SHE SPEAKS RUSSIAN
PHONE RINGS
In the early hours of March 2nd 1953,
the most powerful man in the world lay dying alone.
He had suffered a stroke at least 12 hours before.
His guards were worried but did not dare enter his bedroom.
PHONE CONTINUES TO RING
How could a man worshipped by millions
be left to lie helpless, soaked in his own urine?
Mascha? Mascha?
KNOCKS LOUDLY
Stalin had built an empire on a framework of terror,
justifying in the name of a political faith.
Through it he ruled his country, government, party and his family.
He had even terrorised the doctors he now needed so badly.
KNOCKING
Now there was no one left - no wife, child, lover or friend -
who was brave enough to enter the private world of Josef Stalin.
He had become a victim of his own terror.
At the time of his death, Stalin was probably the best-known man on earth.
His popularity outstripped that of any other world leader.
In the Soviet Union, his image was everywhere.
He had become a living icon - the subject of a cult of personality.
160 million people felt they knew him personally.
But the man they knew was an invention.
The real man was a mass of contradictions.
A dictator whose position was unassailable, yet who was haunted by paranoia.
Stalin used terror more effectively and scientifically than any other ruler.
His extreme faith in a political ideal would destroy tens of millions of lives.
Yet his achievements would hold his people in awe of him to the end.
Although millions of people detested him,
there were millions and millions of people who loved and revered him,
and many further millions of people who detested him
but at the same time, mourned him when he died.
It is tempting to dismiss Stalin as a psychopath,
unable to form normal human relationships with others,
but family photos show a warm, gentle man,
surrounded by daughters, sons, aunts and in-laws.
Stalin was a passionate husband and loving father
and even a committed friend.
Despite this, most of the people in these photos
would be destroyed by him.
THROUGH INTERPRETER: My father was called back to Moscow.
He arrived on 18th November.
He got a phone call and then he left immediately...
and never returned.
INTERPRETER: It was terrible. Everyone wanted to destroy everyone else.
There were betrayals, denunciations,
and hatred that crossed all normal boundaries.
INTERPRETER: It seemed to me that he had some hypnotic power.
He could influence people and he used fear.
TRANSLATOR: Family relationships meant nothing to him at that time.
The opening of the Russian archives in recent years
has revealed the story of the terror that Stalin created
during his journey from extreme poverty to absolute power.
Stalin was a Georgian from the south of the Russian Empire.
The village where he was born - Gori - was nearer to Baghdad than St Petersburg.
This was a wild country -
a land of tribalism and blood feuds.
He had been baptised Josef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili.
His mother Keke called him Soso.
Soso was born into extreme poverty.
The family rented a single room in a two-room house.
Three siblings had already died in infancy.
Keke invested all of her hopes in her one surviving son.
She was a deeply religious woman
and she dreamed that he might become a man of God.
But Soso's life was overshadowed by the violence of his father.
Vissarion Dzhugashvili was a shoemaker and a drunk.
He spent his money on alcohol
and when he came home, which was not often, there was trouble.
SHOUTING
His father beat his son viciously just to alleviate his own frustrations
and, in fact, severely wounded Stalin at the age of seven.
The left elbow never recovered, in fact.
You see in all the photographs of Stalin this withered shorter arm
which affected the mobility of the left hand.
So he had reason to be terrified of his father
and I think this instilled in him the wish for revenge
and never ever in his life to be the underdog -
he must always be the top dog.
Soso could have disappeared into the squalor of 19th-century Georgia
but, remarkably, the young boy was plucked from obscurity by a powerful patron.
Jakob Egnatashvili was the answer to Keke's prayers -
perhaps in more ways than one.
It was rumoured that the wealthy merchant was Soso's true father.
The Egnatashvilis treated him and his mother as family
and he would protect them all his life.
TRANSLATOR: His godfather, Jakob Egnatashvili,
was our closest relative and Stalin would to them after classes
and they received him as a relative
because Jakob was his godfather.
DISTANT BELL TOLLS
Father or godfather, Jakob's
g.
Entry into the priesthood would
pire.
She brought him up to feel that he could do no wrong
and a man who is hero-worshipped by his mother believes he is a hero.
The Orthodox Church underpinned the authority of the Imperial family.
Its priests encouraged peasants to revere the Tsar.
They urged them to accept their ties to the land
as if they were still medieval serfs.
This was the prize that Keke had in mind for her only son,
who was already showing signs of talent.
This is an exceptional child.
The super-intelligence and sensitivity of this damaged child.
He learned to read and write much earlier than other children.
Other children at eight or nine
but he told people how he himself had learned at four or five to read and write very well.
Soso was brought up speaking Georgian - his native language.
But Georgian was part
It was also a land of factions and vendettas,
and he grew up learning to be a fighter.
Although he was the smallest boy in his year, he was the toughest.
At 14, he won a scholarship to the Orthodox Seminary in Tbilisi.
The road from poverty to priesthood lay before him,
but it would be a harsh journey.
When he arrived, the discipline imposed on him by his priests - his teachers -
was very, very severe, including beatings and solitary confinement.
To Stalin, beating was the worst punishment you could inflict.
Later, when someone asked him about
."
The seminary at Tbilisi was not just a centre for studying Christianity.
Here, some of the brightest minds
eas.
They'd read Darwin and now they found the works of Karl Marx.
These had only recently been published in Russia.
TRANSLATOR: In Tbilisi, there was only one copy of Das Kapital.
It was handwritten.
They used to read it at night.
Of course, the seminary found out about it.
The seminary authorities would have
.
The elegance of Nicholas II's court was a glittering disguise.
Behind it lay an absolutist monarchy
which made few concessions to the ideas of democracy taking root in Europe.
The regime stifled protest
ria.
20-year-old Soso was entranced
ass war.
He turned his back on a career in the priesthood.
Soso had found a higher calling.
The sort of Marxism that attracted
ire,
that was going to bring Tsarism crashing down.
And Stalin, throughout his young manhood,
saw Tsarism as being an order that brought about political oppression
and economic exploitation and national hatreds.
He wanted all of that to be eliminated.
Conversion to a new faith demanded a new identity.
Soso was dead.
He would call him self Koba after a Georgian Robin Hood-style hero.
Koba the revolutionary had a mission to spread the new gospel to the urban workers
who had most to gain from Marxism.
In the Black Sea port of Batumi,
.
15 were killed and many more wounded.
Koba the revolutionary had been bloodied.
He had his first police record.
On 9th July 1903, he was sentenced to three years' exile in Siberia.
If the seminary in Tbilisi had been a school for revolutionaries,
Siberia would prove to be his university.
Here, he met a group of hard-line activists,
many of whom would become leaders in the Russian Revolution.
They were rather like reading holidays.
A group of revolutionaries would find themselves reading books in boring Siberian villages.
Every now and then, they'd escape and go to the local train station...
They were only guarded often by a local gendarme,
who kept a pretty unclose watch on them.
Koba could easily slip away from his exile back to Tbilisi.
He had fallen in love with a local girl, Katyo Svanidze -
the sister of one of his comrades.
But unlike her brother, Katyo was surprisingly conventional.
I think he fell in love with his mother.
She was deeply religious, this very beautiful girl that he married,
and she didn't believe in politics either.
It was his mother.
Koba's new love would draw him back into a world he had just left.
Katyo and his mother wanted a church wedding.
Remarkably, he agreed.
His relationship would quickly be tested by his life as a revolutionary.
He wanted her to be his "baba" - keeping Georgian house for him -
but he was always gone, he was never there.
He was always on the road, in secret meetings, trips abroad and so on.
The life of a revolutionary was the opposite to that of a good husband
and Katyo had a very lonely life.
Katyo had to rely on her family rather than on her new husband.
Now the certainties which bounded their world were to be challenged.
The year was 1905.
In 1905, of course, Nicholas II almost was overthrown.
Strikes broke out in all the major cities.
Peasants started moving against their landlords.
It came very close to a full revolution.
So these young revolutionaries who had read their Marx,
had been rather bookish,
had been drawn to doctrines of total change,
suddenly became big political figures in their own right.
The unsuccessful rising created new heroes for Koba.
Within weeks of marrying Katyo
he left for Finland on forged papers to meet Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.
What he found surprised him.
"I was expecting to see the eagle of our party -
"a great man, not only politically but, if you will, physically.
"I had formed an image of Lenin as a giant - stately and imposing.
"What was my disappointment when I saw the most ordinary-looking man -
"distinguished from ordinary mortals by nothing, literally nothing."
In Stalin, Lenin found exactly what he needed.
Lenin was existing in the world of bourgeois intellectuals,
exiles sitting in coffee houses discussing dialectical materialism.
What he needed was ruthless, tough, energetic organisers in Russia itself.
Men who would do anything for the cause, who had nothing to lose, and Stalin was that.
That's why Lenin called him "my wonderful Georgian."
Stalin, for example, organised the bank robberies, the "expros" - expropriations.
Lenin was impressed by Stalin's ruthlessness and organisational flair,
but others in the party were less comfortable.
In a world poisoned by suspicion,
one incident cast particular doubt on Stalin's loyalties.
For years, the Okhrana - the Tsarist
Tbilisi.
Revolutionary pamphlets were flooding the factories
and bombs and ammunition were stored there.
In 1906, the Okhrana raided
s -
and possibly rivals.
Koba himself just happened to be out of town.
Many thought Koba was the informer and an agent for the Okhrana.
People around him were double agents, single agents,
and Stalin was probably one.
It didn't mean they weren't Marxist fanatics.
It just meant that they might betray
exile,
but they were still fanatics.
In 1907, whilst on the run, he heard that Katyo had given birth to a boy - Yakov.
He managed to get home, but not to celebrate.
Weakened by the birth, Katyo had succumbed to tuberculosis.
When she died, what he said was, "All warm feeling for people died with her.
"She melted my stony heart."
It was as if nobody else could do that again.
It's almost a betrayal that she dies.
A betrayal of that love, that he'd opened to her
and she died.
It's very complicated. He is a very complex person there's no doubt.
Yakov, Stalin's first son,
would be almost 20 before he'd see his father.
He abandoned him to the care of Katyo's sisters
and returned to his life of revolutionary action.
In weeks, he was back in prison - a hardened man.
A fellow prisoner, Simeon Verishchak, recalls:
"Nothing would ever upset Stalin.
"When executions were taking place and the others were shaken, he slept soundly
"or quietly studied Esperanto.
"On one occasion after a major riot,
"the politicals were made to run the gauntlet of soldiers' rifle butts.
"Stalin walked through the ordeal calmly and bravely,
"reading a book."
Stalin proved his usefulness to the cause
by his diligent work as a bank robber and agitator.
His reward was a post on the party's Central Committee
and for this he would leave his quiet life in exile.
He returned to St Petersburg, travelling under a new name -
from now on he would be Stalin, the man of steel.
Behind the facade of St Petersburg's imperial splendour
seethed an underworld of murderous revolutionary groups
dedicated to overthrowing the Tsars.
Stalin slipped quickly into the heart of this dissident network.
He found a home with a trusted family of radicals, the Alliluyevs.
Their flat - not far from the Tsar's winter palace -
was a safe house for subversives.
Stalin had already met the family in Georgia.
Sergei the father was married to Olga -
a restless woman notorious for her affairs.
Stalin became intimately involved with Sergei and his children.
TRANSLATOR: Grandfather used to hide revolutionaries in his flat.
The police would come and the children would be afraid.
Can you imagine the children knowing that everyone could go to prison?
He would save revolutionaries
The first thing they would ask was, "Are there two exits?
"A back door and a front door? Good. Then we'll stay here."
The police came to the front door, so they could escape at the back.
But escape wasn't an option when,
exile.
This time it was a remote camp beyond the Arctic Circle
where he would remain for four miserable years.
From here he wrote to the Alliluyevs in the paradise of St Petersburg:
"I'd be happy if you would send postcards with views of nature.
"In this forsaken spot, nature is reduced to ugliness.
"In summer, the river and in winter, the snow."
Just a year into his exile, the First World War broke out.
Russia mobilised millions of troops against Germany.
Stalin, with his damaged arm, was found unfit for military service,
so he escaped the catastrophic defeats and harsh conditions
which began to undermine the Tsarist regime.
In February 1917, the Tsar was overthrown.
The news that the Tsar had abdicated took them totally by surprise.
They set off from their exile on this train journey to St Petersburg
with their hopes of power,
Power was now in the hands of a provisional government.
Lenin's faction, the Bolsheviks, formed part of the opposition.
Stalin came directly to this house.
It was a barracks for party workers.
Upstairs were the editorial offices of Pravda, the Bolshevik newspaper.
Stalin took over as editor,
but instead of following the
,
Stalin went badly off message. He would soon taste Lenin's wrath.
When Lenin arrived in St Petersburg,
Stalinist history recalls how, with
aration.
In fact, Lenin got off the train cursing the editor of Pravda.
Stalin was given a telling off for his weak attitude.
However, he was content to follow Lenin, the hero of the revolution,
but he loathed the intellectual arrogance of the silver-tongued Leon Trotsky.
Trotsky's brilliance far eclipsed Stalin in those early years.
Stalin was not one of the great orators.
His Georgian accent told against him.
He was nervous about giving big political speeches.
What he was good at was editing newspapers
and organising the revolution within the Central Committee.
Stalin's role lacked glory but it was practical.
He was Lenin's secret factotum.
tsky.
Trotsky was a European figure, he was famous.
That was only true of Lenin and Trotsky then.
Lenin now approved of Stalin's skills in editing Pravda
and he had other strengths.
On 3rd July, the Bolsheviks tried to seize power, but the plot backfired.
Trotsky was arrested and a warrant was issued for Lenin.
Stalin plucked Lenin from danger
and took him to the Alliluyev's safe house.
TRANSLATOR: Lenin was at my grandfather's flat for 36 hours.
His beard had to be shaved off.
My grandmother started to shave his beard,
but Stalin said, "You can't do it. Let me."
So he finished shaving him.
They shaved his beard off then put
Looking like this, he was escorted to the railway station.
Stalin, the master of misinformation,
successfully disguised one of the most recognisable men in history.
Lenin's second chance to hijack the revolution came in October 1917.
Russia was in crisis as her army crumbled before the Germans.
The Bolsheviks harnessed the discontent of soldiers in St Petersburg
and mounted a coup against the provisional government.
They surrounded the Winter Palace and forced the government out.
Stalin got a job as a People's Commissar in Lenin's government.
He later joined the inner circle of power - the Politburo.
For his secretary, he chose one of the daughters of the Alliluyevs -
the 16-year-old Nadezhda.
She was a girl when she met Stalin and had fun with him.
They went for sleigh rides, Stalin read to them.
He would read Chekhov to them.
They would laugh a lot, apparently.
Nadia was a boisterous, mischievous child and liked to play jokes.
Soso would laugh and joke with them.
At times they found him quite solemn and introverted,
but he had this humorous side which they loved.
Stalin was old enough to be Nadezhda's father,
but she was entranced by him
and she shared his revolutionary passion.
When the encroaching Germans
him.
Here, Lenin's government was in trouble.
Although they had signed
Forces loyal to the Tsar were massing in parts of the old empire.
Lenin had to defend his revolution ruthlessly, using "war communism"
and the Terror tactics once harnessed in the French Revolution.
There was enormous resistance to Lenin and the Bolsheviks
even from the working class.
It wasn't going to be an easy revolution. There was going to be civil war.
Civil war would use Stalin's talents as an organiser -
an agitator who could push men into desperate action.
The skills he had honed in orchestrating bank robberies now had real value.
There was a problem in the south.
Stalin left Moscow with many militia to sort it out.
His destination was the city of Tsaritsyn.
Stalin and his top people learnt to be killers -
the glamour of macho expeditions into the countryside,
riding shotgun in armoured trains
Riding out to execute massive numbers of aristocrats or bourgeois or whatever.
In these expeditions,
they felt they were living the power and glamour of revolution.
On board Stalin's train thundering south was his secretary Nadezhda.
Her brother Fyodor was also there.
Returning to his carriage from dinner, Fyodor heard his sister cry out.
Nadia?
TRANSLATOR: Allegedly, Stalin started to rape her.
I read this rubbish somewhere.
But she was very much in love with him.
Why would he rape her if she was so much in love with him?
Nadezhda and Stalin were man and wife from that day on.
Their Bolshevik marriage would be solemnised in a bloodbath
as around them dozens were being executed.
He behaved with the macho violence of a Bolshevik in command.
When he had prisoners on a barge, he sunk the barge with prisoners on deck.
Nothing was too much for Stalin.
No excess of violence was too much
ll.
He had absolute power and he learnt how to use it.
He learnt one of the ruling rules of his life -
one man, one problem, no man, no problem.
In 1921, Stalin masterminded the Bolshevik takeover of Georgia,
which had declared itself independent.
Stalin said, "We must draw a white hot iron across this Georgian land."
His swaggering behaviour
s
Nadia understood Stalin's harsh world - she too was a Bolshevik
and she knew that revolutions called for blood.
In Moscow, they lived in the Kremlin
on.
TRANSLATOR: We started living with Stalin and Nadezhda Sergeyeva
in a communal flat with one kitchen for several families.
They were comfortable and the comrades were all friends
and their wives were all friends too.
So they carried on living there.
Even though there was one kitchen, you had your own private room.
Then in 1921, Vasily was born and the flat became too small for Stalin,
so he had to move.
Although Stalin now had a family,
he would not allow it to compromise his revolutionary zeal.
A letter recently unearthed in one of the state archives
shows how determined he was to prove his proletarian credentials.
It's to the head of state Kalinin.
"I've moved into my new flat in the Kremlin
"and I'm furious to discover that someone has brought new furniture for it.
"This is directly against my orders.
"I'm very angry. I gave orders that I was to have old furniture.
"More than that", he writes, "Find the culprit and punish him."
And he signs off, "With Communist greetings, J Stalin."
Both Stalin and Nadia, in the first two decades of the 20th century,
had very similar ideals,
which were social justice and equality
and fair working conditions and so on.
Nadia was one of the first emancipated women.
Women won equal rights and she went for them.
She wanted independence. She wasn't going to change her name.
As leader of the party, Lenin was burdened by a huge workload.
He was relying on Stalin more and more.
A job was created for Stalin - General Secretary of the Bolshevik Party.
He wrote his own job description.
It would make him the most powerful man in the party.
The civil war had left the country in ruins.
Transport had broken down. Food was no longer reaching the cities.
So Lenin relaxed the policy of collectivising land and seizing grain.
"Let the peasants sell their grain. Let the market unlock shortages."
This was a big retreat from Bolshevism.
Lenin was the ultimate Machiavellian pragmatist and he argued for this,
but a lot of the young Bolsheviks believed that this was a compromise too far
and that one day they'd have to deal with the peasant problem.
Nonetheless, Lenin got the NEP brought in.
Lenin had exhausted himself in holding the revolution together.
In May 1922, he suffered the first of a series of strokes.
Over a few months, he recovered some of his strength,
but he became concerned that he
Stalin.
As Lenin weakened through the winter of 1922,
his fears about Stalin grew.
In December, Stalin persuaded the Central Committee
to make him responsible for Lenin's medical care.
Now he had control over the man he once served.
TRANSLATOR: He changed when he understood he could become leader.
It's probably the psychology of somebody who wants power,
who loves power and knows how to use power.
That's how he was. His yes meant yes and his no meant no.
He didn't say a lot.
He built an invisible wall around Lenin -
forbidding access to him and controlling contact with others.
He heard that Lenin had dictated a memo to his arch-enemy Trotsky.
Lenin's devoted wife Krupskaya was acting as his secretary.
Stalin now telephoned her.
Her account of the conversation would almost destroy him.
One hears about Stalin the controlled ice man,
but he also had this fiery Georgian temper that he couldn't control.
This is a man who's supposed to be this great political machine,
but he loses his temper and almost loses everything.
Stalin had gone too far in abusing Krupskaya.
Lenin was now dictating his "testament to the party".
He was already incensed
When he heard about the phone call to his wife,
he added a devastating condemnation of Stalin.
The testament was sealed in an
ath.
But one of his secretaries leaked the fact to Stalin
that Lenin meant to finish him.
It was to be done at the next
behalf.
But Stalin offered Trotsky a political concession
in return for dropping the issue.
Trotsky fell for it, Stalin was reprieved,
and the chance to halt his grim progress was lost forever.
Lenin had foreseen the danger in an all-powerful Stalin.
The protegee would go on to eclipse the worst excesses of his master.
TRANSLATOR: I remember going to the building where Lenin's body was lying.
I remember that we went up the stairs
and everything was covered in black cloth.
Halfway up the stairs, two boys were crying,
then all the little children passed by the body.
We didn't know what was going on,
but we knew that something horrible had happened.
At the funeral, Stalin read an extraordinary evangelical tribute to his leader.
"Comrade Lenin ordained us to hold high and keep pure
"the title of member of the party.
"We vow to thee that we shall fulfil thy commandment."
Stalin would now use Lenin's name
r.
There was to be a collective leadership,
but his main rival was Trotsky - the darling of the party.
For 20 years, Stalin had lived in Trotsky's shadow.
His fame as the charismatic orator
himself.
Trotsky had described Stalin as a "grey bureaucrat, a mediocrity."
It was a fatal underestimation of Stalin's political skill
and of his unswerving hatred.
Stalin now had control of the party machinery.
He would use it over the next six years to destroy Trotsky and all his other rivals.
Henceforth, Trotsky's name would become synonymous with heresy.
Stalin won the support of the party by elevating Lenin
to the status of a hero and prophet.
The man who had tried to destroy
re.
He took over the intellectual side of Lenin.
He decided what of Lenin's work was published and what wasn't.
His embalmment of Lenin and displaying him in a mausoleum
was the deliberate creation of a religion of Bolshevism,
and of a religious symbol for Bolshevism, which worked.
By 1929, Russia had just matched
.
As the increasingly powerful General Secretary,
Stalin embarked on a mission
He wanted to make the Soviet Union into an industrial colossus
and a military power to be reckoned with on the European mainland.
He wanted Soviet modernity.
He wanted an end to the old Russia -
of the peasant, the village, the Christian faith.
He wanted virtually an industrialised countryside
to take the place of the medieval Muscovy
that he so much detested.
In the cities, Stalin mobilised an army of young Communists
to help crush anyone who might oppose his plans.
They flooded out of Moscow and St Petersburg into the countryside.
Their mission was to drag the peasants into the 20th century.
If the peasants didn't cooperate, they would be destroyed.
The master of propaganda showed town dwellers, in films like this,
how the richer class of peasant -
rain.
Lists of the guilty were published.
He expropriated their property
and he deported most of them to Siberia for at least five years.
Bolshevik squads seized thousands of tons of grain across the country.
The peasants would starve.
For those who dared to hoard grain, Stalin had a solution -
a new law, Protocol 111.
They called it the "Five Ear Law."
You could be shot for stealing five grains of corn.
Stalin had unleashed his army
He was worried, but he imposed his will regardless.
The deliberateness of the violence and terror is fascinating.
They divided the peasants into three categories.
Category one - to be shot instantly.
Category two - to be deported to the gulags.
Category three - to be deported into exile.
This expanded into a sort of civil war against the countryside.
And it was done by thousands of young workers from the cities
who went to the countryside and saw the people starving and being shot,
but they believed it was right
because it was the way to heaven
Hundreds of thousands of peasants were deported into the east.
They were making the same journey Koba had made many times,
but they were not expected to return.
They were destined for camps
where they would be starved and worked to death in conditions of absolute brutality.
For most, exile would become another word for the death sentence.
The tundra swallowed hundreds of thousands of families.
Stalin executed a radical turn - "the great turn" he called it - a Stalin revolution.
A Stalin revolution was a much more dramatic change
for the Russian people than the Lenin revolution of 1917. It changed everything.
There was resistance from Stalin's partners in government -
Bukharin and the rightists - and Stalin easily defeated them.
They recanted and agreed to follow the party line.
Stalin believed that any number of human casualties were worth it
in order to achieve deferred paradise - the deferred paradise of Socialism.
Between 1929 and 1933, up to five million people perished.
Instead of creating communal farms, they were digging communal graves.
Stalin suppressed news of this, although 30 million were starving.
TRANSLATOR: I went to the city of Karkov.
I was in a good compartment.
When I opened the window, there was a famine going on outside.
I saw on the railway platform people who were starving.
When my mother told Stalin, he said it's an illusion.
She's only a child. Only he could say things like that.
Stalin's behaviour was beginning to scare people -
his wife Nadezhda in particular.
She wasn't meant to know about this,
but she picked it up from her friends
who used to go out to the country and tell her what was happening.
Stalin wasn't telling her.
This caused enormous distress to her
and division in the marriage.
They think that women are weak but she was very strong.
Probably their two characters clashed and they had rows about it.
In 1931 - according to her sister Anna - she was packing her bags.
She was going to finish her studies
er,
and set up her own career because she'd had enough.
Stalin now controlled the destiny of millions,
but not that of his own family.
In 1926, a daughter, Svetlana, had been born.
Stalin doted on her, but not so on the boys.
His first son Yakov had now joined them in the Kremlin,
but Stalin's constant bullying had driven him to shoot himself.
He survived - much to his father's disgust.
"Huh!" sneered Stalin. "He can't even shoot straight."
Stalin's wife was also unsympathetic to Yakov's cry for attention.
She had her own concerns.
Nadia obviously had severe psychological problems.
Svetlana said her mother was schizophrenic. Molotov said she was psychopathic.
She was a hysteric.
Nadezhda could no longer cope
ntry.
Nadezhda Sergeyevna, Vasily and I went to Red Square.
Soon, Nadezhda - well, maybe in 15 or 20 minutes -
literally started to moan.
"Oh, my head!" She clutched her head and started to moan
and a couple of minutes later went home.
The next day, Nadezhda saw the children for the last time.
That evening, they were having dinner with the Molotovs and the Vorishilovs.
The Vorishilovs, as usual, were holding their revolution party.
Down the table was General Igoroff's wife Galina.
Stalin began to flirt with her in the clumsy way he did, drunkenly,
by tossing balls of bread at her.
That was his way of flirting. He did it to entertain children too.
Coarse and clumsy it certainly was.
He didn't notice his young wife's lovely dress or new hairdo.
He didn't notice anything about her.
There was a toast and she didn't drink to it.
Then she got up suddenly and ran out.
Molotov's wife followed her and they went for a walk.
She said, why does Stalin have to flirt with all these women?
He flirts with the hairdresser who he may be having an affair with.
They agreed that men were men and silly things.
But Polina said Stalin's under immense pressure,
you can't put him under more pressure when he's fighting a war.
No one knows why when she left
.
She got out the little pistol that her brother had got from Berlin,
then she wrote a letter attacking Stalin personally and politically.
GUNSHOT
When he stood by her open coffin...
to take his parting from her, he said, "She went away as an enemy"
and he turned and walked away, according to his daughter Svetlana.
TRANSLATOR: The coffin stood in the room surrounded by people.
Stalin approached the coffin and wept.
What's more, he wept so strongly that he was shaking all over.
It was absolutely clear he couldn't control himself.
It was the most horrible thing that could have happened to him.
Such grief. Vasily was clutching at him.
"Daddy, don't cry. Daddy, don't cry. Please don't cry."
For Stalin, it was a huge betrayal.
She had publicly said, by leaving a letter,
that she thought Stalin's policies were wrong
and she agreed with Bukharin's ideas.
And that she found it intolerable
.
So not only was it a personal tragedy,
it was a political betrayal.
And it was on that level, principally, that he took it.
Nadezhda's death marked the end
ife
He filled the gap with his affection for Svetlana,
whom he called "the lady of the house."
She was even allowed to appear at Politburo dinners.
For male company - always important to him -
he had his old friend Kirov.
Kirov, when he wasn't at his office
ha.
Kirov took Nadia's place, in a way, as his comfort and dear friend.
He would only go to the baths with Kirov.
Among his political fraternity,
.
This relationship was very close,
but there were severe political tensions.
At the 17th Congress in 1934,
some Bolsheviks, disenchanted with the horrors of collectivisation,
planned to overthrow Stalin and place Kirov as leader of the party.
Kirov was Stalin's closest friend.
Now suddenly he was his closest rival and a serious threat.
On December 1st 1934, at Kirov's office in Leningrad,
a lone gunman stalked the corridor.
GUNSHOT
TRANSLATOR: Suddenly there was a telephone call.
It was an inter-city call - you could tell by the ring.
Stalin took the receiver and, my mother told me, he turned pale.
His face went completely strange.
He put down the receiver and said, "Kirov has been killed.
"I'm going to Leningrad."
He left for Leningrad with his own court of judges, prosecutors and executioners.
Within hours of Kirov's death,
Stalin had drafted the 1st December law,
which gave him the power to shoot anyone accused of terrorism quickly.
He personally interrogated Kirov's assassin, Nikolaev.
Stalin claimed he implicated
ev.
Nikolaev was quickly executed.
Then he had the assassin's wife, brother and sister-in-law shot without trial.
He identified and arrested Zinoviev supporters and had them all shot.
GUNSHOTS
His old colleagues Zinoviev and Kamenev were seized in Moscow.
It isn't known whether or not Stalin ordered Kirov's death,
but he had drafted the law allowing
news.
The 1st December law was to be the basis of his personal dictatorship.
and the foundation of the Terror of the '30s.
Within a year, over 100,000 people in Leningrad alone
would be imprisoned or shot.
In time, most of the 2,000 delegates
d.
Too many had voted for Kirov.
If the party wouldn't follow Stalin, he'd build one that would.
The initial trial of Zinoviev and Kamenev was a sham,
but after being promised light sentences, they confessed.
He'd brought the Georgian vendetta - the Caucasian blood feud - to Moscow.
He'd brought it north.
And he was determined to physically
rgiven.
He is a Georgian and Georgians have
You didn't just annihilate your enemy, you stamped on his grave.
In 1936, at the first of the infamous show trials before the international press,
Kamenev and Zinoviev were retried, found guilty and executed...
GUNSHOT
..despite Stalin's promises that their lives would be spared.
The Terror spread in shockwaves throughout the Soviet Union.
In the midst of it all,
Stalin went with his children to visit his mother Keke.
Now 75, she was looked after on Stalin's behalf,
by the head of the Georgian NKVD, Lavrenti Beria.
Keke knew what was going on.
TRANSLATOR: Friends would visit who knew about the arrests
and they would complain because she was his mother. She didn't like it.
When he came to say his final goodbye to her...
I forget why she died, I forget what illness, but she was very old.
..she told him, "Son, it would have been better if you'd been a priest."
The man who could have been a priest was playing God.
It was a religious Terror essentially.
Stalin said that we had to kill people because "they'd lost faith".
People were killed not for their conscious sins,
but for the fact that they MIGHT sin, MIGHT turn against the project,
MIGHT show a lack of faith in Stalinism, in Bolshevism.
Stalin took a close personal interest in the Terror
as it assumed a life of its own.
He decided to kill people like industrial production targets.
For example, Stalingrad was told,
The amazing thing we've discovered about Stalin in the last few years
is that the Terror was organised deliberately from the centre
and that Stalin and his leaders didn't care who they killed.
It was done by quota, by numbers, not even by name.
In one year, arrests for counter-revolutionary crimes increased tenfold.
But Russian State archives reveal
uction.
Here's a chilling document that comes from the height of the Terror.
It's 22nd November 1938.
It's headed Top Secret.
It's a very laconic, very Stalinist message.
"Comrade Malenkov, Moscovin must be arrested. J Stalin."
Very simple. Moscovin, who was a top official in the Comintern
and an ex-secret policeman, was arrested and shot soon after this note.
Stalin's orders were carried out by a "troika" -
a travelling court that read out charges and supervised executions.
GUNSHOTS CONTINUE
Stalin personally signed for execution almost 400 lists of names,
totalling about 40,000 people.
During the Terror, around 700,000 men and women were sentenced to death.
On 12th December 1937 alone,
Stalin and Molotov approved 3,167 death sentences
before breaking to go to the cinema.
Stalin had killed most of those who had been part of the revolution.
He now turned his attention to another former ally -
one of the original Bolshevik leaders, Nikolai Bukharin.
Bukharin is probably the most
Lenin called him "the darling of the party" and he was.
Bukharin would have to endure the humiliation of a public show trial.
He knew he was never going to escape the condemned cell.
In his last letter to Stalin, he appealed to his old friendship
and showed that he still loved the cause even if not the man.
"If I am to receive the death sentence,
"then I implore you by all you hold dear not to have me shot.
"Let me drink poison in my cell.
"I am preparing myself mentally to depart from this vale of tears
"and there is nothing in me toward all of you, the party and the cause,
"but enormous and boundless love.
"For that reason, I embrace you in my mind.
"Farewell forever
"and remember kindly your wretched Nikolai Bukharin."
Now no one was safe.
No one was closer to Stalin than his secretary Alexander Poskrebyshev -
no one that is except Poskrebyshev's wife, Bronislava.
According to her daughter, she was having an affair with Stalin.
One day in 1939, she vanished.
TRANSLATOR: My father thought she'd gone to the dacha,
but she wasn't there.
He asked Stalin about it. Stalin said, "I don't know. Ask Beria."
Beria said she had links with Trotskyism and was therefore an enemy of the people.
She had been arrested. Two years later, she would be shot.
Before her death, Poskrebyshev had already taken a new wife.
His first wife had ceased to exist
and still Poskrebyshev served his leader.
TRANSLATOR: Papa couldn't do anything about it.
She was accused of links with Trotskyism.
Trotsky was an ideological enemy
and, besides, Stalin had his own score to settle with Trotsky.
When you were accused of that, there was no hope of pardon.
You have to understand he had two little girls to look after.
I think he did it for us.
These two faded photographs are all that remain
of Bronislava Poskrebyshev -
Natalia's mother and perhaps Stalin's mistress.
My nanny told me that when I was little, Papa was looking through some photographs -
it must have been 1939.
I saw a picture of mother and I went, "Mama! Mama!"
And he burst into tears and left the room.
The circle of terror closed in on everyone,
tightening until it touched his own family.
He'd reached the family album
including the Georgian brother and sister-in-law of his first wife, Katyo Svanidze.
The Svanidzes were locked up -
she in a camp and he in a prison, and he was shot there.
When she heard about it, she died.
Before she died, she wrote on a pillowcase and sent it to my mother.
My mother wrote it down on paper and showed it to Stalin.
He read it and said, "Eugenia, don't ever do anything like that again."
She could see by his face that she'd done something stupid.
You see, she understood that he'd crossed them out of his life.
They didn't exist for him anymore.
When he put people in prison, he just forgot about them.
What kind of a man is it that can do that?
There was no clear end to the Terror.
No specific date.
But by mid 1938, Stalin had killed almost all of the 1934 Central Committee,
enough of his generals to undermine the army,
and enough industrial bosses to have brought the country near standstill.
Those he hadn't killed were rotting in the camps.
He had almost finished. It was time to blame somebody.
He chose the head of his secret police, Nikolai Yezhov.
Yezhov is perfect. He's behaving like the cliche of a vampire -
living at night, permanently drunk,
Stalin subtlely turns against him,
brings up a very trusted,
The man he chose to deliver the final blow
was the secret policeman who'd been looking after his mother.
Beria had Yezhov arrested and shot on 4th February 1940.
The Terror was very nearly over.
On 20th August that year,
a Soviet agent finally tracked down Trotsky in Mexico
and plunged an ice-pick into his head.
Stalin had once said, "There is nothing sweeter than to plan revenge on an enemy,
"see it executed, and then go to bed to sleep peacefully."
He believed that he had neutralised any threat from Nazi Germany
by signing a non-aggression pact with Hitler.
In the early hours of June 22nd 1941,
Hitler's forces burst onto Russian soil along a 500-mile front.
In the first day, they shot down 2,000 Soviet planes
and slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Red Army soldiers.
It was the greatest miscalculation of his life.
The first few hours after Operation Barborossa's start were terrible ones for Stalin.
He refused to believe that what was happening really was happening
and he refused, initially,
He started to speak in a very, very low voice.
He was clearly mentally... shattered by what had happened.
Stalin pulled himself together and took control of Russian defences.
After a week of ever-worsening disaster, he withdrew to his dacha.
It was half a crisis of confidence
and half a test of loyalty for the Politburo.
They come out to the dacha - all of them - cap in hand.
He stiffens when they arrive because he thinks they've come to arrest him.
He's frightened. Usually, he'd be doing the arresting,
but in this case, the buck stops with Stalin.
He says, "What have you come for?"
They say, "We want you to come back and command the armies."
SPEECH IN RUSSIAN THROUGH SPEAKERS
On July 3rd, Stalin broke his silence to make a speech to the nation.
His delivery was described as "dull and colourless."
Perhaps Stalin was more shaken than people realised.
A new piece of evidence suggests that at some point in 1941,
Stalin had more than just
TRANSLATOR: By chance, I met with a very religious person at a church.
Somebody had told him that I knew Stalin's grandchildren.
I said, "I'm Tina Egnatashvili."
He said, "I know this name - Egnatashvili.
"I believe you are related to Stalin."
And as we passed the church, he drew me aside for conversation.
He said, "Do you know that Stalin took confession?"
I said, "Josef Vissarionovich Stalin?" I was amazed.
"He confessed in 1941, '43, '45 and '48.
"He made these confessions to my father."
And he told me that his father took his secret to the grave,
but he had told his son,
"Remember, Stalin took confession four times."
Is it possible that the great
in the crisis of 1941?
He was clearly shattered by what had happened.
However, the idea that he went into psychological meltdown is wholly untrue.
He quickly gathered his strength again.
Soon he was barking at his generals and bullying his political subordinates
in the way he had done in recent years.
He took hold of the State Committee for Defence and headed it.
He took hold of military strategy.
He killed the general who had been in charge of the western front,
blaming him for the catastrophe that he himself had caused by his own misjudgment.
So he quickly reasserted himself.
Stalin run the war as he had run everything else -
singlehandedly and without mercy.
In August 1941, he issued Order 270,
n captive.
Serious punishment awaited Soviet prisoners-of war should they return.
Retreat was prohibited.
Stalin left his forces in no doubt as to who they should fear most - him or Hitler.
As soon as the war started, Yakov, Stalin's eldest son, was captured by the Germans.
Realising his identity, they offered to exchange him for one of their generals.
Stalin, who had pronounced, "there
d,
"I have no son called Yakov."
TRANSLATOR: I remember a person bringing me an American,
or an English, magazine
with a picture of a soldier hanging dead on barbed wire.
And the caption said, my father - "Jacob Stalin."
Stalin decreed that the wives
and his own daughter-in-law was no exception.
Yakov's wife was arrested and
rents.
This doesn't even surprise Gulia.
If his daughter-in-law was considered guilty of something,
why should he treat her differently from anybody else?
Blood relations didn't mean anything to him at that time.
Stalin's ruthlessness, first in building an industrialised Soviet Union,
and then in allowing it to be destroyed, would win the war.
One of the reasons that the USSR was successful
was that they could afford to lose more tanks, aircraft and more men
than the Germans could afford to lose.
The Russians had huge industrial and human resources...
unavailable to Adolf Hitler.
Victory cost Stalin an estimated 26 million Russian lives,
but he had won the war and conquered Eastern Europe
and his prestige and popularity had never been greater.
He had this vision and one has to say that he did turn the tank around.
The industrialisation that took place over the 30 years that Stalin was in power
took the rest of the Western world about 150 years.
He also brought education and training to Russia, which had none.
He changed that.
When the war was over, he was almost 70.
He was now frail, exhausted.
But even if his political energies
.
Stalin became more paranoid that
His health went too. He became increasingly sclerotic and had high blood pressure,
so his physical health wasn't good.
Certainly, this paranoia became
His family had started to disappear as early as 1938,
but for them, the Terror never stopped.
It's very difficult to understand this and the family still don't understand it.
In 1947, he banished Yegenevya, his elder sister-in-law...
first to prison and then to the camps.
Then in 1948, Anna Sergeyevna, his younger sister-in-law.
Even his beloved Svetlana, bereft of her family,
came close to disappearing.
When Svetlana said to him, "Why have you imprisoned my aunts?"
He said, "Don't play the advocate or I'll imprison you."
Is it normal for a father to say things like that to his daughter?
And finally Kira herself.
One day, about 25 days later... It was two o'clock in the morning.
I'd locked up because I thought
n.
There was a ring at the door. My little brother Sacha answered it.
He said, "There's three warrants for arrest."
They were pretending there were three to frighten us.
It was rather confusing.
Then Sacha said, "Kira, they've come for you."
This was the ultimate destruction of Stalin's family.
They remained in solitary confinement.
Genya said she survived because she thought of her children.
Otherwise she might have given up life in prison.
TRANSLATOR: The secret police said, "If you write to Stalin, he'll let you out."
I said, "I'm offended. I'm not going to write to Stalin."
As it turned out, that's what saved me.
If anyone wrote to Stalin,
PHONE RINGS, KNOCKING
So now Stalin lay dying alone.
TRANSLATOR: If my father had known that we were imprisoned,
what would he have said?
It's a lack of gratitude. He lived with the family. He was hidden by them.
And he married into the family.
But he said, "I'm a man of
son.
"You'll be silent there."
My mother came in and said, "Stalin's let me out of prison."
My brother said, "You fool.
On the day of Stalin's funeral, millions of Russians wept
and not just for the camera.
They grieved the passing of the greatest tyrant in a century of tyrants -
the man who had killed their friends, neighbours and families.
But they had seen how his cruel revolution had made their country great.
They recognised that Stalin was the last of the Russian Tsars.