Russia: The Wild East: Series 2
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13-Aug-2011
Russia: The Wild East: Series 2 - 25. The Lessons of History
Starting with the relationship between Putin and Medvedev Martin Sixsmith reviews the dichotomy of Russian history: "on the one hand, tantalising hints of democracy and freedom; on the other, hard-bitten conviction that Russia needs strong centralized power to rule her unruly lands." Medvedev has questioned Putin's 'managed democracy' but has failed to free the legislature from the state, and there have been few improvements in Russia's human rights record. His role in Georgia, Abkhazia and South Ossetia reveals, Sixsmith argues, "the reflexes of an autocrat ... If Medvedev is a liberal, his reformist instincts seem to be curbed by his Prime Minister, Putin, whom most Russians continue to regard as the real leader of the country." So if Russia's past experiments with democracy all ended in failure, what of her prospects now? Sixsmith notices a recurrent pattern: nearly every attempt at reform has come from 'above;' all have been motivated by an immediate threat to autocracy. The revolution 'from below' in February 1917 was quickly hijacked by the idealist despots of Leninist socialism, another form of autocracy that lasted for 74 years. Gorbachev's Glasnost taught the Russian people to have their own opinions and in 1991 it was the people who demanded freedom and democracy - a tectonic shift that opened up new possibilities for the future. But instead of prosperity and freedom, Russia got economic meltdown, crime and ethnic strife. The reassertion of autocracy was carried out with the approval of the people, not imposed on them, and the governments of Putin and of Putin-Medvedev are genuinely popular. Sixsmith questions why liberalism always fails and ends suggesting, "Could it be that centripetal Russia really can be ruled only by the fist of centralized autocracy?" Producers: Adam Fowler & Anna Scott-Brown A Ladbroke Production for BBC Radio 4.
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12-Aug-2011
Russia: The Wild East: Series 2 - 24. Return of the Fist
Vladimir Putin came to power determined to halt economic meltdown and re-establish Russia as a world power. He achieved both, but at the expense of democracy: parliamentary powers were weakened, those of the president enhanced; opposition parties were harassed, protestors jailed, freedom of the press restricted. This so called 'managed democracy' was described by critic Lilia Shevtsova as a "smokescreen to conceal the old power arrangements." Putin revived the trappings of the Soviet era promoting a strong state and the pop song 'Be Like Putin!' shot up the charts. He took on the oligarchs, forcing them to hand over the TV channel that criticized his handling of the Kursk tragedy when 118 sailors died on board a nuclear submarine; and when the oil magnate Khodorkovsky, started to fund political parties he was arrested on bogus tax charges and sent to a labour camp. Russia resumed its seat at the world's top table when Putin reclaimed the oil for the state, using his power to ramp up oil and gas prices to Ukraine when angered by Western encroachment in the former Soviet republics. But after guerrillas seized a school in Beslan, Northern Ossetia, and several of the hostage-takers were Arabs, Putin argued it was proof, that Russia was fighting the same war on international terror as the West. 200 children died, but Putin's response was uncompromising: "the weak get beaten," he said. Ongoing conflict with Chechnya gave him further chances to demonstrate his toughness, and when Alexander Litvinenko was murdered in London, a commentator on Russian state television compared it to the elimination of Trotsky by agents of Stalin. "There was a new willingness to rehabilitate the dictator's memory," says Martin Sixsmith. "Autocracy was back in Russia, and the people liked it." Producers: Adam Fowler & Anna Scott-Brown A Ladbroke Production for BBC Radio 4.
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11-Aug-2011
Russia: The Wild East: Series 2 - 23. Brave New World?
The programme opens with a new national anthem full of hope for a country frantically ridding itself of its communist past. At the time, Martin Sixsmith witnessed the dumping of Moscow's communist statues "here on the grass for the crowds to spit on" and returns to the site to reflect on what actually happened. President Yeltsin's 'economic shock therapy' freed prices and deregulated trade, but inflation soared to 400%. In late 1992 every citizen was given a $60 stake in Russia's denationalized industries, but entrepreneurs bought out the people, who were left poorer than ever. Corruption and violence flourished; wages went unpaid; homelessness and poverty escalated. When opposition to his policies reached a climax, Yeltsin demanded the right to rule by decree; the Russian parliament refused; Yeltsin dissolved the parliament but the parliament impeached him. Supporters of the 2 sides clashed on the streets of Moscow and Yeltsin sent in the tanks, destroying his reputation as a democrat and giving the Russian Communist Party a chance. When it won a clear majority in the elections of 1995 Yeltsin panicked. Conflict in Chechnya and the failure of the economic reforms had brought Moscow close to bankruptcy so Yeltsin turned to the new oligarchs for a massive injection of cash to save his political skin. In return he had to hand over Russia's remaining state industries, including steel, gas and oil. In 1998 oil and gas prices collapsed sending the Russian economy into freefall. When demonstrators took to the streets, Yeltsin announced his reforms were being suspended, ending Russia's experiment with Western style liberal democracy. On New Year's Eve he dramatically announced he was stepping down, handing over to his Prime Minister, a little known bureaucrat - Vladimir Putin. Producers: Adam Fowler & Anna Scott-Brown A Ladbroke Production for BBC Radio 4.
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10-Aug-2011
Russia: The Wild East: Series 2 - 22. The Moscow Coup
Intermingling memories and on location reporting at the time, Martin Sixsmith recreates the dramatic events of August 1991 when hardline communists removed Gorbachev from power and instituted a State of Emergency. Standing on the steps of the Russian parliament building he describes Yeltsin climbing onto a tank calling for all citizens to oppose "the anti-constitutional coup that will return us to the days of the Cold War era." Thousands of people ignored curfews and threats to respond; Sixsmith recalls the campfires and people sharing their food, waving the pre-revolutionary Russian flag. We hear a poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko written for the occasion and of 3 young men crushed by tanks as demonstrators intercepted their advance. And then on 21st August the coup plotters lost their nerve and the tanks withdrew. On 22nd August, Gorbachev flew back to Moscow claiming, "This is the victory of perestroika." But he underestimated Yeltsin's heroism and the guilt of the Communist Party that had backed the coup. The days of reforming and modernizing the Party were over. The end of the week brought the political showdown that would determine the country's future: Gorbachev stubbornly defended the communist party, but was forced to recognize the entire government had supported the coup and agreed everyone must resign. Yeltsin moved in for the kill, banning the Russian Communist Party. The next day Gorbachev addressed the nation, agreeing the Soviet Communist Party, too, should be abolished. 74 years of political domination had come undone in a mere six days. Forced to accept the inevitable Gorbachev announced his resignation in an emotional television address on Christmas Day. At midnight on the last day of 1991, the hammer and sickle was taken down from the Kremlin towers. Producers: Adam Fowler & Anna Scott-Brown A Ladbroke Production for BBC Radio 4.
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09-Aug-2011
Russia: The Wild East: Series 2 - 21. Gorbachev vs Yeltsin
Martin Sixsmith remembers the "electric" sessions of the Congress of People's Deputies, after the Soviet Union's first genuinely contested elections in March 1989."As I wandered through the parliament's corridors, meeting openly with former dissidents, I realized that Gorbachev had let the genie of liberty out of the bottle," he says. Thousands of people took to the streets demanding multi-party democracy and booing Gorbachev. Boris Yeltsin -Chairman of the newly-created Russian parliament and de facto leader of the Russian Republic was demanding independence. Gorbachev, as leader of the Soviet Union and nominally the senior figure, struggled to hold the USSR together. "I'm doomed to go forward and only forward," he told a colleague. "If I retreat, I will perish..." Hardline communists were also on the attack; 'Gorbymania' in the West gave them leverage, and when Soviet territory was 'lost' as the Berlin wall came down, Gorbachev was derided as a traitor. The Baltic republics stridently demanded independence and although Gorbachev had publicly renounced coercion, Soviet troops were sent in. Yeltsin announced he would battle the threat of autocracy with the sword of democracy, proposing free and open elections for a new post of Russian President. Gorbachev tried to block it, but on 28 March 1991 the battle took to the streets. Gorbachev was forced to back off; the balance of power was shifting. In June 1991 Yeltsin was elected President of Russia with a mandate for radical change. He wanted to end communism and abolish the USSR. Gorbachev's compromise of a looser confederation of states with considerable autonomy but not control of defence and foreign policy, might have worked. But before the New Union Treaty could be signed, history would take a dramatic turn. Producers:Adam Fowler & Anna Scott-Brown A Ladbroke Production for BBC Radio 4.
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06-Aug-2011
Russia: The Wild East: Series 2 - 20. The Shape of Things to Come
Martin Sixsmith draws on his experience as BBC Moscow Correspondent during Mikhail Gorbachev's leadership of the Soviet Union, which began he says, "with little hint of the tectonic shocks it would unleash." Gorbachev's aim was to revitalize communism, not destroy it. He had to make radical reforms, which he referred to as perestroika or 'restructuring'. His first target was to revive the civilian economy, allowing a measure of free enterprise. Sixsmith remembers being surprised by "the number of restaurants, private bakeries, hairdressers and taxi firms that sprang into existence. It all seemed remarkably hopeful." But, it aroused fierce opposition, and Gorbachev's military and foreign policies met the same resistance. To counter conservative opposition, Gorbachev appealed directly to public opinion to back his policies. Glasnost, or 'openness', intended to give the people access to information in order to prove that the changes he proposed were a good thing: a test case was the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. It was unprecedented and risky and would have momentous, unforeseen consequences. Attacked by both left and right, Gorbachev needed to shore up his own position. At the 19th Party Conference in 1988 he proposed replacing the old parliament, with a new body, the Congress of People's Deputies - its Chairman would serve in the new post of President of the USSR, and could be removed only by the parliament, and not a rival faction in the party elite. The first genuinely contested elections in the history of the Soviet Union were set for March 1989. The communist party had voted - almost inadvertently - to loosen its own grip on power. But Yeltsin saw the elections as his chance and within months the tide of popular revolution would be lapping at the Kremlin. Producers: Anna Scott-Brown & Adam Fowler A Ladbroke Production for BBC Radio 4.
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06-Aug-2011
Russia: The Wild East: Series 2 - 19. The Brezhnev Years
Leonid Brezhnev's 'era of stagnation' returns the country to the stifling conservatism of the past, plunging the USSR into crisis. Speaking freely was risky and repression worsened after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia when Soviet demonstrators were beaten up and sent to jail, although their courage inspired new generations of dissidents. The March of the Communist Brigades trumpets Soviet power: "Working hard every day is a holiday for us..." the workers sing, but the whole economy needed a radical overhaul. As Brezhnev stalled and prevaricated "the USSR began the inexorable decline that would end in collapse, a quarter of a century later," says Martin Sixsmith. By the end of the 1960s national discontent was increasing in the Soviet republics, but Brezhnev ignored the fault lines that eventually tore the Soviet Union apart, instead he looked for scapegoats. When Solzhenitsyn wrote An Open Letter to the Soviet Authorities in 1973, urging Brezhnev: "Throw away the dead ideology that threatens to ruin us!" he was banished to the West. Sakharov, who took up the baton, was given 6 years internal exile. In 1979 Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan; the arms race resumed bankrupting the USSR, and hastening its collapse 10 years later. In 1980 Lech Walesa turned a local rebellion into a nationwide struggle for Polish liberty and national dignity. The people's grievances were suppressed, but would explode again at the end of the decade. Meanwhile Reagan pressed ahead with his controversial 'Star Wars' missile shield, which left the Soviets vulnerable to an American nuclear strike. The Kremlin couldn't afford another arms race, but both Brezhnev's successors agreed to increase spending leaving problems for the next Soviet leader that put the country's very survival in doubt. Producers: Anna Scott-Brown & Adam Fowler A Ladbroke Production for BBC Radio 4.
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04-Aug-2011
Russia: The Wild East: Series 2 - 18. The Rise and Fall of Khrushchev
Martin Sixsmith walks down Cosmonauts Alley in Moscow where plaques and statues commemorate the achievements of the Russian space programme. He uses archive recordings from 1961 when Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space. The USSR had beaten the US, and Khrushchev claimed vindication: "once-illiterate Russia has pioneered the path into space. Let everyone who has sharpened their claws against us know this!" He was determined to prove the USSR equal to the US, but he struggled to modernize and the Soviet Union remained a police state. He insisted the era of socialist struggle was over and fancifully predicted Communist perfection by 1980. Having committed himself to big improvements in living conditions he had to start delivering, but Shostakovich's operetta Cheryomushki shows just how far the Soviet Dream had diverged from the reality of everyday life. The economy was slow to respond to Khrushchev; with few incentives to work hard, people joked 'they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.' With agriculture failing to meet the country's needs, Khrushchev embarked on a series of disastrous grand schemes but still had to cut the defence budget to buy food. Perceived military vulnerability lead to thawing relations with the West, but Khrushchev continued to bluff and intimidate. He told Western ambassadors that the triumph of communism was inevitable. "Like it or not," he said, "history is on our side. We will bury you." But humiliation in Cuba undermined his authority. While on holiday on the Black Sea in October 1964, he was summoned to Moscow and forced to resign. "I'm old and tired", he told a friend. "Let them cope by themselves. I've done the main thing. The fear has gone now; we can talk as equals. That is my contribution." Producers: Anna Scott-Brown & Adam Fowler A Ladbroke Production for BBC Radio 4.
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03-Aug-2011
Russia: The Wild East: Series 2 - 17. The Secret Speech/Scramble for Power
When Stalin died in March 1953, the USSR was militarily strong, but economically fragile. Beria, Molotov, Malenkov and Khrushchev assumed the collective leadership of the Soviet Union but the struggle for supremacy had begun. Khrushchev and Malenkov accused Beria of being a British spy. His execution sparked unrest in labour camps across the county - at Kengir in Kazakhstan, 13,000 political prisoners and former Red Army men seized power and demanded justice. The new men in the Kremlin set up an inquiry to expose the abuses that had sent innocent millions to the Gulag. The report found all four had acquiesced in the abuses, but Nikita Khrushchev decided the facts could not be kept secret. "If we don't tell the truth," he told the politburo, "We'll be forced to do so in the future. And then we won't be the people making the speeches - we'll be the people under investigation." His report to a session of senior party officials, now referred to as Khrushchev's secret speech, portrayed Stalin as a murderer, a coward and a bungler. The myth of the mighty infallible ruler was debunked; Communist orthodoxy was shaken, and with it the ethical basis of the whole Soviet system. Khrushchev's speech fanned the flames of the independence movements - Polish workers went on strike; in Hungary the crisis was deeper and limited concessions encouraged demands for much more. But powerful colleagues opposed Khrushchev's de-Stalinisation programme. Martin Sixsmith visits Asbest in Western Siberia to which Lazar Kaganovich was humiliatingly sent after his failed bid to overthrow Khrushchev. The plotters all escaped with their lives, signalling the end of Stalinist terror, but Khrushchev's unpredictable nature left its mark on the erratic course of the country in the years ahead. Producers: Adam Fowler & Anna Scott-Brown A Ladbroke Production for BBC Radio 4.
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02-Aug-2011
Russia: The Wild East: Series 2 - 16. The Doctor's Plot
By the late 1940s, the Soviet Union was the most powerful force in Europe, but Stalin faced a wave of discontent in the states annexed after the war and when Mao Zedong formed the People's Republic of China in 1949 was eager to conserve his place as the leader of world communism. He encouraged conflict between North and South Korea but had to appeal to Mao for help when the US came to the South's aid. It was a tactical failure for Stalin. In early 1952 Stalin's personal physician, Vladimir Vinogradov, told the Soviet leader he was suffering from hypertension and sclerosis of the arteries, and if wished to avoid death he must retire from public activity. Stalin saw this as part of a plot to remove him from power. The New York Times correspondent in Moscow, Harrison Salisbury, writes: "on the 13th of Jan, we picked up Pravda and found the announcement of the doctors' plot, as it was so called ... it was the most sinister news I read while I was in Moscow." As a result of Stalin's paranoia, hundreds of innocent doctors were arrested, a new show trial was prepared, and top party leaders including Mikoyan, Molotov and Beria feared they were among the targets. It never happened. Martin Sixsmith walks around Stalin's secret Dacha on the outskirts of Moscow, "a set of high metal walls surrounding a hidden compound where you can glimpse the roofs of some dark brick buildings," and describes Stalin's death of a massive stroke. Newspapers were printed with black borders and Soviet radio replaced its transmissions with funereal music. For thirty years, the Soviet people had been subjugated to the cruellest tyranny, but they spoke of feeling 'orphaned' by Stalin's death. It held out the possibility of freedom. But for a numbed, subjugated nation, freedom was far from easy to grasp. Producers: Anna Scott-Brown & Adam Fowler A Ladbroke Production for BBC Radio 4.
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30-Jul-2011
Russia: The Wild East: Series 2 - 15. The Iron Curtain
In 1946 Winston Churchill defined the realities of post-war Europe and etched an image in the world's imagination: "an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe ... This is certainly not the liberated Europe we fought to build up, nor is it one which contains the essentials of permanent peace." Martin Sixsmith argues, "there were genuine fears that Stalin had designs on the West, but the allies had a crucial advantage: the atomic bomb." The motherland was defenceless and Stalin exhorted Igor Kurchatov, leader of the Soviet nuclear programme: "Build us an atomic weapon in the shortest possible time! You must build the bomb to save us from a grave danger." Kurchatov called his team 'soldiers' in a new scientific war. They were driven hard and lived under the threat of reprisals if they failed to deliver. Then on the 29th of August 1949, the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic weapon in the deserts of Kazakhstan. Neither side could now prevail unscathed. When the Western Powers merged their half of divided Germany into a new semi-independent state, the Federal German Republic, the Soviet sector became a separate, socialist state and to underline the split, the Soviet authorities halted all Western shipments into Berlin, an "island of capitalism in a sea of communism" which irritated Stalin. It was the first flashpoint of the post war years and Khrushchev later said Stalin was "prodding the capitalist world with the tip of the bayonet". But he hadn't counted on the West's determination. The Berlin airlift forced Stalin to capitulate. On the 12th of May 1949, Moscow lifted the blockade but it left a legacy of bitterness and mistrust. The Cold War had begun. Historical Consultant: Professor Geoffrey Hosking Producers: Anna Scott-Brown & Adam Fowler A Ladbroke Production for BBC Radio 4.
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29-Jul-2011
Russia: The Wild East: Series 2 - 14. The Spoils of War
Victory had been a remarkable national achievement and a chance for national unity that might have healed a fractured society. But instead Stalin used the war as a pretext, to carry out a cynical campaign of ethnic engineering against those nationalities he viewed with suspicion: ethnic Soviet Germans were deported to Siberia; hundreds of thousands of Chechens, Ingush, Kalmyks and Tartars were expelled from their homes; anti-semitism, briefly forgotten during the war resurfaced. People who expected their heroism to be rewarded with freedom and the right to participate in the running of their country found the party-state apparatus had reasserted its grip on power and did not intend to let go. Major Yershov, in Vasily Grossman's novel Life and Fate, sums up the hopes of the nation: "He was certain that he was not only fighting the Germans, but fighting for a free Russia: certain that a victory over Hitler would be a victory over the death camps of the Gulag where his father, his mother and his sisters had perished..." Instead, the state was seeking to suppress the very qualities it had encouraged during the years of fighting. Courage, initiative and enterprise were deemed dangerous, former soldiers were regarded as a potentially hostile force, freedoms (religious and artistic) granted during the war were swiftly withdrawn, and the regime acted to prevent unrest in the only way it knew how - by sending potential troublemakers to the Gulag. Set against Shostakovich's Anti-Formalist Rayok, written in private having been forced to publicly recant, Martin Sixsmith concludes, "if nothing had changed after the war, if Soviet society was simply going back to the old ways, the question inevitably arose in many people's minds of what exactly they'd been fighting for." Historical Consultant: Professor Geoffrey Hosking Producers: Anna Scott-Brown & Adam Fowler A Ladbroke Production for BBC Radio 4.
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28-Jul-2011
Russia: The Wild East: Series 2 - Episode 13
Victory at Stalingrad in February 1943 turned the tide of the war. For 6 months, 2 million soldiers had battled for a city that was already in ruins. German conscripts recorded the brutality of the combat: "Stalingrad is no longer a city ... Even the hardest stones cannot bear it. Only men endure." Soviet forces were trapped in a thin strip of land on the edge of the Volga. But for all the horror and all the losses, they did not retreat. The world watched: if Stalingrad could be held, it seemed the war could be won. At last, a counter offensive trapped 300,000 enemy troops in a sealed enclave christened the 'cauldron'. When the Germans finally surrendered only 90,000 of them remained alive. Just 5,000 would make it home. The retreat westward gathered pace and 6 months later Hitler ordered his final offensive on the eastern front. Martin Sixsmith visits Kursk where the "biggest tank battle in history" dealt Hitler his final body blow. Within a year, the Germans had been driven out of the Soviet Union. The Red Army swept westwards to Warsaw. Andrzej Wajda's 1957 film 'Kanal' depicts the final harrowing hours of the destruction of Warsaw by the Nazis, but its anger is also directed against the Soviets, who allowed 50,000 civilians to be wiped out to secure the future dictatorship of Communism. In mid-April, the Soviet assault on Berlin began. The Nazi capital was pounded with more shells than the Allied bombers had dropped on it in five years. A week later the Hammer and Sickle was planted on the roof of the Reichstag. On the 9th of May, Stalin told the Soviet nation Germany had surrendered. "Our mighty nation - our mighty people - have triumphed over the forces of German imperialism... All our sacrifices, all our suffering and all our losses have not been in vain." Historical Consultant: Professor Geoffrey Hosking Producers: Anna Scott-Brown & Adam Fowler A Ladbroke Production for BBC Radio 4.
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27-Jul-2011
Russia: The Wild East: Series 2 - 12. Redemption through Blood
Having retreated from Moscow, Hitler focused on capturing the oilfields of the Caucasus, penetrating farther into Russia than any western army. Stalin urged the Red Army to greater sacrifices: "we must throw back the enemy whatever the cost. Those who retreat are traitors . and must be exterminated on the spot." 150,000 soldiers were executed for cowardice. Those who survived were sent to penal battalions "to redeem by blood their crimes against the Motherland," drawing on the deep-seated Russian belief that the individual must sacrifice himself for the good of the state. Women took the strain in industry and agriculture, overtime was obligatory, holidays suspended and the working day increased to 12 hours. Food supplies were limited; the author Fyodor Abramov wrote of "little girls with runny noses" working in the forests: "you didn't dare come back without fulfilling your quota! Not on your life! "The front needs it!"' Hitler had pledged to make Leningrad a terrifying symbol of Nazi invincibility and for 900 days the city was shelled nonstop and starved of fuel and food. One in three of the city's 2.5 million inhabitants starved to death. Martin Sixsmith stands in the concert hall where Shostakovich's 7th Symphony, which he dedicated to "our struggle against fascism ...our coming victory over the enemy and to my native city, Leningrad..." was first performed on August 9th 1942. So many members of the orchestra had died in the siege that amateur players were brought in to fill their seats, and the brass section was given special rations to give them the strength to play. But the performance was a triumph. It was broadcast on national radio and then around the world as a symbol of the strength of Soviet resistance that would eventually defeat the Nazi menace. Historical Consultant: Professor Geoffrey Hosking Producers: Anna Scott-Brown & Adam Fowler A Ladbroke Production for BBC Radio 4.
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26-Jul-2011
Russia: The Wild East: Series 2 - 11. The Great Patriotic War
The words of Konstantin Simonov's poem 'Wait for me and I shall return,' is an anthem of loss, courage and yearning for the terrible months that followed the outbreak of war in 1941. Untrained volunteers fought with pikes and sticks, entire divisions were wiped out, but the Red Army did not collapse as Hitler had predicted. One General reported, "It is increasingly plain we have underestimated the Russian colossus... if we destroy a dozen, the Russians present us with a dozen more." Neither did the Soviet people welcome the Germans as saviours. Some Baltic states, where the invaders were seen as allies helping to throw off the Soviet yoke, greeted German soldiers with bread and salt, but they were repaid with brutality. Martin Sixsmith visits the suburb of Kiev that witnessed the biggest single massacre of the holocaust, immortalized in Yevgeny Yevtushenko's epic poem 'Babi Yar'. A heartrending account of one woman who survived is set against music from Shostakovich's 13th Symphony that uses the words of the poem. But German casualties were mounting. As winter approached, Hitler urged his generals to capture the major Soviet cities. By early November the exhausted Germans were within 50 miles of Moscow. 600 miles and two fifths of the Soviet population were under enemy control, but the people's determination to fight was passionate. Stalin evoked heroes of the past to inspire new Russian heroes, but Sixsmith reflects, "their motives were not always the ones the Kremlin desired: people were fighting not for Stalin, not for the revolution or the Soviet Union, but for the Russian land." In the hit song of 1942 Napoleon speaks to Hitler from the grave saying 'I'll move over and you can join me down here." The Soviet Union had been facing annihilation, but it had survived. Historical Consultant: Professor Geoffrey Hosking Producers: Adam Fowler & Anna Scott-Brown A Ladbroke production for BBC Radio 4.
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23-Jul-2011
Russia: The Wild East: Series 2 - 10. The Faustian Pact
Archive footage recreates the arrival of the German Foreign Minister in Moscow on the 23rd of August 1939. As the Kremlin bells chimed midnight, Germany and Russia signed a treaty of non-aggression, guaranteeing that each remain neutral if the other attacked a third nation. Martin Sixsmith observes, "The Pact was a cynical marriage of convenience, and it meant old enmities had to be reversed." Wolfgang Leonhard, a young German living in Moscow at the time recalls: "On the same day all anti-fascist books were taken out of the libraries. All anti-Nazi films were taken out of the cinemas. There was no mention even of the existence of fascism any more." Poland was the biggest loser and within weeks had been invaded by Germany in the West and Russia in the East. The Nazi-Soviet pact shocked the world; would lead to the deaths of millions and the division of Europe, but it was not to last. When the weakness of the Red Army was revealed, after a humiliating retreat from Finland, Germany responded. Operation Barbarossa, the largest invasion in history, began on the 22nd of June 1941. The army was unprepared and Stalin collapsed in a state of debilitated despair. It was 10 days until Stalin pulled himself together to address the nation, appealing to old 'bourgeois' values of nationalism and patriotism, urging a divided, discontented people to come together to defend their country: "This war is not an ordinary war. It is a great war of the entire Soviet people against the German fascist forces. This is a national war in defence of our country." It worked. But it would be a brutal and terrible fight to the death that revived Russia's deep-seated fears of national annihilation and conditioned the way its people thought of their country and of themselves for many years to come. Historical Consultant - Professor Geoffrey Hosking Producer: Anna Scott-Brown & Adam Fowler A Ladbroke Production for BBC Radio 4.
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23-Jul-2011
Russia: The Wild East: Series 2 - 9. Show Trials
Sergei Kirov had been a loyal ally of Stalin in the 1920s, but his popularity made Stalin regard him as a rival. Martin Sixsmith visits the "rather sumptuous 5 room apartment" in St Petersburg from which Kirov left for work on December 1st 1934. He never arrived. Rumours that Stalin ordered Kirov's murder would persist for many years; the next day Stalin personally interrogated the assassin, forcing him to sign a statement that he had acted as part of an opposition plot led by Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev. Within days 100s of people were arrested and executed without trial and in the following years Stalin used the Kirov murder as a pretext to exterminate 100s of 1000s of people whom he considered enemies or potential enemies. Leading Bolsheviks were arrested and tortured until they confessed to imaginary crimes against the state; the Soviet Union was gripped by fear; denunciations proliferated. Executions could be ordered without a judge. Families were held responsible for the crimes of a relative, and children were taught to inform on anyone they suspected of disloyalty to Stalin. The Tale of Pavlik Morozov, a schoolboy who denounced his own father was compulsory reading in schools; plays, paintings and an opera inculcated the message that loyalty to one's family is less important than loyalty to the state. With the murder of Trotsky who, from his in exile in Mexico had kept up a vendetta against Stalin, in 1940, Stalin had achieved his goal of removing all actual or potential rivals for power. But the purges of the 1930s had disastrous consequences. Millions died, the economy suffered, national security was undermined, and Stalin had destroyed the cream of the Soviet Union's armed forces at the very moment that the clouds of world war were gathering on the horizon. Historical Consultant - Professor Geoffrey Hosking Producer: Adam Fowler & Anna Scott-Brown A Ladbroke Production for BBC Radio 4.
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21-Jul-2011
Russia: The Wild East: Series 2 - 8. Socialist Realism
"My husband was like the little bird in the old Russian poem: they capture him and squeeze him by the throat -and then they tell him to sing!" Irina Shostakovich tells Martin Sixsmith. "They banned his music, he lost his job. But he wrote his secret revenge, his music". For this programme, Sixsmith has spoken to those who lived through the persecution of the Stalin years - writers, composers and henchmen of the regime - to try to understand the role of art in a time of fear. "It allowed us to keep alive our freedom of memory and independence of thought in the dark years when 'they' were trying to reduce us to nothing..." says Yevgeny Pasternak of whose father, Boris, Stalin wrote on his police file: 'Leave that cloud-dweller in peace'. Sixsmith tells the stories of Anna Akhmatova who committed her verse to memory and burned the manuscripts; Osip Mandelstam who let rip - just once - with savage unguarded hatred for Stalin, was arrested and sent to the Gulag where he died; theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold who was tortured in the cells of the Lubyanka. The poet Vladimir Mayakovsky epitomises the destiny of many who loved the revolution, and then, desperately out-of-love, committed suicide; and Sergei Prokofiev who fled abroad only to find he could live neither in his native land nor outside it. On his return, he was denounced by Tikhon Khrennikov, the head of the Soviet Composers' Union, and like Miaskovsky and Khatchaturian forced to make a humiliating public recantation for his musical 'crimes'. When Khrennikov spoke to Sixsmith shortly before his death he fiercely rejected suggestions that he'd been a willing accomplice in the repression of musical life: "When I said No! it meant No. But - what else could I have done? Stalin's word was law." Historical Consultant - Professor Geoffrey Hosking Producer: Anna Scott-Brown & Adam Fowler A Ladbroke Production for BBC Radio 4.
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20-Jul-2011
Russia: The Wild East: Series 2 - 7. Industrialisation
Martin Sixsmith stands at the restored 'People's Economic Achievements Exhibition' in Moscow. He remembers visiting as a child when "proud guides delighted in showing us foreigners round the extravagantly decorated pavilions showcasing the achievements of Soviet industry and technology." He then recalls the subsequent years of decay. "What a perfect metaphor," he says, "for the meteoric rise and subsequent sorry fall of the Soviet Union's mighty industrialization programme." Stalin launched his first Five Year Plan in 1928, tapping into centuries-old fears of Russian vulnerability and the spectre of powerful enemies at the gates, to mobilise the nation in the face of overwhelming odds: "We are 50 or 100 years behind the advanced countries. We must make up this distance in ten years... Either we do it, or they will crush us!" The Five Year Plans set impossibly high targets and punitive timetables, but in spite of everything, the Soviet people rose to the challenge: output doubled and the Soviet Union became the world's second largest industrial producer. The surging energy of those years is captured in Mosolovs 'The Iron Foundry', and the iconic music Vremya Vperyod- Time Go Faster, which would introduce Soviet TV news bulletins up until 1991. But, as early as 1934 the reality was a sorry one. Despite Soviet propaganda which created a new national mythology (its heroes workers such as Alexei Stakhanov, a coalminer who mined a 102 tons of coal in one shift) when targets were not met, workers were branded 'wreckers' and saboteurs while relentless purges instilled constant anxiety -a great motivating factor, identified by playwright Alexander Afinogenov in his remarkably outspoken play 'Fear'. Historical Consultant - Professor Geoffrey Hosking Producer: Adam Fowler & Anna Scott-Brown A Ladbroke Production for BBC Radio 4.
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19-Jul-2011
Russia: The Wild East: Series 2 - 6. Collectivisation
Collectivisation was Stalin's flagship policy, crucial to the creation of the New Soviet Man, moulded in the ways of socialism, and he couldn't afford to see it fail. But his confident announcement of victory, celebrated in the 1930s musical 'The Rich Bride' (a sort of Ukrainian 'Oklahoma!') was premature. Martin Sixsmith draws on the memories of 84 year old Masha Alekseevna, who witnessed the drive to collectivise Soviet agriculture with the eyes of a startled child. The problem for the Bolsheviks was that they'd never had much support in the countryside. For millions of ordinary peasants collectivisation meant swapping the yoke of the private landlords for the new yoke of the state and thousands of towns and villages rose up in revolt. 25,000 shock troops - class-conscious urban workers, former soldiers and young communists - were sent to bring the countryside to heel. Sixsmith travels to Veryaevo, 250 miles SE of Moscow, where one of the fiercest rebellions took place and resentment and resistance bubbled on even after the authorities regained control. The immediate result of collectivization was appalling, widespread famine - described in contemporary reports by British diplomat Gareth Jones, and Malcolm Muggeridge, one of the few Western journalists courageous enough to travel to the affected areas and report the truth. Just as Soviet cinema was turning out films about happy singing peasants, cases of cannibalism were increasingly being reported in the Ukraine, where 6 to 8 million people died. Stalin hadn't forgotten the civil war when some Ukrainians had welcomed the Polish invaders and he doubted the loyalty of non Russian nationalities. His suspicions would grow, until they ripened into the purges that would leave their dreadful mark on the rest of the decade. Historical Consultant - Professor Geoffrey Hosking Producer: Anna Scott-Brown & Adam Fowler A Ladbroke Production for BBC Radio 4.
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16-Jul-2011
Russia: The Wild East: Series 2 - 5. The Death of Lenin and Rise of Stalin
Stalin crushes all opposition to emerge as Lenin's successor - despite Lenin's attempts to warn colleagues against him. The revolution was only 7 years old when Lenin died, but his cult had already been established and with it a belief that communism in Russia had a holy destiny to change, educate and perfect the human species. The baton had passed from church to party, but the message and methods were the same. Emerging from Lenin's Mausoleum, Sixsmith reflects: "the dimmed lights, the chilly silence, the reverential guards - all tell you that this is the very epicentre of a messianic force which spread its tentacles across the whole world. The Party would lead the people from the grim, corrupted present to a cleansed, harmonious future. But in return it demanded unquestioning obedience: any deviation or dissent would be mercilessly punished". Stalin abandoned the idea of world revolution, but not the model of an all-powerful centralized autocrat. And, if world revolution had been put on hold, communism still had to be secured at home. The newly formed Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was made up of a hundred or so national groups, and not all of them were convinced. Many nationalities, pressing for independence under the tsars, expected the revolution to grant it to them. Lenin favoured patience, understanding and sensitivity, but Stalin set the tone when he responded to Georgian demands for greater independence by sending in the Red Army. The Georgia Affair was an indication that the rhetoric of greater freedom for the national minorities ran counter to the increasingly centralised structure of state and party rule. This fatal contradiction would cause decades of smoldering conflict and, ultimately, the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Historical Consultant - Professor Geoffrey Hosking Producers: Adam Fowler & Anna Scott-Brown A Ladbroke Production for BBC Radio 4.
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15-Jul-2011
Russia: The Wild East: Series 2 - 4. The People's Revolt
With the party divided, workers and peasants disaffected, and food running out, Russia was teetering on the brink of another revolution, and in March 1921 an event of such colossal importance forced the Bolsheviks to rethink the whole way they exercised power. Martin Sixsmith picks his way through the "crumbling, deserted and rather eerie warren" of massive stone fortifications on an island in the Gulf of Finland: Kronshtadt. In the 1917 revolution, the Kronshtadt sailors rose up and murdered their tsarist officers and helped storm the Winter Palace. But by 1921, things had changed. The mood was ugly and the sailors' anger was directed against the Bolsheviks. They drew up a manifesto claiming the Communists had lost the trust of the people, demanding the release of political prisoners, freedom of speech and free elections open to all parties. Lenin realised it was make or break for the Bolsheviks and sent Trotsky to crush the Kronshtadt revolt whatever the cost. The fortress eventually fell to the Bolsheviks, and fifteen thousand rebels were taken prisoner, to face immediate execution or a lifetime in the camps. The immediate crisis was over, but Kronshtadt was a warning that Lenin could not ignore. When he addressed the Party Congress just days after the Kronshtadt rebellion, Lenin promised a new era of milder, more humane government. His New Economic Policy - or NEP as it became known - would soften the dictatorial control of the state, reintroducing some elements of capitalism to try to improve the nation's disastrous economic conditions. In economic terms it was the only way to placate the people, and although it was an ideological bombshell that split the party, it gave Lenin the precious time he needed to consolidate his hold on power. Historical Consultant - Professor Geoffrey Hosking Producers: Anna Scott-Brown & Adam Fowler A Ladbroke Production for BBC Radio 4.
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15-Jul-2011
Russia: The Wild East: Series 2 - 1. Twelve Hours of Democracy
Martin Sixsmith continues his major series tracing 1000 years of Russian history. He begins part two of 'Russia: the Wild East' amidst the whirlwind of the 1917 revolution. At this great flashpoint in Russia's past, he concludes, as we saw in part one that things seem to change radically, only to revert to old stereotypes with spellbinding regularity. The next five weeks show how these recurring patterns help us understand modern Russia, and modern Russians. Sixsmith quotes Boris Pasternak's novel Doctor Zhivago which captures the cruelty, chaos and violence of 1917. It starts with positive and hopeful imagery anticipating a new beginning, the new order Russia had long yearned for - 'Freedom dropped out of the sky' writes Pasternak and Sixsmith reflects "It's a feeling I remember myself, from another turning point in Russian history 1991, when I witnessed the defeat of the hardline coup against the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev. For the victorious demonstrators I mingled with on the bullet riddled Moscow streets, freedom did indeed seem to have dropped from the sky". While Pasternak captures the speed and violence with which expectations of a new world were crushed in 1917 Sixsmith reflects on the pragmatic necessity underlying Lenin's ruthlessness and on the fatal attraction Lenin held for a Russian people who naively thought he was bringing them freedom. In light of later Russian historiography, which continued to revere Lenin even as it denounced Stalin for the crimes of the Soviet system, Sixsmith paints a picture of the first Bolshevik leader. It was he, not Stalin, who founded the one party state, created the feared secret police and the Gulag system of forced labour camps and who first gave the order for summary executions of suspected political opponents Historical Consultant: Professor Geoffrey Hosking Producer: Adam Fowler & Anna Scott-Brown A Ladbroke Production for BBC Radio 4.
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14-Jul-2011
Russia: The Wild East: Series 2 - 3. Terror
Gunshots ring out in a dramatic black and white Soviet feature film while Martin Sixsmith stands at the spot where Fanny Kaplan tried to kill Lenin in August 1918. It unleashed the 'Red Terror' in which 100's maybe 1000's of so-called class enemies were executed for no other crime than their social origin. In the name of Lenin's future Utopia, an estimated half a million people were eliminated in 3 years. Famine, conflict, typhus and economic devastation were bringing the country close to collapse and shortly before he himself starved to death, the philosopher Vasily Razanov wrote presciently: "With a clank, a squeal and a groan, an iron curtain has descended over Russian history". With his regime tottering, Lenin was quick to abandon his promises of freedom, justice and self-determination, replacing them with what came to be known as War Communism - harsh, enslaving and repressive. Forced labour was systematically imposed on the population; industry nationalized, private enterprise banned; food rationed and Russian society transformed into an increasingly militarized dictatorship. The Bolsheviks rallied the masses - no longer seen as agents of the revolution but as an expendable resource to be exploited in the great experiment of building socialism - to their cause by giving them the licence to plunder and murder the castigated richer peasants or kulaks who had kept the rural economy going. Agriculture regressed, cities starved & a 70,000 strong Peasant Army emerged, (reminiscent of the great historical revolts of Razin and Pugachev) prepared to fight for freedom and the right to the land. It took 100,000 troops to massacre the rebels with poison gas as they hid in the forests. But things were getting to the point where terror alone could not solve the problem. Historical Consultant: Professor Geoffrey Hosking Producers: Adam Fowler & Anna Scott-Brown A Ladbroke Production for BBC Radio 4.
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13-Jul-2011
Russia: The Wild East: Series 2 - 2. Murder of the Royal Family
In the second programme of Part 2 of 'Russia- the Wild East' Martin Sixsmith outlines the growing menace facing the Bolsheviks at home. The tsarist regime may have toppled, but supporters of the old order wanted revenge. Even before the war with Germany ended, a violent civil war was threatening to erupt. The conflict between Bolshevik Reds and Tsarist Whites was immensely bloody, the atrocities committed by both sides appalling and its consequences terrible. Sixsmith stands at the spot in Yekaterinburg where the last tsar of Russia met his fate and draws on an eyewitness account of the execution by an ad hoc firing squad. Recent research suggests the decision was taken personally by Lenin to prevent Nicholas II being rescued and used as a rallying point for the White cause. The Red's were surrounded and outnumbered but Lenin stirred up his forces with passionate speeches and Trotsky pulled off an incredible volte face when he routed the White Army stationed at Gatchina 30 miles North of Petrograd. The defence of Petrograd made Trotsky an iconic, terrifying figure, but his own memoirs quoted by Sixsmith, suggest it was a close run thing. Petrograd was renamed in his honour and was called Trotsk until he fell from grace in 1929. Germany's defeat in the World War allowed the Bolsheviks to recoup much of the territory they'd ceded when they withdrew from the war, although the Bolsheviks had to appeal to old fashioned Russian nationalism to defeat the advancing Poles. After peace with Poland Trotsky was able to annihilate the remains of the White Army in the Crimea, immortalised in Bulgakov's play Flight in which two departing White officers discuss the destruction of the old Russia, and the utter failure of the struggle to save her from the Bolshevik yoke. Producers: Anna Scott-Brown & Adam Fowler A Ladbroke Production for BBC Radio 4.
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