitalist enemies who after all had

intervene to try and destroy the Soviet

Union in the in the Civil War so he was

very suspicious of them perhaps more

suspicious of them um at least I suppose

he thought that the na Nazism a fascist

movement opposed to Communism at least

came from revolutionary popular roots

and was run by a leader a single leader

like himself with whom he could do

business and so as War became closer and

the pressure Rose in Europe he needed to

make a decision on sides Stalin's

ultimate decision would be made behind

closed doors when yakim Von ribbentrop

the foreign minister of Nazi Germany

headed to Moscow in August of 1939 to

meet with his Soviet equivalent vaseslav

Molotov a pack between the two Nations

was being

prepared in 1939

Stalin accepted that sooner or later he

was going to have to fight Hitler but he

did not believe that either it suited

the Soviet Union for it to happen soon

uh or that the Soviet Union was ready to

do so um he also saw the opportunity for

territorial booty in Finland in Romania

in Poland which he was happy to seize

and Stalin convinced himself that he was

offering Hitler such a good deal with um

oil wheat and many other Commodities of

which Germany was in desperate need that

he was confident that it was going to be

left to him Stalin and the Soviet Union

to choose the moment at which he

confronted Hitler in arms what he did

not recognize was that his timetable and

Hitler's timetable might not

mesh in the end Stalin's predictions

about the timetable of the war in Europe

would prove disastrously wrong

in August 1939 it was publicly announced

that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany

had signed a non-aggression

PCT the news would cause shock waves

around the

world the lights began to burn all night

in Moscow British and French military

missions arrived to confer with the

Soviet government so did German

representatives and on August 21st

1939 the world was set on its Heels by

the announcement of a treaty between the

Russians and the Germans in which they

agreed not to fight each

other here were the admitted Arch

enemies in a state of apparent

friendship it was too fantastic to make

any sense it

didn't when the news of the molotov

ribbon trop pact was announced to the

world the world was absolutely stunned

this had all taken place in secret all

the negotiations had taken place behind

closed doors no one could quite believe

in the west that Stalin would do a deal

with his arch enemy Hitler but also

inside the Soviet Union there was deep

and profound shock that Hitler who'd

been presented by the regime as the

ultimate monster suddenly Stalin was

sitting down and doing a deal not just a

deal but signing a non-aggression packed

with him well Stalin and the Soviet

leaders were very much afraid of of

Hitler's intentions starting from when

Hitler came to power in 1933 with an

avowed anti-communist platform the one

of the first things Hitler did was to

Outlaw the German Communist party uh and

imprison the German

Communists it was starting in 1936

therefore the Soviet Union adopted a

policy of support for popular fronts

trying to Rally all socialists and all

moderates in popular fronts against

fascism so they were very much trying to

join an International Coalition uh to

fight Nazism and to fight fascism from

1936 to 1939 uh Stalin was trying to

join various collective security packs

with Britain and with France uh but they

were not letting him in uh and when

Stalin was was uh excluded from the

Munich agreements he began to feel that

he was going to be excluded from any

protection that collective security

might give the Soviet Union so then they

started negotiating on the other side uh

for some sort of PCT with with Hitler

that would protect

them many Communists in Western Europe

and in the United States were deeply

bewildered by um the molotov ronro pact

um this was something completely

unexpected something they could not

reconcile were their enormously high

ideals but in the end they did so they

believed that the com and the Kremlin

must know what they were doing and so

they went along with it but it did

extraordinary confusion in the minds of

Western communist so it was a cynical

thing to do to to suddenly announce that

the Germans were your friends and to

start imprisoning people that you

denounced

fatla in their books and articles at

Communist Party dictate and for two

years of course this was official policy

we collaborate with Hitler because at

least he's fighting the capitalist

West just over over a week after the

molotov ribbon trop pack was announced

Nazi Germany invaded the Western half of

Poland marking the beginning of World

War II only a couple of weeks later the

Soviet Union took over the eastern half

of Poland in exactly the way that the

two Nations had secretly agreed part of

Poland passed over to the Soviet Union

and the three independent Baltic states

of Estonia Latvia and Lithuania were

also handed over uh to the Soviet Union

which gave them more space between them

uh and the expanding German Reich which

they hoped would help them if and when

an invasion came he thought and he did

he thought he'd get the Baltic states

he'd get half of Poland and that half of

Poland irritated him enormously because

it was the half of Poland he had lost in

1920 when he was in charge of the war

there and it had been settled by polish

officers uh so he took great care when

he under the mil MTO ribon trop pack he

was entitled to take over that part of

Poland to slaughter 22,000 polish

officers who were taken prisoners and in

fact it made it much easier to cushion

the eventual Nazi Nazi

invasion the invasion of the Soviet

Union itself would occur on the 22nd of

June

1941 when operation Barbarosa was

launched on Hitler's

orders one of the most extraordinary

stories of the second World War

is that in Germany Stalin through

communist sympathizers had the most

superb intelligence of any service of

Any Nation in the western

world and all his spies in Germany were

telling him repeatedly that Hitler was

going to attack him and they told him so

with the utmost Authority with the best

information and all of this information

was getting through to Moscow and Stalin

absolutely refused to believe it he'd

been warned by Churchill himself had

sent intelligence to Stalin saying that

this is going to happen and most

importantly he'd been warned by his

spies in Tokyo notably Richard sge had

told him not only that Hitler was going

to invade but he'd actually told him the

exact date on which the uh invasion was

going to take place Stalin refused to

believe this and dismiss these accounts

as fabricated and it meant that the Red

Army was totally

unprepared Hitler and Stalin read the

same books one of them is clitz on War

clitz fought with Napoleon realized

Napoleon's mistake was to fight on two

fronts in Spain and in Russia well

Stalin concluded if Hitler's read this

he knows I've read it I know you only

fight on one front Hitler is busy

fighting Britain and France when he's

finished with them then we can have a

war but he's not going to attack me

until he's finished with them and on

that basis Stalin made one of the

biggest mistakes he ever

made when The Invasion came on the 22nd

of June 1941 where the ver rolled over

the Soviet Frontier on a massive 1,600

mile front millions of men tanks

Machinery rolling over this stunned

Stalin Stalin had no idea that Hitler

was going to invade his country it came

as a deep and profound

shock Stalin's Behavior immediately in

the aftermath of the invasion of June

1941 was quite extraordinary he went

into seclusion for days he many people

afterwards thought believed that his

comrades were going to kill him

literally kill him murder him

assassinate him execute him because he

was alone responsible for this

extraordinary crime this extraordinary

Folly of allowing Germany a free pass

almost into the Soviet Union with that

Invasion and so all these frighten men

around him who Stalin was expecting to

kill him uh for the first few days they

too were in chaos they too were

bewildered they too couldn't think what

to do and in the end Stalin rallied

Stalin came round Stalin began once

again at first cautiously at first

rather nervously to exercise his

authority

at first Stalin faced astonishing losses

I think something like 6 million men

were lost in the first in the first year

of warfare and Hitler raced towards

Moscow towards Leningrad into Ukraine

towards HOV taking everything before him

before the Russians started to sort of

gather a proper resistance and started

to fight back and stop them which they

only managed to do in October 1941

outside Moscow but before then it looked

like everything was collapsing and

Stalin himself said Lenin left us a

state and we've screwed it up and for a

second he doubted that whether he could

do this and they came and got him and

said his his henchmen came and got him

and said we need you to take control and

when that happened it was as if the

mistake of of being of of being

surprised by Hitler was forgiven and he

was able to start with a clean State and

he

did but as the German Army moved ever

closer towards Moscow in

1941 it seemed to many that just two

decades after its formation the Soviet

Union was on the brink of

[Music]

annihilation in 1922 the Soviet Union

was formed a new nation that would have

a profound impact on the entire Globe it

would emerge from the remnants of the

Russian Empire after a long and bloody

Civil War

War Russia in the aftermath of the

bulvik Revolution was a country in

absolute turmoil a brutal and bloody

Clash of arms trying to wipe out this

new regime before it can take control of

the country the Bolsheviks finally

succeeded in about 1922 and then came

the hard work of trying to create for

the first time ever a new socialist

country from out of nowhere Vladimir

Lenin had become the leader of the

largest Nation on Earth and was now

imposing his will Lenin won the war

Lenin won the revolution Lenin's one of

those amazing figures who really are

decisive in history one's got to

understand that Lenin was an autocratic

character who really didn't want anyone

to succeed him that's true of most

autocratic characters in history but

Lenin would have a successor who proved

to be the most ruthless of all figures

when dealing with both his own people

and his foreign

enemies they realized after the

revolution that the Soviet Union was

surrounded by enemies didn't have a

friend in the world they felt that way

and they were probably right and the

only defense was to build an enormous

army with a lot of tanks and a lot of

aircraft and a lot of ships which they

did in the aftermath of World War II the

Soviet Union emerged as a new Global

superpower that matched the once Mighty

Russian Empire of old

all of us who were then young we were

seeing great achievements by the Soviet

Union they launched the Sputnik

satellite fantastic scientific

achievement they put the first man into

space Yuri gagari fantastic achievement

and so people were saying they saw the

Soviet Union as a genuine comparable

competitor with the United

States now a century from its formation

the Soviet Union seems to define the

whole of the 20th century

[Music]

[Music]

on the 22nd of June 1941 Adolf Hitler

launched operation

Barbarosa a gargantuan military invasion

of the Soviet

Union the Eastern front of World War II

had been opened and for a while it

looked as if the Soviet Union might be

[Music]

doomed the first days of and weeks and

months of the German invasion of the

Soviet Union were a military catastrophe

but Russia was so vast and Russia's

armies were so enormous that even though

the Germans keep advancing and

advancing that it's not enough as time

went on the this Nazi war machine was

stopped it was stopped in front of

Leningrad it was stopped in front of

Moscow and it was absolutely imperative

for the Nazis to capture Moscow before

winter began and it looked like they

were going to achieve this they captured

um notably the towns of uh Vima and

Brians these are very close to Moscow

and this happened shortly before the

winter set in and it looked very likely

that they would seize Moscow as well but

Stalin ordered that Moscow was to be

held at all costs he saw that this was

the great prize for Hitler and he was

determined to ensure that Hitler did not

capture Moscow and so you have this

incred rible counterdefense of the

capital

city it's hard to think of any single

occasion when another nation has

successfully invaded Russia and and

clung to even the Mongols couldn't get

any further than the forests and the

bogs and Napoleon of course made some

terrible mistakes with the weather

reports Hitler made the same mistake and

it said Russia is a very easy country to

get into but an impossible country to

get out of so that was a part of it

there was just unlimited Manpower this

was the first time they had a genuine

enemy they'd had false enemies that

Stalin invented now they had a real one

amazing achievement of the war was in in

the first four months or so of the war

to evacuate heavy industry from Ukraine

uh which was the city of kov especially

which was going to be under attack moved

hundreds and hundreds of kilometers to

Safe Haven behind the urals and within a

matter of months for example the kov tra

Factory was up and running producing

tanks despite the disruption how it was

done this is is a miracle heavy industry

just dismantled put on trains moved to

the eurs re-erected and working and then

they produced tanks that were actually

Superior to German tanks at t72 which I

think still rolls about today which

bounced shells just bounc off them the

Soviet Union is not the hollow shell

that Hitler convinced himself that it

was before launched operation Barbarosa

this is a vast fantastically powerful

fantastically motiva country and society

which can do things that we have never

dreamed of and so those German generals

who had not been frightened by the

British or the French or the poles

suddenly they feel this sense around the

heart they feel these Russians this is

something far more formidable far more

frightening than anything we've hither

to had to face and as those winter

battles began around Moscow in the

autumn and winter in October and

November of

1941 even though Hitler was far from

admitting it most of the smartest people

in the Inner Circle of the Third Reich

realized that that

terrifying IR hand of defeat was staring

them in the face

in order to help guarantee eventual

Victory the Soviet Union quickly made a

new alliance with the Western powers

that had once treated it with enormous

suspicion an alliance of pragmatism was

formed once they met together in in in

August 1942 Churchill went over to see

Stalin and Stalin was actually at the

greatest crisis of the of the war looked

like he was going to lose the whole

South the oil field Stalingrad and the

Caucasus Churchill arrived and they made

they made a sort of deal they they

became kind of they respected each other

and Churchill told them that they

weren't going to do an invasion of

Europe an invasion of France yet but

that they would ultimately but for the

moment they had to build trust among

themselves and so the three of them met

at Teran for the first time in

1943 there they really began to to build

a sort of a sort of Rapport between the

three of them particularly Roosevelt and

and Stalin and they agreed on enough to

proceed with the war and to win the war

they decided on a conditional surrender

and the future shape of what Europe

would look like here the chief

Executives of Britain and the United

States met for the first time with

Marshall

Stalin they reaffirmed their country's

determination to work together in the

war and in the peace to follow

the battles that the Soviet Union fought

on the Eastern Front were on an almost

unimaginable scale and would turn the

tide in favor of this new

alliance these battles inside the Soviet

Union were on a scale that had never

been seen before in the history of

warfare these huge Titanic struggles to

struggle for Leningrad the struggle for

Stalingrad the massive tank battle the

greatest tank battle in history that

took place at KK the death toll in these

battles were absolutely enormous

millions and millions of Soviet soldiers

would lose their lives on these

battlefields it was a people's War this

the people's Homeland was being invaded

and so they resisted there were partisan

groups behind Nazi lines everybody

whether or not they had been victimized

by the pures or not or liked Solen or

didn't they wanted to defend the

Homeland tremendous numbers of victims a

whole generation of young men was was

lost to the Soviet Union and and

economic destruction the the burning of

fields of of of factories tremendous

losses in the beginning of 1945 when it

was clear that the Allies were going to

win the war The Big Three Stalin

Churchill and Roosevelt met at Yalta to

thrash out a new world order they were

to decide really what was to happen to

the world once Nazi Germany had been

defeated

the three parties reach a firm Accord on

Military and political points

coordinated plans are made for great new

blows against Germany from all

directions reaffirming the resolve of

the United Nations to cooperate fully

after the war Roosevelt Churchill and

Stalin reach agreement on the

foundations of European peace Germany

shall be disarmed German militarism and

Nazism will be destroyed

just over two months after the yta

conference Soviet forces reached Berlin

and raised the victory Banner Over the

rag only a few hundred yards away Adolf

Hitler had committed suicide in the fura

bunker the European theater of World War

II had come to a decisive end but the

battle lines of the Cold War were

already being

[Music]

drawn in July 1945 the potam conference

began the leaders of the Victorious

Allied countries met in Germany which

had unconditionally surrendered just 9

weeks

earlier it would be the last time Stalin

ever left the Soviet

Union Stalin and the Soviet Union

emerged from the war both weak and very

powerful weak in the sense that huge

sways of the Soviet Union had been

totally destroyed by the German Army but

powerful in the sense that the Red Army

had steamrolled into Eastern Europe and

that Stalin now controlled many of the

territories he'd always coveted this

placed him in a very very powerful

position Germany itself was to be split

into two separate parts the Soviets

Stalin was going to control the east of

Germany and the Western allies Britain

France and America were to control the

Western sector of Germany and they were

going to do likewise for Berlin good

progress at the Berlin

Conference reparation

settled boundaries

adjusted peoples

relocated new problems will still arise

tomorrow but today we have an

international organization to work them

out so that problems do not become

conflicts the big three changes but the

big three goes on

a president

dies another a takes his place a prime

minister leaves the conference to stand

a free election and by the choice of his

people a new prime minister returns to

his seat but the conference goes

[Music]

on a promise made at Teran and

reaffirmed in Berlin is kept on schedule

[Music]

the battles of World War II still

continued in the Pacific and the Soviet

Union formerly declared war on Japan but

it would not be long before they

surrendered following the dropping of

the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and

Nagasaki the Allies were now fully

victorious in World War II but things

ended very differently for the big three

Roosevelt died before the end of the war

Stalin was now stronger than ever and

Churchill feared the Soviet Union's

power over

Europe Churchill came out of the second

world war a very bitter man because he

felt that the only national leader who'

emerged from the struggle with exactly

what he wanted was

Stalin and Stalin had got his prizes in

the Pacific uh with the sakaran islands

and um and access to um Pacific ports

and of course you'd sees most of Eastern

Europe and Churchill's frustration and

bitterness and so he instructed the

British Chiefs of Staff to draw up a

plan which was code named

Unthinkable for the recapture of Poland

from the Red Army by 42 American and

British divisions with the aid absurdly

of the rump of the

verar and this document which is still

in Britain's National Archive amazing

document I forget it runs to about 150

Pages detailed description of exactly

how this was to be done but the Chiefs

of Staff they used the word hazardous 23

times to describe it because they said

if the Russians want General War they

are in a position to have it they knew

that the Red Army was incomparably

stronger than the Western Allied armies

and of course they also knew that the

British and American armies that their

soldiers had the slightest desire to

fight the Russians they've been told the

Russians Were Heroes for the last four

years so the whole idea was obviously

absurd but the unthinkable plan which is

one of the most riveting postcript of

the second world war that it was a

reflection of how absolutely appalled

Cel felt by the spectacle of the Soviet

Union coming out of the war having

seized Eastern

Europe Stalin was always determined that

all the country countries that he

occupied with the Red Army would become

somehow become Soviet um satellite

States and he said you know whatever we

discuss with the westerners the old rule

will be true you know who Whoever has

their army there will install their own

system and that's what happened so very

quickly he installed a system through

all those countries you know Poland

Hungary Czechoslovakia Bulgaria Romania

and Yugoslavia first all became people's

democracies later he the there was a

rift with Tito in in Yugoslavia but

basically he remained in control of this

kind of huge part of Eastern

Europe in 1946 Churchill would voice his

concerns publicly with his famous Iron

Curtain

Speech from

stetin in the Baltic to tries in the

Adriatic an iron curtain has descended

across the continent

behind that line lie all the capitals of

the ancient states of Central and

Eastern Europe Warsaw Berlin Prague

Vienna Budapest Belgrade Bucharest and

sopia all these famous cities and the

populations around them lie in what I

must call the Soviet sphere one of the

key moment Ms in the postwar period came

in the spring of 1946 when Winston

Churchill no longer prime minister at

this point traveled to America and with

uh President Truman He went to Fulton

Missouri and made his famous Iron

Curtain Speech he says from stetin in

the Baltic to triest on the Adriatic an

iron curtain has descended over Europe

now remember at this time the Western

allies wanted to try and retain their

alliance with Stalin they were hoping

that this military Alliance that had

worked so well during the war could be

continued into this post-war period but

Churchill realizes that everything has

changed that Stalin is no longer a

reliable Ally and so he makes this

speech it's an explosive speech it sends

shock waves around the world because

Truman Atley and England they're trying

to maintain this Alliance and Churchill

has effectively lobbed a stick of

dynamite into this well Churchill speech

acknowledged what was already happening

that Communist governments were taking

over in in one country after another

there was a lot of Suspicion between the

East and the West so the Cold War didn't

begin all at once it was a series of

Maneuvers and then responses a big

factor in the in the hardening of the

Cold War was the Marshall Plan

inaugurated by the United States which

pledged millions and millions of dollars

to rebuild Europe uh they offered

Marshall Plan Aid to the east European

countries as a way to entice them to

come over to the side of of of the west

but also knowing that that Stalin

wouldn't let them accept that so it was

Stalin saw the Marshall Plan as a direct

attack on the autonomy of of the Soviet

Union and that led to further

repercussions the formation of the North

Atlantic Treaty Organization in response

then the Warsaw paack Alliance in

response to that so there was a gradual

closing down of of contacts between east

and west an in gradual increase in fear

and

suspicion the Soviet Union would launch

the molotov plan as a response to the

Marshall Plan and propaganda films were

dispersed in retaliation to the actions

of the United

States in Washington the Marshall Plan

is announced an aid program for the

world no for America's

capitalist Truman's new budget 2 and a

half billion for social welfare 21

billion for

armaments economic and political

enslavement of foreign countries hunger

and unemployment in their own count

that's the real Marshall Plan the stock

exchange the headquarters of the true

masters of America here sit the

Americans who run the opinion

[Music]

factories well the next thing is to

decide whether to make war on the allies

and they have the atom bomb and he has

not and so the most important thing is

to get an atom bomb barrier supervised

the atom project brilliantly absolutely

brilliantly it's one of the most

extraordinary things he found all the

materials in Germany the Bismuth the

uranium that he needed got it all

shipped he built special cities uh to

build it in he gave the scientists

luxurious Villas and there was a little

book in which the reward s were listed

if the atom bomb worked what they would

get a nice car a house Country Cottage

and so on and the punishment they would

get if it didn't work shooting so there

was a great reason to get that atomic

bomb working and it did and once he had

the atomic

bomb then the question was what to do

next and perhaps fortunately for us the

Chinese Revolution happened and for

Stalin it was more important to help

that and start the Korean War

than to attack the West again but um

certainly in his mind was why stop at

Berlin why not go to the

Atlantic the battle lines of the Cold

War that was developing across the globe

took another dramatic turn when the

Communists under ma Tung were finally

victorious in the Chinese Civil War now

two of the world's great former Empires

were under communist Rule and the first

true proxy battle of the Cold War would

take place in

[Music]

Korea there is no margin for error when

the chips are down when the bullets and

projectiles that fly overhead are real a

situation soon to come in the summer of

1950 thousands of miles away on the

other side of the Pacific trouble was

being fermented North Koreans plotted by

the Communists were massing strength for

a war against the democratic government

of Korea a war which threatened the

Peace of all

Nations 1953 would prove a pivotal year

the Korean War would end in a stalemate

and Joseph Stalin's rule over the Soviet

Union came to a dramatic

close on the 5th of March 1953 the

Soviet Union announced that its Leader

Joseph Stalin had died

Salin is

dead the kremlin's coold stone walls the

Eerie face of Moscow a howling wind and

snow adding to the somber picture is the

description accompanying the

announcement that the most powerful

dictator in history has come to the

inevitable end the Scramble for power is

the next chapter there were no immediate

indications of who would succeed Stalin

Molotov or malanov their names fitted

into the patent of the struggle for

Stalin's mantle as did the name of

barrier as this news reel went to print

the word had not yet come from

Moscow but Stalin's life was history

Intrigue ruthless ambition absolute

power rather like with lennin there was

no kind of obvious successor to Stalin

and Stalin like lennin believed he was

indispensable and no one could succeed

him and that was to a certain extent

true CU just as just as there was never

another Lenin there was never another

Stalin but what Left Behind were a bunch

of terrified appara who were used to

being under Stalin's thumb the the

leading successor it seemed was going to

be malen kof who was a rather fat young

and ruthless appara who who' served

Stalin and done some a lot of Dirty Work

Christof was much more Dynamic and no

one thought he would succeed Stalin

least of all Stalin because he was

coarse semi literate um a Ruffian badly

educated and therefore could never be an

ideologist but it didn't matter because

he seized power and he destroyed the the

really the most powerful person in the

government after Stalin's death who was

lenti barrier long- serving secret

police chief and overseer of the nuclear

project to get a nuclear bomb which he'd

successfully done so he arrested him had

him shot had all his people shot and

really ended the period of kind of

brazen Terror in the the leadership so

there was a competition Kush was one of

these people who appeared to be a clown

and one of things reasons that Stalin

liked him he he posed no threat he did

as he was told he was a fellow student

of Stalin's wife he said all the right

things he did all the right things in

the war he was quite effective he only

put one foot wrong his son was going to

be executed for shooting another officer

but managed to fly a plane into Germany

in time was captured uh and uh got back

into Russia by by escaping and kusov

went on his knees to S and said spare my

son and Stalin refused I don't think

Kusa ever forgave Stalin for the

shooting of his son and that may be one

of the motives for his anti- Stalin

speech it may be personal but anyway

that 20th party Congress which shook the

entire communist World when they

admitted that Stalin was a criminal and

they themselves had all dance to his

tune uh that was a very brave thing to

do but it did actually establish HOV in

power because it meant he could get rid

of his enemies he didn't shoot them

molto was made ambassador to out of

Mongolia malinov I think was put in

charge of a electric power station in

Siberia not very nice punishments but

better than death I

suppose Nikita kristof's shocking 1956

speech in which he denounced the The

Cult of Personality that had formed

around Stalin would be a major

contributor to the sinos Soviet

split but although relations with the

other great communist world power were

now soured krof would also soon earn

major political victories for the Soviet

Union and on October 4th

1957 a world stirring event took place

a man made Celestial body for the first

time in history overcame terrestrial

gravity and flew into

space during the early to mid 50s the

Americans had been developing their

space program and they were

they announced that they were soon to

launch a satellite into space this was a

huge moment and a huge Triumph but what

did the Soviets do they had been

developing their own satellite as well

and they got got their first this was

Chris Jeff's great Triumph was to launch

Sputnik before the Americans it was a

public relations

coup the space race was one example of a

great Soviet success story the economy

was improving after the war but it

wasn't running on all cylinders at this

time but but the Space Race began as a

quazi arms race uh knowing that the

Americans were trying to build Rockets

uh the Soviet Union mobilized all of its

resources into launching a satellite and

then to launching a man into space uh so

that they could be the first so when

they're able to mobilize all resources

toward this one goal and they had

brilliant scientists they also had

scientists who had been Germans who had

been gone over to the the Soviet Union

they had tremendous brain power and and

tremendous technological capability uh

and with all the resources at their

disposal they were able to be the first

into

space the launch of the Sputnik

satellite generated frenzied attention

around the world but at the same time an

arms race was in full effect and acts of

Espionage were at extraordinary levels

on both sides a crisis point was reached

when pilot Francis Gary po was took off

from pesar in Pakistan in 1960 and his

U2 spy plane was brought down by Soviet

air

defenses secret reconnaissance of Russia

by highflying American new2 jets ended

when one was downed deep in Soviet

territory its pilot Francis Powers was

made the subject of a showcase

trial power's family was in the

courtroom as Russia began massive

exploitation of this propaganda windfall

power's conviction was inevitable and

the U2 Affair became kof's pretext to

torpedo the Paris Summit conference so

in September of 1959 Krush had met

Eisenhower at Camp David in America and

the two men had agreed to meet again in

Paris in the following spring and this

was Julie to go ahead but something

intervenes in the meantime something

that causes a crisis in relations

between the Soviet Union and the United

States and this is the shooting down of

a U2 spy plane piloted by Gary Powers

chov gave a personal order to his air

defenses to shoot down an American U2

spy plane over Soviet

airspace for three or four years

American planes have been intruding over

Russian airspace

freely very high altitude and the

Russians had no Fighters or missiles

that could reach them by 1960 they

did and he thought and who can blame him

that for the Americans to spend a supply

plane flying over their airspace on May

the 1st May Day the most sacred day in

the in the Soviet um buic calendar uh to

fly over his airspace was a deliberate

insult and so gave the order to shoot it

down Chris job played his cards very

skillfully and ruthlessly that initially

he announced the shoot shooting down the

plane but he did not admit that he

captured its pilot major Gary PS and so

the Americans got themselves deeper and

deeper into a tissue of lies about this

being a weather plane and so on so forth

and only two days later the christov

revealed that they had major Gary Powers

and announced triumphantly to the world

and our cameras are better than the

American cameras that we found on the U2

so the humiliation was terrific this

thrs relations between the two countries

into absolute crisis Christ storms off

back to Moscow he won't have anything

more to do with these talks and he

cancels the intended visit of Eisenhower

to Moscow Eisenhower is very

disappointed he was really looking

forward to going but this is cancelled

and relations between the two countries

descend once more into

crisis the U2 incident was eventually

resolved by an exchange of Gary Powers

for a Soviet spy named Rudolf Abel who'd

been captured in the United States the

technological War would continue though

and the Soviets struck another Victory

when they launched the first man into

space in

1961 Yuri

Gagarin the space race became incredibly

public competition between the two

superpowers as to who could could

display their technology their

sophistication their ambition in a new

realm space and that was really what the

space race was about and why both both

countries put massive amounts into

sending people into space and competing

in that way and of course you know the

Soviet propaganda machine made all the

cosmonauts into massive Heroes just as

the Western American propaganda machine

made made their astronauts into huge

Heroes and I certainly think for a while

the public was pretty fascinated

probably in both both

worlds gagaran was an a pilot and he was

very well trained and he was

extraordinary Fearless man and he became

like a film star

Idol an international thing so the

gagaran squares not only in Russia but

you find them all over Africa it had an

enormous effect on on the American

psyche of course again a Triumph for the

Soviet Union it just demonstrates their

capabilities what they've achieved in

this space program and it's a

humiliation for the Americans who

publicly congratulate the Soviets but in

private they're seething what do they do

one of the first things they do is they

form NASA they are determined to regain

the upper hand in the Space Race the

achievement by the USSR of orbiting a

man and returning him safely to ground

is an outstanding technical

accomplishment we congratulate the

Soviet scientists and Engineers who made

this feat

possible the exploration of our solar

system is an ambition which we at all

mankind share with the Soviet Union and

this is an important step toward that

goal our own Mercury man and space

program is directed toward that same

end the end of the 1950s and the

beginning of the new decade seemed at

first to be an era of unbridled success

for the Soviet Union with their dramatic

lead in the Space Race but huge crime

IES in both Europe and North America

were just over the

horizon the early 1960s would prove to

be the height of Cold War tensions both

in Europe and in the

US a Communist Revolution had taken

place just off America's borders in Cuba

and the Bay of Pigs invasion intended to

overthrow this new government of Fidel

Castro had

failed and in Berlin where the Allies

had converged after their victory in

World War II the Iron Curtain was

becoming a literal

wall krov exercised absolute control

over the Eastern block but at the same

time he was very susceptible to pressure

and one must remember in the late 1950s

and early 1960s first of all China was

ascendant as a Ral for the leadership of

the Socialist World a more more and more

especially in the early 1960s the

Chinese of Mong were publicly denouncing

kov as betraying socialism so he had

that pressure and he also had pressure

for example the East German leadership

who were constantly urging him to take a

much tougher line with the West one of

the key troubles in East Germany in the

late 50s and the very early 60s was the

flood of East Germans who were crossing

the border into West Germany and this

had as it Nexus was taking place in

Berlin where it was relatively easy for

East Germans who wanted to move on who

wanted to get on in life to cross the

frontier Christof saw this as a very

real problem you know several million

Germans had poured over into West

Germany leaving the East German State

and so what did he do he sanctioned

Walter ulri the leader of East Germany

to build the Berlin Wall this

effectively put a stop to the massive

immigration taking place from e Germany

into the west but it also was a PR

disaster it did not look good to have to

build a wall to keep your own people

in the East Germans don't seem to have

guards enough to plug every hole when a

soldier's attention is diverted by

others a hole is cut in the bared wire

and kush's face is slapped again

[Music]

not long after the Berlin Wall was

constructed another flash point in the

Cold War emerged when it was revealed to

the world that the Soviet Union had

placed nuclear weapons on the territory

of newly communist Cuba the world

watched with baited breath as the two

superpowers faced

off the Cuban Missile Crisis is is a

hugely complicated episode and and

historians are still uncovering archives

and and and trying to understand what

exactly happened I think Castro played

an important role in this at least Kush

blames Castro for goting him into uh

sending missiles to protect Cuba against

uh another United States Invasion uh the

Soviet Union miscalculated the United

States response to the presence of these

missiles they didn't realize that they

had been found out so there was a real d

during these two weeks in October that

the world would go up in a nuclear war

because of of of this tension the

greatest crisis between the Soviet Union

and the United States and indeed I think

one of the great crises of the entire

Cold War this was sparked by America

placing missiles its own missiles on

Italian and Turkish soil in retaliation

Kristof wanted to replace Soviet

missiles on Cuban territory very close

to the United States thus began a

standoff Kennedy said that this was

totally unacceptable to have these

missiles so close to the United States

Chris said it was totally unacceptable

for the Americans to have missiles on

Italian and Turkish territory the world

at this point is in deep crisis we are

very very close to a nuclear war being

declared and it is only through wiser

Council wiser heads prevail a deal is

done between the two powers that enables

them to back down Chris you know the

Cuban Missile Crisis as a way to break

the impass that he felt the sort of

stagnation that he felt was was taking

place in the Rivalry between the two

superpowers he thought that if he he

needed to do something to to up the ante

and he he he'd convinced himself that

you know taking a risk a gamble would

would turn the whole course of the Cold

War and he'd seen a hint of it when in

1956 during the seers crisis he'd

threatened that if Britain France and

Israel didn't withdraw from Egypt he

would use nuclear weapons and it's a

moment that's often forgotten and

America had forced them to withdraw so

he saw that as evidence that nuclear

brinksmanship really worked and so what

better way to break the impass and to

overcome American power and wealth than

to place weapons right in America's

backyard and to defend a new fraternal

revolution in Cuba and so that's why he

did it he was also a member you know one

of the World War II generation like all

the Soviet leaders and they were

actually very very afraid of war they'd

seen what war did even conventional war

and so you know he thought he' win that

point call on the chairman of the

Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union

on a point of order

[Applause]

why then this jerk this uh stoe of

American imperialism

here who is speaking before you

he is touching upon questions which uh

are obviously not procedural ones and

the president who is sympathizing with

these colonialist and Colonial

domination obviously is not stopping him

he had a quality of an actx I'm taking

off your shoe and banging it in the

United Nations does get attention and uh

in the Cuba Cuban Missile Crisis I think

he

won uh it was very cunning very risky

but we were more frighten than they

were uh I remember I was a student at

the time and I seriously thought in

Cambridge this might be my last day on

Earth with the Missile Crisis and

Kennedy uh holding out but in fact uh uh

Kush had a bargaining chip

and he was willing to take those armed

Rockets away if America withdrew its

Rockets from turkey that wasn't made

public at at the time but uh it's clear

there was a bargain and the Soviet Union

won it they they had no Atomic weapons

near their borders as a result that was

one of kush's great achievements it was

very risky but I don't think anyone in

Russia held it against him and despite

all these expensive intelligence

services in the west nobody fully

understood that when krof threatened to

bury us all when krof was telling

Western ambassadors that he' ear marked

20 nuclear weapons for Britain and he

was confident that would be enough that

all of this it was boasting of an almost

deranged kind and christov thought he

was playing a brilliant hand and

christov thought rightly that he was

frightening the west but what he failed

to see was that he very very nearly

overdid it because he frightened the

West too

much they Retreat to Moscow Russian

ships steam out from Cuban ports with

their decks loaded with missiles the

Soviet are withdrawing under pressure

from the new world it's one of the last

chapters in the offensive threat from

Cuba that led the United States to throw

a quarantine around that island and

forced the Russians to dismantle their

medium-range rocket installations us

planes and picket ships have counted 42

rockets on Russian bound ships but still

unresolved is the question of the jet

bombers in Cuba Castro claims they

belong to him and that he will not give

them up the US insists the Russians must

remove them before the quarantine will

be

lifted the headlines in the Soviet

newspapers said the Soviet Union has

saved the world uh by the deal that it

made with the United States so they took

all the credit for easing this tension

uh and that's what the Soviet readers

saw that this was a victory

uh for Soviet diplomacy the following is

the text of President Kennedy's

statement of

noon I welcome chairman kav's

statesmanlike

decision to stop building bases in

Cuba dismantling offensive

weapons returning them to the Soviet

Union under un

verification this is an

important and constructive

contribution to

peace both the US President John F

Kennedy and the first Secretary of the

Soviet Union Nikita Kristof would not

have much longer in office after the

deescalation of tensions from the Cuban

Missile Crisis JFK was infamously

assassinated in November

1963 and Kristof would be maneuvered

from Power the following year it was

soon to be the era of Lenard breev in

the Soviet Union

[Music]

in 1922 the Soviet Union was formed a

new nation that would have a profound

impact on the entire Globe it would

emerge from the remnants of the Russian

Empire after a long and bloody Civil

War Russia in the aftermath of the bvic

Revolution was a country in absolute

turmoil

a brutal and bloody Clash of arms trying

to wipe out this new regime before it

can take control of the country the

Bolsheviks finally succeeded in about

1922 and then came the hard work of

trying to create for the first time ever

a new socialist

country from out of nowhere Vladimir

Lenin had become the leader of the

largest Nation on Earth and was now

imposing his will Lenin won the war

Lenin won the revolution Lenin's one of

those amazing f

who really are decisive in history

once's got to understand that Lenin was

an autocratic character who really

didn't want anyone to succeed him that's

true of most autocratic characters in

history but Lenin would have a successor

who proved to be the most ruthless of

all figures when dealing with both his

own people and his foreign

enemies they realized after the

revolution that the Soviet Union was

surrounded by enemies didn't have a

friend in the world they felt that way

way and they were probably right and the

only defense was to build an enormous

army with a lot of tanks and a lot of

aircraft and a lot of ships which they

did in the aftermath of World War II the

Soviet Union emerged as a new Global

superpower that match the once Mighty

Russian Empire of

old all of us who were then young we

were saying great achievements by the

Soviet Union they launched the Sputnik

satellite fantastic scientific

achievement they put the first man into

space Yuri gagari fantastic achievement

and so people were saying they saw the

Soviet Union as a genuine comparable

competitor with the United

States now a century from its formation

the Soviet Union seems to define the

whole of the 20th century

[Music]

[Music]

in October

1964 Nikita kof was about to be removed

from

Power whilst on vacation in pitsunda on

the Black Sea he grew suspicious of

activities developing in Moscow and he

immediately flew back to the capital

city upon arrival he was forced to step

down as leader of the Soviet Union

[Music]

the official Russian announcement said

he resigned the red say ill health

prompted kop to step down observers say

that his abortive Feud with red China

that broke apart the front of Monolithic

communism was the real reason a man who

clawed and fought his way to the top

woed leaders like Nasser of the

neutralist Nations kof probably made his

greatest impact on a strangely

fascinated world when he came to the

United Nations assembly and 1960 and

attempted to purge Secretary General

Doug hamash He piled shock upon shock

when he and the Soviet delegation rudely

interrupted speeches by Western

[Applause]

delegates the Soviet leadership

overthrew Kristof they called him in and

they denounced him and they sacked him

from all his positions and the reason

they did it was because of really

because of his kind of arrogance his

despera ISM his completely ill-thought

out

Adventure what sealed kush's fate was

his interference with Agriculture and

his hairbrain scheme to imitate the

Americans by growing lots of Maze and in

order to do that Wrecking existing crops

so there was serious food shortages in

the shops and serious discontent that

was more important to the party than

anything else there had already been a

number of Rights by workers who were

dissatisfied and that was the decision

to get rid of him forces began to

conspire against him and leading those

forces was Leonid BNF who sees that

maybe now is the moment to act that

maybe this is the moment where he can

get his hands on the levers of power the

crowds that once cheered krof wildly

were left in the dark as to just what

went on when the Central Committee met

to act on his retirement and to name

Leonid BNF as the new leader of the

Party by Lei kosan took the job of

Premier rnf has lately been considered

kof's air apparent but the question

remains as to whether he had anything to

do with hurrying his boss's departure

christop is on holiday he's summoned

back to Moscow and the poit bureau led

by BNF denounce Kristof they criticize

him for everything he's done and they

say they want him to step down from

Power this will not be a coup quite as

brutally as Stalin might have done it

he's allowed to resign but it is the end

of kristof's Reign of Power now Leonid

BNF is the man at the

helm you know they voted him out they

didn't execute him they didn't imprison

him they just retired him in the meeting

he said you know whatever else happens

my one achievement has been that no

one's going to be shot now I'm just

going to retire and so it happened and

breth became the next leader B was a a

pair of safe hands a man with a good

military record he just wanted to keep

the apparatus going as it had in the

past to appoint suitable first

secretaries and uh heads of Soviets and

so on and who allowed a fair amount of

corruption his own family was

horrifically corrupt his daughter Galina

was a a nightmare but um that corruption

was a sort of lubrication for the party

and under under bnff everything had a

had a price rajn is known among Western

diplomats as the red and the gray FL

a man who is expected to continue

peaceful coexistence with the West while

trying to heal the breach with

[Music]

China it had been indicated that brf

would be K successor on his death but no

Spectre of death or disgrace marred the

scene of kof's 70th birthday party last

spring he seemed to and the world the

Communist sphere at his feet and his

power over 220 million Soviet citizens

seemed impregnable now For Better or

Worse the kof era has come to a

close BNF was a generation younger than

than kusov uh and he had been a real

beneficiary of of Soviet higher

education of of Soviet Social Mobility

so born in a working-class family he got

a degree in in engineering and and

became a practicing engineer in the

1930s joined joined the Communist Party

served in military as as a party

official so he had some practical

knowledge of the economy and he wasn't

ideological the way the early bolix had

been uh the party was was the Soviet

Union was the only thing that he knew so

he had worked his way up into the party

uh you can see his face in the great

kitchen debate between kof and Nixon

grnf is standing there just behind kof

so he was a a trusty Aid at the time and

so was one of the the the leaders at the

time of kof's dismissal along with Alexa

kosan the two of them came to power

together brv soon eclipsed kosan but

initially it was a dual

leadership and he was a bluff

good-natured pleasure-loving quite

capable appara who'd been chosen by

Stalin and promoted who'd played a part

in the arrest of barrier and served

kristov quite loyally until the end but

it gradually became a stagnant period

for the Soviet Union no reforms were

really succeeded and the Soviet Union

needed reform unlike Christof who'd

attempted to decentralize the economy to

give more power to the regions BNF

wanted to do exactly the opposite he was

much more in the mold of Stalin he

wanted to bring everything back to the

center to bring power back to Moscow and

to bring power back to himself one can

see at this point the Soviet Union is

reverting much more to the model that

have been created by Joseph Stalin the

re of has seen to be one historian has

called it uh that he made a little deal

uh with the Soviet people that he

promised them economic Prosperity which

included because the the the Communist

economy was so inefficient it included

increasing tolerance for a shadow

economy for some black marketing some

private Enterprise the government turned

a blind eye to that in exchange for

political loyalty and most of the people

made this bargain and and agreed not to

be in opposition to the government what

bref wanted to achieve was a parity in

terms of weapons between the Soviet

Union and America and he begins

injecting vast sums of money into

military expenditure at one point some

12% of GDP is being spent on the missile

program inside the Soviet Union

remarkably he does achieve a parity by

the 70s the Soviet Union has an

equivalent number of warheads to the

United States the world thinks that it's

business as usual and it's just a change

of leader in the eyes of the world the

Cold War continued unchanged but what we

could not see then but we can see now is

that all this time the enormous strain

upon the Soviet economy of maintaining

this Empire and the stupendous Armed

Forces at Colossal cost that all the

time the Soviet Union is creaking and

cracking under these enormous

[Music]

trains since

1954 every American president has

offered support to the people of South

Vietnam we have helped to build and we

have helped to

defend thus over many years we have made

a national pledge to help South

Vietnam defend its

independence and I intend to keep that

promise in

1965 president Lyndon Baines Johnson

followed up on his promise and ordered

US troops to intervene directly in

Vietnam one of the great proxy battles

of the Cold War had begun

[Music]

the Vietnam War affected the Soviet

Union more in in the sense of the Soviet

Union's relations with China than just

with the United States so that the

Vietnam War was kind of a triangular

communist uh Enterprise between China

the North Vietnamese uh and the Soviet

Union the Soviet Union really didn't

want the North Vietnamese to invade the

South because that was going to

destabilize the region but they felt it

was the Chinese who were urging them on

so initially the Soviet Union was not

vocally opposed to the invasion of

Vietnam and and the war in Vietnam but

once it happened they were certainly

willing to use the propaganda points of

an imperialist War being waged by the

United States in Vietnam with the

Vietnam War um all he had to do was

Supply missiles and laugh as the

Americans lost it because he knew

perfectly well that there was no way in

which you could win a war when you

supporting a corrupt regime in the South

and you had a dedicated regime in the

north which had armaments from the

Soviet Union armaments from China and

didn't care how many people it

lost Vietnam was a strange phenomenon

because you know America poured in

forces in there and was never actually

defeated but it lost the will to win

which is always decisive in a war partly

it was a Vietnamese nationalistic

Uprising against foreign control that

started against the French and it

continued against the Americans and

their regime in the South partly it was

a proxy war between the superpowers

American troops were there Russian

advisers armed the Vietnamese in massive

quantities but the Vietnamese were

thought by the Americans to be

completely under Soviet control but in

fact they did they fought the War they

wanted to fight and were quite

recalcitrant in in taking orders from

the Kremlin but you know it was it was

America's first great

[Music]

iation but just as America was becoming

embroiled in Vietnam the Soviet Union

was facing its own battle in Europe in

the 1950s uprisings have been crushed in

Poland and Hungary but a new crisis was

emerging in Czechoslovakia under the

rule of Alexander dubek the Prague

spring had begun

[Music]

the Prague spring was an attempt in

Czechoslovakia by

czechoslovak communist leaders to find a

different path towards communism they

called it socialism with a human face uh

and in fact all the East European

countries were somewhat different from

one another and not all following a

lockstep to the party line uh so certain

deviations were allowed but brna felt

that there was a danger to socialism

itself by these reforms in

Czechoslovakia uh and so he invoked what

became known as the BNF doctrine that

any threat to socialist power in one

socialist country should be combed by

all of them another version of the brf

doctrine is what we have we hold and so

rather than let the reformed Communists

succeed in Czechoslovakia he created the

pretense to send Warsaw pack troops into

the country to put down this

reform Russia's purpose in continuing to

keep such large powerful and mobile

forces in Czechoslovakia has been in

effect to put a pistol to Mr Dub's head

there is plenty of evidence that for his

own part Mr dub intends to go on

resisting the pressures and is prepared

if necessary to get his head shot off

but there is now a question mark over

the continuing loyalty of enough members

of czechoslovakia's communist party's

presidium to give Mr dub the support he

needs to say no to the Russians or the

demands they will make when the talks

begin the Prague spring this Uprising in

Prague against Soviet rule is a real

challenge for brn how on Earth is he

going to deal with this his initial

response is to try and do a deal with

Alexander dubek but it quickly becomes

apparent that this is impossible and

under pressure from the poit bureau he

decides to send in the tanks and send in

the troops and then you have the brutal

crushing of this uprising in in which

thousands of Soviet soldiers will crush

and fight against dug's

civilians never again in the cold war

did either Soviet Union or the United

States attempt to interfere in each

other's recognized spheres of influence

the Americans who'd already stood by

amid terrible blood bars in the Polish

shipyards amid the 1956 Hungarian

Uprising

1968 when was the U rising in Prague the

Prague spring that once again the

Americans did nothing and the Russians

were left free to crush that whereas

again while all that was going on in

Vietnam although of course the Soviet

Union provided terrific material Aid to

Vietnam at no time did the Soviet Union

think of directly intervening in the

Vietnam War so never again was there

such a dangerous moment when either side

attempted to infringe each other spheres

of influence

the first two and a half Decades of the

Cold War had been filled with

revolutionary uprisings and proxy

battles all across the globe but as the

1970s began a surprising period of day

tant emerged where more direct relations

between the Western world and the

Communist world were

established in China with Cho and Li

President Nixon begins a dialogue which

marks an historic change in American

policy a political realist the president

knows that communication with China is

indispensable to his Grand Design the

result of a long careful planning of a

vision for peace born long

ago the thrust for peace leads to the

Soviet Union the president will not be

dissuaded by the days of hard

negotiation ahead the opportunity to

reduce World tension is at hand and he

achieves a breakthrough with agreements

environment space medicine and a trade

pact creating new jobs for Americans but

most significant of all a treaty to

limit

[Music]

[Applause]

[Music]

arms with the significant decrease in

tensions in the Cold War Leonid breev

focused on the domestic challenges that

faed the Soviet

Union the Hallmark I think of rf's uh

economic policies were the 5e plans he

liked these 5year plans in the early'

70s saw a big increase in the consumer

goods that were being produced by the

Soviet Union something of an economic

Miracle took place in these years and uh

even the West were surprised at how the

Soviet economy was performing but it

wouldn't last the Soviet economy was too

reliant on natural resources on oil on

gas and the whole thing would begin to

stagnate and we're soon going to enter

what Orbach would later call the era of

stagnation so there was certainly

stagnation politically in the Soviet

Union under brf uh fewer and fewer

freedoms were allowed writers were

censored people self-censored themselves

rather than risk getting into trouble

the economy actually was not so stagnant

and continued to grow we think of the

Russ of period is a period where a

Soviet consumer public actually came of

age people were aware of of fashion and

able to choose what they wanted to buy

but overall there was a sense that it

wasn't progressing as fast as it could

and this was reinforced by the stability

of of the leadership who were getting

older and older uh and not really

allowing any new blood to come in so

there was a sense uh that the whole

thing was was grinding uh to a slow halt

there were all sorts of holes in the

system that made it possible to live

under bridgeff so although it was

stagnation that the country made no big

progress in GDP or in facilities there

were loopholes and so while the kremin

looks unchanged and in the eyes of the

world some people thought the Cold War

was going to go on indefinitely some

people still thought that the Soviet

Union might emerge as the economic

Victor so self-confidence in the west

was not nearly as high as one might

expect and it is quite extraordinary

that were all those expensive Ive

intelligence services in Britain in the

United States and everywhere else that

the understanding of the fundamental

weakness the Soviet Union which was

getting worse and worse all the time and

that far from the danger to the west

Western Trav that the gap between the

economic attainments of the West and the

Soviet Union is widening relentlessly um

and yet none of this was understood in

the west at the

time in 197 9 after a long period of

deant tensions in the Cold War suddenly

Rose once again with the Soviet Union's

invasion of

Afghanistan brf was very worried that

the Soviet Union was losing its

influence in the countries on the edge

of its borders and one of these was

Afghanistan the communist government of

Afghanistan was under withering attack

from the Afghan maaden and so BNF

decides to send in Soviet troops and

tanks and forces to try and prop up this

Communist

Regime the Soviet invasion of

Afghanistan was part of the Soviet

effort to project itself as an

alternative to capitalism uh in the eyes

of of the third world so they were

always trying to promote Liberation

movements Independence movements 1978 a

a communist government took power in

Afghanistan there was internal fighting

the first government was overthrown a

second communist government came to

power they appealed to the Soviet Union

for help against their enemies uh and so

the Soviet Union agreed to send in

troops to help keep them in

power the plan was really controlled or

or proposed by andropov who was the head

of the KGB and was the most clever and

interesting person in the leadership and

really the most talented he believed it

could be done easily just by chopping

off the head of the of the leader who

was a communist who' turned against rf's

uh the kremlin's own candidate executed

him and taken power they didn't trust

this guy who was called hullah Amin and

so they began to fear that Amin would

turn against them and actually embrace

the Americans all the Chinese and so you

know they decided to replace him and so

in the end they sent in Special Forces

with an army what they didn't expect was

a massive islamist Rebellion U that

would be backed by the

Americans many people compare the Soviet

engagement in Afghanistan with the

United States in Vietnam they got sucked

in uh without realizing what they were

getting into without an exit strategy

many many young Soviet men died LED rise

to a movement among mothers trying to uh

stop men from being drafted uh so it it

it severely weakened the government uh

in in the eyes of its own

population Afghanistan was one of the

decisive strategic mistakes of the last

phase of the Soviet Union before its

collapse and it was the same story as

with a lot of American

wars that they got nowhere and they were

made fools of by their own clients

Afghanistan and their casualties were

appalling and the bungling the military

bungling was

fantastic but the United States could

afford its mistakes in the Cold War and

the Soviet Union couldn't so you had

this extraordinary situation there as

this terrible 10year War went on and

there's this drain of casualties which

was desperately unpopular at home

because people saw these body bags

coming home and coming home and as the

Americans and the CIA of course who were

arming the madin the resistance movement

that the price that here was the Soviet

Union already creaking and groaning and

on the edge of on the edge of an abyss

and you can argue that it was

Afghanistan that pushed it over the edge

that was a major mistake Russians in the

19th century knew very well although

they took over most of central Asia and

they would have liked to take over

British India that you leave Afghanistan

alone nobody has ever successful y dealt

with a Afghanistan since Alexander the

Great invaded it everyone has had to

retreat even the Mongols couldn't stick

it uh the British Army in the 1840s

which just had one blind person

staggering out the rest of the army dead

was an example and the Russians knew

this and uh yet that was a major mistake

to think that they could somehow take it

over 3 years into what would be a near

decade long conf lict in Afghanistan the

Soviet Union would lose its longtime

leader Lenard

breev bref dies and he's succeeded by

Yuri andropov his former head of the KGB

who'd been so ruthless in crushing

internal descent but andropov is simply

IL equipped to deal with the financial

crisis that are facing the Soviet Union

bv's successor was andropov who who he

chose himself but he himself was already

too ill from kidney failure to really do

the reforms that were necessary now to

make industry in the economy work to

rethink the Soviet communist system and

to reinvigorate it and he very quickly

deteriorated his successor should have

been gorbachov who was the young and

intelligent and upand cominging younger

leader and who was a prote of andropov

but instead chenko who once had been an

executioner for Stalin and really was a

sort of known as The Silent One he

already never said anything he was just

a sort of non- entity he too was dying

so he came to leadership for a very

short period uh and the joke at the time

uh because both BNF and and chenko were

not really mobile uh brv was seen to be

immobile and chenko seemed to be moving

around so they said the trouble with brn

was he was running on batteries but

shenko had transistors uh and could get

around

people believed that that Treno would be

giving broadcasts from his office but it

was really a hospital room made up to

look like uh an administrative office

the manner of the collapse of the Soviet

Union was extraordinary in that um it's

almost as if the physical collapses of

successful leaders mirrored the collapse

of the whole edifice and all these very

old charred discredited men in the

Kremlin one by one attempting to seize

the Reigns of power and then proving

completely unable to exercise them and

collapsing and being removed to their

tombs um and it was symbolic Constantine

chernenko who is so old so infirm and so

almost scile that when he gives a eulogy

at androp of's funeral he can hardly

speak the words it's clear he's not

going to last long and within another

year he's also dead and this is the

moment of change this is the moment

where a young younger man Mikel

gorbachov comes to power on a promise to

transform the Soviet

Union gorbachov was an extraordinary man

to have reached the Summits of power in

the Kremlin that he was capable of

recognizing failure of recognizing what

had gone wrong or recognizing the need

for radical change whereas for years the

Soviet Union had being governed by

people who were still clinging

desperately to the past and struggling

at all cost to avoid the humiliation of

um public

defeat GB of course it comes from

Russian word gorba which means bent and

the Russian proverb is that the only the

grave will straighten the bent uh so

people laughed when he came in with a

name like that his idea was that um as

everyone was being dishonest even he

couldn't find out the truth you had to

release the the journalism let the

newspapers expose s and he allowed

complaints and Scandals to be aired on

newspapers and then on on on television

and so on so people found out more about

what was actually happening in the

country and the public came around to

his side when it became clear that some

sort of campaign was being mounted

against uh the corrupt and and the

rich and of course what wrecked it was

the Chernobyl

accident on the 26th of April 1986 the

Chernobyl nuclear power plant went into

meltdown and an enormous cloud of

radioactive contamination was

released well Chernobyl happened early

on in gorbachov's Period of rule uh and

was a key mistake uh in in that period

because when it happened they reverted

to their old habits of secrecy and and

denial which led to much greater loss of

life and more damage than otherwise

would have been necessary and also

created more suspicion toward the Soviet

Union among Western Europeans who are

were disposed to be think positively uh

this was a period of eurocommunism and

of Germany's OS politique trying to make

make deals with the Soviet Union and

this was kind of a throwback uh to the

bad old days so it was a domestic

disaster an international disaster in

health terms but also a very bad signal

for what the Soviet Union was becoming

the White House says Mr Reagan's

attempts to discuss the situation with

Mr gorbachov personally have been

ignored by the Kremlin for 4 days not

very much they're usually a little close

mou about than reception would you

rather hear more from Mr gof yes I think

it would be helpful gorbachov had spoken

of glasnost he'd spoken of openness of a

more open media and the first instinct

is to go back to the old Soviet way of

doing things to hide everything to cover

everything up and this was a disaster

because the Western media had already

picked up from very early on the uh

increased levels of radiation they knew

something disastrous had happened at

this nuclear reactor but gorbachov tries

to hide it and this proved the limits of

his policy of glasnost gorbachov in the

end uh used this to his advantage to him

it was proof that the old system was so

dangerous you could have made half of

Russia

uninhabitable if those reactors had

melted into the ground the Western

Ukraine would

be strictly for the animals it proved to

to the Russian public there was no point

having the traditional secrecy that you

had to have openness and the Very fact

that foreigners knew about it and

Russians heard about it from foreign

broadcasts and then they found

out in 1985 the final leader of the

Soviet Union came to power mik gorbachov

the name gorbachov is really synonymous

with perista this was his great idea he

wanted to reform the system he wanted to

bring an element of of the markets into

the system he could see that the Soviet

economy was simply not functioning it

was Mond he was going to revitalize it

was going to be a renaissance to the

economy I think gorbachov is

misunderstood by everyone everyone

nowadays thinks that he was in the west

anyway that he was a sort of

anti-communist um liberal Democrat

rather like one of our leaders but in

fact it was very different he was a

leninist he believed in communism he

believed in the Soviet Union and he

wanted to reform it to make it to make

it stronger to make it work better to

make it to make it more formidable what

in fact happened was he had very

attractive features in terms of his

openness and his his smile and his

ability to go and walkabouts and he

immediately impressed the Western

leaders but in the Soviet Union himself

he really attempted an an insane

plethora of reforms that undermined the

whole the whole empire and in some ways

his Ambitions were hubristic if not

arrogant he thought he could do it he

hadn't really thought through the nature

of the Soviet Union and the nature of

the leninist system he tried to reform

the economy the power politics and

ultimately the the nature of the Union

itself in other words the empire

all at the same time and no one had

attempted that before and with good

reason because each of those reforms was

an colossal reform that could have

destroyed the Soviet Union in it on its

own we can all see today um that he was

something very remarkable and he broke

with the past but I remember so well

when the first reports of gorbach from

our correspondents in Moscow and some

imaginative correspondents did see that

gbop was something quite new and quite

special I met him and he was an

extraordinary man and I do hope that

history will pay him the tribute that is

is due because he was the one who broke

the mold but for us who lived almost all

our lives and the shadow of the Cold War

it was almost impossible to believe that

the whole edifice the whole structure

around which we lived was suddenly

changing and that um the Soviet Union

and Russia as we'd known it was suddenly

tottering so we were very slow some of

us and governments to realize the nature

of the change gorbachov wanted an end to

the Cold War he wanted an end to the

arms race but this was very difficult

when during Reagan's first term as

president of the United States Reagan

spoke of the evil empire he was very

antagonistic uh towards the Soviet Union

but this began to change I think he saw

in Mikel gorbachov somebody could do

business with and they eventually sat

down and they began to discuss the

reduction in weaponry and I think really

it was the personal relationship between

these two men and also with Margaret

saer and gorbachov that it was a a a

coming together of personalities that

enabled the Cold War and the arms race

to come to an

end General Secretary

gorbachov if you seek peace if you seek

prosperity for the Soviet Union and

Eastern

Europe if you seek

liberalization come here to this gate Mr

garbach Open this

[Applause]

[Music]

[Applause]

gate Mr

gorbachov Mr

gorbachov teared down this

[Applause]

Waller not long after Ronald Reagan's

famous speech at the Brandenburg gate

one of the great symbols of the Cold War

the Berlin Wall would finally form

[Applause]

the Berlin Wall had been a success in

the sense that it it stopped East

Germany becoming depopulated but it

hadn't made it much more prosperous I it

had a limited uh uh Prosperity because

it produced better Goods than any other

East European country but even so uh the

desire to to get across that war was

very very great and in fact when goov

thought about he clearly realized there

was no enormous advantage AG to the

Soviet Union in having Germany divided

he perhaps made a mistake he should have

insisted that Germany be permanently

neutral never be allowed to join NATO if

it was reunited that would have

reassured a lot of people but it was a

way of making gorbachov extremely

popular in Germany but of course he

didn't realize that he had to be popular

at home in Russia and um the problem

with gorbachov is all that he's been

adored abroad and LED at

home there were people within the party

who opposed his reforms they opposed it

because they they believed in a

different kind of Communism or they

opposed it because they were going to

lose their positions of privilege a lot

of backsliding and a lot of opposition

so that's when he decided 1988 to launch

democratization opening up the Communist

Party to elections hoping that that a re

rejuvenated party would decisively

defeat the Old Guard uh and provide

support within the party for his

policies of Reform and so starting 1988

there were elections for party

committees uh and people started to join

the the party in drose because suddenly

the party was becoming very interesting

there you know important things are

being discussed they were being

discussed openly so there was a real

ferment 1988 1989 uh as a result of his

democratization but unfortunately it

awakened sentiments in Eastern Europe

that suddenly the countries of Eastern

Europe East Germany Poland Hungary they

sniffed at Freedom here and we began to

get unrest protests against the Soviet

Union and this began in Poland where we

have the first semi-free elections and

we have solidarity under the charismatic

leadership of Le feno with his walrus

mustache storming to victory in this

election this is a a huge shock for not

just for Poland and the Soviet Union but

for the whole of Eastern Europe suddenly

a whole new way of doing things becomes

apparent we see the first cracks in the

entire Soviet

system 1989 proved to be the beginning

of the end for the Soviet Union its

forces finally left Afghanistan and

political uprisings could not be stopped

either among the warsa pack countries or

within the Soviet Union

itself the economy completely failed

gorbachov and the Communist part party

lost all authority and the 15 republics

particularly those that had joined the

Soviet Union very late particularly the

Baltic republics the three baltics

Estonia Lithuania lvia pushed for for

freedom and for the breakup of the

Soviet Union and in in August 91 there

was an attempted coup by his own

effectively by his own government which

from which he was only rescued by yelson

and that was really the death the death

now the Soviet Union and of

gulov if you go back to it its

Beginnings the hopeful replacement of of

of an autocratic Zar with a Democratic

Socialist Republic and it it failed to

do that uh the question is did it fail

because a socialist economy was

inherently incapable of providing

prosperity and development for the

people or was it badly run was it uh did

it descend into corruption it was a

strong military force it it was decisive

in defeating Hitler and I think that's

today one of the the enduring sources of

Pride for Russians in the Russian

Federation is the victory that they had

over Hitler and that became that that

happened because of of the strong

support of of the people but it was also

known for its

repression uh for the numbers of victims

for its inhumanity and and the mendous

costs of this this

experiment the final dissolution of the

Soviet Union happened in a forest

hunting lodge on the Polish border with

a lot of vodka

consumed that they they recognized it

couldn't go on that they might as well

split up and try and remain friends and

then go back to Moscow and announce that

the Soviet Union no longer existed

gorbachov resigned himself to the fact

that the Soviet Union was finished it

was no more on the 25th of December 1991

he resigns of as Soviet president and as

commander-in-chief on the following day

the Supreme Soviet vote the Soviet Union

out of existence it will stagger on for

a couple more days but it comes to an

end on the 31st of December

1991 the USSR is no more broke apart

into its constituent Parts laia

Lithuania Estonia had already voted for

Independence Georgia became independent

all the 15 Union republics that had been

part of the Union all went their

separate ways as independent

republics the Central Asian republics

probably didn't really want to be

independent but but they really had no

alternative because there was no Soviet

Union and so all all the parts of the

machine if you like fell fell to pieces

at the same time simultaneously and

Russia emerged as an independent

Republic as did the other 15 republics

the constituent republics of the Soviet

Union which Lenin and Stalin had

designed never to become independent

never to S sucede well now they all

became independent at the same time and

the Soviet Union was no more

[Music]

a

[Music]

l