Russia: The Wild East: Series 2 Omnibus
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13-Aug-2011
Russia: The Wild East: Series 2 Omnibus - 5. Collapse
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 Omnibus - 4. Cold War
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 Omnibus - 3. War and (Uncertain) Peace
Germany swept across the Soviet Union, but failed to take Moscow before winter, and as Stalin urged the Red Army to ever greater sacrifices, Soviet society became an all-consuming military state. 1 in 3 of the inhabitants of Leningrad died during the 900-day siege when the city was shelled nonstop, but Victory at Stalingrad in February 1943 turned the tide of the war. The retreat westward gathered pace. The Red Army pursued the Nazis to Warsaw but let the retreating SS murder 50,000 civilians in order to secure the future dictatorship of Communism. In mid April the Soviet assault on Berlin began and on May the 9th Stalin told the Soviet nation Germany had surrendered. "Victory had been a remarkable national achievement and a chance for national unity that might have healed a fractured society," says Martin Sixsmith. Instead Stalin used the war as a pretext to destroy those nationalities he viewed with suspicion. 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 had reasserted its grip on power and was not letting go. Courage, initiative and enterprise were deemed dangerous; former soldiers were seen as a potentially hostile force; freedoms (religious and artistic) granted during the war were withdrawn. The pre-war suspicion between the Soviet Union and the Western powers returned and Churchill's powerful image of "an iron curtain" dividing Europe came to define the realities of post-war Europe; once Russia developed the bomb neither side could prevail unscathed. The first flashpoint in this conflict of ideologies centered on Berlin. The allied airlift forced Stalin to capitulate humiliating the Soviets, which left a legacy of bitterness and mistrust. The Cold War had begun. 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 Omnibus - 2. Stalin's Iron Fist
Josef Stalin adopts the model of an all-powerful centralized autocrat as he rules Russia with an iron fist. Collectivisation destroys the country's agriculture and leads to widespread famine - exploited by Stalin to destroy anti-soviet elements including 6 to 8 million Ukrainians who die of starvation. Meanwhile Stalin's Five Year Plans, financed by heroic sacrifices on the part of the workers, transform a backward agricultural nation into a modern industrialised one at breakneck speed. Stalin taps into centuries old fears of Russian vulnerability: "We are 50 or 100 years behind the advanced countries. We must make up this distance in ten years... or they will crush us!". The creative arts are not free from Stalin's stifling grasp either, and Martin Sixsmith recalls speaking with 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. Stalin himself was becoming more and more paranoid. The murder of Sergei Kirov - head of Leningrad's Communist party - unleashes paranoia, terror and suffering for millions of people as Stalin begins his extermination of political enemies, real and imagined. The purges of the 1930s had disastrous consequences, not least that Stalin destroyed the cream of the Soviet Union's armed forces at the moment the clouds of world war were gathering on the horizon. The non-aggression pact signed with Germany does not save Russia from the war, "more brutal and more terrible than anything seen on the Western Front, perhaps even in the history of war," says Sixsmith. "It 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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16-Jul-2011
Russia: The Wild East: Series 2 Omnibus - Episode 1
Martin Sixsmith continues his major series of Russian history amidst the whirlwind of 1917 revolution and the Bolshevik rise to power. Here, as in part one, Sixsmith argues that things seem to change radically, only to revert to old stereotypes. He stands at the spot in Yekaterinburg where, while the country was engulfed in a bloody civil war, the last tsar of Russia met his fate. He draws on an eyewitness account of the execution by an ad hoc firing squad. Recent research suggests that Lenin took this decision personally to prevent Nicholas II becoming a rallying point for the White cause. Sixsmith reflects on the pragmatic necessity underlying Lenin's ruthlessness and on the fatal attraction Lenin held for a Russian people who thought he was bringing them freedom. 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, but an attempt to kill Lenin led to harsh reprisals and a ruthless war on so-called class enemies. Lenin abandoned his promises of freedom, justice and self-determination, replacing them with what came to be known as War Communism - harsh, enslaving and repressive. But the Kronshtadt rebellion, with its manifesto claiming the Communists had lost the trust of the people, forced the Bolsheviks to rethink how they exercised power. Trotsky crushed the uprising but Lenin was forced to offer economic concessions. The New Economic Policy (NEP) placated the people, and, although it split the party, gave Lenin the time he needed to consolidate his hold on power. But, just 7 years after the Revolution, Lenin dies to be replaced by the man he had tried but failed to warn his party against - Josef Stalin who increasingly adopted the model of an all-powerful centralized autocrat. Historical Consultant - Professor Geoffrey Hosking Producers: Adam Fowler & Anna Scott-Brown A Ladbroke Production for BBC Radio 4.
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