1922 - 1991: The Complete History Of The Soviet Union

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 Bolshevik Revolution, was a country in absolute turmoil. A brutal and bloody clash of arms, trying to wipe out this new regime before it could 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's one of those amazing figures who really are decisive in history. One's got to 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.

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.

All of us who were then young, we were seeing great achievements by the Soviet Union. They launched the Sputnik satellite, fantastic scientific achievement. They put the first man into space, Yuri Gagarin, 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.

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In 1917, the Romanov dynasty fell, and Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks had managed to seize power in the Russian Revolution. This new government signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Central Powers, bringing an end to Russian involvement in World War I. But despite an end to the conflict with foreign governments, the battle for Russia itself would continue for years.

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, 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 place, notably the Kronstadt Mutiny, where the sailors of the fleet rebel against the new Bolshevik government. So not only is the Bolshevik government fighting for its very survival, but it's fighting against powerful and desperate forces, all of whom have one goal, and that is to destroy it.

Various national groups formed their own armies: the Ukrainians, uh, the Georgians, and and they all fought. Uh, 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, uh, and the Americans all thought they might intervene and save something from the situation. So there were at least five or six foreign armies also mostly fighting the Bolsheviks, uh, and trying to help the Whites. But in the end, they gave up because the presence of foreign soldiers only made the Red Army stronger, could increase national feeling among the peasants and and the workers.

But while Lenin, as 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.

Lenin and Trotsky are now firmly in power. The Tsar is abolished. In its place comes the OGPU, or political police. And to check on the OGPU, there is the Workers and Peasants Inspection Group, whose chief is one Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, party name Stalin.

Stalin was uh born in Georgia, one of the, the national areas of of the Russian Empire. He was uh the son of a shoemaker, and initially he was intended to go into the church. He attended a seminary. He joined the Bolsheviks at a young age, and he became known for his practical work, working in the underground, organizing bank robberies and and political demonstrations. He was never, he spent a few years abroad, but he, 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, that the secretary, if they have enough personality and power and ruthlessness, is a person who determines what the agenda is, who is going to receive that agenda, who's going to be notified at the meeting, and who's going to be allowed to speak, and who writes the notes, 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 Lenin 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 of them, of course, was the Russians themselves, Orthodox Russians. But then there were uh Poles, who were Catholic, Finns, who were Protestant, Georgians, who had their own church, Armenians, and and Tatars, 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. 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 the problem was how to organize the different nationalities. 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 Belorussia. He'd retaken the Caucasus, including Georgia, Stalin's homeland. But he'd lost the Baltic states, which became independent. He'd lost Finland, and he'd lost Poland. So how does he manage the rest of this empire? 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 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 uh quasi-independent, nominally independent republics. It was Soviet because the political form was elected councils. The Russian word for council is Soviet. It was socialist because the uh state owned the means of production. To begin with, they had the Russian Federal Republic, which still 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, Armenia, Azerbaijan. Central Asia was still uh in chaos till 1924, and the present states, 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 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.

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 overwork. His funeral was a monstrous affair, hundreds of thousands chewed up in the streets in 25 degrees 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, Stalin 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 left as the sort of leading member of the leadership, along with Trotsky, and there were other, there were other major figures, uh, Zinoviev and Kamenev, and younger ones like Bukharin and as well, and Rykov, who was, who were also key figures. But the, the leading two contenders were Stalin 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 with 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 needed a rest, and suggested that Trotsky go to the Caucasus. And Trotsky, who although a very powerful figure, could be at times hysterical and 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. Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev forced Trotsky into exile. Then Stalin overruled his two associates and ended the New Economic Policy. In its place came three successive five-year plans, all designed to emphasize productive capacity, especially heavy industry and power output. From 1928 to 1941, Russia's industrial capacity rises nearly 300%.

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 market, some market forces, or whether they should have strict communism with collectivization. But at the same time, uh, 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, um, with mass production, and they wanted it too.

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. Well, the Bolshevik party, which became the Communist party, was was split in its foreign 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 believed that Britain, Germany, France, United States also needed to become socialist in order to make the revolution succeed. And so part of the part policy was to, uh, 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, uh, 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 on the other hand, they were trying to undermine them with their local communist parties. The foreign policy, you know, changed, and he was extremely, um, 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, uh, 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 get diplomatic recognition happening soon 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 I: 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 it came to an agreement with another pariah state, the Soviet Union, and they developed submarines, tanks, and aircraft in, uh, various sites on the Volga.

Well, this was the first socialist country in the world, so it was a, 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, transportation, energy sector, and machine manufacturing, in order to provide the capacity to then develop the economy further into, uh, consumer goods, and and a broad-based economy. But everything was mobilized toward this, this plan.

And so Stalin, in the end, embraced the extreme leftist view of Communism, which was collectivize, eliminate all 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 a radical policy, and by 19, about 1928, he, he decided that that was the only way to go to make the Soviet Union a great power and to, and to, 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 widespread famine across the whole of the USSR. 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 it, and 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 ate all the meat they wanted to, because rather than hand over their pigs and sheep and cows, they just had an enormous feast and ate as much as they could.

One of both Lenin's policies and Stalin's policies was the destruction of the wealthy farming class, the kulak farmers, if you like. These are farmers who 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 and devastation, mostly in Ukraine, because this was the main grain-growing area. But it would also affect parts of Southern Siberia and, uh, Eastern Russia as well. So historians who have 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 mistakes made in economic planning and an unwillingness to collect unbiased information, but rather trying to, uh, 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 shot the 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. There was a sort of insanity about it. The agriculture 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 sidings. So it was a form of madness. But it did solve one problem: it got rid of the peasantry as 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. 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 them in these show trials that took place in Moscow. Men like Kamenev, like Zinoviev, 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 Bolshevik comrades. They were put on trial, they were found guilty, and they, they were executed. It was absolutely brutal. These are also the years of the Great Executions, called Yezhovshchina, in honor of Stalin's executioner, Nikolai Yezhov. How many people are permanently removed from circulation? No one knows. In some provinces, as much as 4% of the population vanishes. Kamenev and Zinoviev, 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 activity. 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, uh, 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, uh, 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 if you know the Stanislavski method of acting, which still survives today, the Stanislavski 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 trial rehearsed. So when they appeared in court, they would say, "Yes, I'm terribly guilty. I've been 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 you thought had more brains, were convinced, "Oh, he says he's guilty, he must be guilty."

A very few of Yezhov'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. Next case, in 1938, Yezhov himself is purged, together with many purged judges, labor camp operators, and the like. 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 disloyalty in his own family. And, you know, also the 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 a great terror in in 1935, 36, in which over 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, far flung places in in, uh, Siberia, miles from anywhere, where political prisoners, troublemakers, or anyone deemed to be hostile to the regime would be sent off. They'd often be 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 1 and a half million, 2 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 2,000 delegates who were at the 1934 Communist Party Congress, two-thirds of them 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 who could be suspected of disloyalty in case of 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 and executed. Poles 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 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, Yezhov, had become a drunk, completely drunk, and stopped 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. It didn't last long, but it was an extraordinary period. 1939, if you look at the books that were published then, and you can see Stalin start relaxing after the Great Terror. He was, in some ways, morally exhausted. It may be that he realized that it couldn't have gone on, that he'd be left with no population to rule.

By the late 1930s, the changing nature of Europe refocused Stalin and the USSR's attention on global rather than internal affairs. The great hope at the outset of the Bolshevik Revolution was this would spread to other countries, notably Germany, which was seen as ripe for a similar sort of Bolshevik Revolution. 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 Civil War. So he was very suspicious of them. Perhaps more suspicious of them. At least, I suppose he thought that 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 Ribbentrop, the foreign minister of Nazi Germany, headed to Moscow in August of 1939 to meet with his Soviet equivalent, Vyacheslav 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, or that the Soviet Union was ready to do so. He also saw the opportunity for territorial booty in Finland, in Romania, in Poland, which he was happy to seize. And Stalin convinced himself that he was offering Hitler such a good deal with, uh, 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 and the Soviet Union, to choose the moment at which he confronted Hitler in arms. What he did not recognize was that his timetable and Hitler's timetable might not mesh.

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 shockwaves around the world. The lights began to burn all night in 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 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact 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 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 imprison 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 were very much trying to join an international coalition to fight Nazism and to fight fascism. From 1936 to 1939, uh, Stalin was trying to join various collective security pacts 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 Hitler that would protect them.

Many Communists in Western Europe and in the United States were deeply bewildered by, um, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. This was something completely unexpected, something they could not reconcile with their enormously high ideals. But in the end, they did. They believed that the Comintern and the Kremlin must know what they were doing, and so they went along with it. But it did extraordinary confusion in the minds of Western Communists. So it was a cynical thing to do to to suddenly announce that the Germans were your friends and to start imprisoning people that you denounced Hitler 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-Ribbentrop Pact 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. So he took great care when he, under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, he was entitled to take over that part of Poland, to slaughter 22,000 Polish officers who were 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 of 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 Sorge, 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 dismissed 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 Clausewitz on War. Clausewitz 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've read it. I know you 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 Wehrmacht 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. 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 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 6 million men were lost in the first, in the first year of warfare, and Hitler raced towards Moscow, towards Leningrad, into Ukraine, towards Kharkov, 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 his henchmen came and got him, and said, "We need you to take control." And when that happened, it was as if the mistake of being of of being surprised by Hitler was forgiven, and he was able to start with a clean slate. 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.

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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 Bolshevik Revolution, was a country in absolute turmoil. A brutal and bloody clash of arms, trying to wipe out this new regime before it could 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's one of those amazing figures who really are decisive in history. One's got to 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.

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.

All of us who were then young, we were seeing great achievements by the Soviet Union. They launched the Sputnik satellite, fantastic scientific achievement. They put the first man into space, Yuri Gagarin, 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.

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On the 22nd of June 1941, Adolf Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, a gargantuan military invasion of the Soviet Union. The Eastern Front of World War II had been opened, and for a while, it looked as if the Soviet Union might be doomed.

The first days of and weeks and months of the German invasion of the Soviet Union were a military catastrophe. But Russia was so vast, and Russia's armies were so enormous, that even though the Germans kept advancing and advancing, it's not enough. As time went on, this Nazi war machine was stopped. It was stopped in front of Leningrad. It was stopped in front of Moscow. And it was absolutely imperative for the Nazis to capture Moscow before winter began. And it looked like they were going to achieve this. They captured, uh, notably the towns of, uh, Vyazma and Bryansk. These are very close to Moscow. And this happened shortly before the winter set in, and it looked very likely that they would seize Moscow as well.

But Stalin ordered that Moscow was to be held at all costs. He saw that this was the great prize for Hitler, and he was determined to ensure that Hitler did not capture Moscow. And so you have this incredible counter-defense of the capital city. It's hard to think of any single occasion when another nation has successfully invaded Russia and clung to. Even the Mongols couldn't get any further than the forests and the bogs. And Napoleon, of course, made some terrible mistakes with the weather reports. Hitler made the same mistake. And it's said Russia is a very easy country to get into, but an impossible country to get out of. So that was a part of it. There was just unlimited manpower. This was the first time they had a genuine enemy. They'd had false enemies that Stalin invented. Now they had a real one.

Amazing achievement of the war was in, in the first four months or so of the war, to evacuate heavy industry from Ukraine, which was the city of Kharkov, especially, which was going to be under attack, moved hundreds and hundreds of kilometers to safe haven behind the Urals. And within a matter of months, for example, the Kharkov tank factory was up and running, producing tanks despite the disruption. How it was done, this is a miracle. Heavy industry just dismantled, put on trains, moved to the Urals, re-erected and working. And then they produced tanks that were actually superior to German tanks. The T-72, which I think still rolls about today, which bounced shells, just bounced off them.

The Soviet Union is not the hollow shell that Hitler convinced himself that it was before launching Operation Barbarossa. This is a vast, fantastically powerful, fantastically motivated country and society which can do things that we have never dreamed of. And so those German generals who had not been frightened by the British or the French or the Poles, suddenly they feel this around the heart. They feel these Russians. This is something far more formidable, far more frightening than anything we've hitherto had to face. And as those winter battles began around Moscow in the autumn and winter, in October and November of 1941, even though Hitler was far from admitting it, most of the smartest people in the inner circle of the Third Reich realized that that terrifying hand of defeat was staring them in the face.

In order to help guarantee eventual victory, the Soviet Union quickly made a new alliance with the Western powers that had once treated it with enormous suspicion. An alliance of pragmatism was formed. Once they met together, in in August 1942, Churchill went over to see Stalin, and Stalin was actually at the greatest crisis of the of the war, looked like he was going to lose the whole south, the oil field, Stalingrad, and the Caucasus. Churchill arrived, and they made, they made a sort of deal. They, they became, kind of, they respected each other. And Churchill told them that they weren't going to do an invasion of Europe, an invasion of France yet, but that they would ultimately. But for the moment, they had to build trust among themselves. And so the three of them met at Tehran for the first time in 1943. There they really began to to build a sort of a sort of rapport between the three of them, particularly Roosevelt and and Stalin, and they agreed on enough to proceed with the war and to win the war. They decided on a conditional surrender and the future shape of what Europe would look like.

Here the chief executives of Britain and the United States met for the first time with Marshal Stalin. They reaffirmed their country's determination to work together in the war and in the peace to follow. The battles that the Soviet Union fought on the Eastern Front were on an almost unimaginable scale and would turn the tide in favor of this new alliance. These battles inside the Soviet Union were on a scale that had never been seen before in the history of warfare. These huge, titanic struggles, the struggle for Leningrad, the struggle for Stalingrad, the massive tank battle, the greatest tank battle in history that took place at Kursk. The death toll in these battles was absolutely enormous. Millions and millions of Soviet soldiers would lose their lives on these battlefields. It was a people's war. This, the people's.

Homeland was being invaded, and so they resisted. There were partisan groups behind Nazi lines. Everybody, whether or not they had been victimized by the Pures or not, or liked Solen or didn't, they wanted to defend the Homeland. Tremendous numbers of victims, a whole generation of young men was lost to the Soviet Union, and economic destruction. The burning of fields, of factories, tremendous losses.

In the beginning of 1945, when it was clear that the Allies were going to win the war, The Big Three, Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt, met at Yalta to thrash out a new world order. They were to decide, really, what was to happen to the world once Nazi Germany had been defeated. The three parties reached a firm accord on military and political points. Coordinated plans were made for great new blows against Germany from all directions, reaffirming the resolve of the United Nations to cooperate fully after the war. Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin reached agreement on the foundations of European peace. Germany shall be disarmed. German militarism and Nazism will be destroyed.

Just over two months after the Yalta conference, Soviet forces reached Berlin and raised the victory banner over the Reichstag. Only a few hundred yards away, Adolf Hitler had committed suicide in the Führerbunker. The European theater of World War II had come to a decisive end, but the battle lines of the Cold War were already being drawn.

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In July 1945, the Potsdam conference began. The leaders of the victorious Allied countries met in Germany, which had unconditionally surrendered just nine weeks earlier. It would be the last time Stalin ever left the Soviet Union. Stalin and the Soviet Union emerged from the war both weak and very powerful. Weak in the sense that huge swathes of the Soviet Union had been totally destroyed by the German Army, but powerful in the sense that the Red Army had steamrolled into Eastern Europe, and that Stalin now controlled many of the territories he'd always coveted. This placed him in a very, very powerful position.

Germany itself was to be split into two separate parts. The Soviets, Stalin was going to control the East of Germany, and the Western Allies, Britain, France, and America, were to control the Western sector of Germany, and they were going to do likewise for Berlin. Good progress at the Berlin Conference. Reparations settled, boundaries adjusted, peoples relocated. New problems will still arise tomorrow, but today we have an international organization to work them out so that problems do not become conflicts. The Big Three changes, but the Big Three goes on. A president dies, another takes his place. A prime minister leaves the conference to stand a free election, and by the choice of his people, a new prime minister returns to his seat. But the conference goes on.

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A promise made at Tehran and reaffirmed in Berlin is kept on schedule.

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The battles of World War II still continued in the Pacific, and the Soviet Union formerly declared war on Japan. But it would not be long before they surrendered, following the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Allies were now fully victorious in World War II, but things ended very differently for the Big Three. Roosevelt died before the end of the war. Stalin was now stronger than ever, and Churchill feared the Soviet Union's power over Europe. Churchill came out of the Second World War a very bitter man because he felt that the only national leader who emerged from the struggle with exactly what he wanted was Stalin, and Stalin had got his prizes in the Pacific, with the Sakhalin Islands and access to Pacific ports, and of course, he'd seized most of Eastern Europe. Churchill's frustration and bitterness, and so he instructed the British Chiefs of Staff to draw up a plan which was code-named "Unthinkable" for the recapture of Poland from the Red Army by forty-two American and British divisions with the aid, absurdly, of the rump of the Wehrmacht. And this document, which is still in Britain's National Archive, an amazing document, I forget it runs to about 150 pages, detailed description of exactly how this was to be done. But the Chiefs of Staff, they used the word "hazardous" twenty-three times to describe it because they said, "If the Russians want general war, they are in a position to have it." They knew that the Red Army was incomparably stronger than the Western Allied armies, and of course, they also knew that the British and American armies, that their soldiers had the slightest desire to fight the Russians. They'd been told the Russians were heroes for the last four years. So the whole idea was obviously absurd. But the "Unthinkable" plan, which is one of the most riveting postscripts of the Second World War, that it was a reflection of how absolutely appalled Churchill felt by the spectacle of the Soviet Union coming out of the war having seized Eastern Europe.

Stalin was always determined that all the countries that he occupied with the Red Army would become, somehow, become Soviet satellite states. And he said, "You know, whatever we discuss with the Westerners, the old rule will be true: Whoever has their army there will install their own system." And that's what happened. So very quickly, he installed a system through all those countries: Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Yugoslavia. First, all became People's Democracies. Later, there was a rift with Tito in Yugoslavia, but basically, he remained in control of this kind of huge part of Eastern Europe.

In 1946, Churchill would voice his concerns publicly with his famous Iron Curtain Speech. "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe: Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest, and Sofia. All these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere."

One of the key moments in the postwar period came in the spring of 1946, when Winston Churchill, no longer Prime Minister at this point, traveled to America. And with President Truman, he went to Fulton, Missouri, and made his famous Iron Curtain Speech. He says, "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended over Europe." Now, remember, at this time, the Western Allies wanted to try and retain their alliance with Stalin. They were hoping that this military alliance that had worked so well during the war could be continued into this post-war period. But Churchill realizes that everything has changed, that Stalin is no longer a reliable ally. And so he makes this speech. It's an explosive speech. It sends shockwaves around the world because Truman, Attlee, and England, they're trying to maintain this alliance, and Churchill has effectively lobbed a stick of dynamite into this.

Well, Churchill's speech acknowledged what was already happening. Communist governments were taking over in one country after another. There was a lot of suspicion between the East and the West. So the Cold War didn't begin all at once. It was a series of maneuvers and then responses. A big factor in the hardening of the Cold War was the Marshall Plan, inaugurated by the United States, which pledged millions and millions of dollars to rebuild Europe. They offered Marshall Plan aid to the Eastern European countries as a way to entice them to come over to the side of the West, but also knowing that Stalin wouldn't let them accept that. So it was, Stalin saw the Marshall Plan as a direct attack on the autonomy of the Soviet Union, and that led to further repercussions: the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in response, then the Warsaw Pact alliance in response to that. So there was a gradual closing down of contacts between East and West, and a gradual increase in fear and suspicion.

The Soviet Union would launch the Molotov Plan as a response to the Marshall Plan, and propaganda films were dispersed in retaliation to the actions of the United States. "In Washington, the Marshall Plan is announced. An aid program for the world? No! For America's capitalist Truman's new budget: two and a half billion for social welfare, twenty-one billion for armaments. Economic and political enslavement of foreign countries, hunger and unemployment in their own country. That's the real Marshall Plan. The Stock Exchange, the headquarters of the true masters of America. Here sit the Americans who run the opinion factories."

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"Well, the next thing is to decide whether to make war on the Allies. And they have the atom bomb, and he has not. And so the most important thing is to get an atom bomb." Barrier supervised the atom project brilliantly, absolutely brilliantly. It's one of the most extraordinary things. He found all the materials in Germany, the bismuth, the uranium that he needed, got it all shipped. He built special cities to build it in. He gave the scientists luxurious villas, and there was a little book in which the rewards were listed if the atom bomb worked. What they would get: a nice car, a house, country cottage, and so on. And the punishment they would get if it didn't work: shooting. So there was a great reason to get that atomic bomb working, and it did. And once he had the atomic bomb, then the question was what to do next. And perhaps fortunately for us, the Chinese Revolution happened. And for Stalin, it was more important to help that and start the Korean War than to attack the West again. But certainly, in his mind, was "Why stop at Berlin? Why not go to the Atlantic?"

The battle lines of the Cold War that was developing across the globe took another dramatic turn when the Communists under Mao Zedong were finally victorious in the Chinese Civil War. Now, two of the world's great former empires were under communist rule, and the first true proxy battle of the Cold War would take place in Korea.

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"There is no margin for error when the chips are down. When the bullets and projectiles that fly overhead are real. A situation soon to come." In the summer of 1950, thousands of miles away, on the other side of the Pacific, trouble was being fermented. North Koreans, plotted by the Communists, were massing strength for a war against the democratic government of Korea, a war which threatened the peace of all nations.

1953 would prove a pivotal year. The Korean War would end in a stalemate, and Joseph Stalin's rule over the Soviet Union came to a dramatic close. On the 5th of March 1953, the Soviet Union announced that its leader, Joseph Stalin, had died. "Stalin is dead." The Kremlin's cold stone walls, the eerie face of Moscow, a howling wind and snow adding to the somber picture, is the description accompanying the announcement that the most powerful dictator in history has come to the inevitable end.

The scramble for power is the next chapter. There were no immediate indications of who would succeed Stalin. Molotov or Malenkov, their names fitted into the pattern of the struggle for Stalin's mantle, as did the name of Beria. As this newsreel went to print, the word had not yet come from Moscow, but Stalin's life was history. Intrigue, ruthless ambition, absolute power. Rather like with Lenin, there was no kind of obvious successor to Stalin, and Stalin, like Lenin, believed he was indispensable and no one could succeed him. And that was, to a certain extent, true, because just as there was never another Lenin, there was never another Stalin. But what he left behind were a bunch of terrified apparatchiks who were used to being under Stalin's thumb. The leading successor, it seemed, was going to be Malenkov, who was a rather fat, young, and ruthless apparatchik who served Stalin and done some a lot of dirty work. Khrushchev was much more dynamic, and no one thought he would succeed Stalin, least of all Stalin, because he was coarse, semi-literate, a ruffian, badly educated, and therefore could never be an ideologist. But it didn't matter, because he seized power, and he destroyed the really the most powerful person in the government after Stalin's death, who was Lavrentiy Beria, long-serving secret police chief and overseer of the nuclear project to get a nuclear bomb, which he'd successfully done. So he arrested him, had him shot, had all his people shot, and really ended the period of kind of brazen terror in the leadership. So there was a competition. Khrushchev was one of these people who appeared to be a clown, and one of the reasons that Stalin liked him. He posed no threat. He did as he was told. He was a fellow student of Stalin's wife. He said all the right things, he did all the right things in the war. He was quite effective. He only put one foot wrong. His son was going to be executed for shooting another officer, but managed to fly a plane into Germany in time, was captured, and got back into Russia by escaping. And Khrushchev went on his knees to Stalin and said, "Spare my son." And Stalin refused. I don't think Khrushchev ever forgave Stalin for the shooting of his son, and that may be one of the motives for his anti-Stalin speech. It may be personal. But anyway, that 20th Party Congress, which shook the entire communist world when they admitted that Stalin was a criminal and they themselves had all danced to his tune, that was a very brave thing to do. But it did actually establish Khrushchev in power because it meant he could get rid of his enemies. He didn't shoot them. Molotov was made ambassador to Outer Mongolia. Malinov, I think, was put in charge of an electric power station in Siberia. Not very nice punishments, but better than death, I suppose.

Nikita Khrushchev's shocking 1956 speech, in which he denounced the cult of personality that had formed around Stalin, would be a major contributor to the Sino-Soviet split. But although relations with the other great communist world power were now soured, Khrushchev would also soon earn major political victories for the Soviet Union. And on October 4th, 1957, a world-stirring event took place. A man-made celestial body, for the first time in history, overcame terrestrial gravity and flew into space.

During the early to mid-50s, the Americans had been developing their space program, and they announced that they were soon to launch a satellite into space. This was a huge moment and a huge triumph. But what did the Soviets do? They had been developing their own satellite as well, and they got their first. This was Khrushchev's great triumph: to launch Sputnik before the Americans. It was a public relations coup.

The space race was one example of a great Soviet success story. The economy was improving after the war, but it wasn't running on all cylinders at this time. But the space race began as a quasi arms race, knowing that the Americans were trying to build rockets. The Soviet Union mobilized all of its resources into launching a satellite and then to launching a man into space, so that they could be the first. So when they were able to mobilize all resources toward this one goal, and they had brilliant scientists, they also had scientists who had been Germans who had been gone over to the Soviet Union. They had tremendous brainpower and tremendous technological capability, and with all the resources at their disposal, they were able to be the first into space.

The launch of the Sputnik satellite generated frenzied attention around the world. But at the same time, an arms race was in full effect, and acts of espionage were at extraordinary levels on both sides. A crisis point was reached when pilot Francis Gary Powers took off from Peshawar in Pakistan in 1960, and his U-2 spy plane was brought down by Soviet air defenses. Secret reconnaissance of Russia by high-flying American U-2 jets ended when one was downed deep in Soviet territory. Its pilot, Francis Powers, was made the subject of a showcase trial. Powers' family was in the courtroom as Russia began massive exploitation of this propaganda windfall. Powers' conviction was inevitable, and the U-2 affair became Khrushchev's pretext to torpedo the Paris Summit conference.

So in September of 1959, Khrushchev had met Eisenhower at Camp David in America, and the two men had agreed to meet again in Paris in the following spring, and this was due to go ahead. But something intervened in the meantime, something that caused a crisis in relations between the Soviet Union and the United States, and this is the shooting down of a U-2 spy plane piloted by Gary Powers. Khrushchev gave a personal order to his air defenses to shoot down an American U-2 spy plane over Soviet airspace. For three or four years, American planes had been intruding over Russian airspace freely, very high altitude, and the Russians had no fighters or missiles that could reach them. By 1960, they did. And he thought, and who can blame him, that for the Americans to send a spy plane flying over their airspace on May 1st, May Day, the most sacred day in the Soviet calendar, to fly over his airspace was a deliberate insult. And so he gave the order to shoot it down.

Khrushchev played his cards very skillfully and ruthlessly. Initially, he announced the shooting down of the plane, but he did not admit that he captured its pilot, Major Gary Powers. And so the Americans got themselves deeper and deeper into a tissue of lies about this being a weather plane and so on and so forth. And only two days later, Khrushchev revealed that they had Major Gary Powers and announced triumphantly to the world, "And our cameras are better than the American cameras that we found on the U-2." So the humiliation was terrific. This throws relations between the two countries into absolute crisis. Khrushchev storms off back to Moscow. He won't have anything more to do with these talks, and he cancels the intended visit of Eisenhower to Moscow. Eisenhower is very disappointed. He was really looking forward to going, but this is cancelled, and relations between the two countries descend once more into crisis.

The U-2 incident was eventually resolved by an exchange of Gary Powers for a Soviet spy named Rudolf Abel, who'd been captured in the United States. The technological war would continue, though, and the Soviets struck another victory when they launched the first man into space in 1961: Yuri Gagarin.

The space race became an incredibly public competition between the two superpowers as to who could display their technology, their sophistication, their ambition in a new realm, space. And that was really what the space race was about, and why both countries put massive amounts into sending people into space and competing in that way. And of course, you know, the Soviet propaganda machine made all the cosmonauts into massive heroes, just as the Western American propaganda machine made their astronauts into huge heroes. And I certainly think for a while, the public was pretty fascinated, probably in both worlds. Gagarin was an ace pilot, and he was very well-trained, and he was an extraordinarily fearless man, and he became like a film star idol, an international thing. So the Gagarin squares are not only in Russia, but you find them all over Africa. It had an enormous effect on the American psyche, of course, again a triumph for the Soviet Union. It just demonstrates their capabilities, what they've achieved in this space program, and it's a humiliation for the Americans, who publicly congratulate the Soviets, but in private, they're seething. What do they do? One of the first things they do is they form NASA. They are determined to regain the upper hand in the space race.

"The achievement by the USSR of orbiting a man and returning him safely to ground is an outstanding technical accomplishment. We congratulate the Soviet scientists and engineers who made this feat possible. The exploration of our solar system is an ambition which we, all mankind, share with the Soviet Union, and this is an important step toward that goal. Our own Mercury man-in-space program is directed toward that same end."

The end of the 1950s and the beginning of the new decade seemed at first to be an era of unbridled success for the Soviet Union, with their dramatic lead in the space race. But huge crises in both Europe and North America were just over the horizon. The early 1960s would prove to be the height of Cold War tensions, both in Europe and in the US. A communist revolution had taken place just off America's borders in Cuba, and the Bay of Pigs invasion, intended to overthrow this new government of Fidel Castro, had failed. And in Berlin, where the Allies had converged after their victory in World War II, the Iron Curtain was becoming a literal wall.

Khrushchev exercised absolute control over the Eastern bloc, but at the same time, he was very susceptible to pressure. And one must remember, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, first of all, China was ascendant as a rival for the leadership of the socialist world. More and more, especially in the early 1960s, the Chinese, Mao, were publicly denouncing Khrushchev as betraying socialism. So he had that pressure. And he also had pressure, for example, from the East German leadership, who were constantly urging him to take a much tougher line with the West. One of the key troubles in East Germany in the late 50s and the very early 60s was the flood of East Germans who were crossing the border into West Germany. And this had as its nexus, was taking place in Berlin, where it was relatively easy for East Germans who wanted to move on, who wanted to get on in life, to cross the frontier. Khrushchev saw this as a very real problem. Several million Germans had poured over into West Germany, leaving the East German state. And so what did he do? He sanctioned Walter Ulbricht, the leader of East Germany, to build the Berlin Wall. This effectively put a stop to the massive immigration taking place from East Germany into the West, but it also was a PR disaster. It did not look good to have to build a wall to keep your own people in.

"East Germans don't seem to have guards enough to plug every hole. When a soldier's attention is diverted by others, a hole is cut in the barbed wire."

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Not long after the Berlin Wall was constructed, another flashpoint in the Cold War emerged when it was revealed to the world that the Soviet Union had placed nuclear weapons on the territory of newly communist Cuba. The world watched with bated breath as the two superpowers faced off.

The Cuban Missile Crisis is a hugely complicated episode, and historians are still uncovering archives and trying to understand what exactly happened. I think Castro played an important role in this. At least, Khrushchev blames Castro for getting him into sending missiles to protect Cuba against another United States invasion. The Soviet Union miscalculated the United States' response to the presence of these missiles. They didn't realize that they had been found out. So there was a real danger during these two weeks in October that the world would go up in a nuclear war because of this tension. The greatest crisis between the Soviet Union and the United States, and indeed, I think, one of the great crises of the entire Cold War. This was sparked by America placing missiles, its own missiles, on Italian and Turkish soil. In retaliation, Khrushchev wanted to replace Soviet missiles on Cuban territory, very close to the United States. Thus began a standoff. Kennedy said that this was totally unacceptable to have these missiles so close to the United States. Khrushchev said it was totally unacceptable for the Americans to have missiles on Italian and Turkish territory. The world at this point is in deep crisis. We are very, very close to a nuclear war being declared, and it is only through wiser counsel, wiser heads prevail, a deal is done between the two powers that enables them to back down.

Khrushchev saw the Cuban Missile Crisis as a way to break the impasse that he felt, the sort of stagnation that he felt was taking place in the rivalry between the two superpowers. He thought that if he needed to do something to up the ante, and he'd convinced himself that taking a risk, a gamble, would turn the whole course of the Cold War. And he'd seen a hint of it when in 1956, during the Suez Crisis, he'd threatened that if Britain, France, and Israel didn't withdraw from Egypt, he would use nuclear weapons. And it's a moment that's often forgotten. And America had forced them to withdraw. So he saw that as evidence that nuclear brinksmanship really worked. And so what better way to break the impasse and to overcome American power and wealth than to place weapons right in America's backyard and to defend a new fraternal revolution in Cuba? And so that's why he did it. He was also a member, you know, one of the World War II generation, like all the Soviet leaders, and they were actually very, very afraid of war. They'd seen what war did, even conventional war. And so, you know, he thought he'd win that point.

"Call on the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union on a point of order."

[Applause]

"Why then this jerk, this stooge of American imperialism, here, who is speaking before you? He is touching upon questions which are obviously not procedural ones. And the President, who is sympathizing with these colonialists and colonial domination, obviously is not stopping him."

He had a quality of an act. I'm taking off your shoe and banging it in the United Nations. It does get attention. And in the Cuban Missile Crisis, I think he won. It was very cunning, very risky, but we were more frightened than they were. I remember I was a student at the time, and I seriously thought in Cambridge, this might be my last day on Earth. With the Missile Crisis and Kennedy holding out, but in fact, Khrushchev had a bargaining chip, and he was willing to take those armed rockets away if America withdrew its rockets from Turkey. That wasn't made public at the time, but it's clear there was a bargain, and the Soviet Union won it. They had no atomic weapons near their borders as a result. That was one of Khrushchev's great achievements. It was very risky, but I don't think anyone in Russia held it against him.

And despite all these expensive intelligence services in the West, nobody fully understood that when Khrushchev threatened to bury us all, when Khrushchev was telling Western ambassadors that he'd earmarked twenty nuclear weapons for Britain, and he was confident that would be enough, that all of this, it was boasting of an almost deranged kind. And Khrushchev thought he was playing a brilliant hand. And Khrushchev thought, rightly, that he was frightening the West. But what he failed to see was that he very, very nearly overdid it, because he frightened the West too much.

They retreat to Moscow. Russian ships steam out from Cuban ports with their decks loaded with missiles. The Soviets are withdrawing under pressure from the new world. It's one of the last chapters in the offensive threat from Cuba that led the United States to throw a quarantine around that island and forced the Russians to dismantle their medium-range rocket installations. U.S. planes and picket ships have counted forty-two rockets on Russian-bound ships, but still unresolved is the question of the jet bombers in Cuba. Castro claims they belong to him and that he will not give them up. The U.S. insists the Russians must remove them before the quarantine will be lifted.

"The headlines in the Soviet newspapers said the Soviet Union has saved the world by the deal that it made with the United States. So they took all the credit for easing this tension, and that's what the Soviet readers saw. That this was a victory for Soviet diplomacy."

"The following is the text of President Kennedy's statement of noon: I welcome Chairman Khrushchev's statesmanlike decision to stop building bases in Cuba, dismantling offensive weapons, returning them to the Soviet Union under UN verification. This is an important and constructive contribution to peace."

Both the U.S. President John F. Kennedy and the First Secretary of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, would not have much longer in office after the de-escalation of tensions from the Cuban Missile Crisis. JFK was infamously assassinated in November 1963, and Khrushchev would be maneuvered from power the following year. It was soon to be the era of Leonid Brezhnev in the Soviet Union.

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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 Bolshevik Revolution, was a country in absolute turmoil, a brutal and bloody clash of arms trying to wipe out this new regime before it could 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's one of those amazing figures who really are decisive in history. One's got to 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. 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. All of us who were then young, 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 Gagarin, 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.

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In October 1964, Nikita Khrushchev was about to be removed from power. Whilst on vacation in Pitsunda on the Black Sea, he grew suspicious of activities developing in Moscow and he immediately flew back to the capital city. Upon arrival, he was forced to step down as leader of the Soviet Union.

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The official Russian announcement said he resigned. The red say ill health prompted Khrushchev to step down. Observers say that his abortive feud with Red China that broke apart the front of monolithic communism was the real reason. A man who clawed and fought his way to the top, wooed leaders like Nasser of the neutralist nations. Khrushchev probably made his greatest impact on a strangely fascinated world when he came to the United Nations assembly in 1960 and attempted to purge Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld. He piled shock upon shock when he and the Soviet delegation rudely interrupted speeches by Western delegates.

[Applause]

The Soviet leadership overthrew Khrushchev. They called him in and they denounced him and they sacked him from all his positions. And the reason they did it was because of really because of his kind of arrogance, his desperation, his completely ill-thought-out adventure. What sealed Khrushchev's fate was his interference with agriculture and his hair-brained scheme to imitate the Americans by growing lots of maize, and in order to do that, wrecking existing crops. So there were serious food shortages in the shops and serious discontent. That was more important to the party than anything else. There had already been a number of riots by workers who were dissatisfied, and that was the decision to get rid of him. Forces began to conspire against him, and leading those forces was Leonid Brezhnev, who seized that maybe now is the moment to act, that maybe this is the moment where he can get his hands on the levers of power. The crowds that once cheered Khrushchev wildly were left in the dark as to just what went on when the Central Committee met to act on his retirement and to name Leonid Brezhnev as the new leader of the party. By Alexei Kosygin took the job of Premier. Brezhnev has lately been considered Khrushchev's heir apparent, but the question remains as to whether he had anything to do with hurrying his boss's departure. Khrushchev is on holiday. He's summoned back to Moscow, and the Politburo, led by Brezhnev, denounce Khrushchev. They criticize him for everything he's done, and they say they want him to step down from power. This will not be a coup quite as brutally as Stalin might have done it. He's allowed to resign, but it is the end of Khrushchev's reign of power. Now Leonid Brezhnev is the man at the helm. You know, they voted him out. They didn't execute him. They didn't imprison him. They just retired him. In the meeting, he said, "You know, whatever else happens, my one achievement has been that no one's going to be shot now. I'm just going to retire." And so it happened, and Brezhnev became the next leader.

Brezhnev was a pair of safe hands, a man with a good military record. He just wanted to keep the apparatus going as it had in the past, to appoint suitable First Secretaries and heads of Soviets and so on. And he allowed a fair amount of corruption. His own family was horrifically corrupt. His daughter Galina was a nightmare, but that corruption was a sort of lubrication for the party. And under Brezhnev, everything had a price. Brezhnev is known among Western diplomats as the "Red and the Gray Fox," a man who is expected to continue peaceful coexistence with the West while trying to heal the breach with China.

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It had been indicated that Brezhnev would be Khrushchev's successor on his death, but no spectre of death or disgrace marred the scene of Khrushchev's 70th birthday party last spring. He seemed to and the world, the communist sphere at his feet, and his power over 220 million Soviet citizens seemed impregnable. Now, for better or worse, the Khrushchev era has come to a close. Brezhnev was a generation younger than Khrushchev, and he had been a real beneficiary of Soviet higher education, of Soviet social mobility. So born in a working-class family, he got a degree in engineering and became a practicing engineer in the 1930s, joined the Communist Party, served in the military as a party official. So he had some practical knowledge of the economy, and he wasn't ideological the way the early Bolsheviks had been. The party was the Soviet Union was the only thing that he knew. So he had worked his way up into the party. You can see his face in the Great Kitchen Debate between Khrushchev and Nixon. Brezhnev is standing there, just behind Khrushchev, so he was a trusty aide at the time, and so was one of the leaders at the time of Khrushchev's dismissal, along with Alexei Kosygin. The two of them came to power together. Brezhnev soon eclipsed Kosygin, but initially, it was a dual leadership. And he was a bluff, good-natured, pleasure-loving, quite capable apparatchik who'd been chosen by Stalin and promoted, who'd played a part in the arrest of Beria, and served Khrushchev quite loyally until the end. But it gradually became a stagnant period for the Soviet Union. No reforms were really succeeded, and the Soviet Union needed reform. Unlike Khrushchev, who'd attempted to decentralize the economy, to give more power to the regions, Brezhnev wanted to do exactly the opposite. He was much more in the mold of Stalin. He wanted to bring everything back to the center, to bring power back to Moscow, and to bring power back to himself. One can see at this point, the Soviet Union is reverting much more to the model that had been created by Joseph Stalin. The reign has seen to be, as one historian has called it, "the era of stagnation." He made a little deal with the Soviet people. He promised them economic prosperity, which included, because the Communist economy was so inefficient, included increasing tolerance for a shadow economy, for some black marketing, some private enterprise. The government turned a blind eye to that in exchange for political loyalty, and most of the people made this bargain and agreed not to be in opposition to the government.

What Brezhnev wanted to achieve was parity in terms of weapons between the Soviet Union and America, and he begins injecting vast sums of money into military expenditure. At one point, some 12% of GDP is being spent on the missile program inside the Soviet Union. Remarkably, he does achieve parity by the 70s. The Soviet Union has an equivalent number of warheads to the United States. The world thinks that it's business as usual, and it's just a change of leader. In the eyes of the world, the Cold War continued unchanged. But what we could not see then, but we can see now, is that all this time, the enormous strain upon the Soviet economy of maintaining this empire and the stupendous armed forces at colossal cost, that all the time the Soviet Union is creaking and cracking under these enormous strains.

"Since 1954, every American president has offered support to the people of South Vietnam. We have helped to build, and we have helped to defend. Thus, over many years, we have made a national pledge to help South Vietnam defend its independence, and I intend to keep that promise."

In 1965, President Lyndon Baines Johnson followed up on his promise and ordered U.S. troops to intervene directly in Vietnam. One of the great proxy battles of the Cold War had begun.

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The Vietnam War affected the Soviet Union more in terms of the Soviet Union's relations with China than just with the United States. So that the Vietnam War was kind of a triangular communist enterprise between China, the North Vietnamese, and the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union really didn't want the North Vietnamese to invade the South because that was going to destabilize the region, but they felt it was the Chinese who were urging them on. So initially, the Soviet Union was not vocally opposed to the invasion of Vietnam. But once it happened, they were certainly willing to use the propaganda points of an imperialist war being waged by the United States in Vietnam.

With the Vietnam War, all he had to do was supply missiles and laugh as the Americans lost it, because he knew perfectly well that there was no way in which you could win a war when you're supporting a corrupt regime in the South and you had a dedicated regime in the North which had armaments from the Soviet Union, armaments from China, and didn't care how many people it lost. Vietnam was a strange phenomenon because, you know, America poured in forces there and was never actually defeated, but it lost the will to win, which is always decisive in a war. Partly it was a Vietnamese nationalistic uprising against foreign control that started against the French and continued against the Americans and their regime in the South. Partly it was a proxy war between the superpowers. American troops were there, Russian advisors armed the Vietnamese in massive quantities, but the Vietnamese were thought by the Americans to be completely under Soviet control. But in fact, they fought the war they wanted to fight and were quite recalcitrant in taking orders from the Kremlin. But, you know, it was America's first great humiliation.

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But just as America was becoming embroiled in Vietnam, the Soviet Union was facing its own battle in Europe. In the 1950s, uprisings had been crushed in Poland and Hungary, but a new crisis was emerging in Czechoslovakia under the rule of Alexander Dubček. The Prague Spring had begun.

The Prague Spring was an attempt in Czechoslovakia by Czechoslovak communist leaders to find a different path towards communism. They called it "socialism with a human face." And in fact, all the East European countries were somewhat different from one another and not all following a lockstep to the party line. So certain deviations were allowed. But Brezhnev felt that there was a danger to socialism itself by these reforms in Czechoslovakia. And so he invoked what became known as the Brezhnev Doctrine: that any threat to socialist power in one socialist country should be combatted by all of them. Another version of the Brezhnev Doctrine is what we have: "What we hold." And so, rather than let the reformed Communists succeed in Czechoslovakia, he created the pretense to send Warsaw Pact troops into the country to put down this reform.

"Russia's purpose in continuing to keep such large, powerful, and mobile forces in Czechoslovakia has been, in effect, to put a pistol to Mr. Dubček's head. There is plenty of evidence that for his own part, Mr. Dubček intends to go on resisting the pressures and is prepared, if necessary, to get his head shot off. But there is now a question mark over the continuing loyalty of enough members of Czechoslovakia's Communist Party's Presidium to give Mr. Dubček the support he needs to say no to the Russians or the demands they will make when the talks begin."

The Prague Spring, this uprising in Prague against Soviet rule, is a real challenge for Brezhnev. How on earth is he going to deal with this? His initial response is to try and do a deal with Alexander Dubček, but it quickly becomes apparent that this is impossible, and under pressure from the Politburo, he decides to send in the tanks and send in the troops. And then you have the brutal crushing of this uprising, in which thousands of Soviet soldiers will crush and fight against Dubček's civilians. Never again in the Cold War did either the Soviet Union or the United States attempt to interfere in each other's recognized spheres of influence. The Americans, who'd already stood by amid terrible bloodbaths in the Polish shipyards, amid the 1956 Hungarian Uprising, 1968, when was the Uprising in Prague, the Prague Spring, that once again the Americans did nothing, and the Russians were left free to crush that. Whereas again, while all that was going on in Vietnam, although of course the Soviet Union provided terrific material aid to Vietnam, at no time did the Soviet Union think of directly intervening in the Vietnam War. So never again was there such a dangerous moment when either side attempted to infringe each other's spheres of influence.

The first two and a half decades of the Cold War had been filled with revolutionary uprisings and proxy battles all across the globe. But as the 1970s began, a surprising period of détente emerged, where more direct relations between the Western world and the Communist world were established. In China, with Zhou Enlai, President Nixon begins a dialogue which marks an historic change in American policy. A political realist, the President knows that communication with China is indispensable to his grand design. The result of long, careful planning, of a vision for peace born long ago. The thrust for peace leads to the Soviet Union. The President will not be dissuaded by the days of hard negotiation ahead. The opportunity to reduce world tension is at hand, and he achieves a breakthrough with agreements on environment, space, medicine, and a trade pact, creating new jobs for Americans. But most significant of all, a treaty to limit arms.

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With the significant decrease in tensions in the Cold War, Leonid Brezhnev focused on the domestic challenges that faced the Soviet Union. The hallmark, I think, of Brezhnev's economic policies were the five-year plans. He liked these five-year plans. In the early '70s, saw a big increase in the consumer goods that were being produced by the Soviet Union. Something of an economic miracle took place in these years, and even the West were surprised at how the Soviet economy was performing. But it wouldn't last. The Soviet economy was too reliant on natural resources, on oil, on gas, and the whole thing would begin to stagnate. And we're soon going to enter what Gorbachev would later call the era of stagnation. So there was certainly stagnation politically in the Soviet Union under Brezhnev. Fewer and fewer freedoms were allowed. Writers were censored. People self-censored themselves rather than risk getting into trouble. The economy actually was not so stagnant and continued to grow. We think of the Brezhnev period as a period where the Soviet consumer public actually came of age. People were aware of fashion and able to choose what they wanted to buy. But overall, there was a sense that it wasn't progressing as fast as it could, and this was reinforced by the stability of the leadership, who were getting older and older, and not really allowing any new blood to come in. So there was a sense that the whole thing was grinding to a slow halt. There were all sorts of holes in the system that made it possible to live under Brezhnev. So although it was stagnation, the country made no big progress in GDP or in facilities, there were loopholes. And while the Kremlin looked unchanged, and in the eyes of the world, some people thought the Cold War was going to go on indefinitely, some people still thought that the Soviet Union might emerge as the economic victor. So self-confidence in the West was not nearly as high as one might expect, and it is quite extraordinary that were

All those expensive intelligence services in Britain, in the United States, and everywhere else that the understanding of the fundamental weakness of the Soviet Union, which was getting worse and worse all the time, and that far from the danger to the West, Western travel, that the gap between the economic attainments of the West and the Soviet Union is widening relentlessly. Um, and yet none of this was understood in the West at the time.

In 1979, after a long period of detente tensions in the Cold War, suddenly rose once again with the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan. Brezhnev was very worried that the Soviet Union was losing its influence in the countries on the edge of its borders, and one of these was Afghanistan. The communist government of Afghanistan was under withering attack from the Afghan Mujahideen, and so Brezhnev decides to send in Soviet troops and tanks and forces to try and prop up this communist regime.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was part of the Soviet effort to project itself as an alternative to capitalism, uh, in the eyes of the Third World. So they were always trying to promote liberation movements, independence movements. 1978, a communist government took power in Afghanistan. There was internal fighting, the first government was overthrown, a second communist government came to power. They appealed to the Soviet Union for help against their enemies, uh, and so the Soviet Union agreed to send in troops to help keep them in power.

The plan was really controlled or proposed by Andropov, who was the head of the KGB and was the most clever and interesting person in the leadership, and really the most talented. He believed it could be done easily just by chopping off the head of the leader who was a communist who'd turned against Brezhnev's, uh, the Kremlin's own candidate, executed him and taken power. They didn't trust this guy who was called Hafizullah Amin, and so they began to fear that Amin would turn against them and actually embrace the Americans or the Chinese. And so, you know, they decided to replace him. And so in the end, they sent in special forces with an army.

What they didn't expect was a massive Islamist rebellion, uh, that would be backed by the Americans. Many people compare the Soviet engagement in Afghanistan with the United States in Vietnam. They got sucked in, uh, without realizing what they were getting into, without an exit strategy. Many, many young Soviet men died, led rise to a movement among mothers trying to, uh, stop men from being drafted. So it, it severely weakened the government, uh, in the eyes of its own population.

Afghanistan was one of the decisive strategic mistakes of the last phase of the Soviet Union before its collapse, and it was the same story as with a lot of American wars that they got nowhere and they were made fools of by their own clients. Afghanistan and their casualties were appalling, and the bungling, the military bungling was fantastic. But the United States could afford its mistakes in the Cold War, and the Soviet Union couldn't. So you had this extraordinary situation there as this terrible 10-year war went on, and there's this drain of casualties which was desperately unpopular at home because people saw these body bags coming home and coming home.

And as the Americans and the CIA, of course, who were arming the Mujahideen, the resistance movement, that the price that here was the Soviet Union already creaking and groaning and on the edge of, on the edge of an abyss. And you can argue that it was Afghanistan that pushed it over the edge. That was a major mistake. Russians in the 19th century knew very well, although they took over most of Central Asia and they would have liked to take over British India, that you leave Afghanistan alone. Nobody has ever successfully dealt with Afghanistan since Alexander the Great invaded it. Everyone has had to retreat. Even the Mongols couldn't stick it. Uh, the British Army in the 1840s, which just had one blind person staggering out, the rest of the army dead, was an example. And the Russians knew this, and, uh, yet that was a major mistake to think that they could somehow take it over.

Three years into what would be a near decade-long conflict in Afghanistan, the Soviet Union would lose its longtime leader, Leonid Brezhnev. Brezhnev dies, and he's succeeded by Yuri Andropov, his former head of the KGB, who'd been so ruthless in crushing internal dissent. But Andropov is simply ill-equipped to deal with the financial crisis that the Soviet Union is facing. Brezhnev's successor was Andropov, who he chose himself, but he himself was already too ill from kidney failure to really do the reforms that were necessary now to make industry in the economy work, to rethink the Soviet communist system and to reinvigorate it. And he very quickly deteriorated.

His successor should have been Gorbachev, who was the young and intelligent and up-and-coming younger leader and who was a protégé of Andropov. But instead, Chernenko, who once had been an executioner for Stalin and really was a sort of known as "The Silent One," he already never said anything, he was just a sort of non-entity. He too was dying. So he came to leadership for a very short period, uh, and the joke at the time, uh, because both Brezhnev and Chernenko were not really mobile, Brezhnev was seen to be immobile and Chernenko seemed to be moving around, so they said, "The trouble with Brezhnev was he was running on batteries, but Chernenko had transistors, uh, and could get around." People believed that that Chernenko would be giving broadcasts from his office, but it was really a hospital room made up to look like an administrative office.

The manner of the collapse of the Soviet Union was extraordinary in that, um, it's almost as if the physical collapses of successful leaders mirrored the collapse of the whole edifice. And all these very old, charred, discredited men in the Kremlin, one by one, attempting to seize the reins of power and then proving completely unable to exercise them and collapsing and being removed to their tombs. Um, and it was symbolic. Konstantin Chernenko, who is so old, so infirm, and so almost senile that when he gives a eulogy at Andropov's funeral, he can hardly speak the words. It's clear he's not going to last long, and within another year, he's also dead.

And this is the moment of change. This is the moment where a young, younger man, Mikhail Gorbachev, comes to power on a promise to transform the Soviet Union. Gorbachev was an extraordinary man to have reached the summits of power in the Kremlin that he was capable of recognizing failure, of recognizing what had gone wrong, or recognizing the need for radical change, whereas for years the Soviet Union had been governed by people who were still clinging desperately to the past and struggling at all cost to avoid the humiliation of, um, public defeat.

Gorbachev, of course, it comes from the Russian word "gorba," which means bent. And the Russian proverb is that "only the grave will straighten the bent." So people laughed when he came in with a name like that. His idea was that, as everyone was being dishonest, even he couldn't find out the truth, you had to release the journalism, let the newspapers expose things. And he allowed complaints and scandals to be aired on newspapers and then on television and so on. So people found out more about what was actually happening in the country, and the public came around to his side when it became clear that some sort of campaign was being mounted against the corrupt and the rich.

And of course, what wrecked it was the Chernobyl accident on the 26th of April 1986. The Chernobyl nuclear power plant went into meltdown, and an enormous cloud of radioactive contamination was released. Well, Chernobyl happened early on in Gorbachev's period of rule, and was a key mistake in that period because when it happened, they reverted to their old habits of secrecy and denial, which led to much greater loss of life and more damage than otherwise would have been necessary. And also created more suspicion toward the Soviet Union among Western Europeans who were disposed to be think positively. This was a period of Eurocommunism and of Germany's Ostpolitik, trying to make deals with the Soviet Union, and this was kind of a throwback to the bad old days. So it was a domestic disaster, an international disaster in health terms, but also a very bad signal for what the Soviet Union was becoming.

The White House says Mr. Reagan's attempts to discuss the situation with Mr. Gorbachev personally have been ignored by the Kremlin for four days. Not very much. They're usually a little close-mouthed about reception. Would you rather hear more from Mr. Gorbachev? Yes, I think it would be helpful. Gorbachev had spoken of glasnost, he'd spoken of openness, of a more open media. And the first instinct is to go back to the old Soviet way of doing things, to hide everything, to cover everything up. And this was a disaster because the Western media had already picked up from very early on the increased levels of radiation. They knew something disastrous had happened at this nuclear reactor. But Gorbachev tries to hide it, and this proved the limits of his policy of glasnost.

Gorbachev, in the end, used this to his advantage. To him, it was proof that the old system was so dangerous, you could have made half of Russia uninhabitable if those reactors had melted into the ground. The Western Ukraine would be strictly for the animals. It proved to the Russian public there was no point having the traditional secrecy, that you had to have openness. And the very fact that foreigners knew about it, and Russians heard about it from foreign broadcasts, and then they found out.

In 1985, the final leader of the Soviet Union came to power, Mikhail Gorbachev. The name Gorbachev is really synonymous with Perestroika. This was his great idea. He wanted to reform the system. He wanted to bring an element of the markets into the system. He could see that the Soviet economy was simply not functioning. It was moribund. He was going to revitalize it. It was going to be a renaissance to the economy. I think Gorbachev is misunderstood by everyone. Everyone nowadays thinks that he was, in the West anyway, that he was a sort of anti-communist, liberal democrat, rather like one of our leaders. But in fact, it was very different. He was a Leninist. He believed in communism. He believed in the Soviet Union, and he wanted to reform it, to make it stronger, to make it work better, to make it more formidable.

What in fact happened was he had very attractive features in terms of his openness and his smile and his ability to go and walkabouts, and he immediately impressed the Western leaders. But in the Soviet Union himself, he really attempted an insane plethora of reforms that undermined the whole empire. And in some ways, his ambitions were hubristic, if not arrogant. He thought he could do it. He hadn't really thought through the nature of the Soviet Union and the nature of the Leninist system. He tried to reform the economy, the power politics, and ultimately the nature of the Union itself, in other words, the empire, all at the same time. And no one had attempted that before, and with good reason, because each of those reforms was a colossal reform that could have destroyed the Soviet Union in its own.

We can all see today, um, that he was something very remarkable, and he broke with the past. But I remember so well when the first reports of Gorbachev from our correspondents in Moscow, and some imaginative correspondents did see that Gorbachev was something quite new and quite special. I met him, and he was an extraordinary man, and I do hope that history will pay him the tribute that is due because he was the one who broke the mold. But for us who lived almost all our lives in the shadow of the Cold War, it was almost impossible to believe that the whole edifice, the whole structure around which we lived, was suddenly changing, and that the Soviet Union and Russia as we'd known it was suddenly tottering. So we were very slow, some of us and governments, to realize the nature of the change.

Gorbachev wanted an end to the Cold War. He wanted an end to the arms race. But this was very difficult when during Reagan's first term as president of the United States, Reagan spoke of the "evil empire." He was very antagonistic, uh, towards the Soviet Union. But this began to change. I think he saw in Mikhail Gorbachev somebody he could do business with, and they eventually sat down, and they began to discuss the reduction in weaponry. And I think really it was the personal relationship between these two men, and also with Margaret Thatcher and Gorbachev, that it was a coming together of personalities that enabled the Cold War and the arms race to come to an end.

General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall! Not long after Ronald Reagan's famous speech at the Brandenburg Gate, one of the great symbols of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall would finally fall. The Berlin Wall had been a success in the sense that it stopped East Germany becoming depopulated, but it hadn't made it much more prosperous. It had a limited, uh, prosperity because it produced better goods than any other East European country, but even so, the desire to get across that wall was very, very great.

And in fact, when Gorbachev thought about it, he clearly realized there was no enormous advantage to the Soviet Union in having Germany divided. He perhaps made a mistake. He should have insisted that Germany be permanently neutral, never be allowed to join NATO if it was reunited. That would have reassured a lot of people. But it was a way of making Gorbachev extremely popular in Germany. But of course, he didn't realize that he had to be popular at home in Russia. And the problem with Gorbachev is all that he's been adored abroad and led at home. There were people within the party who opposed his reforms. They opposed it because they believed in a different kind of communism, or they opposed it because they were going to lose their positions of privilege.

A lot of backsliding and a lot of opposition. So that's when he decided in 1988 to launch democratization, opening up the Communist Party to elections, hoping that a rejuvenated party would decisively defeat the Old Guard and provide support within the party for his policies of reform. And so starting in 1988, there were elections for party committees, and people started to join the party in droves because suddenly the party was becoming very interesting. You know, important things were being discussed, they were being discussed openly. So there was a real ferment in 1988, 1989, as a result of his democratization.

But unfortunately, it awakened sentiments in Eastern Europe that suddenly the countries of Eastern Europe, East Germany, Poland, Hungary, they sniffed at freedom here. And we began to get unrest, protests against the Soviet Union. And this began in Poland, where we have the first semi-free elections, and we have Solidarity under the charismatic leadership of Lech Wałęsa, with his walrus mustache, storming to victory in this election. This is a huge shock for not just for Poland and the Soviet Union, but for the whole of Eastern Europe. Suddenly a whole new way of doing things becomes apparent. We see the first cracks in the entire Soviet system.

1989 proved to be the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union. Its forces finally left Afghanistan, and political uprisings could not be stopped either among the Warsaw Pact countries or within the Soviet Union itself. The economy completely failed. Gorbachev and the Communist Party lost all authority. And the 15 republics, particularly those that had joined the Soviet Union very late, particularly the Baltic republics, the three Baltics, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, pushed for freedom and for the breakup of the Soviet Union. And in August '91, there was an attempted coup by his own, effectively by his own government, from which he was only rescued by Yeltsin. And that was really the death, the death knell.

Now, the Soviet Union, if you go back to its beginnings, the hopeful replacement of an autocratic Tsar with a democratic socialist republic. And it failed to do that. The question is, did it fail because a socialist economy was inherently incapable of providing prosperity and development for the people, or was it badly run? Was it, did it descend into corruption? It was a strong military force. It was decisive in defeating Hitler, and I think that's today one of the enduring sources of pride for Russians in the Russian Federation is the victory that they had over Hitler, and that became, that happened because of the strong support of the people. But it was also known for its repression, for the numbers of victims, for its inhumanity, and the tremendous costs of this experiment.

The final dissolution of the Soviet Union happened in a forest hunting lodge on the Polish border with a lot of vodka consumed. They recognized it couldn't go on, that they might as well split up and try and remain friends, and then go back to Moscow and announce that the Soviet Union no longer existed. Gorbachev resigned himself to the fact that the Soviet Union was finished. It was no more. On the 25th of December 1991, he resigns as Soviet president and as commander-in-chief. On the following day, the Supreme Soviet votes the Soviet Union out of existence. It will stagger on for a couple more days, but it comes to an end on the 31st of December 1991. The USSR is no more. Broke apart into its constituent parts. Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia had already voted for independence. Georgia became independent. All the 15 Union republics that had been part of the Union, all went their separate ways as independent republics. The Central Asian republics probably didn't really want to be independent, but they really had no alternative because there was no Soviet Union. And so all, all the parts of the machine, if you like, fell to pieces at the same time, simultaneously. And Russia emerged as an independent republic, as did the other 15 republics, the constituent republics of the Soviet Union, which Lenin and Stalin had designed never to become independent, never to secede. Well, now they all became independent at the same time, and the Soviet Union was no more.