Original subtitles

(narrator) No country, no people

suffered so terribly in the war as the Soviet Union.

Nowhere else are the memories of war so alive today,

and so profound.

The German invasion brought about a catastrophe

which it seemed at first no nation could surVive.

ln the siege of Leningrad alone, which lasted for over two years,

more human beings died

than the total war dead of Britain and the United States combined.

Yet it was here that Hitler was broken.

The Russian people faced the possibility that they might perish,

and overcame it.

We are hoping for the victory.

We are quite sure that the victory will come sometime,

and we hoped that our hardships would end.

(narrator) Kharkov, under German occupation, 1942.

Hitler had written in Mein Kampf:

"The colossal empire in the east is ripe for dissolution."

"And the end of Jewish domination in Russia

will also be the end of Russia as a state."

The Soviet system was to be demolished.

But there was more. lt was in Russia that Hitler would find Lebensraum -

new territory for German colonisation.

The Soviet peoples would be treated as mere natives

in a German colonial empire.

Their cities would be Germanised or razed to the ground.

They would be pedlars, backward peasants,

domestic serVants, labourers.

Communists and intellectuals were exterminated.

The least sign of defiance brought instant reprisal.

(speaking Russian)

(mterpreter) The occupiers were harsh, very harsh,

especially in those areas where the partisans were active.

ln the Ukraine, 51 1 villages were burnt down by the Nazis

before the population could escape.

ln one village, Pisk, near Kiev,

which was totally razed to the ground,

babies were thrown into the fire.

(narrator) Before the war,

the regions now occupied by the Germans

had produced nearly three quarters

of the country's coal and iron,

a third of its beef and grain,

almost all its sugar.

By autumn 1941 , the Germans controlled

what had been the industrial and agricultural heart of the Soviet Union.

The invaders found that the Russians had tried to destroy

everything they had to leave behind.

Villages burned, the summer harVest flamed in the fields around them.

By that autumn, the Germans had advanced for 600 miles

over scorched earth.

ln some of the Baltic republics,

which had only been annexed by the Soviet Union a year before,

the Germans were made welcome by local nationalists.

ln parts of the Ukraine,

some of the peasants made the traditional offering of bread and salt.

The bodies of nationalists shot by Soviet security at the last moment

were brought out and carried through the streets.

For a brief moment, it seemed to some that these submerged nations

might become willing partners of the Nazis.

Communists were hunted down.

And in all the places the Nazis occupied,

the round-up of the Jews began.

ln the path of the German, Russia seemed to be crumbling away.

Stalin had the defeated commander of the Western Front and his staff

arrested and shot.

Monuments of Soviet construction, even the Dnieper Dam,

the very symbol of the Five-Year Plans,

had to be blown up and abandoned.

Locomotives were wrecked, though they were needed as never before,

for there now began an evacuation which in the end was to save Russia

and change the course of the war.

1500 factories moved on 18,000 trains with over a million workers

to the safety of eastern Russia and the Urals.

One witness said:

"lt was as if the earth tilted up

and everything human or mechanical rolled from west to east."

(speaking Russian)

(interpreter) There was no factory when we arrived.

There were only storehouses where materials were kept.

We began by emptying the stores and clearing the land around it.

We were working up to 14 hours a day.

(narrator) ln bleak places, lacking food or sleep,

the Russians reconstructed a new war industry beyond the reach of the Nazis.

When we emptied the storehouses,

the machinery arrived.

Where the warehouses used to be,

we built a new factory.

(patriotic Russian song)

(narrator) Unlike the Germans, the Russians, from the first hour,

waged a total war.

Every pair of hands was set to the machines

as the men were draffed into the battles of the west.

War work strained everyone to the heart.

1 1 to 15 hours a day, rations short,

worry about a husband or a son at the front,

exhaustion like a permanent illness.

But for the camera, they wore a cheerful, determined face.

Now the Germans were breaking through to Leningrad,

Russia's second city and capital of the revolution.

(Russian marching song)

The workers were given rifles.

Harking back to the days of revolution,

Leningrad's leaders encouraged the whole city to stand and fight.

Untrained, they marched out to face the panzers

within sight of their own factory chimneys.

The chance to get non-combatants out of Leningrad was missed.

Anyway, most families preferred to stay.

My husband, he got two places on a plane,

and he asked me suddenly to take the child and go with him,

but l refused because l couldn't leave my mother

and his mother, my mother-in-law, here in the besieged city.

So l told him to take the old lady with him

and l remained in Leningrad with my mother and child.

(narrator) ln September, the German ring closed.

Over two and half million people were trapped in the city,

400,000 of them children.

Leningrad's only link with Russia was across Lake Ladoga.

The greatest of all sieges was beginning.

Now Stalin interVened.

Marshal Voroshilov, in command of Leningrad, was sacked.

ln his place was sent Marshal Georgi Zhukov,

who was to become one of the great commanders of the war.

His deputy was the hard and resourceful Andrei Zhdanov,

Leningrad's Communist Party chief.

Leningrad soon felt the new team's determination.

Outside the city,

Zhukov threatened that anyone who retreated further would be shot.

lnside, the security forces hunted down spies and defeatists.

Zhdanov's men ended the wastage of food,

mobilising everybody for the city's defence.

Every major building was mined in case the Germans broke in.

But the German attempt to take Leningrad by storm failed.

(siren)

Berlin ordered: "The Führer has decided to raze the city of Petersburg

from the face of the earth."

"There is no reason for the future existence of this large city."

The Leningraders were to be bombarded and starVed to death.

Day affer day, the bombers came over.

German gunners could see the spires of Leningrad from their lines.

Their shells could strike every district, every street.

Lake Ladoga remained the only gap in the enemy ring.

When it froze, an ice road for supplies was built across its surface.

Trucks fell through the ice or were destroyed by air attack.

The ice road could bring too little in and take too few civilians out

to keep Leningrad from the onset of starVation.

Everything was running out. The trams and buses stopped.

ln the darkness and intense cold of the North Russian winter,

there was no longer heating or electric light.

Workers, half-conscious with hunger,

kept the arms factories turning,

even when shells had torn off the roof.

Tanks of raw, unpainted steel drove out of the factory into the front line.

Bread was now made with sweepings, cattle-cake, sawdust.

People ate soap, linseed oil,

the paste for wallpaper.

Housewives and children

got only four and half ounces of this "bread" a day.

Frozen and silent,

Leningrad refused to die.

The libraries stayed open.

People took inspiration from the new literature of the blockade.

(Olga) Poetry was, for us,

a great force that kept us alive.

(narrator) "lf what they say of Leningrad is true,

the tears have frozen in the people's eyes."

"We cry no longer, for no tears could quench our burning hate."

"And hate is our only course."

"The guarantee of life, the cure for grief,

the one uniting, warming, guiding force."

And the end of November, December and January

were the most tragic of times.

Firstly, it was cold - minus 40.

Then the famine, the hunger, began to...

to... to be felt.

And people began to starVe

and to die from cold.

(narrator) The siege went on.

There were few ways to hit back at the Germans.

One was with naval guns from the warships trapped in the port.

On land, small raiding parties penetrated behind the German trenches.

They cut supply lines,

they captured prisoners

and collected information.

They descended on collaborators and tried them on the spot.

January 1942.

About 4,000 people were dying in Leningrad each day.

(Glga) When l went to the shops

to receive my ration for my family,

if l passed on the way there two bodies,

on the way back there were four.

(narrator) Outside the ring, the Russians fought to loosen the blockade

and to speed up the pitifully slow convoys across the frozen lake.

But there was no major offensive to break the siege ring, and no airliff.

The battles before Moscow had first call on men and equipment.

Spring brought new fears.

The murderous cold slackened,

but melting snowdriffs revealed thousands of corpses

in the streets and yards.

A campaign was launched to clean up the city.

There was no epidemic.

Now the ice road was melting.

Although there would be a difficult time before the lake was clear for ships,

the mood in Leningrad was turning confident.

(Olga) When the sun began to shine, then we began to clean

and to wash.

Of course, now we had water in our homes.

We began to feel normal again.

(narrator) The city council dared to send a few trams back on the streets.

(Olga) We greeted the tram as an old forgotten friend coming back to us.

l remember l clapped my hands when l saw the tram running along Liteiny.

(narrator) The surVivors felt stronger.

Their rations were increased.

Squads of volunteers went from house to house bringing help to families

who, in the winter, had almost lost contact with the city outside.

Children who should have been evacuated eight months before

were taken by ship across Lake Ladoga.

The ships brought back troops and munitions

to relieve the gaunt men in the trenches.

Leningrad began to look more like a military base.

The worst of the siege was over.

Though the bombardment went on, it now made sense to repair the damage.

Peat was dug for fuel against the next winter.

Schoolchildren and professors of botany

helped to plant every open space with vegetables.

There were no worries about food for the Germans

occupying the prairies of the Ukraine.

For 50 years, German expansionists had looked to this region

to free Germany from dependence on imports by sea.

General Manstein said, "A large part of the population will have to go hungry."

"Nothing, out of a misguided sense of humanity,

may be given to the population,

unless they are in the serVice of the German Wehrmacht."

ln Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, plans to win over local nationalists

with the promise of an anti-Russian puppet state never got off the ground.

They were brushed aside by the army and the SS.

The reality was work under German overseers

or deportation to the Reich.

Each village learned the price of defiance.

ln Moscow in early 1942 there was confidence.

The winter fighting had revealed

that the Germans were no more invincible than Napoleon had been.

But it seemed to Russians

that they bore the burden of the war against Fascism alone

and that the West was not doing enough.

When Stalin began to call for a second front, a landing in the west,

the people joined willingly in the meetings organised to support it.

Molotov, the foreign minister, was told by Western diplomats

that though they admired the heroism of the Red Army,

a second front was not yet practical.

Stalin didn't believe them.

(speaking Russian)

Stalin was in direct command of an army

becoming harder and more formidable every day.

But the Russians did not pretend to be immune to grief.

Tens of thousands knew this poem by heart...

"Wait for me, and l'll return."

"Only, wait very hard."

"Wait when you are filled with sorrow as you watch the yellow rain."

"Wait when the winds sweep the snowdriffs."

"Wait in the sweltering heat."

"Wait when others have stopped waiting, forgetting their yesterdays."

"Wait even when from afar no letters come to you."

"Wait even when others are tired of waiting."

"Wait even when my mother and son think l am no more,

and when friends sit around the fire drinking to my memory."

"Wait, and do not hurry to drink to my memory too."

"Wait, for l'll return,

defying every death."

"And let those who do not wait say that l was lucky."

"They never will understand that in the midst of death

you with your waiting saved me."

"Only you and l will know how l surVived."

"lt's because you waited, as no one else did."

There were still disasters to come.

ln May, the Germans beat off a Russian offensive near Kharkov.

As the Red Army advanced, the panzers cut round its flanks.

The Soviet commanders begged to be allowed to pull back

before it was too late,

but Stalin, pushing advice aside, forbade them to retreat.

The German pincers closed.

Most of the men of three Russian armies were forced to lay down their arms.

ln the whole war, over five million Russian soldiers were taken prisoner.

Less than two million surVived.

For the British especially,

the Russians were now "Our gallant Soviet ally."

But, at first, help could only come through the Arctic convoys

heading for Murmansk and Archangel

through the killing ground of the German U-boats, bombers and warships.

ln July 1942, this one convoy lost 80% of its ships.

But the courage of British seamen could not make the convoys carry enough

for Russia's gigantic needs.

1942 was the year of deep war -

defeat fought off, but as yet no sign of victory.

This was a time of bitter endurance,

a season for learning to bear disappointment and loss.

Once, it seemed possible that German soldiers

were only brother workers in uniform,

but now Soviet writers spoke in words of hate.

"One can bear anything - the plague, hunger and death -

but one cannot bear the Germans."

"One cannot bear these fish-eyed oafs

contemptuously snorting at everything Russian."

"We cannot live as long as these grey-green slugs are alive."

"Today there are no books, today there are no stars in the sky."

"Today there is only one thought - kill the Germans."

"Kill them all and dig them into the earth."

"Then we can go to sleep."

"Then we can think again of life and books

and girls and happiness."

"We shall kill them all,

but we must do it quickly or they will desecrate the whole of Russia

and torture to death millions more people."

As the Soviet soldiers advanced,

they found what Germans had been doing to civilians.

(priest chanting)

The churches were full once more.

The priesthood was invited to pray for the life of holy Russia

to work on the patriotism of the worshippers.

The icons were honoured again.

The public campaign for atheism was dropped.

(congregation singing)

The Germans murdered Jews and Communists.

They murdered those suspected of supporting the partisans.

They murdered hostages.

Affer battle, in retreat,

they just murdered.

To the north, the Russians prepared to attack the German ring round Leningrad.

As they waited, runners brought the news

of the surrender of the German armies at Stalingrad.

For army and people, this was the sudden glow of victory at the tunnel's end.

Now they knew they would win.

At Leningrad, the relieving troops broke through.

(speaking Russian)

They forced open a land route. The 16-month blockade was over.

But they did not break the siege.

The Germans and Finns still lay around the city.

(speaking Russian)

(Olga) lt was such a feeling l can't relate it.

l went to my neighbour across the yard,

and we kissed each other and told each other:

"Now we shall live. There is a way out."

(narrator) ln a fortnight, a railway was laid through the gap.

Food and fuel began to roll into Leningrad.

The symbols of old Russian honour

were restored to the army as they had been to the church.

(patriotic Russian song)

Propaganda united Lenin with Alexander Nevski...

..the 18th century hero, Suvorov...

..heroes of the Red cavalry,

mighty ghosts cheering forward the avengers of the Soviet motherland.

The insignia of a traditional and professional army were brought back.

Gold braid was imported from Britain.

Political commissars lost rank.

The years of the purges were forgotten.

(Russian marching song)

(speaking Russian)

(mterpreter) Every Soviet citizen felt himself a part of the common struggle.

Some people say it was the Fascists' cruelty

which led to resistance in the Ukraine and other occupied lands.

No.

l believe resistance was inevitable.

Soviet people in the rear could not hold themselves back from the struggle.

(narrator) ln 1941 , behind the lines partisan bands began to form.

At first, they lacked arms.

They grew slowly.

German deportations for forced labour made thousands flee to the forests,

where they joined the partisans.

(patriotic song)

Soon the partisans became a formidable army

operating against the enemy lines of communication.

The penalty for collaboration was death.

On a mere suspicion of sympathy for the enemy,

whole national groups, the Volga Germans, the Crimean Tatars,

were deported to central Asia.

For individual collaborators, no mercy.

As German prisoners were paraded through Leningrad,

people struck out at an enemy they could reach.

ln the steppes of Soviet Asia, in the new factories and mines of Siberia,

the most desperate production effort of modern times was coming to its climax.

Russia has been caught with obsolete aircraff,

unfit for close battle support.

Now the plants turned out 9,000 modern aircraff every month.

ln 1943, military output finally outstripped Germany's.

Above all, it was the tank.

ln 1943, the factories built 24,000 of them.

More than any other weapon, it was the tank,

especially the famous T-34,

which won the battle on the Eastern Front.

With the American trucks now streaming in from Persia,

this torrent of armour moved up to the line.

The Russians knew that in July 1943

the Germans would launch their full strength against them once more.

They knew too that the blow would fall at Kursk.

They must hold firm.

Then the Red Army, now the biggest land force ever seen in war,

would strike back.

The Germans planned to drive

into the shoulders of the Kursk bulge,

hoping to cut off the huge Soviet army,

then hit at Moscow.

They brought up 70 divisions - almost a million men -

with the new Tiger tanks and Ferdinand guns.

Hitler had intended to strike in May,

but there were delays in production and building up reserVes.

Weeks passed.

When the German were ready to attack, the Russians were waiting for them.

(speaking Russian)

(mterpreter) We were all prepared.

We were more than ready to meet Hitler's attack.

We knew we had enough armour

to stop the Fascists breaking through our defences.

Our reconnaissance patrols had captured prisoners.

From them we learned that Hitler's troops

planned to start the attack at 2:30 in the morning on July 5.

The news was given to our troops.

(speaking Russian)

(mterpreter) The commander sits in the obserVation post,

the soldiers are in the trenches,

and tomorrow the enemy is expected to attack.

You can imagine what thoughts are in his mind.

There were more than a hundred tanks every kilometre.

When tanks are moving, the whole earth trembles.

And the guns fire,

but the soldier just sits.

(narrator) Soviet aircraff took off at dawn

to wreck the German bombers waiting on their airfields.

The Germans kept to the timetable.

On the morning of July 5, the panzer divisions moved forward.

Kursk was the biggest tank battle in history.

ln the north, the German pincer made ten miles in five days, and halted,

with 50,000 dead and 400 tanks destroyed.

ln the south, in an even vaster battle,

a 20-mile dent was made in the Russian defences,

but the Germans were spent.

On July 15, Hitler called off the Kursk offensive.

The Red Army went over to the attack.

Under bombardment, the sappers went ahead

to cut a path into the German defences.

Through the gap, the tanks plunged forward,

the troops riding on their sides.

These were the new Russian soldiers,

very different from the defeated masses of 1941 .

Their clothes were shabby, but their weapons were clean.

They were tough, chasing the enemy into close-quarter battle.

They were resourceful,

trained to live off the land and to cross rivers on their own.

lf there was no boat, a bench or a log would do.

They went without regular leave or pay,

but now their morale was fierce and high.

ln military terms, it was Kursk which decided how the European war would end.

When this supreme German effort failed, the Soviet victory began.

The fighting to break through German positions was hard and slow,

but affer nine days the Red Army had recaptured

all the ground lost in this last German offensive.

The Germans began to fall back, destroying everything as they went.

Now they were under constant attack by Soviet fighters.

The Luffwaffe had lost command of the air.

Suddenly, the towns of occupied Russia were full of armour moving west.

Affer two years, the conquerors were pulling out.

(air-raid siren)

At Leningrad, the Germans were still at the outskirts,

the city still under shellfire.

The siege was not to be finally broken until January the following year.

The strength of Russia, like a gigantic spring compressed back to its limit,

was now bursting forward.

The first cities were liberated.

On August 5, 1943,

Orel and Belgorod were freed.

ln each town, those who had died in battle were buried.

"Do not call me, Father, do not seek me."

"Do not call me, do not wish me back."

"We're on a route uncharted, Fire and blood erase our track."

"On we fly on wings of thunder, Nevermore to sheath our swords."

"All of us in battle fallen, Not to be brought back by words."

"Will there be a rendezvous? l know not."

"l only know we still must fight."

"We are sand grains in infinity,

Never to meet, nevermore see light."

"Farewell then, my son, farewell then, my conscience,

My youth and my solace,

My one and my only."

"And let this farewell be the end of a story

Of solitude vast, and which none is more lonely,

ln which you remain barred forever and ever

From light and from air,

with your death pangs untold."

"Untold and unsoothed,

not to be resurrected, Forever and ever an 18-year-old."

"Farewell, then. No trains ever come from those regions,

Unscheduled or scheduled, no aeroplanes fly there."

"Farewell then, my son, for no miracles happen,

As in this world dreams do not come true."

"Farewell. l will dream of you still as a baby,

Treading the earth with little, strong toes."

"The earth where already so many lie buried."

"This song to my son, then, is come to its close."

ln Moscow, Stalin announced:

"Tonight at 2400 hours on August 5, the capital of our country, Moscow,

will salute the valiant troops who liberated Orel and Belgorod."

(shouting in Russian)

"Eternal glory to the heroes who fell

in the struggle for the freedom of our country."

"Death to the German invaders."

ln November, Kiev was freed.

(upbeat Russian song)

Russia was saved by its soldiers and by its people.

But in the earth, never to welcome the coming of peace,

lay 20 million dead.