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IBP FILMS DISTRIBUTION LTD.

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24 July 1996

Dr. Henry Kissinger
c/o Kissinger Associates
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REF: 'RUSSIA'S WAR' - 10 Hour Documentary Series
Hosting Introductions to Series

Dear Dr. Kissinger:

This Letter will confirm our Agreement with respect to your serving as Host and introducing the ten part documentary series entitled 'RUSSIA'S WAR' (the "Programs") to be broadcast initially on PBS. IBP FILMS DISTRIBUTION LTD. ("IBP") produced and financed the series and holds the exclusive copyright and all right and title to the series.

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The introductions will be taped in New York City during two consecutive mornings in the first two weeks of November on such dates and times and locations as are mutually agreed upon.

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IBP agrees to indemnify and hold you harmless against any and all losses, claims, damages, liabilities and expenses (including attorney's fees and expenses reasonably incurred in connection therewith), which you may incur or become subject to arising out of, or based upon, your services rendered hereunder and your service as Host of the Programs. In addition, notwithstanding the foregoing provisions, if at any time after the production of the Programs, you determine that your acting as Host of the Programs by reason of the content, presentation or promotion of the Programs would adversely affect your reputation, you will have the right upon your return of all amounts paid hereunder, to request the deletion of your introduction of the Programs and all references to you as Host of the Programs.

[NYCORP:188904.1:4370F-07/30/96 6:02pm]

IBP FILMS DISTRIBUTION LTD.

1 August 1996

Dear Dr. Kissinger:

This Letter will confirm our Agreement with respect to your serving as Host and introducing the ten part documentary series entitled 'Russia's War' (the "Programs") to be broadcast initially on PBS. IBP FILMS DISTRIBUTION LTD. ("IBP") produced and financed the series and holds the exclusive copyright and all right and title to the series.

IBP agrees to provide to you a first draft script on or about 15 August 1996, and after incorporating your comments, provide a final draft script no later than four weeks prior to taping the introductions. You agree to provide your comments and changes no later than mid-September. All final script revisions of the introductions shall be subject to PBS' customary review and approval.

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Date: 8/12/96

IBP FILMS DISTRIBUTION LTD.

RUSSIA'S WAR

BLOOD UPON THE SNOW

10 x 1 Hour Documentary Series

**Executive Producer**
Judith De Paul

Synopsis - Treatment
10 x 1 Hour Episodes

Script Consultant:
Donald James

**Please Contact:**
Ms Judith De Paul
c/o JDP Productions Ltd
50 Molyneux Street
London W1H 5HW
Tel: (44-171) 706 7111
Fax: (44-171) 706 7222

RUSSIA'S WAR

BLOOD UPON THE SNOW

- To make this unique and deeply moving film record, leading Russian cinematographers have worked with award winning Western producers and writers. It is a series remarkable for its candour, for its absence of any attempted censorship. Through our Russian colleagues, we have obtained access to the Soviet record and captured German film which, together constitute the greatest war archive in existence.

- But we have gone further, discovering, with the aid of leading Russian historians like Professor Volkogonov and for the first time showing on screen some of the most chilling documents from Stalin's thirty year tyranny - like the infamous Order 270 branding captured Soviet officers as traitors and committing their wives to immediate forced labour.

- We have, too, an unusual range of Russian witnesses - Boris Yefimov, the cartoonist who receives phone calls from Joseph Stalin; Kazinsky Beck, the last man to see the 4000 Polish officers tramping through Katyn Forest to their death; the great generals, Rokossovsky, Konev and Zhukov himself. And we have, his eyes as watchful as ever, Alexei Rybin, Stalin's old bodyguard.

- In its human approach too, the series can claim to be a unique record of a nation at war. And perhaps especially of women, as pilots and tank commanders, or as victims of the State's oppression. Because this is the Russian people's story. In all its boundless courage, in all its suffering, in its cost in human hope.

- It is also the story of Joseph Stalin as both tyrant and warlord, emphasising the strangely parallel track of his life and that of Adolf Hitler, rivals in Barbarity. We provide the fullest revelation yet of how Stalin, while Soviet citizens were fighting a war to the death against the foreign enemy, conducted his war against his own people. His readiness to arrest, transport, torture, murder anybody, including members of his own family, without, at any single time, showing the faintest shred of pity.

- Finally, this series offers the first full length sombre salute to all the estimated thirty or forty million people who died in Soviet camps, under Soviet torture, of starvation during the great famines, murdered by SS special detachments, or fighting against Hitler at Stalingrad, or Kursk or on the long road to Berlin. The following is an account, in synopsis, of the ten episodes which make up the series. This is Russia's War....

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# RUSSIA'S WAR - BLOOD UPON THE SNOW

## Programme One.

### THE DARKNESS DESCENDS

Lenin's testament. His fatal warning against Stalin's ambition. Stalin's rise to power. The beginning of his war against the Soviet people: his assault on the peasantry and the wholesale murder of political rivals. And, on the eve of war with Germany, his disastrous purge of the Red Army.

It is 1924. Lenin is dead. For the moment the newly born Soviet Union is without a leader. Among the senior Bolsheviks at the leader's funeral, one man alone possesses the ruthlessness to seize Lenin's mantle. In his deathbed testament, Lenin foresees and seeks to block, Joseph Stalin's rise. But without success.

### A war against the people...

From now until his death Joseph Stalin will wage war on his own people. His motive is a never ending extension of his power. In thirty years he will bind his countrymen in a new serfdom and annihilate nearly twenty five million Soviet citizens.

And incredibly, within this war, the series shows how the Soviet people will be called upon to fight another war - this time against the Germany of Adolf Hitler. A war based on racial myth, with fleeing civilians, ghetto populations, and the enormity of planned extermination.

But for now we are in the early days of Stalin's rise.

### Days of hope

For the people of the Soviet Union these are days of hope. Time to begin the great crusade for a better life, a better world. An indulgent Stalin seems to bask in the Soviet peoples' hopes and achievements. The popular acclaim is genuine, the smiles of congress delegates are not yet hollow with fear. As the Soviet people set out on their journey, Stalin is their chosen guide.

Inconceivable to them that, behind what Trotsky calls his "yellow eyes", Stalin is plotting to wage war on every man, woman and child in the Soviet Union.

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Professor Volkogonov, Stalin's biographer and a historian who has had unique access to Stalin's papers, describes him, on interview, as a man with a powerful but evil mind. A man to whom power is an all-consuming addiction.

Now, though we see Fascism on the rise in Europe and militarism blossoming in Japan, Joseph Stalin takes his first steps against his own people.

### The devastation of the Russian peasantry.

The first targets are the *Kulaks*, the millions of landed peasants whose smallholdings make up the vastness of rural Russia. Stalin's object: to bring this huge area of Soviet life under his direct control.

The operation is planned on a gigantic scale. We see NKVD security units and Special Food Detachments from the towns sweep through the Soviet Union, taking forcible possession of land and crops in the name of the State. It is called collectivisation, but for millions it is a euphemism for theft, famine and death.

There is no mercy. We see the NKVD tearing apart peasants' homes and barns, flushing out desperate families and their hidden grain. They are the public face of this brutal campaign against an 'enemy within'. Hundreds of thousands are simply shot, and millions more are imprisoned, to be worked to death as slave labour, ground, in Beria's telling phrase, into 'camp dust'. Nearly twenty percent of the population dies as Stalin's man-made disaster strikes Khasakstan, millions more succumb to starvation in the northern Caucasus and the Ukraine ... and this is just the beginning.

By the early 1930's Stalin is ready to strike at the brothers of the smallholders, the landless peasantry. Now millions more follow the kulaks as forced labour into collective farms or prison camps. The huge forced labour army of the Soviet Union comes into being.

### The Gulag takes shape

And the industrial workforce, the proletariat themselves, are not long spared the lash of Stalin's 'reorganisation'. We watch the striking miners of the Donetsk Basin sit ashen-faced, unbelieving as they are sentenced to death for 'treason', the first of hundreds of thousands who will be shot or sent to labour camps for trivial infringements of the new rules.

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This is the time of rapid extension of the labour camps. Old Tsarist camps are pressed back into service, new ones built. Buildings that no longer serve their original purpose are roughly converted.

## From monastery to Labour camp

We see the remote beauty of the gold-topped domes of Solovki Monastery glinting in the Arctic sunlight - and we hear the sad, baffled testimony of Sergei Schchelgolkov, seventeen years old when he was given a life sentence at the monastery-camp on a charge of plotting to kill Stalin.

Now as the need for cheap labour expands we see men like Schchelgolkov breaking their backs to build roads, factories, the Moscow subway ... and the mighty White Sea Canal, where excess labour will simply be drowned when their work is completed.

## The rise of Hitler

But the world outside the Kremlin has not stood still. Already in 1931 we hear the first gunshots in what is to become a world war as Japan invades Manchuria, bringing her army face to face with Soviet forces in the Far East.

Two years later, Hitler comes to power in Germany. We see the contrast between the retiring, calculating Stalin and the public flamboyance that Hitler will make his hallmark. But political candour, even recklessness is also Hitler's hallmark. He announces his intention to exercise the right of the German people to take living space, *Lebensraum*, on the eastern borders of the Reich.

Now Stalin has been clearly warned: the history of Germany and Russia can no longer run peacefully parallel.

## A rival for Stalin

We join delegates at the great, triumphalist Party Congress of 1934. The dazzling achievements of the Soviet economy are paraded to unprecedented acclaim, with no thought for their cost in human suffering. The glittering stars of the Party hierarchy are displayed like matinee idols. None shines more brightly than Sergei Kirov, the handsome, smiling orator who, more than any other politburo member, has captivated popular hearts and minds.

But among the lesser delegates are those for whom adulation is no more than a mask. In the supposed formality of the vote of approval which winds up the Congress, Sergei Kirov is shown to be far more popular than Stalin.

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It is Kirov's death warrant.

## The Night of the Long Knives

From the Kremlin, Stalin watches with admiration as Hitler deals swiftly, clinically, with his own Kirov. On the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler's popular deputy, Ernst Rohm and his followers are swiftly dispatched, hunted down and murdered.

In Leningrad, Stalin applies his own solution. Sergei Kirov is assassinated by an NKVD officer. The officer is himself swiftly murdered. Even while Stalin weeps at his funeral, the imprisonment or death of everybody remotely connected with Kirov has been ordered.

And here we have the first of several appearances in the series of the Soviet cartoonist Boris Yefimov, a man with a unique ability to bring to life on screen the hopes and fears of those days.

## The terror widens

Now Stalin's spies find conspiracies and treachery wherever they choose to look. The Party is purged from the top down, Stalin's old comrades, Kamanev and Zinoviev are arrested on trumped up charges, tortured into confessions and shot after brutal show trials.

The towering figure of Bukharin is shouted down by his prosecutor - 'You are a cross between a fox and a pig' - and goes to his death in silence.

## The old order changes

For the first time arrests, imprisonment and shootings touch the privileged of the Soviet Union. From their luxury apartment block on the Moscow River embankment, senior officers of the Red Army and Navy watch the dynamiting of the huge Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. It is an act of symbolic severance with the old world.

It cannot escape many of the occupants of the embankment house who saw *their* beginnings in the old world too.

Now the privileged are haunted by unexplained disappearances and dark rumours. Intrigue and denunciation become a way of life. Madame Mukleivich remembers as a child living in the embankment house, an old woman's prophetic warning.

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## A Gestapo coup

It is spring 1937. As Europe stumbles towards war, evidence reaches Stalin of a coup planned by Marshal Tukhachevsky, one of the most able Red Army officers. The evidence is faked, the work of Nazi agents, but Stalin, a man afraid to allow floor length curtains in the Kremlin, is instantly convinced of treachery throughout his armed forces.

## The annihilation of the officer corps

Tukhachevsky's formidable reputation cannot save him. Newly discovered interrogation documents, stained with his blood, are eloquent testimony to the value of his confession. He is shot after a token trial which ends before lunch.

Now officers under torture implicate dozens of their colleagues, who in turn denounce dozens more. The bitterness lives on in interviews of the sons and daughters of the condemned officers. In all 40,000 officers have been arrested or shot, including almost half of all senior commanders. The Red Army is reduced to a state of demoralised, confused incompetence. The son of one tortured general describes this as Stalin's ultimate act of treason; to German military planners in the late 1930's it seems pure madness.

## Stalin the Georgian - Hitler the Austrian

Now two insatiable tyrants eye each other across the plains of Eastern Europe.

Each in a sense is a foreigner in his own land; each will use his adopted country as the instrument of his ambition.

Hitler will seek his new empire in the east. He has armed and unified his people for the crusade. But Joseph Stalin has crippled the Red Army on the eve of the greatest test, and has been at war with his own people for more than a decade.

The closing questions are asked against a background of the onion domes and shifting snowfields of Solovki Labour Camp. As the last days of peace in Europe slip by, can the Soviet people put the horrors of the 1930's behind them? Will they still feel Soviet ideals are worth defending?

When war comes, will the Soviet people fight?

***

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## Program Two

### THE HOUR BEFORE MIDNIGHT

The end of the Versailles system. Fascism and Communism face each other in Spain. The purges reach a new crescendo. In foreign affairs, Stalin plans the most astounding *volte face* of the century. Hitler and Stalin as friends and allies. The invasion and partition of Poland. The wolf turns east.

The Versailles Settlement, which ended the First World War, is about to be split wide open. In contemptuous defiance of its terms Hitler marches his army into the demilitarised Rhineland. While the world watches... Britain and France, guarantors of the Treaty, remain silent.

But nobody watches more closely than the man in the Kremlin.

### The mantle of world statesman...

... does not come easily to Stalin. At home, though his position is unchallengeable, his paranoia is growing daily. He is especially afraid of any Soviet contact with foreigners. We illustrate his fear with the extraordinary story of the courtesy visit of the USS Augusta to Vladivostok and the arrest and shooting of hundreds of people who innocently turned out to see an American warship.

### At home, a tyrant unchecked

By the late 1930's Stalin's reckless savagery leaves no area of Soviet life untouched. The purges of the Red Army reach their bloody climax. The brutal enslavement of the peasantry is carried to the farthest frontiers of the empire. Party officials, artists, scientists, journalists, achievers in all walks of life, live in terror.

We listen to their sons, daughters, orphaned as young children ... to Vladimira Uborevich, whose father was tortured and killed, telling of her burning desire, as an 18 year old, to murder Joseph Stalin.

### Rehearsal in Spain

But Stalin may soon be in desperate need of popular support. From now the Soviet Union can be plunged into war at any time. In Spain, where a bitter civil war has been raging since 1936, we see Italian, German and Soviet forces rehearsing their future

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roles. Though Stalin cannot save the Republican cause from Franco, his support for legitimacy wins a valuable propaganda victory.

But it is only half the story. The activities of NKVD murder squads are concealed from view. What happens to Russians returning from service in Spain is likewise hidden.

## The cartoonist's brother

The irrepressible Yefimov, the cartoonist we met in the first episode, recounts the homecoming of his own brother and a sinister meeting with Stalin that led to his death.

## The road to war

Events now move with unprecedented speed. Hitler's armies march into Austria. His threats to relieve the 'suffering' of Germanic peoples in the Czech Sudetenland bring Britain, France and Italy to Hitler's negotiating table. It is the high-point of appeasement. Without the loss of a single soldier, Hitler takes a first bite out of Czechoslovakia.

## Turning point

March 1939. The 18th Party Congress reports to the nation. Not mentioned among the self-serving announcements at the Congress is the news that in the previous year, between seven and eight million Soviet citizens have been arrested, at least a million killed and more than half of last year's delegates are dead.

On the fifth day of the Congress comes the shocking news: Hitler has swallowed the rest of Czechoslovakia, shattering the Munich agreement signed only months before with British prime minister Chamberlain.

## Stalin's choice...

Hitler's theatrical denials of aggressive intent mean nothing now. Few doubt that Poland will be the Fuhrer's next target. And Stalin knows that the USSR will not obtain a piece of Poland by fighting alongside the West to defend Poland's borders. The only conceivable division of spoils can be between Stalin and his avowed enemy. But that will involve a *volte face* which will stun the world.

## Volte face

As a final preliminary, he sends foreign minister Litvinov to the League of Nations, where he proposes sending Soviet troops into Poland as guarantors of its independence.

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The Poles refuse to countenance the idea, as Stalin knows well. His excuses made, his way is clear.

Now, at the 1939 Moscow May Day parade, sharp eyed German diplomats notice that the pro-Western Foreign Minister Litvinov is absent from the rostrum. When, next day, Molotov is appointed in Litvinov's place, Hitler tells his generals it is like a volley from a gun.

Behind the scenes Soviet and German diplomats begin talking.

## The Nazi-Soviet Pact...

On August 23rd Ribbentrop, the German Foreign Minister, arrives in Moscow. Within days a Treaty of Non-Aggression has been signed. But it has sinister *secret* protocols, shown in interview with Professor Volkogonov. The protocols are an agreement to divide the spoils of Hitler's coming invasion of Poland, a treaty not to preserve peace but to make war....

And Stalin raises his glass: *To Germany's finest son - Adolf Hitler!*

It is an extraordinary *coup de théâtre*. That it is also the betrayal of millions of dedicated Communists throughout the world means nothing to Stalin. Yefimov, the cartoonist tells how it was. One day he was drawing cartoons about Hitler, the next it was forbidden to even mention the word Fascist.

## The first blitzkrieg ...

On September 1 German troops cross the Polish border. It is the first blitzkrieg. Warsaw is bombed - Polish cavalry hopelessly charges German tanks. The Luftwaffe is allowed by Stalin to fly missions from Russian soil against the Polish defenders.

Within six weeks it is over. In a remarkable film sequence, never to this day shown to a Russian audience, we watch German and Soviet troops parading together through the fortress of Brest.

## The Katyn Massacre

Who murdered up the 4,000 Polish officers whose bodies were later found in the Russian forest of Katyn? And what happened to the 20,000 Polish officers who simply disappeared? For long it has remained a highly sensitive political mystery. Russians blamed SS; Germans blamed NKVD.

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There is no longer a mystery. Our witness Kazinsky Beck describes on camera seeing
the Poles taken into the forest by NKVD detachments.

And Stalin's signed order to shoot the officers is shown on screen for the first time.

## The Western Front

Now suddenly, where for months all has been quiet, the Western Front erupts. A German blitzkrieg carries the Wehrmacht to Paris. French civilians flee in their millions. At Dunkirk, the Royal Navy evacuates over 350,000 British and French soldiers. France surrenders; there is no longer a Western Front.

## The spoils of war

While Hitler has Paris and the industrial wealth of much of continental western Europe, Stalin has gained part of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia., in all 175,000 square miles of territory, twenty million new Soviet citizens. Immediately the NKVD are loosed upon them. Ten of thousands of these new Soviet citizens are rounded up and shot. We watch as countless thousands more are marched to swell workforce in the Gulag.

## The final betrayal

In international affairs Stalin's acts are now edged with hysteria. The day after he signs a pact of friendship with Yugoslavia, Hitler invades the Balkans. Still he refuses to believe Hitler will invade. But warnings of disaster come thick and fast. Churchill in possession of German codes, informs Stalin by secret cable that an invasion of the Soviet Union is planned. The story is confirmed by Stalin's agent in Tokyo, and a host of reliable informants all over the world. German troops and armour begin to mass close to the Soviet borders. A German deserter gives the code-name, the time and date for Hitler's plan to invade the Soviet Union: Operation Barbarossa, scheduled for first light, June 22, 1941.

His country, in all essentials unprepared for war, Stalin dares not believe the truth.

## The early hours of June 22, 1941

All over the Soviet Union students are celebrating graduation. But as young Russians dance, drink and flirt through the night, on the Western frontier, signal flares arc into the sky, radios crackle. The panzer divisions waiting in the darkness along the Soviet border are start up their engines.

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## Programme Three

### THE GOTHS RIDE EAST

Barbarossa - Chaos and confusion as the Red Army falls back. A Stalin paralysed by shock. Minsk, Kiev, Smolensk fall. The infamous Order 270. And with the first snows, the Wehrmacht approaches the gates of Moscow.

#### Chaos and confusion

Along the length of the western Soviet frontier, from the Black Sea to the Baltic, three million German troops, with tanks and mobile artillery, cross the start-line. Total chaos multiplies the speed and effectiveness of the Wehrmacht's advance. Soviet commanders without orders, lose contact with bewildered troops, and confused units blindly surrender....

But from Stalin's dark green dacha outside Moscow, there is silence.

Images of chaos and confusion punctuate this first day: Zhukov recalls his vain attempt to elicit instructions from the dictator by telephone; an ordinary soldier is told that the planes bombing Minsk are Soviet aircraft, on a tactical exercise. It is a full eight hours after the start of the attack, that Stalin finally allows Soviet troops to fire on the enemy.

#### The disappearance of Stalin

In Moscow, shocked, silent crowds hear over loudspeakers news of the invasion. But they are listening to Foreign Minister Molotov. The man to blame for the catastrophe on the Western frontier has retreated to the solitude of his dacha.

On the battlefields the Red Army pays a terrible price for his self-delusion. Border troops are away from their stations, defence lines lie half built and useless; on Stalin's orders no attempt has been made to interfere with the past week's Luftwaffe reconnaissance of the entire frontier region.

At his dacha Stalin, the Man of Steel, is in a state of profound shock. Professor Volkogonov recounts his disbelief at the sheer pace of German advance. After six days the Germans are in Minsk. 'How can that be?' Stalin asks. 'How can the Germans be in Minsk?'

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Only after eleven days after the invasion and when Politburo members have pleaded with him to take control, does Joseph Stalin return to face the crisis.

## A Great Patriotic War

Now he speaks to the Soviet people. He appeals to them as 'brothers and sisters'. And despite the unspeakable tyrannies they have suffered at his hands, the great mass of the Soviet people responds to his call to fight a 'Great Patriotic War'.

But not all Stalin's subjects have forgotten his crimes. In the Ukraine, where collectivisation has killed millions, old women bless German troops as they march by, and their menfolk smash effigies of the Soviet leadership. No matter that they are passing into Hitler's realm, this is a heaven-sent opportunity to throw off the yoke of dictatorship.

## The Army of Traitors

In his hour of crisis, Stalin turns to tested methods: terror will stiffen the spine of the army. The first to be shot is General Pavlov, commander of the western sector and one of those dismissed as 'panic mongers' before the invasion. The charge is treason.

## The Defense of Brest

Not all Soviet Formations have disintegrated. The garrison of the mighty Brest fortress has fought to the last. We watch Adolf Hitler, visibly delighted, as he tours the ruins with Mussolini. While Hitler praises the heroic defence, Stalin condemns survivors to hard labour in absentia ... for treason.

## Order No 270

And with the issue of Order No 270 all officers or political officials taken prisoner in the field are now branded traitors. If they ever return to the USSR they will be executed. On screen Stalin's granddaughter, Galina Dzhugashvili explains that, after her father's capture in the early weeks of the war, her mother spent two years in a labour camp in Siberia.

## Stalin sues for peace

Barely six weeks into the campaign and the Wehrmacht is already threatening Kiev. Cocooned in the Kremlin, Stalin refuses the request of the front commander to withdraw his troops. When the pincers close in mid-September they swallow four armies, more than 650,000 men and the battered remains of the Ukrainian capital.

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It is in these days, Professor Volkogonov recounts, that Stalin, the scourge of all who would surrender, is considering a negotiated peace. He asks for the help of a Bulgarian intermediary to contact the Germans. His request is rejected so strongly he is forced to think again. Defeatism, he has himself proclaimed, is punishable by death.

## First Leningrad....

Far to the north, Leningrad is in mortal peril. Virtually defenceless, the city is completely cut off from the rest of the Soviet Union by late September. It is only now that the danger is faced. The incompetent, pessimistic Voroshilov is removed from command. Zhukov, rushed from Moscow, galvanises the city into determined self-defence.

## And now Moscow....

With the fall of Smolensk, defended to the death by ten hopelessly outnumbered divisions, Hitler urges his central armies on to Moscow. The city is already within range of the Luftwaffe, and is suffering as London, Warsaw and Belgrade have already suffered. Barrage balloons fill the main streets, citizens scurry into subway stations as the sirens sound, and sleep in huddled ranks on the platforms.

## Typhoon

In late September Hitler launches Operation Typhoon, another huge pincer movement aimed at completely surrounding Moscow. His plan is to obliterate the city, replacing it with a huge artificial lake. Perhaps some sense of his diabolical intent has touched the population ... an eyewitness recalls scenes of panic and looting in the streets.

General Konev guardedly describes on screen the extent of the military disaster. The threat of execution hangs over him. Only the recall from Leningrad Georgi Zhukov and his intervention on his friend's behalf, prevents Stalin having Konev shot.

Staff Colonel Salomakhin describes Zhukov's telephone conversation with Stalin. A compromise is reached. Stalin agrees to Zhukov's request to make Konev his second in command. Having stiffened the defense of Leningrad, Zhukov must now do the same for Moscow.

## A People's Militia

Civilians are recruited where no regular troops are available. Almost half a million Muscovites, women, children and old men, brave the early chill of winter to dig

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anti-tank ditches and build barricades. A People's militia is formed. A few hours of rudimentary training and these men will be sent to the front, where few will live long.

By mid-October, heroism has become almost commonplace on the roads outside Moscow. A cadet officer unit, mere boys of 16 or 17, defies the enemy for a few vital hours at Podolsk, 30 miles away. Every one of them forfeits his life. General Paniflov and just twenty-eight men stop 50 German tanks and enter the Soviet history books. Today we know that Paniflov had no choice. Zhukov's telegram has already informed him that he will be shot if he survives a defeat.

## A Swastika over Moscow?

But no single act of heroism will save Moscow now. One German pincer is at the Moscow-Volga Canal, the other reaches Krasnaya Polyana, 17 miles from the city, on the 2nd of December, and pauses before the tank traps erected by Moscow's citizens. There is now only one hope left, that the weather will halt the Wehrmacht.

## Russian Roulette

Adolf Hitler is no less a reckless gambler the Joseph Stalin, and the whole of Operation Barbarossa has been founded on one colossal assumption - that the Soviet Union will be defeated before winter halts campaigning for the year. Hitler's armies are without winter uniforms, and their vehicles and weapons are not designed to operate in freezing conditions.

And so, as temperatures fall to ominous depths, German commanders know that time has become their most deadly foe.

But their armies stand at the gates of Moscow. The fall of the capital of the Soviet Union is now only days, perhaps even hours away.

***

15

## Programme Four

### BETWEEN LIFE AND DEATH

The Germans at the gates of Moscow. Leningrad under bitter siege. The defence of two cities. The winter closes in. And the Red Army counter-attacks on the Moscow front.

### On the brink of defeat

As the autumn of 1941 turns to winter, Joseph Stalin is on the brink of total defeat. The Luftwaffe bombs Moscow nightly and, now, a German advance brings the city within the range of the Wehrmacht's heavy guns.

In interview, General Rokossovsky describes Stalin's call to his headquarters. He is asked one question: "Are you aware, General ... that the Germans can bombard any point in the city?" Rokossovsky has already been imprisoned once; Stalin's implied threat is obvious. To save his own life, Rokossovsky launches an immediate attack to clear the German heavy guns.

But a counter-attack in much greater force will be needed to stop the Germans taking Moscow.

### Anniversary of the Revolution

It is the evening of November 6. Sheltered from air-raids in the gloomy chambers of the Moscow subway, Stalin delivers his speech on the eve of the anniversary of the Revolution. The Party elite is told that Germany is all but exhausted, and that the war is almost won. At Stalin's insistence the traditional parade is held in Red Square. The parade commander Colonel-General Artemyev recounts an exchange with Stalin. 'What about the Luftwaffe? he asks Stalin. 'If the Luftwaffe bombs Red Square,' Stalin says, 'Clear away the dead and wounded and continue with the parade.'

### The Hero City

If the citizens of Moscow seek real inspiration and hope in their hour of need, it beckons from the ruins of Leningrad, birthplace of the same Revolution they

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aresombrely celebrating. Surrounded since the early autumn, with no land link to the rest of the USSR, Leningrad has been starved of all supplies and pounded by German artillery and aircraft.

But as the northern winter spreads an icy blanket across the Neva, Leningrad is still holding out.

But now, as the air raids intensify and terrified civilians run through the streets, or learn to toss burning incendiaries into firebuckets, their ordeal is just beginning. With the full onset of winter, and no let up in Hitler's savage determination to obliterate their city, they face months of pain and suffering unmatched even in this most brutal of wars.

## To starve or freeze to death...?

As temperatures plummet, water pipes freeze and explode. Transport systems grind to a complete halt. Citizens sacrifice anything that can be burnt - books, furniture, their most previous possessions, simply to stay alive. And above all, they starve. Only a foul mix of sawdust and flour reaches a city hopelessly overcrowded with refugees from surrounding regions.

As we watch, before our eyes, Leningrad is dying of exposure. An old woman collapses suddenly in the street. Another lets the swaddled body of an infant tumble from her arms. Passers-by ignore corpses in the gutters. Small children drag their parents' coffins across the ice.

It is chaos in painful slow-motion, and even death itself is disorganised. The cemeteries are overwhelmed, and the ashes of victims are scattered all over Leningrad's parks and commons.

## The resort to cannibalism

But in the winter of 1941, and for another fifty years, the Soviet people are not told the full story of Leningrad's terrible ordeal. Only now, with the release of previously secret documents, can historians like Dmitry Likhachov estimate the full extent of a catastrophe that killed perhaps *two million* people in the besieged city.

And we have the chilling testimony of Nadyezhda Cherepinina confirming the rumours whispered by survivors for decades - that among the wretched refugee population, homeless multitudes with no papers and no ration cards, there were those who would stop at nothing, not even cannibalism, to keep their children alive.

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## The Road of Life

If there is hope for the defenders of Leningrad it lies in the ice highway gouged across frozen Lake Ladoga, the temporary, fragile link that they call the 'Road of Life'. The truck convoys rumble across the ice, surviving air attack to deliver their precious loads, but they can never bring more than a fraction of Leningrad's most basic needs. Mostly they bring hope, not relief.

And though they are hungry for bread, nourishment can be found in the life of the mind: libraries are packed; artists, authors and architects are hard at their works; and the great composer Dmitri Shostakovitch is creating his immortal Leningrad Symphony.

As a symbol of the city's refusal to die, and despite the almost daily deaths of musicians during rehearsals, the symphony's first performance soars above the mayhem at the very height of the siege.

No produce of Leningrad's siege culture is more poignant than the diary of nine year old Tania Savicheva. Its simple, painful record of a whole family's destruction, ending with her own death from malnutrition, speaks for thousands upon thousands of dead children. But as the first shafts of spring penetrate the frost, there are signs at last that their suffering may not be in vain.

## Rebirth

We are watching a people emerge into the light. Though they are weak, citizens greet the marvel of spring with an astonishing will to live. There is work to be done, and with most of the men at battle, it must be done by the women.

Women digging, transforming every patch of Leningrad's unyielding earth into a priceless vegetable garden. Women pushing trams up the street, helping to restart the system and shake the complacency of German observers. Beneath the melted waters of the lake, a lifesaving oil pipeline is laid. And on the surface, an armada of small supply ships runs the gauntlet of Luftwaffe attacks.

It is not over. It will be almost two years before the Red Army finally reunites Leningrad with the rest of the nation, but the Wehrmacht will never again be so strong. They have survived their winter of grief. They have not capitulated to Hitler or to death, and they will never surrender now.

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## The battle of Moscow

If Moscow is to survive this winter, the defiance on the streets of Leningrad must be matched by the Red Army on the battlefields outside the capital. To the amazement of Hitler and his own allies, the Moscow has not yet fallen to the Wehrmacht's grinding advance. The Panzers on the road, frozen to a standstill, tell the story. Ice and cold, killers in Leningrad, have saved the capital.

## Zhukov's Plan

In late November, Stalin accepts Zhukov's plan for a massive counter-attack against the flanks of the German advance. A plan made possible because Stalin has agreed to take a gigantic risk. The reinforcement armies travelling the Siberian railway to the Moscow front - infantry, cavalry, trainloads of tanks and guns - have been taken from the frontier with Manchuria. Stalin is gambling that the Japanese will not attack him in the rear.

In Moscow, a prowling, impatient Stalin can hardly wait to exact revenge on the invader. 'Attack at once', he tells field commanders, 'Attack everywhere. And if you fail, attack again!' For once he is persuaded to wait while Zhukov's armies, bolstered by seventeen fresh divisions, complete careful preparations. Then on December 5th, the Red Army launches its first planned offensive of the Great Patriotic War.

## Zhukov attacks

For the first time, but not the last, the Wehrmacht must now pay the price of overconfidence. Ravaged by an army they believed beaten, German units fall back. Deaf to Hitler's wrath, they are pushed west, clattering across their emergency pontoons, until Soviet attacking strength is exhausted. In a few short weeks, the Red Army has put some 65 miles between the capital and the frontline.

There will be greater victories, but none more important than this first triumph. It is in many ways a blueprint for what is to come, for both the glories and the disasters that will befall the Soviet people in this gruelling war.

## Liberation

As the first towns and villages are liberated, we see them as a horrified world saw them for the first time ... the scorched land, the burnt-out smouldering communities, the shallow graves and weeping women, the mutilated victims of Nazi tyranny. All this

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alongside the ritual desecration of hated Slav culture: Tchaikovsky's house ruined, the
composer's manuscripts burnt; Tolstoy's grave dug up to make room for German
casualties; churches bombed, vandalised and stripped of their icons ...

From the jaws of victory ...

And as he will do again and again in the campaigns to come, Stalin allows blind
ambition to dilute this victory. He flings exhausted troops into repeated attacks long
after further gain has become impossible. By February 1942 the Red Army has lost
more than a million soldiers in the battle for Moscow. But, as always, the true cost
will be hidden from the people.

For those who witness the shocked disbelief on the faces of captured German troops,
and for British Foreign Minister Eden as he tours a gigantic scrapyard of abandoned
Wehrmacht equipment, it seems a miracle. But Joseph Stalin now, wrongly, sees
himself on the verge of ultimate victory. Matching Hitler's folly, he believes the
Wehrmacht to be beaten, and he is already planning to throw the Red Army into new,
'decisive' offensives.

But Hitler is by no means finished, and when, the following year, his armies return
triumphantly to the attack, the Soviet people will again pay for Stalin's miscalculation
with their blood.

***

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## Programme Five

### THE FIGHT FROM WITHIN

The war in the occupied Soviet Union. Oppressed Soviet people welcome Hitler. Hitler's plans for Russia. The Partisans. Stalin's belated support. The forest wars. Stalin's return, and his revenge on collaborators.

### Hitler as Liberator

Now with fifty million citizens of the western USSR under German occupation, Stalin's prisons are thrown open, the mass graves of NKVD victims are dug up, land is parcelled out to co-operative peasants ... Desperate for freedom from one tyrant, not everybody recognises they have been delivered into the hands of another.

On the streets of Lvov, in the northern Ukraine, they smash effigies of Stalin and parade through the streets holding banners for the Fuhrer.

An SS unit parades through Kiev, banners flying. These are native Ukrainians fighting against the USSR. We watch Estonians, Latvians, Belorussians, all swearing their solemn oaths to Hitler's SS. Within a few weeks more than a million collaborators are working for the Germans in the occupied lands.

But for many the honeymoon period is already over. For some it never even began.

### The science of skulls

Revolving skulls illustrate Nazi racial theory. Calipers establish the width of noses. Men in white coats soberly teach a pseudo-science which divides men into superior Aryans and subhuman non-Aryans.

Now, in occupied Russia, the madness will be put into practice.

### Babi Yar

Hard on the heels of the advancing Wehrmacht come SS 'Special Action Groups', the Einsatzgruppen; their prime function, mass murder of 'undesirable elements'. Their appearance on the horizon announces imminent atrocity, and their first targets are Soviet Jews.

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We watch as men and women are rounded up in the centre of Kiev. We watch the unwatchable in the nearby ravine of Babi Yar as naked men and women file forward to be shot. Soviet authorities will later exhume 125,000 bodies from this one burial alone.

### And the Yama at Minsk...

We see Jews herded into Europe's largest and most brutal ghetto by guards who clearly enjoy their work.

Three women, among the very few survivors of Europe's largest ghetto, in Minsk, stand today before the 'Yama', a natural hole in the city centre that once held 120,000 corpses. The women tell of appalling humiliations, of victims shipped into Minsk from all over Europe, and of the small miracles that kept them alive while so many perished...

### The Vampire State

Now in the name of Aryan superiority and the German war effort, the conquered lands are ruthlessly stripped of every economic and human resource. Hundreds of thousands of able-bodied adults will be sent to Germany as slave labour. But those left at home fare little better under the jackboot. As crops and livestock are crammed aboard trains bound to Germany, whole communities are starving.

### One mother among thousands...

Abducted 'Aryan' children are exported to the Reich as breeding stock. German propaganda displays the smiling children taking their oaths to Hitler. A remarkable sequence taken by a hidden camera shows the anguish behind German policy. A child is being taken. The distraught mother tries the snatch the child back but the SS man shoves the woman away at gunpoint. She will never see her child again.

### The Forest Resistance

Soviet citizens cannot halt the tide of destruction that engulfs their homes, but they can hide in the vast, empty hinterlands of the western USSR. By autumn 1941 they are streaming into the forests to build new lives.

For this early resistance movement there is no support from Stalin (although postwar Soviet history will carefully adjust the facts). The Kremlin sees local resistance fighters as nationalist armies in the making. For the moment Moscow is more anxious to discourage collaboration than to encourage resistance.

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The mutilated young woman in the photograph was once Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, Komsomol agent. Until caught, tortured and killed by Germans or local villagers, she and her comrades burned barns and houses in a continuation of the scorched earth policy behind the lines.

The blindfolded man being led into the woods and shot is a village leader, executed, as we watch, by NKVD agents as an example to would-be collaborators.

## The Otryadi

In 1942 a desperate Stalin changes his mind. He now calls for the formation of partisan units, 'Otryadi', throughout the occupied regions, and at last opens up supply routes across enemy lines.

Suddenly Soviet footage shows forest dwellers training with modern weapons, rehearsing sophisticated guerilla tactics ... and it highlights again the unique role played by women in the Soviet war effort, as they take their share of combat and command duties in a burgeoning partisan war.

But what Stalin supports, he must control. Partisan units will have NKVD advisers. From now on every partisan fighter is given Red Army rank and new recruits swear their oath of allegiance to Stalin.

## The Forest Wars

By autumn of 1942 the partisan movement is 150,000 strong. And it is wrecking Hitler's dreams of colonisation. We see partisans blowing up trains, sabotaging cable lines, preparing to ambush the invader wherever he appears. And German patrols, flamethrowers blazing, moving through woodlands hunting for the elusive enemy.

A young woman, numb with shock and grief, stumbles through the smoking embers of what was once her village. Lena Knyazeva recalls the day that partisan hunting Germans came to the village, locked everyone they could catch into a haybarn and burned them all alive.

Now we see war without a trace of pity. Hundreds of villages are razed to the ground, their inhabitants murdered, raped or forced to flee. But month by month, the partisan movement is going stronger.

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## The Assassination of the Gauleiter of Minsk

In the Minsk district the rule of Gauleiter Wilhelm Kube had already accounted for tens of thousands of innocent lives when Lena Mazanik, a 20 year old partisan secured work at his house. In interview she explains how she planted the bomb that killed Kube. And she faces the fact that a thousand fellow citizens were hanged in retaliation.

## A three-cornered war

Through smoke and dust a Soviet partisan band storms a rural village, but the enemy is not the German invader. The Soviet partisans are attacking nationalist guerillas, armed patriots fighting for independent homelands, the third force at war in the forests.

In interview we hear from the man who suffered the loss of his right hand for suppoerting the Soviets; and how a member of the Nationalist Army was taught to garotte the Soviet enemy.

Strongest in the Ukraine and the Baltic States, where national status has been tasted and snatched away, nationalists are fighting the Germans and Soviets at the same time.

But the Great Patriotic War will have no happy ending for these patriots. Denied the resources of their bitter rivals, they fight without mercy and receive none in return when the Red Army sweeps west during 1943 and 1944.

## Retribution

Now in the wake of Stalin's armies comes his revenge. In a field in the Ukraine, one of the dreaded troikas is in session, a kangaroo court dispensing instant punishment to nationalists, anti-communist, collaborators, suspected collaborators ... The citizens watch the swinging bodies in solemn silence or with restrained applause. Their faces dare not show pity.

And no pity for the innocent boys who flocked to Hitler's colours. Even less for an SS officer, whose craven pleas for mercy earns barely a pause on his way to the gallows. If there is pity it is for their own loved ones, as German captives dig out the pits at Babi Yar.... and another mother weeps for her dead son.

The triumphant partisan heroes of the forest wars accept their medals and pose shyly for the cameras. They have passed once more back into Stalin's realm. In official Soviet histories, the struggle was straightforward.

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The Partisan Myth

But the truth is much more complex. Lena Mazanik's reward for her assassination of Kube was interrogation by the NKVD in the Lubyanka, and an attempt to credit the assassination to another, more Soviet, partisan.

For many years Stalin's attempt to deny the nationalists a part in the forest wars was successful. Only now is it possible to see something of the dimensions of partisan warfare. Lena Mazanik asserts she would fight her battles again today for the right to live in the land of her birth. Perhaps all those who fought in the forests, Soviet and nationalist, would say the same.

Perhaps to that extent, she speaks for them all.

***

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## Programme Six

### THE CAULDRON BOILS

The Wehrmacht thrusts south. Stalin's brutal reform of the Red Army. The cauldron - the battle for Stalingrad.

May 1942. Soviet troops crowd the road west as spring comes to the Eastern Front. But this is not the great break-through expected by Stalin after the Red Army's relief of Moscow. We are watching, as Hitler watched, film of 300,000 prisoners captured during an ill-planned and disastrous Soviet attack on Kharkov. Stalin's predictions of a quick victory over a demoralised Wehrmacht were clearly wildly mistaken.

### The Battle for the Caucasus

Hitler now sends his armies south, in a dramatic thrust aimed at capturing the precious oilfields of the Soviet Caucasus. But the Red Army regroups as the mountain passes steepen, and halts the invasion just short of the main refineries at Baku.

Not to be cheated of a summer victory, Hitler now transforms a secondary operation into the spearhead of a great drive east, intended to cut the Soviet Union in half.

But the spearhead must first take its original objective - Stalingrad. And in defence of this city, named for him, Stalin will tolerate no more hasty retreats. For both sides the name of the city takes on immediate symbolic importance ...

### Order No 227

This astonishing document, newly released from secret archives, is signed by the dictator himself. In June 1942, Order No 227 specifically prohibits any unauthorised retreat on the battlefield, on *pain of death*.

It is no idle threat. Remarkable film shows NKVD troops, 'blocking units', deployed just behind attacking Red Army soldiers, ready to shoot anyone moving back. And a woman, Anna Bugrimova, who worked in this grim trade describes her comrades in her own blocking unit.

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Yet some soldiers saw the order as necessary to stiffen the army's backbone. Suren Mirzoyan, a commando at Stalingrad, to this day approves Order 270.

## The Penal Battalions

Now as a further grim aid to discipline, Stalin introduces the Penal Battalions. Units from infantry companies to air squadrons made up of convicts to fight where the danger is greatest. And a serious wound the only chance to escape. Penal Battalion pilot Artyon Anfinogenov reveals in interview the bitterness he still feels.

## The Cauldron ...

is the code-name given to the Stalingrad battle. The city is already a nightmare labyrinth of intersecting front lines ... a thousand killing zones with landmines laid in streets strewn with bodies, machine-gun nests and snipers every building ... In interview the famous sniper, Zaitsev, describes a sniper duel.

We join Soviet troops at windows, pinned behind charred vehicles, crouching in doorways ... turning every inch of the city's gaunt shell into a barricade ... and we climb the steps of Pavlov's house, named for the sergeant whose platoon, completely surrounded, held the building for 59 days ...

Boris Perepechayev, a doctor at the murderous Volga crossing, speaks of his midnight mercy missions across a carpet of corpses. Pilot Anfinogenov tells of appalling casualties as he and his comrades are flung into combat after less than four hours training ... Soldiers, aircrew... nurses killed rescuing precious rifles from the battlefields, and of course civilians ... the struggles of the defenders of Stalingrad live forever filmed as they happened.

## The Great Crusade

Hitler is already claiming to have conquered Stalingrad, Stalin insists it will not fall. People who have fled across the Volga like Diane Sokolova, are forced to return to the city. Drawn by the dictator's obsessive propaganda, that autumn, the eyes of the world turn to the city on the Volga.

Every Soviet citizen knows that, though not the last, this is the crucial battle- for the Soviet Union, the struggle for life and death.

We see an old man hand over a sheaf of banknotes, his life savings ... a woman gives up her family's jewellery ... mothers and children work at the lathes and in the aircraft factories, replacing men called to the front ... their hope is invested in Stalingrad.

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Miracle in the Tundra

Anglo-American aid is already flowing into the Soviet Union, via Persia in the south as well as through the far northern port of Murmansk.

But in Siberia we witness a very Soviet miracle. Snatched from the very jaws of German conquest, trainloads of industrial equipment from the western USSR are rolling east, to safety beyond the Urals. There, in the frozen Siberian wastes, we watch labourers rebuilding Soviet heavy industry, brick by brick, by day and by night. But many are Gulag labourers and nobody counts the cost.

Uranus

A massive counter-offensive is planned for the Stalingrad front. Georgi Zhukov, Stalin's trusted commander, describes for us the cautious, secret preparations for Operation Uranus, Meanwhile it falls to General Chuikov's forces, still clinging to a tiny portion of the city, to fight to the death ...

When Zhukov's blow falls, on the 19th of December, it cuts through the flanks of an astonished enemy. Only four days later, across a flat snowfield near the little town of Kalach, we watch as General Vatutin's troops from the north embrace their comrades from Eremenko's southern wing.

The trap has closed. Seemingly on the brink of victory, some 300,000 of Hitler's finest soldiers are suddenly surrounded inside Stalingrad.

Goering's promise

The tangled wreckage of Germany's air transport fleet is strewn all around the ruins of Stalingrad. These aircraft were the Sixth Army's last hope. General Manstein's relief force has been halted by 400,000 Red Army troops holding the ring around the city, and now Goering's promise of a massive supply operation lies exposed as an empty boast.

The Cauldron boils

We are with a Red Army unit as it liberates the German camp for Soviet prisoners on the outskirts of Stalingrad. All but twenty of some 2,000 inmates have been murdered. This is the terror of the struggle for Stalingrad.

And now, in the bitter cold of midwinter, Soviet troops tighten their stranglehold on the city. We have a wealth of testimony to the nature of the battle - from artillery sergeant

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Rasporkin, to cameraman Orlyankin and Intelligence officer Bezyemsky as he recalls wearing German uniform to locate the whereabouts of Field Marshal von Paulus, the German Commander. 'Corpses on the left, corpses on the right, corpses next to you, corpses under you, and your rifle' ... for ordinary soldiers on both sides, the final battles in the streets rise to a horrific climax as the cauldron of battle boils around them.

Frozen, hungry, short of ammunition, bereft of hope, German soldiers defend the last barricades with their last ammunition. In early February they can fight no more.

## The turning point.

More than 90,000 German survivors have surrendered in Stalingrad. Now, hollow-eyed in defeat, they are paraded through the streets for the cameras. We are shown individual studies of their senior officers, filmed for Stalin's personal archive, and we see Sixth Army commander Paulus exhibited to the world's press as a trophy.

For the Soviet Union Stalingrad marks a great turning point in its fortunes. The Wehrmacht will never again trespass so far east, and the Red Army can now begin the long march west.

***

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## Programme Seven

### THE CITADEL

Spring stalemate as all eyes turn to the Kursk salient. A surge in Soviet war production, and the decline of German strength. Delays in German attack. Massive Soviet victory at Kursk. Soviet women at war. The recapture of Kiev. All glory to Stalin.

### The warlords of history

We watch troops hardly older than cadets. Bent against the freezing February sleet, waist-deep in mud, they haul themselves and their wagons slowly along the road west, towards Kharkov. Russian author Bulat Okndzhava was one of the young recruits. He describes his journey to the front for the first time. Paratrooper Konstantin Vanshenkin has just turned seventeen.

Once more convinced that the Wehrmacht is a spent force, Stalin sees 1943 as a year of victory, a chance to join the ranks of history's greatest warlords - at the expense, inevitably, of Adolph Hitler.

The attack on Kharkov is successful and the city falls to Russian troops. But a powerful SS force is ready to counter-attack, and, within three weeks, in the deadly game of warlords, Hitler draws level again. Both Stalin and Hitler are now determined on new victories. The Soviet-held Kursk salient, a bulge in the frontline 200 kilometres long and 150 deep, juts out like a boil. This will be the focus for the next great clash of arms.

### A harsh miracle in the East

The camera pans across an industrial landscape stretching into the haze. Construction workers, many of them prisoners, labour unceasingly to establish new factories. In the mines and munitions plants, women work shifts of up to 20 hours, knowing that any absence or slackness can mean up to a year in prison. That is Stalin's law.

We are witnessing more than just the harsh miracle of Soviet industry's reincarnation beyond the Urals; we are seeing a crusading people at work, willing to accept partnership with a brutal dictator for the sake of the nation. And as thousands of

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modern warplanes and tanks roll off the production lines, the Red Army is reaping the rewards of these miracles.

## Germany in Crisis

Adolf Hitler and his generals pore over a map of the Kursk salient. Hitler is desperate to regain the initiative, his empire under pressure from all sides as never before. In the air, at sea and on land, the Fuhrer needs manpower and weapons everywhere and at once. His conclusion: to anaesthetise the East Front with a powerful and rapid thrust before the Red Army has time to mount its own offensive.

Hitler's hopes are pinned on two new tank designs, the Tiger and the Panther, but the highly advanced Panther suffers delay after delay. April slips by, and May ... and every day the Red Army is growing more powerful than Hitler has ever imagined possible.

## The trap is set

A Red Army brigade marches into the rolling plains of the Kursk steppe. On their backs, shovels. This is not an army gathering for the offensive, but the baiting of an enormous trap for the Wehrmacht.

By the middle of April Soviet intelligence knows Hitler's plan, and Stalin, at last listens to his leading commanders. Forces around Kursk have been ordered to dig in for a defensive battle, to draw the attacking panzer divisions deep into the salient, where they will be annihilated by powerful counter-offensives.

## The Waiting

Through the eyes of frontline cameramen, we share the tensions of early summer in the Red Army's Kursk trenches. Young soldiers, most of them raw recruits, lie around on tanks, write letters home from the dug-outs, smoke endless cigarettes ... on every face the stress of waiting for the storm to break, and the same unspoken question: when will the Wehrmacht attack?

'We didn't even know how to use a rifle' ... Semen Semnikhin and his comrades were among those fledgling formations at Kursk, but they would be granted time enough to learn. For an army ravaged by millions of casualties in two years of war, even the agony of waiting has its advantages.

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## The greatest armoured battle ...

Hitler's offensive, Operation Citadel, crashes to life in the early morning of the 5th of July. From that moment the battle for Kursk draws the might of two huge armies into a white hot whirlwind of destruction ... two and a half million troops, 30,000 heavy guns, 5,000 warplanes ... and more than 6,000 tanks.

Tanks charging ... tanks firing ... tanks bursting through walls, colliding, exploding ... this is the day of the tank. It is the greatest confrontation of armoured force the world has ever seen, and it creates a firestorm that rages across hundreds of square miles for almost a month.

But in the first week it is already clear that the day belongs to the tanks of the Red Army.

Hitler has already been forced to call a halt at Kursk when Soviet counter-offensives erupt on the 12th of July. From now on, though the man-made typhoon does not subside, the Wehrmacht can only attempt a fighting retreat.

## Aspects of Victory

A lone survivor, gaunt and shivering despite the high summer heat, gazes unseeing at the mangled bodies and machines around him, then holds his head in his hands. He is a Soviet soldier, and the Red Army has just won a massive victory, but for this man the sheer scale of the destruction is simply overwhelming.

The streets of Orel, on the 5th of August. Ecstatic citizens embrace garlanded soldiers ... Away from the battlefield, the magnitude of this success can be summed up in one word - liberation!

And crowds swamp the streets of Moscow, milling around amid the crash of artillery salutes and the flash of searchlights. The celebration proclaims the simultaneous fall of Orel and Belgorod, climax and curtain of the Kursk action, and, implicitly, it claims the glory for Joseph Stalin.

## Women at War

The woman in the photograph is Anna Koyalyova, surrounded by some of the 42 bombs she has personally disarmed ... film captures the funeral of Maria Otyabrskaya, tank commander ... the dauntless rescue work of Leningrad's women firefighters ... the

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city's hard-pressed female anti-aircraft crews ... airfield ground crew like Elena Ivanova who describes in interview how she came to volunteer.

At this hour of triumph no section of Soviet society is more deserving of recognition
than its ordinary women. And perhaps because they are so alien to western images of
war, these stories of women fighting and dying for the cause bring home the message
from the east: this was a war of the people. Of the whole people.

## The Night Witches

At first glance they look like just another gaggle of pilots ... scruffy, laughing, lounging around in the mess ... but even among the many extraordinary stories of the people's war, the women of the Marina Raskova Night Bomber Squadron are exceptional.

Their ancient biplanes are slow, vulnerable, firetraps. They call them 'kerosene cans', but they are ideally suited for low-level night attacks against well-protected targets.

Nadezhda Popova, who flew an incredible 850 missions describes her time with the Marina Raskova squadron: 'We flew without parachutes, so of course people were burned alive with their planes.'

Pilot casualties are high, but these women become a feared and respected force in the skies over the frontlines. And the Wehrmacht has given them an appropriate name - the Night Witches.

## Crossing the Dnieper

Soviet troops wade into the waters of the broad Dnieper, rifles held aloft, or launch themselves in fragile rowboats. The plumes of German bombs rise all around. Faced with an obstacle that could delay them for months they have not hesitated - those are Stalin's orders - but few among the first wave will survive.

## Kiev

Winter approaches. The end of a triumphant year for Stalin. But he wants more. His sights are on the recapture of Kiev in time for the November anniversary of the Revolution ... no matter what the cost.

An old woman stands alone on the streets of Kiev. She is not smiling or cheering, but she is waving a filthy rag at the tanks rolling by. It is the 6th of November, one day before Stalin's deadline, and General Konev's forces are entering a shattered city. The cost has been gigantic: another half a million Soviet casualties.

33

Stalin's Renaissance

On the eve of the anniversary, in the Kremlin palace, Stalin is announced to the assembled Party elite, and to radio audiences all over the USSR. Once at the podium he silences the thunderous ovation with a slight cough. He oozes power. His speech boasts of victories, and predicts the collapse of Hitler's Reich. But it will never once mention the endeavours of the Soviet people.

A month later we see him in Tehran, basking in the admiration of Allied leaders. His confident features betray nothing of the fear that the Allies will question his role in the Katyn massacre, exposed by German authorities in the spring of 1943.

But Churchill and Roosevelt do not mention the Polish officers murdered at Katyn. Instead the world sees Stalin receiving a jewel-encrusted sword, a gift for the victor of Stalingrad from King George VI.

Stalin's year of rebirth is now complete. But for the expendable multitudes whose dogged patriotism has rescued his regime, the struggle is far from over.

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