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# RUSSIA'S WAR - BLOOD UPON THE SNOW

## Programme Eight

### FALSE DAWN

1944. Liberation and revenge. The Chechens, the Crimean Tatars. Operation Bagration. German prisoners march in Moscow. The tragedy of Poland. And Stalin meets his allies at Yalta.

New Year's Eve 1944. The USSR's head of state, the sad figure of President Kalinin addresses the Soviet people. At the end of a year flushed with victories, his message is one of hope: hope for the final defeat of Hitler's empire.

But this old man also nourishes his own secret hope: that this year his master, Joseph Stalin, will at last release his wife from the Siberian labour camp she has suffered from the past seven years.

This is the reality of Soviet power. But the myth is powerful too. The myth of Joseph Stalin, the leader united with his people in pursuit of peace, will be a driving force behind great Soviet achievements in the momentous year to come. The myth will disguise from an admiring world, Stalin's savage resumption of repression. It will even disguise his insatiable lust for global power from his allies in the West.

Only at the year's end will the mask finally begin to fall, to reveal the megalomaniac ambition that inspires Joseph Stalin's every act.

## Liberation and Cleansing

The Red Army opens the year with new offensives all along the front. The hero city of Leningrad, besieged for 900 days at a cost of nearly two million dead, is finally liberated on January 19th. Soviet forces push into Belorussia, the Ukraine, the Caucasus ... and Moscow rail stations hum with the press of refugees going home to liberated towns and villages all over the USSR.

Yet even as the Red Army pushes forward the line of liberation, Stalin's mind is on revenge. Revenge against his own people.

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All people who have suffered occupation are suspect. It is enough that they have been in contact with the foreigners.

In interview, Russian historian, Professor Naumov shows that, though small scale Soviet experiments in the transportation of peoples have already taken place elsewhere, the scale of the revenge clearances in the North Caucasus is completely different.

## The great clearances

A mounted NKVD detachment gallops into the North Caucasian mountains, the advance party of the teams of NKVD troops, whose orders are to achieve the deportation of entire communities. Great brutality, savagery even, marks the eviction of these mountain people from their homes. We see the bewilderment in their faces. They will be taken, hungry and without shelter, to the trackless wildernesses of the eastern Soviet Union. Families will be separated, thousands will die in the crowded railcars and trucks. Ingushi, Balkars, Chechens.... And of course they will never forget.

## The Infection of Foreigners

The Crimean Tartars are next. A whole people condemned without trial, they follow the Chechens to exile in inhospitable lands to the east. Their crime is to have been occupied by the Germans. At a time when the Soviet Union desperately needs trains and trucks for the war effort, Stalin's priority remains revenge.

But his acts must be disguised from the world at large. Though his war machine has the measure of the Wehrmacht by 1944, producing the best weapons of their type in enormous quantities, Stalin still needs food and trucks, and Allied sailors are still being sent through the gauntlet of the Arctic convoy run to supply Uncle Joe's crusade against Hitler.

Valentina Ivleva was a teenager in Murmansk when the first Allied convoy arrived in the Arctic port. She recalls the air raids that greeted its approach, and the huge crowds on the shore to cheer it home. She recalls too the innocent love she shared with an American sub-lieutenant. It is a romance her masters also remember.

Shortly after the ships leave, the arrests begin. Valentina is arrested and imprisoned as an Allied spy: 'I thought ... a temporary hiccup. Well, that temporary hiccup lasted for six whole years.'

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And even while the Soviet people are beginning to reap the bitter fruit of victory, many
are still suffering from the retreating Germans.

## Concealed by corpses

A Belorussian villager breaks down before the cameras. She has seen a mother crush her infant to death on the frozen ground, to spare it further torment as an SS plaything.

The Wehrmacht's retreat through the western Soviet Union leaves behind only scorched wastelands, bodies discarded by the roadside. and terrified, traumatised survivors ... For the time being, evidence of Hitler's monstrous crimes overshadows the machinations of his rival in Moscow.

And there is worse to come on the roads through the occupied lands.

## The Year of Victories

We are witnessing a day like no other on the streets of Moscow. Fifty thousand German prisoners are marching in silence down Tverskaya Street, on their way to the railway stations and the labour camps. A sea of humbled, frightened men, no more that a ghostly echo of the 'Thousand Year Reich', flows past the awestruck crowds of Muscovites. In their wake come the columns of street-cleaning trucks, symbolically washing away the contamination of their passage, and as the crowds stream homeward, they too are silent.

These are momentous times. The enemy is almost beaten.

Massive Anglo-American bombing fleets now brush aside an enfeebled Luftwaffe to pulverise German cities by day and night ... Overwhelmingly strong Allied armies are advancing overland towards the German frontiers, from the south through Italy and, after the Anglo-American landing of the 6th of June, from Normandy to the west ...

But two thirds of Hitler's forces are facing east, to meet the enemy that is already hammering at the foundations of his empire - the Red Army.

## Operation Bagration

In a field somewhere in the Ukraine we watch Zhukov giving the final orders for the massive Red Army summer offensive which will complement the Allied landings in Normandy. He looks, as ever, completely confident of the result.

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Now, three years to the day after the start of Operation Barbarossa, the Red Army launches Operation Bagration. Meticulously planned, colossal in scope, it completes the reconquest of the western USSR.

In Minsk, capital of Belorussia, echoes of Stalingrad as we watch Red Army soldiers scramble through the ruins in a bitter street war. But portents for the future too: as citizens embrace their liberators and weep over the massed graves of their loved ones ...

## Collapse from within

In Germany, on July 20th, Hitler plans a strategy at his Rastenburg headquarters. A suitcase bomb planted by Count Claus von Stauffenberg fails to kill the Fuhrer. Within hours Hitler is filmed visiting those wounded in the explosion.

On film, some of the leading figures in non-Nazi German society undergo trials of a kind Stalin's people have come to recognise. Tortured and humiliated, men like Count von Schulenberg, former ambassador to Moscow, are harangued by rabid Nazi prosecutor, Roland Freisler. Some will be shot, others will die at the guillotine, or hang from rows of meathooks while they are garotted with piano wire. Hitler will gloat over film of every execution.

## The Tragedy of Poland

And now, as the Red Army sweeps through Romania and into Bulgaria - a further act in the tragedy of Poland.

Lublin, in eastern Poland. July 1944. A cameraman films Red Army troops as they smash down the doors of Lublin Castle, used as a German prison throughout the occupation. Local citizens follow the troops inside. We are in the prison tailoring shop. It is as if we have stopped in horror, our own eyes searching through the hundreds of bodies butchered at their work tables. Countless more fill the courtyard, thronged by distraught families and loved ones ...

After Lublin comes the concentration camps ... Sobibor, Treblinka, and the great killing complex at Auschwitz. Again the sheer horror of Nazi occupation masks the grim intentions of Poland's self-proclaimed liberator.

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Stalin is now ready to devour Poland. An appeal by Soviet radio to Poland's underground movement, the nationalist Home Army, triggers an uprising in Warsaw on August 1st, and signals perhaps the most chilling of Stalin's war crimes. The Home Army are not communists. They have no part to play in the future of Stalin's Poland. He already has a puppet government to hand. The uprising must be allowed to burn itself out.

## The Warsaw Rising

The Home Army takes Warsaw's German garrison by surprise, seizing and holding large sections of the city, awaiting help from a Red Army stopped just to the east. Callously Stalin sends no aid himself until he is sure that the Home Army has been wiped out by SS units sent to reclaim Warsaw. He will not even allow British aircraft to use Soviet airfields as supply bases ...

When the Red Army finally enters Warsaw in January 1945, more than 300,000 of its citizens have died since the start of the uprising and there is no longer a nationalist force to contest Stalin's control over Poland.

## At war with the world

Churchill, alarmed by the brutal realpolitik of Warsaw, visits Moscow in October. But the British Empire is too weak to impose sanctions on Stalin and the Red Army. The two reach informal agreement to accept the status quo in much of eastern Europe. The fate of Poland is not even discussed.

It is the same story at the Yalta conference. Stalin's land forces will dictate the shape of Eastern Europe.

## And back to Moscow...

Again we see the bent figure of President Kalinin. Still petitioning in vain for the release of his wife, he presents a self-awarded medal to Stalin, who stands erect, his face a travesty of humility. But there is nothing humble about the destiny he sees for himself now. This year of victories, of popular dreams dashed by repression, and of deceptions on a massive scale, leaves Joseph Stalin poised to devour half a continent.

***

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## Programme Nine

### THE FALL OF THE SWASTIKA

1945. Germany on the brink of defeat. The Red Army before Berlin. Young and old mobilised to defend the capital. Hitler's madness. The battle for Berlin. Victory in Europe, and the resumption of Stalin's war on the Soviet people.

**A war battered nation...**

Ruins and rubble, fire and death ... our pictures tour the reality of life in Germany as 1945 dawns. A reality imposed by huge Anglo-American bomber fleets, virtually unchallenged by the Luftwaffe. It is the overture to the final collapse of Hitler's dreams.

The Thousand Year Reich is crumbling, menaced not only from the skies, but by implacable and powerful enemies on its land frontiers. On the western borders, powerful Allied armies are ready to surge across the Rhine. But the Wehrmacht's last reserves are now being sent east, to meet the relentless advance of the most deadly foe of all - the enormous Red Army.

**In Sight of Vengeance**

With the Red Army driving west, we share days of triumph. Tank crews defy the chill of early spring to splash into the waters of the Baltic, symbolically claiming its coasts for their own ... in western Poland an old man, motionless in the shop doorway, watches yet another conquering army march through his town. As Soviet forces stream past the frontier sign, and into Germany itself, the ultimate prize is now in sight.

Yet tragedy casts its shadow over every victory. Young Russian soldiers stand in the middle of a death camp, dead children in their arms, their shock almost tangible ... confused, starving survivors, incredulous in the light of liberation ... whole communities scorched and pillaged ... these are lands visited by plague.

**And in the Reich capital ...**

Women, old men and children are straining to turn a streetcar into a barricade ... a line of elderly men, each shouldering a primitive rocket-launcher, fires a ragged practice

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volley ... small boys, dwarfed by their uniforms and wide-eyed with awe, are inspected by Adolph Hitler. This is Berlin in spring 1945, and these people are preparing to defend their capital, and their Fuhrer, to the death.

But beyond the spellbound city of Berlin, Hitler's word has become meaningless.

## Resistance fades

Captured SS guards line a path through the concentration camp as an ex-prisoner is led past. A bag over his head protects his identity - fear of Nazi revival will not disappear overnight, and he knows he is marking these guards for death. This is Buchenwald, in the west, and an Allied firing squad completes the sketch, but scenes like these do not prevent a rush to surrender to British or American troops once they are across the great barrier of the Rhine. Goebbels' propaganda machine has left the German people certain of a far worse fate at the hands of Stalin's avengers.

April 1945, and a great Soviet host is drawn up east of Berlin. Some 22,000 heavy guns menace the city, supporting perhaps six million troops. Command goes again to Georgi Zhukov, Stalin's most consistently successful general, though Stalin is already secretly gathering evidence against him as a possible rival.

Staff Officer Puchkov who was present many times with Zhukov at the Kremlin, recalls Stalin's unstinted praise. But Zhukov will suffer for his successes in later years. While Germany is still undefeated the dictator needs his supreme military talent ...

## The Last Great Battle

Every available soldier is brought up for the battle. General Oustugov, a battalion commander on the Berlin front describes the young, green Soviet reinforcements, barely older than Berlin's own Hitler Youth defenders.

On the night of the 15th of April the Red Army's guns announce the last great offensive of Russia's War. A million German troops are ranged in defence. Many, demoralised survivors short of every possible supply requirement. Others, prepared to give their lives to defend the city.

While Zhukov's main strike force rolls towards the city from the east, Konev's southern wing dashes forward to reach the western suburbs in four days.

Now the real battle for Berlin begins. Suddenly it is street fighting, house to house, with SS defenders in every building and explosions on every corner. We are with

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skirmishers, inching through an apocalyptic landscape of bombed-out ruins, to the bass thud of artillery as it multiplies the devastation. Impossible that anyone can survive this inferno ... yet resistance is stiffening and Soviet casualties are mounting.

## The Final Fantasy

As Berlin disintegrates around him, Adolf Hitler inhabits the twilight unreality of his bunker, surrounded by yes-men and lunatics. He greets the death of Roosevelt on April 23rd as a portent of the new war he expects to erupt between the Allies. Remarkable film reveals the bankruptcy of his last hope as, two days later, US and Soviet troops meet at the Elbe.

They laugh, share cigarettes. We join their unique victory banquet: menus printed in English and Russian; wine, whisky and vodka; dancing and toasts. For later generations raised in an atmosphere of Cold War mistrust, these are poignant images.

Through the shellfire and rubble dust above Berlin a single engine German aircraft swoops down to make a perilous landing on the debris-strewn Unter den Linden. A daring rescue bid by fighter pilot Hanna Reitsch which founders on Hitler's refusal to leave. Next day he marries Eva Braun, the woman who has chosen to share his fate. By now the Red Army is literally yards from the bunker.

## The Red Flag over Berlin

It is the last day of April, and Red Army units are crouched a stone's throw from the Reichstag building. The battle is almost won, but thousands have died in three attacks on this final, symbolic bastion.

Now Soviet troops race up the Reichstag steps, flag held aloft, and clatter through the building to the roof. There, filmed for posterity, two Soviet troopers hoist the Red Flag over Berlin. It is the end of the Third Reich.

## Surviving the Peace

Defeat plunges Germany's Nazi hierarchy into an epidemic of suicides. The charred remains of Goebbels ... Himmler's body ... a nameless official slumped over his desk ... a dead family on a park bench, dressed for a day out, but with heads tilted back, mouths gaping ...

## The Death of Hitler

Most surviving Nazi leaders are already in captivity, but for days after the fall of Berlin Hitler's fate remains uncertain. Cameraman Mikhail Poselsky describes finding a body

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in Reich Chancellery which looked remarkably like Hitler, a corporal's award in his buttonhole and a bullet hole through the skull. The body is rejected as being Adolf Hitler's. The unidentified man, Poselsky explains, wore heavily darned socks. Eventually Hitler's remains and those of Eva Braun are identified, half-burned in the bunker garden. He has poisoned his wife and then shot himself.

## And in Berlin beyond the bunker ...

There is looting at many levels. Professor Semyriaga recounts the story of the NKVD chief in Berlin looting part of the German gold deposit.

In the city desperate Berliners clamour for meagre handouts from a bread wagon ... a fistfight erupts between two middle-aged women scavenging for fuel ... a teenage rape victim, one among tens of thousands, cowers in a bombed-out doorway. Her foetal posture speaks for German women still living in Berlin ... their misery does not end with the fighting.

## Victory in Europe

The limousines pull up outside an unassuming building in an eastern Berlin suburb. Inside its main hall, we watch as Zhukov leads senior Allied commanders to the conference table. There, Field Marshal Keitel, his face an expressionless mask, signs the formal surrender document on behalf of the last Nazi government.

An artilleryman answers a field telephone, listens for a moment, and launches into a demented dance of joy ... a truck speeds its load of dancing soldiers through the streets of Moscow ... generals are chaired and cheered as spontaneous parties break out all over the Soviet Union. After four gruelling years and 25 million deaths, the Great Patriotic War is over at last.

But the celebrations will end soon enough. The dark eminence in the Kremlin is already re-opening hostilities in his never-ending war with his subjects.

## Gulags and graveyards ...

In a continent awash with lost children, this busload could be from almost anywhere in Europe. But these are Soviet infants, coming home from captivity in Germany. For the rest of Stalin's life they will live under a cloud of suspicion as *spies*.

Adult deportees and returning PoWs are sent straight to special detention camps, to face NKVD interrogators and probable imprisonment.

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Political exiles extracted from Allied protection, or anti-communists like General Krasnov's rebel Cossacks, are simply executed, alongside their wives and children. Gulags and graveyards ... world war has not altered the essential Joseph Stalin.

## The Summit at Potsdam

Against the torrential flow of his victims travelling east, Stalin's personal train speeds west, to the Allied summit at Potsdam. Towering above his minions at the conference, he secures recognition of his puppet regime in Poland, and effortlessly avoids the question of his other eastern European ambitions. Roosevelt is dead, Churchill loses office during the summit, and as the delegations part, all smiles, Stalin is the last of the 'Big Three', the sole surviving warlord.

## Stalin and Hitler

But until the day Stalin dies, he will refuse to acknowledge publicly Hitler's death. Instead he will order the Fuhrer's remains hidden in an NKVD building at Magdeburg, and maintain a ghoulish collection of memorabilia: Hitler's uniform ... his Iron Cross ... books from his own library ... a part of his skull, the bullet hole clearly visible ...

***

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## Programme Ten

### THE CULT OF PERSONALITY

The greatest Tsar. Soviet foreign policy balked by the first Atomic Bomb. The ashes of victory. The Cold War. The decline and death of Joseph Stalin.

### Slava! Glory!

Moscow, in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet people's monumental victory over Hitler. A giant curtain rises and falls, dwarfing the dancers and singers beneath its skirts. Inscribed on it: *Slava! - Glory!* Then simply *Stalin*. All glory, all credit for the Soviet people's achievements, belongs to the dictator.

### The Greatest Tsar

June 24th, 1945. Colour film reveals the Soviet Union's great victory parade through Red Square in all its solemn pageantry. Mile after mile of tanks and guns roll by, flight after flight of war planes overhead, thousands of troops in solemn rhythm ...

And overseeing it all, an emperor reviewing his gladiators, Stalin stands impassive, eyes watchful as ever, demanding and receiving the tribute of his subjects.

On screen the verdict of historian Lelchuk: 'The fact remains he was the greatest Tsar this country has ever known'.

At the climax of this formal triumph, a battalion of war heroes hurls the swastika battle standards of the beaten enemy at Stalin's feet.

### The emerging Superpower

In June 1945, Stalin commands the greatest army, and the greatest concentration of firepower, that the world has ever seen. At a Kremlin strategy meeting after the war several generals favour driving Soviet tanks on to the English Channel.

Stalin refuses. He sees greater spoils in the east. Now, Soviet troops invade Manchuria and Korea, but Stalin's plans to attack and occupy one third of the Japanese home islands are brought to an abrupt halt by the bomb the US drop on Hiroshima.

A single event has brought about a crucial change in the global balance of power.

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## At home -Reconstruction

It is no more than a hole in the ground, covered with a rough weave of branches and otherwise exposed to the elements. It stands in a scorched, barren landscape, surrounded by the bombed remains of brick dwellings. A woman emerges with her water jug and goes about her business. This hovel, something out of the Dark Ages, is her home. This is the reality of the western Soviet Union in 1945.

Huge tracts of the country lie in ruins: arable land, industrial regions, more than 2,000 towns, and countless villages.... For millions of Soviet citizens struggling to eke out an existence during those first months of peace, reconstruction is the most urgent priority.

## Repression

The great construction site swarms with labourers. From our panoramic view they are like an insect worker colony, or perhaps a prison slave enterprise. But these are not prisoners, or even paid workers, they are volunteers, and as we move closer we can see that most of them are women.

But Stalin does not understand crusades - only compulsion. When Ukrainian girls return from slave labour in Germany, they are immediately sent to forced labour in the Donbas mines. They join Soviet prisoners of war, civilians captured by the Nazis, innumerable 'enemies of the state', many convicted only of being late for work ... all fodder for a gulag labour force that must expand to meet the times.

## Reparation

Rare pictures reveal German prisoners of war labouring to rebuild the land they helped devastate - but these are not the ragged skeletons we have seen in the gulag camps. More than a million Germans are working in the USSR after 1945, and Stalin will not release some for almost a decade, but most are relatively well-treated. They are high quality labour.

But above all he believes they will be living propaganda on their return. Attendance at Communist indoctrination classes grants extra privileges.

## Revenge

The camera picks up a row of identical trucks straddling the city square, each carrying two standing figures. Huge crowds throng the pavements as the trucks pull forward simultaneously, and their passengers swing from the gibbets above them. These are the

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first public executions in Russia since the 18th century. These are scenes repeated all over the Soviet Union. Germans convicted of war crimes, and all Soviet collaborators, must die as propaganda for home consumption ... as a grim warning that Stalin once more has the leisure to indulge in terror.

## Olga Simakova

Propaganda film at this time echoes the vibrant days of hope in the 1920's, before Stalin's shadow darkened the Soviet vision. Smiling young men and women, pulling together to build a new state for the new age ... dancing, kissing, behaving like any other normal, free people in peacetime.

But it is a sham that mocks the misery of millions who have crossed invisible lines to earn Stalin's enmity.

Olga Simakova was a trainee schoolteacher in Orel, where she fell in love with a Free French pilot stationed nearby. Denounced by a student informer and arrested in the dead of night, she tells, with film and moving illustration, one woman's shocking story of a whole decade of imprisonment in camps all over the USSR.

## In the Baltic States

In the newly acquired Baltic republics - Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania - the arrests and executions begin again.

## And in the Ukraine ...

Stalin's baleful gaze falls yet again on its suffering peoples. Nationalist guerillas have been fighting Soviet partisans in the forests for years and their complete suppression take many years more. In the meantime the deportation of thousand upon thousands of Ukrainian men is resumed...

But now climate intervenes. A burning summer brings drought throughout the producing regions of the Soviet Union. In the Ukraine crop failure follows quickly and is ultimately an enemy even more deadly than Stalin. Throughout the winter of 1946 the familiar pattern is repeated as the third great famine in half a century decimates the already battered population of the Ukraine.

Nicolai Minushkin, a peasant farmer in those days, paints his own picture of the workers' state.

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## The new terror

And in Moscow, as Stalin again steps up the terror, Kremlin dignitaries, in fear for their lives, line up to vote Stalin's way in fixed elections ... members of the dictator's own family are arrested or shot for the slightest misdemeanour ... artists, intellectuals, entertainers hasten to confirm their adulation, but Stalin will allow them no peace.

This is the terror of the 1930's reborn, controlled by Stalin and carried out by his twisted executives, Zhdanov and Beria.

## Cold War

In the outside world, Stalin's relations with the West are rapidly cooling to freezing point. The cartonist Yefimov brilliantly acts out his alarm at a sudden call from Stalin: An Eisenhower cartoon is to be drawn so... to be captioned so.

Churchill, in the United States, speaks of an *iron curtain* stretching from the Baltic to the Adriatic. But if a single day can be said to mark the beginning of the Cold War, is the 25th of September 1949. On that day the Tass news agency announces the first successful Soviet atomic weapons test, and a dark cloud rising over Siberia announces an arms race that will lead the world to the brink of destruction.

December 1949. At a huge gala in Moscow, small children present bouquets to their undisputed leader on the occasion of his 70th birthday. At Stalin's side on the podium sits Mao Tse Tung, the new communist leader of 800 million Chinese. Bitter rivalry will soon haunt Sino-Soviet relations, but for now Mao helps convince Stalin to join an attack on South Korea.

## The twilight of the god

At the 19th Party Congress, we see Stalin as he appears in no propaganda poster. He stops, his jowls sag, his manner is tired. But there are no signs that Stalin is mellowing with age - and the war against his own people is conducted more savagely than ever. Against those who work close to him his suspicions are sudden, arbitrary and infinitely dangerous.

At the Nineteenth Congress he pounces on old cronies Voroshilov, Mikoyan and Molotov, reducing the hall to stunned silence as he accuses them of spying for the British.

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His next campaign is a mad purge of the Kremlin's medical staff, most of them Jewish, on the absurd premise of an all embracing poisoning plot.

In the last months of his life, there is no one close to Stalin who does not expect the midnight creak on the stairs, the knock on the door.

## The death of Joseph Stalin

Alex Rybin, one of Stalin's bodyguards, recounts the bizarre circumstances of the dictator's last night on earth.

Bodyguards and ministers alike are paralysed by fear of Stalin's wrath. Yet they all know he is close to death. When finally Beria calls the doctors, it is too late to save Joseph Stalin. Perhaps it was intended that way. It is a fittingly enigmatic end for a man who has murdered millions beneath a veil of state secrecy.

Yet our film shows ordinary Soviet citizens overwhelmed with genuine shock and grief when the news is broadcast the next day. If Stalin was nothing else to them, he must have seemed indestructible. They stand like children, incredulous at the loss of an autocratic parent.

For almost the last moments of the series we are back in Red Square and again the might of the Soviet empire parades past the Kremlin.

It is as it should be, a scene of unrivalled pomp and gravity. For it is the moment at which another long war against the Soviet people formally ends. It is the funeral of Joseph Stalin.

***

IBP FILMS DISTRIBUTION LTD.

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19 June 1996

Dr. Henry Kissinger
Kissinger Associates
350 Park Avenue
New York, New York 10022

JUN 20 1996

REF: 'Russia's War' - 10 Hour Documentary Series

Dear Dr. Kissinger:

I was extremely honoured to learn from our US representative, Lindsey Gruson, that you have graciously agreed to host our 10 Hour Documentary Series to air on PBS entitled 'Russia's War', which spans the 30 year time frame of 1923 - 1953. We are extremely grateful for your cooperation, as our material contains mainly hitherto unseen archives and very sensitive documents and personal recollections. Your participation and intimate knowledge of the historical aspects concerning the former Soviet Union will allow the American public to more keenly grasp the immensity of the subject materials.

Lindsey has informed me that you will be going on holiday at the end of this week. Perhaps when you return I can come to the States and discuss an overall schedule for filming with you. **We would require a maximum of one day in total.** We would prepare a draft script outline for your consideration, comments and revisions, and work to your calendar obligations.

IBP FILMS DISTRIBUTION, the producer of the series, worked together with five leading Russian Documentary makers for several years to prepare the materials for this mammoth undertaking, and there is great excitement surrounding your agreement to introduce the episodes. We can imagine no other more respected and intellectually aware individual to help guide the viewing public through the complex maze that was Stalin's reign.

I have enclosed a PR kit to supplement the cassettes already supplied to you, which I hope you will find of interest. I will keep in touch with you office in order to arrange a time upon your return for us to meet to discuss all necessary details and contractual points in order to conclude all arrangements.

Most cordially,
JUDITH DE PAUL

CYJ

To: HAK

From: SSM

Re: PBS 10-Part Documentary on "Russia's War"

July 9, 1996

This is the project that Lindsay Gruson discussed with you in which
you would host/introduce ten segments. Allegedly you told Gruson
that you were interested in doing it.

I have spoken at length with the Executive Producer. It will be a
serious, well-produced series with what they say is some remarkable
and never-before-seen footage of WWII in Russia. It will air on
PBS in February 1997 during "sweeps week".

They would need to tape your introductions (which will all be short -
no more than 3 minutes) before the end of October (or first week of
November in a pinch.) Taping will take a day - they recommend two
mornings - wherever you would like to do it. The office will be
fine, although we would have to set up a "scholarly" background with
books and so forth.

They will prepare a *draft* script by the end of August for you to make
whatever changes you *want* and to personalize. Your input is very
much desired.

The honorarium is $25,000, which Gruson told them was acceptable
to you.

Material on the series, including a synopsis of the ten programs,
is attached.

Would like to host series; accept ____ noted
infoed 7/16 decline ____

If you go ahead with this, it looks as if the mornings of November 6 and 7 (Wed. and Thurs.) would be easiest for you.

Accept for Nov. 6 and 7 ____

Schedule attached ->