About this season
Three years in the making, this comprehensive study of the Soviet dictator blends documentary footage and interviews with experts and surviving witnesses.
Episodes (3)
1. Revolutionary
Aired 13 March 1990
He was hailed as "teacher, leader, favorite friend" and given flowers by adoring children on his 70th birthday in 1949. A former prisoner recalls that upon his death in 1953, "Even in the prison camp they wept." Another man defends his actions as an informer for Stalin. This hour traces Stalin's ascent in Lenin's shadow and his accumulation of power at the expense of his Bolshevik comrades and rivals, whom he outmaneuvered and then consigned to their deaths. The account of how he managed to create a Lenin-Stalin cult despite the famous testament of Lenin that warned against him and recommended his removal as General Secretary of the Communist Party is fascinating for its display of hypocrisy, audacity and ruthlessness.
2. Despot
Aired 20 March 1990
Stalin's reign is one of murder on an immense scale: an estimated 20 million deaths at the hands of the state. Historians tell of the destruction of the peasantry that resulted in a famine in the early 1930s that took the lives of more than 5 million people yet went unreported by most Western observers including George Bernard Shaw, shown here. Forced labor killed millions more.
3. Generalissimo
Aired 27 March 1990
The last years of Stalin's life, from the 1939 non-aggression pact with Germany through the victory of the Red Army in World War II, the takeover of Eastern Europe, and the beginnings of a new purge before his death. He was mourned by millions of those whom he held in subjugation.