The Soviet Union | Part 1: Red October to Barbarossa | Free Documentary History

in 1922 the Soviet Union was formed a new nation that would have a profound impact on the entire globe it would emerge from the remnants of the Russian Empire after a long and bloody Civil War Russia in the aftermath of the bolsharik Revolution was a country in absolute turmoil a brutal and bloody Clash of arms trying to wipe out this new regime before it can take control of the country the Bolsheviks finally succeeded in about 1922 and then came the hard work of trying to create for the first time ever a new socialist country from out of nowhere Vladimir Lenin had become the leader of the largest Nation on Earth and was now imposing his will Lenin won the war Lenin won the revolution Lenin is one of those amazing figures who really are decisive in history once got understand that Lenin was an autocratic character who really didn't want anyone to succeed him that's true of most autocratic characters in history but Lenin would have a successor who proved to be the most ruthless of all figures when dealing with both his own people and his foreign enemies foreign they realized after the revolution that the Soviet Union was surrounded by enemies didn't have a friend in the world they felt that way and they were probably right and the only defense was to build an enormous army with a lot of tanks and a lot of aircraft and a lot of ships which they did in the aftermath of World War II the Soviet Union emerged as a new Global superpower that matched the once Mighty Russian Empire of old [Music] who were then yeah we were saying great achievements by the Soviet Union they launched the Sputnik satellite fantastic scientific achievement they put the first man into space Yuri gagari fantastic achievement and so people were saying they saw the Soviet Union as a genuine comparable competitor with the United States now a century from its formation the Soviet Union seems to define the whole of the 20th century [Music] thank you [Music] in 1917 the Romanov Dynasty fell and Vladimir learning and the Bolsheviks had managed to seize power in the Russian Revolution this new government signed the Treaty of breast litowsk with essential Powers bringing an end to Russian involvement in World War one but despite an end to the conflict with foreign governments the battle for Russia itself would continue for years [Music] in the beginning it seemed fairly simple it seemed to be the Red Army which was an army of soldiers with hardly any officers and the other Army is the white Army which you could say was an army of officers with hardly any soldiers who wanted to put Russia back to what it had been before the first world war and possibly continue that war to a victory and then it got complicated for really the better part of two three years this struggle is taking place for control of this vast and completely turbulent country at the same time other things are going on there is a famine there's a war going on between Russia and Poland at the same time and there are endless mutinies rebellions taking places notably the kronstadt Mutiny where the sailors of the of the fleet rebel against the new Bolshevik government so not only is the bolshewik government fighting for its very survival but it's fighting against powerful and disparate forces all of whom have one goal and that is destroy it various National groups formed their own armies the ukrainians the Georgians and and they all fought there was an anarchist Army which fought all sides sometimes allying with one so basically red and white with various other factions and of course from 1919 the Japanese the French the British and the Americans all thought they might intervene and save something from the situation so at least five or six foreign armies also mostly fighting the Bolsheviks and trying to help the whites but in the end giving up because the presence of foreign soldiers only made the red armies stronger it increased National feeling Among The Peasants and the workers but while Lenin is the overall leader of the Bolsheviks and Trotsky as the leader of the Red Army wound up victorious in the Russian Civil War it was another figure who truly established himself during the fighting now you or political police and to check on the old GPU there it is Rob cream the workers and peasants inspection group whose Chief is one Joseph bizarianovichvili party name stallion Stalin was born in Georgia or one of the the national areas of the Russian Empire he was uh the son of a Shoemaker initially he was intended to go into the the church uh he attended a seminary he joined the Bolsheviks at a young age and he became known for his practical work working on in the underground organizing bank robberies and and political demonstrations he was never he spent a few years abroad but he was he was mainly an inside guy and in the course of the Civil War he became in charge of all of the Bolshevik cadres the organization and he developed a patronage Network in that way so then he became obviously one of the potential successors to Lenin everyone underestimated him because he pretended to be not as clever as he was he pretended not to know foreign languages he pretended not to have read anything so they thought this is a useful gopher he'll do as a sort of Chief whip to get others into organization and when they uh founded a Central Committee they thought well what's the most boring job on a committee it's a secretary but the point is uh that the secretary if they have enough personality and power and ruthlessness is the person who determines what their gender is who is going to receive that agenda who is going to be notified of the meeting and who's going to be allowed to speak and who writes the notes and uh and so on so as a result of that right to the end of the Soviet Union the most powerful person was the first Secretary of the Central Committee not the president not the chairman and that was Stalin's doing one of Stalin's key tasks in the Bolshevik party had been how the issue of the nationalities that made up the Russian Empire would be handled by this new regime you know his interest in the nationalities and the creation of the Soviet Union was that Lenin appointed him in 1911 1912 to be his nationalities expert and Stalin went to Vienna and lived there for a few months and wrote his his his paper on the nationalities question which him and Lennon worked out what to do with the nationalities you've got to understand that the Russian Empire was a multi-ethnic Empire it contained something like a hundred tiny ethnic groups but obviously a handful of big ones the biggest them of course was the Russians themselves Orthodox Russians but then there were polls who were catholic Finns who were Protestant Georgians who had their own church aziris and and chechens who were Muslim so the big question um in the Russian Empire was how do we overthrow the tsar and how do we make how do we liberate these peoples the problem of national minorities had been a thorny one throughout Europe a Woodrow Wilson decided the solution was to allow National groups to self-determine themselves and create Nations if they wanted to Russia was a multinational Empire so so the problem was how to organize the different nationalities uh and Lenin decided that nationalities should have their own homelands that the Soviet Union would be socialist in content nationalist in form and so the republics were formed along these National lines so he'd retaken and reconquered Ukraine and Bella Russia he'd retaken the Caucasus including Georgia Stalin's Homeland but he'd lost the baltics states which became independent he'd lost Finland and he'd lost Poland so how does he manage the rest of his Empire and what does he do with these nationalities because the Bolsheviks have supported their right to freedom and all of them have their own nationalist movements now and all of them would you know really would like to be independent that was the big question what do we do what kind of new country do we create to keep these these territories within our new Soviet Bolshevik State and yet give them freedom and that's the million Ruble question in December of 1922 the solution that the Bolsheviks enacted was the creation of a federal system of republics known as the USSR the name comes from the Union of Soviet Socialist republics it was a union of quasi-independent nominally independent republics it was Soviet because the the political form was elected councils the Russian word for Council is Soviet it was socialist because the the state owned the means of production to begin with they had the Russian federal republic which exists there was a Ukrainian Republic once they'd entered Ukrainian Independence which lasted until about 1920 and there was a Caucasian Republic which later split into Georgia I mean Azerbaijan Central Asia was still in chaos until 1924 and the present stands Kazakhstan Tajikistan Uzbekistan Kyrgyzstan they didn't really emerge until the middle of the 1920s when they'd been pacified there were great differences between Lenin and Stalin about this new Union of socialist republics Lenin saw it as a decentralized system with each socialist republic having considerable power over their own Affairs Stalin saw it very differently he wanted it ruled from the center he wanted Russia as the dominant Force Moscow as the center of power and preferably himself running the whole thing it was quite surprising given that he himself was Georgian at the same time as this new state was being established its leader was falling into a terrible state of health a series of Strokes would render Lenin unable to speak and a new leader would soon be needed one man had long been plotting for the position and he would eventually become one of the most powerful and feared figures in the whole world foreign in January 1924 Vladimir Lenin died the battle for succession of leadership in the Soviet Union was now truly underway with one man Stalin determined to come out on top and then on January 21st 1924 the moon faced balding dictator left the scene as abruptly as he had appeared he literally died of overwork his funeral was a monstrous Affair hundreds of thousands queued up in the streets in 25 degree below zero weather it seemed that everyone wanted to pay their last respects Stalin removed his Rivals systematically with Incredible Ingenuity and in such a way they didn't know it was happening Lenin's great fear I think was that Stalin would develop a personality cult a cult that had already developed around Lenin himself and in fact sullin exploited this he built up the cult of Lenin when Lenin died he took charge of the funeral arrangements he wanted to have complete control of what happened to Lenin's Legacy it was Stalin who wanted Lenin's body to be embalmed much against the wishes of Lenin's Widow and once Lenin was dead this personality cult was transferred onto Stalin himself and this would become one of the Hallmarks of his entire Reign of Power in the Soviet Union Stalin was was left as the sort of leading member of the leadership along with Trotsky and there were other there were other major figures um zenorife and Cameron F and younger ones like bukharim as well and recover who was who who were also key figures but the the leading two contenders was darling and Trotsky and even though it's always this is always presented as one of the great sort of struggles and it was an amazing thing that Stalin won this won this succession struggle actually he'd really already won it by the time Lenin died he was already the leading figure in the regime and you know somebody had to do something pretty radical to stop him he already controlled the Party Machine and the party controlled the country so Trotsky was actually his ideal competitor Trotsky was very arrogant and so famous and so preeminent and so pleased himself that he really believed that he didn't need to do much organizing and he would simply be given the leadership the first thing he did was to tell Trotsky he'd needed a rest and suggested that Trotsky go to the Caucasus and Trotsky who called a very powerful figure could be at times hysterical to have fainting fits and feel suddenly psychosomatically ill Trotsky consented and he went pheasant shooting and the instructions Stalin sent to the locals was he is not to meet anybody he was not to receive any telegrams or letters so Trotsky missed Lenin's funeral and you know people who Miss funerals miss the will reading and miss the distribution of the spoils Stalin's Maneuvers during Lenin's funeral would be the beginning of the end for Leon trotsky's role in the newly formed USSR and the beginning of Stalin's radical plans for the nation for Trotsky into Exile then Stalin overrules his two Associates and ends the New Economic Policy in its place come three successive five-year plans all designed to emphasize productive capacity especially heavy industry and power output [Music] industrial capacity Rises nearly 300 percent after the Civil War Lenin had promoted a policy of compromise economic compromise the New Economic Policy which allowed quite a lot of Market forces to delay communism because the country was so impoverished and of course in the Communist party there was a wide variety of views about which way they should go whether they should allow some some more some Market forces or whether they should have a strict communism with collectivization but at the same time another big issue was industry and bazaars had begun to industrialize Russia in the 1890s but of course that had all been destroyed in the war and so now they look towards America the rising power and they saw this extraordinary industrial miracle that was happening in America with mass production and they wanted it to but while the Soviet Union wanted to emulate the industrialization witnessed in countries like the United States of America it remained very wary of its precarious place in international affairs holstric party was policy those on the left believed that a revolution in one country could not survive only by itself so they they believed that only a World Revolution could bring real socialism so they they believe that Britain Germany France United States also needed to become socialist in order to make the revolution succeed uh and so part of the part of policy was to organize and support foreign communist parties to undermine governments and to carry out this revolution but at the same time the Soviet Union needed to survive in the world that existed so they were also engaging in diplomatic relations with these Powers trying to arrange a trade deals so that they could borrow technology in order to develop their own economy so there was this two-pronged policy on the one hand they were being nice to to capitalist countries and the other hand they were trying to undermine them with their local communist parties [Music] foreign policy or you know changed and he was extremely flexible with the foreign policy but the essential thing was just to strengthen the Soviet Union wherever possible by any means possible and in that sense you know he was actually quite he was he was very radical internally he was incredibly murderous internally but out outside in foreign policy he was you know very much a traditional Statesman making alliances you know winning friends trying to win territory in order to make the USSR great the early years of the Soviet Union both Lenin and Stalin after him really craved foreign recognition they wanted this new revolutionary state to be recognized by countries across the world one of the first Nations to enter into negotiations was Great Britain and you get the anglo-soviet trade agreement and then you get diplomatic a recognition happens soon after afterwards and eventually America itself in the early 1930s will recognize this new state and send an ambassador to Moscow and soon after that the Soviet Union is recognized by the League of Nations in 1934 this is a key moment for the Soviet Union at last it's been recognized as an official country on the world stage while the USSR would eventually be officially recognized on the world stage it continued to have extremely tense relationships with foreign powers but one of the ussr's surprising opportunities for Industrial Development in this time was with the country it had been in direct conflict with just a few years prior during World War One Germany Germany after the first world war was a pariah state it wasn't allowed to have an army wasn't allowed to have tanks or airplanes so he came to agreement with another prior State the Soviet Union and they developed submarines tanks and aircraft in various sites on the Volga [Music] first socialist country in the world so it was a tremendous experiment in transforming an economic system modernized the country to build hydroelectric dams to build the economy the Soviet economic Elite decided that centralized economic planning would be the most efficient way to mobilize resources so targets were set for every sector of the economy by the center and orders were given to all parts of the economy to fulfill their parts of the plan so initially they recognized they needed to build infrastructure and heavy Industries a transportation energy sector and machine Manufacturing in order to provide the capacity to then develop the economy further into consumer goods and in a broad-based economy but everything was mobilized uh toward this this the plan and so Stalin in the end embraced the extreme leftist view of Communism which was Collective eyes eliminatal property but also to make this into a great power and to promote industrialization and the best way to do that was to collectivize the fields and the farms and then sell the grain abroad and buy technology to industrialize the country and that was the policy he decided on so it was an a radical policy and by 90 about 1928 he decided that that was the only way to go to make the Soviet Union a great power and and to ensure the survival of the USSR and that was what he decided to do and he would do it at any cost the economic policy enacted by Joseph Stalin in the late 1920s would lead to a wide-scale famine across the whole of the USSR [Music] he did it by first of all introducing a policy of collective Farms they had been tried briefly in the 1920s and found that peasants didn't want to have their horses owned collectively and rebelled against them that was quickly abandoned and then he tried again in 1929 and this time it was organized with the help of the Red Army and it is said for the first time in Russian history peasants at all the meat they wanted to because rather than hand over their pigs and sheep and cows they just had an enormous feast and at as much as they could one of both Lenin's policies and Stalin's policies was the destruction of the wealthy farming class the Yeoman Farmers if you like these are farmers who've had quite a lot of land and produced a lot of produce which they would then sell on this was deemed unacceptable to the Bolshevik regime and they were to be liquidated and other Farmers the smaller peasant farmers were to be gathered into Collective farms and produce grain and supplies for the benefit of the state this was an absolute disaster because on the one hand Stalin had wiped out the one class of farmers that produced a surplus and there was no longer any incentive for the rest of the peasant Farmers to produce any food that was going to be taken from them anyway what happens next is the Great Famine of the early 1930s the regime would not listen to signals from below they wouldn't listen to the fact that there was no seed to plant and they insisted on high quotas anyway and this led to an even worse harvest the next year with loss of life uh and Devastation mostly in Ukraine because this was the the main grain growing area but it would also affected parts of Southern Siberia and Eastern Russia as well so historians who've looked very closely at this don't believe this was a deliberate attack on Ukrainian nationalism or Ukrainian Independence it was just a terribly tragic manifestation of of the of mistakes made in economic planning and an unwillingness to collect unbiased information but rather trying to believe the most Rosy predictions and reports rather than the actual reports records weren't kept properly but we know how many people died simply because of the census report that in 1937 there are about 12 million people missing from the population well they're shot there's people who took the census and they had a new census which was faked and the problem with this famine was that there was a depression going on all over Europe and so on and there wasn't much demand for buying grain from the Soviet Union so the price wasn't good they had to sell more and more in order to finance their industrialization so that famine killed an enormous number of people between 10 million and perhaps 15 million because it happened not only to ukrainians it happened to russian Farmers uh there was a sort of insanity about it the agricultural policy and the workers I think got party workers got quite cynical they realized their job was to destroy so Vineyards were torn up and Farms destroyed animals destroyed the grain wasn't even stored properly it rotted in great Railway sightings so it was a form of Madness but it did solve one problem it got rid of the peasantry as a force they were those who survived were cowed but it was not just the peasantry that was terrorized the very leadership of the government and the original Bolshevik revolutionaries would also be targeted [Music] he would take his old Bolshevik comrades many of whom had helped him maneuver him into the position of absolute power and he would proceed to liquidate hit them in these show trials that took place in Moscow men like kamenev like zenoviev were put on trial on trumped-up charges and there was never any doubt that they were going to be found guilty and he really went through many of his old bolshvik comrades they were put on trial they were found guilty and they were executed it was absolutely brutal these are also the years of the Great executions called yajav Shana in honor of Stalin's executioner n.i yejov how many people are permanently removed from circulation no one knows in some provinces as much as four percent of the population vanishes [Music] who helped Stalin seize power are quickly disposed of to have been a friend of either one of them is now a crime for this and related Act activities well over half of the top communist leadership and thousands of lesser officials vanish as do most of the army officers well the show trials were masterpieces of propaganda they were meant to be public displays of Crime and Punishment and they were carefully rehearsed they were carefully prepared those that were sentenced in these trials their confessions were scripted hundreds of people were invited to witness them they were covered by the media and they were an attempt to prove to the people at large that there were enemies in the country and and that Stalin was doing a good job of finding them and rooting them out it was also a demonstration to foreign governments that the Soviet Union was was intent on on preserving its integrity and Stalin was helped by his chief of police at the time who was a decadent poet and who had a lot to do with the theater and I if you know the stanislavski method of acting which still survives today the stanislavsky method of acting is very destructive for the actor because it tells the actor you've got to be whoever you are and prisoners when arrested and interrogated were trained just as stanislavski trained actors they were their trials were rehearsed so when they appeared in court they would say yes I'm terribly guilty I bet a Japanese spy all my life and they would then of course make mistakes saying they'd met somebody in a hotel which hadn't existed for 40 years a lot of foreigners are convinced quite influential foreigners historians like Christopher Hill Bernard Shaw people who thought had more brains were convinced that he says he's guilty he must be guilty a very few of yajav's victims are given trials some of the trials are remarkable for example several defendants are convicted of conspiring with Trotsky in 1936 in the hotel Bristol in Copenhagen in actual fact in 1936 the hotel was no longer in business [Music] case in 1938 yejov himself is purged together with many Purge judges labor cap operators and the like [Music] his basic plan was you know when he looked at when he looked at the Soviet Union he saw there was disloyalty in the party a lot of people wanted to get rid of him a lot of people weren't happy with his collectivization policy and the suffering of the peasants you know there was just all in his own family and you know also the party bosses had become like little princes running their own territories so he decided the way to deal with this was by Bloodshed by Terror quite deliberately and he launched the great Terror in in 1935-36 in which there were a million people basically innocent were executed this is also a time when there's a great expansion of the gulags these are these uh prison camps often in far just far-flung places in in Siberia miles from anywhere where political prisoners troublemakers or anyone deemed to be hostile to the regime would be sent off there often walking there under unspeakable conditions and they'd be simply locked away and they'd have to work they were forced labor camps they were fed uh very little food they were held in the most primitive conditions you know in the depths of winter in Siberia it was freezing cold and millions maybe one and a half million two million people died in these camps but it meant that by the end of the 1930s Stalin was absolute Master of the Soviet Union he had simply wiped out anyone who could challenge his leadership some 2000 delegates who are at the 1934 uh Communist Party Congress two-thirds of them will would have lost their lives by the end of the great Terror so the leadership was disproportionately targeted but there are many other victims as well other whole groups of victims were members of national minorities who could be suspected of disloyalty in case a war came so there was a German minority in Russia that had been there for 200 years it was feared they would be disloyal so they were rounded up unexecuted uh polls living on the Borderlands between the Soviet Union and Poland it was feared that they would turn on the Soviet Union in case of a war so they were also targeted and victimized not for anything they did but just for the the language that they spoke basically so it was a completely cynical thing it went on for about 18 months and then there were several incidents which even Stalin realized made it impossible to go on for instance there was a low temperature laboratory in Moscow and they'd arrested so many of the scientists that it was about to explode and destroy a large amount of the new Russian underground that was being built and so they decided to reverse things the little chief of police Nikolai Jeff had become a drunk completely drunk and stopping to turn up for work and Stalin decided to get rid of him so the great Terror came to a fairly sudden end towards the end of 1938 and 1939 became a sort of Almost Paradise here in which you could write what you like you could walk the streets you could say what you like and nobody seemed to be bothered didn't last long but it was an extraordinary period 1939 if you look at the books published then and you can see Stalin started relaxing after the great Terror he was in some ways morally exhausted it maybe that he realized that he couldn't go on that he'd be left with no population to rule by the late 1930s the changing nature of Europe refocused Stalin in the ussr's attention on global rather than internal affairs great hope at the outset of the bolsharik Revolution was that this would spread to other countries notably Germany which was seen as right foreign but it didn't happen and events changed rapidly in the 1930s Germany becomes the dominant power in Europe Hitler is the dominant personality in Europe and Stalin recognizes this Stalin wanted to safeguard the Soviet Union as much as possible he regarded Hitler as his first enemy but he also regarded the Western democracies France and Britain and America as capitalist enemies who after all had intervened to try and destroy the Soviet Union in the in the Civil War so he was very suspicious of them perhaps more suspicious of them at least I suppose he thought that the Nazism a fascist movement opposed to Communism at least came from revolutionary popular roots and was run by a leader a single leader like himself with whom he could do business and so as War became closer and the pressure Rose in Europe he needed to make a decision on sides Stalin's ultimate decision would be made behind closed doors when Joachim Von ribantrop the foreign minister of Nazi Germany headed to Moscow in August of 1939 to meet with his Soviet equivalent vyasha slav Molotov a pact between the two Nations was being prepared in 1939 Stalin accepted that sooner or later he was going to have to fight Hitler but he did not believe that either it suited the Soviet Union for it to happen soon are all the Soviet Union was ready to do so he also saw the opportunity of a territorial booty in Finland in Romania in Poland where she was happy to seize on Stalin convinced himself that he was offering Hitler such a good deal with um oil wheat and many other Commodities of which Germany was in desperate need that he was confident that it was going to be left to him Stalin on the Soviet Union to choose the moment of which he confronted Hitler in arms what he did not recognize was that his timetable and Hitler's timetable might not mess in the end Stalin's predictions about the timetable of the war in Europe would prove disastrously wrong in August 1939 it was publicly announced that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany had signed a non-aggression pact the news would cause shock waves around the world the lights began to burn all night Moscow British and French military missions arrived to confer with the Soviet government so did German Representatives and on August 21st 1939 the world was set on its Heels by the announcement of a treaty between the Russians and the Germans in which they agreed not to fight each other here were the admitted Arch enemies in a state of apparent friendship it was too fantastic to make any sense it didn't when the news of the monotoff ribbon truck packed was announced to the world the world was absolutely stunned this had all taken place in secret all the negotiations had taken place behind closed doors no one could quite believe in the west that Stalin would do a deal with his arch enemy Hitler but also inside the Soviet Union there was deep and profound shock that Hitler who'd been presented by the regime as the ultimate monster suddenly Stalin was sitting down and doing a deal not just a deal but signing a non-aggression pact with him well Stalin and the Soviet leaders were very much afraid of of Hitler's intentions starting from when Hitler came to power in 1933 with an avowed anti-communist platform one of the first things Hitler did was to Outlaw the German Communist party and imprisoned the German communists it was starting in 1936 therefore the Soviet Union adopted a policy of support for popular fronts trying to Rally all socialists and all moderates in popular fronts against fascism so they're very much trying to join an International Coalition uh to fight Nazism and to fight fascism from 1936 to 1939 Stalin was trying to join various collective security packs with Britain and with France but they were not letting him in and when Stalin was was excluded from the Munich agreements he began to feel that he was going to be excluded from any protection that collective security might give the Soviet Union so then they started negotiating on the other side for some sort of pact with with Hitler that would protect them many Communists in Western Europe and in the United States were deeply bewildered by the molotov remain pact this was something completely unexpected something they could not reconcile where there are enormously high ideals but in the end they did so they believed that the common town and the Kremlin must know what they were doing and so they went along with it but it did so extraordinary confusion in the minds of Western communism so it was a cynical thing to do to to suddenly announce that the Germans were friends and to start imprisoning people that you denounced fettler in their books and articles at Communist Party dictate and for two years of course this was official policy we collaborate with Hitler because at least he's fighting the capitalist West just over a week after the molotov ribbon Trot pack was announced Nazi Germany invaded the Western half of Poland marking the beginning of World War II only a couple of weeks later the Soviet Union took over the eastern half of Poland in exactly the way that the two Nations had secretly agreed part of Poland passed over to the Soviet Union and the three independent Baltic states of Estonia Latvia and Lithuania were also handed over to the Soviet Union which gave them more space between them and the expanding German Reich which they hoped would help them if and when an invasion came he thought and he did he thought he'd get the Baltic states he'd get half of Poland and that half of Poland irritated him enormously because it was the half of Poland he had lost in 1920 when he was in charge of the war there and it had been settled by polish officers uh so he took great care when he under the middle model ribbon truck pack he was entitled to take over that part of Poland to slaughter 22 000 polish officers who had taken prisoners and in fact it made it much easier to cushion the eventual Nazi Nazi invasion the invasion of the Soviet Union itself would occur on the 22nd of June 1941 when Operation Barbarossa was launched on Hitler's orders one of the most extraordinary stories of the second World War is that in Germany Stalin through communist sympathizers had the most superb intelligence of any service Any Nation in the western world and all his spies in Germany were telling him repeatedly that Hitler was going to attack him and they told him so with the utmost Authority with the best information and all of this information was getting through to Moscow and Stalin absolutely refused to believe it he'd been warned by Churchill himself had sent intelligence to Stalin saying that this is going to happen and most importantly he'd been warned by his spies in Tokyo notably Richard Serge had told him not only that Hitler was going to invade but he'd actually told him the exact date on which the invasion was going to take place Stalin refused to believe this and dismiss these accounts as fabricated and it meant that the Red Army was totally unprepared Hitler and Stalin read the same books one of them is klausovitz on War klausvitz fought with Napoleon realized Napoleon's mistake was to fight on two fronts in Spain and in Russia well Stalin concluded if Hitler's read this he knows I read it I know he only fight on one front Hitler is busy fighting Britain and France when he's finished with them then we can have a war but he's not going to attack me until he's finished with them and on that basis Stalin made one of the biggest mistakes he ever made when The Invasion came on the 22nd of June 1941 where the Vermax rolled over the Soviet Frontier on a massive 1 600 mile front millions of men tanks Machinery rolling over this stunned Stalin Stalin had no idea that Hitler was going to invade his country it came as a deep and profound shock Stalin's Behavior immediately in the aftermath of the invasion of June 1941 was quite extraordinary he went into seclusion for days he many people afterwards thought believed that his comrades were going to kill him literally kill him murder him assassinate him execute him because he was alone responsible for this extraordinary crime this extraordinary Folly of allowing Germany a free pass almost into the Soviet Union with that Invasion and so all these frightened men around him who Stalin was expecting to kill him but for the first few days they too were in chaos they too were bewildered they too couldn't think what to do and in the end Stalin rallied Stalin came round Stalin began once again at first cautiously at first rather nervously to exercise his authority at first Stalin faced astonishing losses I think something like six million men were lost in the first in the first year of warfare and Hitler raced towards Moscow towards Leningrad into Ukraine towards harkov taking everything before him before the Russians started to sort of gather a proper resistance and started to fight back and stop them which they only managed to do in October 1941 outside Moscow but before then it looked like everything was collapsing and Stalin himself said Lenin left us a state and we've screwed it up and for a second he doubted that whether he could do this and they came and got him and said his henchman came and got him and said we needed to take control and when that happened it was as if the mistake of of being of being surprised by Hitler was forgiven and he was able to start with a clean State and he did but as the German Army moved ever closer towards Moscow in 1941. it seemed to many that just two decades after its formation the Soviet Union was on the brink of annihilation [Music] thank you

Channel: Free Documentary - History

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Keywords: Free Documentary, Documentaries, Full Documentary, documentary - topic, documentary (tv genre), History, History Documentaries, Free Documentary History, History Documentary, Soviet Union, Soviet Union Documentary, History of the Soviet Union, USSR, USSR Documentary, History of the USSR, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Joseph Stalin, Red October, October Revolution 1917, Origin of the Soviet Union, Origin of the USSR

Id: s29Q9EIbDT8

Length: 45min 15sec (2715 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 06 2023