[Woman singing]
[Ominous music]
NARRATOR: December 1941.
In a six-month Blitzkrieg campaign,
the Wehrmacht has blasted its way through the western Soviet Union.
German troops approach the outskirts of Moscow
less than 20 miles from the city.
Along the road to the Soviet capital,
hundreds of thousands of Red Army soldiers
have perished, killed in action.
More than one million are wounded.
Whole armies have been taken prisoner by the Germans.
Stalin's empire is on its knees.
The nightmare began just six months earlier,
on the morning of the 21st of June.
For Soviet citizens, the dawn of just another day.
Yet, along a line stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea,
three million German soldiers are moving into position,
awaiting the Führer's order to launch Operation Barbarossa.
The most brutal conflict between two nations in recorded history
is about to begin.
And yet, the citizens of Moscow and Leningrad
awake in blissful ignorance,
unaware that today will be the last day of peace.
But Zhukov and Timoshenko, Stalin's senior commanders,
are nervous.
From the frontier, they receive intelligence reports
heavy with menace of a German invasion.
At midday, they request an emergency meeting
with Stalin at the Kremlin.
They beg him to allow them to issue a border alert
to all Red Army formations.
Stalin refuses his generals' request.
He cannot believe that his new ally, Hitler,
is about to betray him.
All through that evening he accuses Zhukov and Timoshenko of panic
and insists that there will be no invasion.
But Stalin is wrong.
On the Soviet Union's western border,
in the early hours of the morning of the 22nd of June,
the silence is broken by the sounds of the invader.
Three million German troops and thousands of tanks
storm the entire length of the frontier.
At their headquarters in Moscow,
first reports of the invasion confirm the generals' worst fears.
Zhukov immediately telephones Stalin at his dacha outside Moscow.
In his memoirs, Zhukov recalls the moment.
[Telephone rings]
"No one picks up the telephone.
I let it ring.
After about three minutes, the duty officer answers.
After a long wait, Stalin comes on the line.
I report the situation and ask for permission to return fire.
Stalin says nothing.
I only hear the sound of breathing.
'Have you understood me? '
Again, silence."
A stunned and speechless Stalin allows vital hours to pass.
He orders his military commanders to meet him at the Kremlin,
but he refuses to give the order for the Red Army to return fire.
Meanwhile, the Germans are bombing Soviet cities
and killing Soviet citizens.
Panzer units, sweeping east,
are already deep inside Soviet territory.
Chaos multiplies the catastrophe.
Without orders from the Kremlin,
Red Army field commanders lose control of their units.
Dazed, cut off, surrounded,
thousands of Soviet soldiers surrender.
One hour after the first reports of the invasion reach Moscow,
Stalin meets Zhukov and Timoshenko in his office at the Kremlin.
Still he refuses to allow Soviet troops to open fire on the enemy.
He is adamant that reports of the invasion are untrue,
or if they are true, that the attack is an act of provocation,
organized without Hitler's consent.
Foreign Minister Molotov is instructed to find out,
is this really war?
Only when Molotov confirms foreign press reports
does Stalin finally give the order to fire on the Nazi invader.
An old soldier, Vyacheslav Semyonov,
remembers the confusion in the first hours of the war.
[Speaking Russian]
INTERPRETER: They started bombing Minsk.
We were stationed seven kilometers from Minsk.
We ran onto the street to find out what was going on.
It was Sunday the 22nd.
We were assured that the planes overhead were ours.
They had been on tactical exercises
and had to unload their bombs before landing.
We were told to go back to our barracks.
We couldn't get back to sleep, and at half past six,
the regimental alert was sounded.
We were taken into the forest.
I remember there was a radio there.
We stood there in the forest.
Molotov's speech was broadcast on the radio.
NARRATOR: Stalin cannot face his people.
So he leaves it to Molotov to make the official announcement.
INTERPRETER: Without any declaration of war,
German troops have attacked our country,
attacked our borders in many places,
and bombed our cities with their aircraft.
Zhytomyr, Kiev,
Sevastopol, Kaunas, and others.
NARRATOR: Eight hours have passed since the Germans attacked.
Only now are the Russian people allowed to know
that their country is at war.
And at the height of the Wehrmacht's ferocious onslaught,
Stalin disappears completely.
He has every reason to hide from his people.
Captured German newsreel footage
shows Soviet frontier troops overwhelmed.
A retreat under fire in total confusion.
Whole formations surrendering,
hundreds of thousands of men, entangled with fleeing civilians,
in scenes of Biblical disorder.
On the first day of Barbarossa alone,
1,200 Soviet aircraft are destroyed in a single strike.
The blame for all their turmoil and suffering
lies with one man, Joseph Stalin.
His purges of the military in the late '30s
have paralyzed the Red Army command.
His stubborn refusal to countenance the possibility of German invasion,
despite overwhelming evidence of Wehrmacht build up on the borders,
has left his country utterly exposed.
And in the weeks prior to Barbarossa,
Stalin's self-delusion has reached criminal proportions.
Red Army frontier troops are away from their stations on maneuvers.
Fortified lines of defense are only half completed.
And the Luftwaffe has been allowed to reconnoiter Soviet targets at will.
In the fateful first week of the war,
when his country has most need of him,
Stalin, the man of steel,
retires to his dacha and collapses into panic-stricken immobility.
Aware of his personal failure
and that he has been outwitted by Hitler,
Stalin is, above all, stunned
by the sheer speed of the German advance.
Professor Volkogonov, military historian,
has unique access to Stalin's private papers.
INTERPRETER: The Germans had taken just six days
to reach the outskirts of Minsk.
And it was reported to Stalin that their advance units
were already east of Minsk.
Stalin completely lost his nerve.
He was in a state of shock,
but he had not completely lost control.
"How can that be? You must be mistaken," he said.
"How can the Germans be in Minsk?"
He could not in any way accept
that the Germans could have got to Minsk in six days,
in less than a week.
And as it was proved later, he was in a terrible state of shock
and had to spend several days at his dacha.
It was there at the dacha that members of the Politburo
finally brought him back to his senses.
NARRATOR: Molotov and other members of the Politburo
visit the stricken Stalin at his dacha.
They plead with him to take control,
asking if he is willing to lead the State Defense Committee.
He agrees.
Four years on, Stalin will confess to one of his aides
that he thought Molotov and his colleagues
had come to demand his resignation.
Shaken into action by their visit, the man of steel returns.
On July 3rd, after 11 long and painful days,
he at last emerges from his dacha to address the nation.
INTERPRETER: Comrades, citizens,
brothers and sisters,
I turn to you.
Brave warriors of our army and navy.
NARRATOR: At this grave hour,
the same Stalin whose policy of collectivization
has dispossessed millions,
who has destroyed his best generals
and the flower of the nation's intelligentsia,
who has ordered hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens
to be shot or left to rot in slave-labor camps,
this same Stalin turns to his people
with the supplicant call "brothers and sisters"
and appeals to them to join forces to fight a Great Patriotic War.
INTERPRETER: My friends,
treacherous invasion of our motherland,
which began on the 22nd of June,
continues despite the heroic resistance of the Red Army
and despite the fact that the enemy's finest divisions and air squadrons
have been destroyed.
NARRATOR: But even now,
his speech is a shoddy tapestry of lies.
The best German units have not been destroyed,
and the Nazis will not be defeated as easily as he implies.
And so, galvanized,
they march to a war they believe will last a month at most.
In their worst nightmares
they do not imagine that it will take four years to defeat the invader.
Or that on the long road to Berlin,
25 million soldiers and civilians will die.
Yet, there are some Soviet citizens who welcome the invader.
To many in Ukraine,
the arrival of the Germans is a heaven-sent opportunity
to throw off Stalin's yoke.
How can they forget the starvation of the '30s,
the violent dispossessions,
the loss of family and friends to camps and prisons?
Local women bless the Germans as they pass.
Their menfolk destroy reminders
of a man who has terrorized them for years.
From his office in the Kremlin,
a revived Stalin returns to a well-trodden path.
He searches for scapegoats,
people to blame for the terrible defeats of the war's opening weeks.
And his first victim is General Pavlov,
hero of the Soviet Union and commander of the Western Front.
It is Pavlov whose troops first felt the full thrust
of the initial German attack,
and Pavlov had foreseen the danger.
A week before the launch of Barbarossa,
he had pleaded with Stalin
for permission to set up defensive positions behind the border
in preparation for an invasion.
Stalin's response... an angry order not to panic.
Just weeks later, German Panzer divisions and infantry
are tearing through the Western Front
as one Soviet city after another falls to the Blitzkrieg.
Accused of conspiring with the enemy,
Pavlov's file reveals that he conducts himself bravely
during interrogation.
He refuses to confess any guilt
and defends the conduct of his comrades.
His reward is a death sentence.
Still, the Germans drive east.
They are at the outskirts of Kiev, Smolensk, and Leningrad.
Yet fierce pockets of Red Army resistance
fight on behind enemy lines.
The fortress city of Brest.
Menaced on all sides by German forces,
it stands like a cliff against the raging sea.
The besieged Red Army garrison fights on and on
for more than a month until they are finally compelled to surrender.
Even the wounded have only stopped fighting
when water, ammunition, and food are exhausted.
Hitler is so impressed by the tenacity of the Russian troops
that he exercises rare clemency.
Only one survivor is shot,
the political officer at the fortress, Mikhail Fomin.
The Führer sites the defense of Brest as a heroic effort,
an example to his own soldiers.
And he visits the fortress with Mussolini
to acknowledge a hard-earned victory.
But for Stalin, the defenders of Brest are not heroes.
Years later, after they are released from German capture,
he will send survivors to the Gulag.
The Wehrmacht's rapid, relentless advance seems unstoppable.
Traveling at up to 50 miles a day,
Panzer divisions are already approaching
the heart of Stalin's empire.
And in the middle of July,
Stalin is forced to consider offering the Germans a negotiated peace.
[Speaking Russian]
INTERPRETER: An attempt to halt Hitler's advance through appeasement
was made secretly.
There was a Bulgarian ambassador called lvan Stamenov,
who was, I can tell you now, one of our agents.
He was summoned to the Kremlin to meet Beria, Stalin, and Molotov.
Stalin and Beria didn't say anything.
It was Molotov who did the talking.
He said, "Could you contact Berlin?"
Bulgaria was on a friendly footing with Germany, you see.
"Could you contact Berlin?"
You see, they didn't use the word "Hitler."
"And tell them that we are prepared to consider negotiating
a second, separate peace, as we did at Brest."
They didn't say exactly what kind of peace treaty they were considering.
"We are ready to negotiate,
handing over a whole range of provinces in the Baltic,
and part of Ukraine, and Belorussia,
on condition that the Germans stop their advance."
But Stamenov reacted to this proposition
with greater dignity than the others.
He said, "What are you doing?
Even if you retreat all the way to the Urals,
you will still beat Hitler.
Why are you doing this?"
NARRATOR: While Stalin contemplates a way out of the war,
he is drawing up plans to punish his own troops if they surrender.
In a desperate attempt to halt the route,
he issues Order Number 270...
all officers and political officials taken prisoner at the front
are to be considered traitors.
If ever they return to the Soviet Union,
they will be arrested and executed.
But the barbarity of Order 270 does not stop there.
The wives of captured troops also face imprisonment in the Gulag.
This savage order will claim thousands of victims
before the end of the war.
They will even include members of Stalin's own family.
In the first weeks of the war, Stalin's son, Yakov Djugashvili,
is captured by the Germans.
A month later, Yakov's wife is arrested under Order 270
and exiled to a camp in Siberia.
[Speaking Russian]
INTERPRETER: There was a panic in the first years of the war.
A lot of people were surrendering.
And so a law was introduced to prevent it to a certain extent.
It was, of course, a harsh law, but these were harsh times.
They arrested the wives of all the officers who surrendered.
I don't know if this applied to the children as well,
but this law was passed and announced to the army.
My mother spent two years in prison because of this law,
and was later released.
My grandfather did help us again later,
but there could be no allowances made for the law.
NARRATOR: Now with Moscow in range of the Luftwaffe,
Stalin's own citadel of power comes directly under attack.
The city's defenses are prepared.
Barrage balloons are set up to disrupt German bombing.
Around-the-clock watch is set up.
But the Luftwaffe penetrates the defenses
to bomb the center of the city,
forcing citizens to take shelter in the subway.
Above them, German aircraft cause terrible damage
and suffer relatively few losses themselves,
though Soviet propaganda makes the most of those few.
This hankle is displayed for Muscovites
outside the Bolshoi Theatre.
Outside Moscow, German armies race for the capital.
Elsewhere, Army Group North heads for Leningrad.
Army Group Center makes a pincer movement toward Smolensk.
Army Group South strikes towards Kiev and Ukraine.
Adept at the use of terror to gain political control,
Stalin's touch in military matters is less sure.
In these early weeks of war,
he constantly ignores the advice of his generals,
and the blood of literally countless Soviet soldiers
is sacrificed to his megalomania.
The suburbs of Kiev, the beginning of August.
In a vast pincer movement,
German Army Group South threatens to encircle the city.
General Kirponos, commander of the Southwestern Front,
wants to retreat east of Kiev, out of the pincer's claws.
Zhukov supports Kirponos,
knowing that this tactic alone will save the Southwestern Front.
But of course, Stalin has the final say,
and he does not listen to generals.
Dismissing their fears,
he orders the two commanders to defend Kiev at any cost.
Kiev is and always will be Soviet, he insists.
It is a deadly error.
During August and the first two weeks of September,
the Wehrmacht encircles a vast area crammed with Red Army troops.
Thousands of square miles gripped in the German vise,
Four Soviet armies perish, Kirponos dies in combat.
Hundreds of thousands of men are captured.
A massive haul of weapons and equipment is seized.
Yet even at such a cost, Kiev is not saved.
On the 18th of September, the city falls,
a battered carcass for Hitler to gloat over.
The Führer is now lord of all he surveys.
It seems as if he is on-course to meet his objective,
to crush Stalin's Russia before winter sets in.
Far to the north of Kiev,
Hitler knows that Leningrad also lies in mortal peril.
Army Group North's charge across the Baltic
under the command of Field Marshall von Leeb
means that the city is now within the Führer's grasp.
For an entire month, Red Army troops isolated in Tallinn,
the last bastion before Leningrad,
had been fighting to hold the German advance from the south.
But in the face of the Wehrmacht's blistering assault,
they can fight no longer.
Their only option is to evacuate by sea.
But it will be an evacuation without air cover
across a heavily mined sea
under bombardment from German coastal artillery and the Luftwaffe.
16 ships, 34 transports,
and innumerable men are lost in the operation.
Leningrad lies ahead of the Wehrmacht, defenseless.
German aerial forces are now concentrated for the attack.
Day after day, the city is pounded by the Luftwaffe.
Hitler wants Leningrad wiped from the face of the Earth,
but its citizens keep the city alive.
As September draws to a close, Leningrad is totally cut off,
with no land link left to the Soviet Union.
The city's Defense Committee is in crisis.
Now, at last, the gravity of the situation in the north
penetrates the Kremlin.
Stalin concludes that Voroshilov,
commander of Red Army forces in Leningrad,
is failing in his duty.
To prevent the second city's fall,
Stalin summons Zhukov and orders him to take command in Leningrad.
It is vital to rally the spirits of Leningrad's citizens,
to mobilize its entire population.
Zhukov cancels Voroshilov's pessimistic directives.
Reversing an order to scuttle the Baltic fleet,
Zhukov ordered his guns to be turned against the enemy.
And factories, mined to self-destruct in the event of capitulation,
are ordered back into production.
Further south, German army groups enter,
led by Field Marshal von Bock.
He's aimed at Moscow.
But the city of Smolensk stands in its way.
Ten Soviet divisions
caught in the deadly noose of another encirclement
hold the enemy at bay for 10 whole weeks...
...before, inevitably, they, too, are overwhelmed.
And so, the advance on Moscow continues.
It, too, is marked for utter oblivion,
and a vast artificial lake is to be created in its place.
At the end of September, the Führer launches Operation Typhoon,
the final drive along the road to Moscow.
Its aim... to encircle the Soviet army
by driving both north and south of the Moscow highway,
the pincers closing at Vyazma.
It is an attack on the grand scale.
The front stretches for more than 400 miles.
14 German tank and 74 infantry divisions,
a total of 1.8 million officers and men,
take part in the offensive.
General Konev was commander of the Red Army's Western Front.
[Speaking Russian]
INTERPRETER: Early in the morning of the 2nd of October,
the German high command made a strike
against the Western and Reserve Fronts.
By the 7th of October,
thanks to the enemy's clear numerical superiority,
their tank maneuvers, and their mechanized mobility,
we were surrounded in the Vyazma region
on the Moscow-Minsk highway.
NARRATOR: Stalin has good cause for panic now.
Facing a disaster that might sweep away the whole Soviet Union,
Stalin calls for the one general with an unbroken record of success.
He summons Zhukov to the Kremlin.
[Speaking Russian]
INTERPRETER: I arrived in Moscow in the evening
and made straight for Stalin's apartments in the Kremlin.
Stalin had the flu, but he was still working.
He greeted me with a nod of his head
and suggested that I look at a map
and then said, "So, what is the situation in the West?
I can't get a clear report of what's going on at the moment,
where the enemy is, where our troops are.
So, if you can go immediately
to the headquarters of the Western Front,
work out what the situation is,
and phone me at any time, day or night.
I'll be waiting for your call."
NARRATOR: Three days later, on the 10th of October,
Zhukov delivers a report laden with doom.
Nothing stands between Hitler's armies and Moscow.
[Speaking Russian]
INTERPRETER: To the West,
especially in the Western Front sector,
the situation was very serious.
All the roads to Moscow were effectively open to the enemy.
The only so-called positive news
was that the main part of the German forces
were pinned down by the activity of our troops,
surrounded in an area to the northwest of Vyazma.
Stalin orders Zhukov to assume command of the Western Front,
hoping that somehow he can prevent the Germans from taking the capital.
He blames the debacle on Konev,
who seems certain to go the way of Pavlov.
Konev's fate hangs by a thread.
[Speaking Russian]
INTERPRETER: At that time, I was an adjutant,
officer for special tasks,
to Konev, the commander of the Western Front.
And I had heard a telephone conversation
between Stalin and Zhukov.
They were discussing what should happen to Konev.
So, then the meeting took place.
We had no idea what was on the agenda.
Nothing had been sent to us by that time.
But later, when Zhukov on the 10th of October
reported the situation back to Stalin,
Stalin told him that they had decided to unite the forces of the two fronts
and appoint Zhukov as the commander in chief.
Stalin also said that the commission would deal with Konev
and will probably pass his case to the Revolutionary Tribunal.
This, as far as I understand it, was Zhukov's reply.
He said, "Pavlov was shot, but that changed nothing.
The situation at the Front didn't improve.
Therefore, I don't recommend you to do the same to Konev.
He is an immensely experienced and clever man,
strong-willed and capable of establishing order.
I request that you appoint him as my deputy."
NARRATOR: Having saved Konev's life,
Zhukov turns to the salvation of Moscow
with the same charisma, energy, and ruthlessness
he has shown in the defense of Leningrad.
The total Red Army force at his disposal,
all he has to hold the 150-mile Western Front
now stands at 90,000 troops.
Weeks earlier, it had been 800,000.
The number of Soviet troops taken prisoner
has now reached three million.
Zhukov has no alternative but to seek his soldiers elsewhere.
And he sets about recruiting civilians to Moscow's defense.
In the chill of winter's overture, 450,000 Muscovites...
men, women, children, and old-age pensioners...
dig anti-tank ditches and expand the city's defenses.
A people's militia is formed from academics, writers, students,
and those kept from the front by age or disability.
Few will live long.
They have absolutely no military experience,
and there is no time left to train them
in more than the bare rudiments.
Zhukov fears for Moscow.
[Speaking Russian]
INTERPRETER: Were we confident at the staff headquarters at the front
that we could hold our line of defense
and to stop the enemy at the Mojaisk border?
I have to say straight away that we did not have total confidence.
Podolsk, 30 miles from Moscow, the 14th of October.
The Soviet officer-cadet unit
makes one last desperate attempt to halt the German advance.
For a few crucial hours, they frustrate the enemy.
But by the time the Panzers roll past them,
every cadet in the unit is dead.
Some are just 16 or 17, true heroes.
Members of the Soviet government
are less willing to die for their country.
On the morning of the 16th of October,
certain that Moscow is about to be overrun,
the bureaucrats quit the capital for Kuibyshev on the Volga,
some 400 miles east.
Stalin has his own bunker ready there,
but at the last moment, he decides to remain in Moscow.
He has been given Zhukov's assurance that the city will not fall.
Triggered by rumors of the government's escape,
panic has engulfed the streets of Moscow.
Expecting Nazi rule at any moment,
civilians flee Moscow in the thousands,
laying siege to the city's eastbound railway stations.
Yevgeny Gromov, art critic and native Muscovite,
was only 10, but he remembers the day well.
[Speaking Russian]
INTERPRETER: It's strange,
but I always associate the 16th of October with gunfire.
There should not have been any at that time,
but even today, it sticks in my memory.
It was a frightening and dreadful day.
My parents had a feeling that something was going to happen.
I can't recall too much,
but I do remember people rushing down Taganskaya street
carrying sacks.
And I even remember someone carrying a children's bath
filled with something or other.
My friends told me... I did not see it myself...
that at the meat factory where my mother worked...
and she told me about it later as well...
that people were looting from the shop floor
and people were walking about
with strings of salami around their necks.
And there, at the top of Taganskaya street,
where there's a poultry shop now...
there used to be a bakery at the time...
well, this bakery was looted.
But it wasn't because people just wanted to steal.
It was simply because people were hungry,
and there was a general feeling
that the Germans would be here any minute anyway.
And so, people took the bread
so that they'd have something to fall back on.
NARRATOR: The Soviet Union's Western allies
hold their breath and pray for the city.
Even in London, children sing for Russia.
To most, it seems Moscow must fall
as Warsaw, Paris, and Belgrade have already fallen.
But on the outskirts of Moscow,
the Germans meet an obstacle on their final drive to the Kremlin.
General Panfilov mounts a valiant last stand.
28 men from his division
stop 50 tanks and enter Soviet history books.
But the files show Panfilov had little choice.
Directive to Panfilov from Marshal Zhukov:
"I warn you that if you let the enemy through,
we shall arrest you and shoot you."
Either way, he is condemned to death.
During the last week of October,
as Stalin contemplates the twilight outside his dacha,
he decides to visit the front, now just a few hours' drive away.
INTERPRETER: Stalin made his first visit to the front
in October, 1941.
Well, as you know, the situation
in October was extremely difficult.
The Germans were tearing their way towards Moscow,
and we were in a tight spot.
Over half a million of our troops were surrounded near Vyazma.
They had thrown everything they had at the front,
patching equipment together as best they could.
Zhukov quite often didn't even have enough reserve battalions
to stop all the gaps in the front.
And all this time, hundreds of thousands of NKVD troops
were being deployed as prison guards
in Siberia, the Urals, and other areas.
All these guards and their prisoners
could have been fighting Hitler instead.
This was the darker side of the system.
No one suggested that Stalin should go to the front.
There were only three vehicles...
his bodyguards' cars and his armored car.
But just as they turned off the Volokolamsky Road,
his armored car got bogged down, and they couldn't shift it.
This was about 20-25 kilometers from the front.
It was already getting dark, and the sky was lit up by gunfire
as serious fighting was going on in the area.
He'd seen all he needed to see.
He waited a few minutes, climbed into a different car,
and then went back to Moscow.
So, his first trip to the front was purely symbolic,
but he claimed and wrote later that he'd been to the front anyway.
For the sake of history, he had to say that he'd been to the front.
NARRATOR: The front now lies along the Moscow-Volga Canal,
the last obstacle before the capital.
Battling to hold off another encirclement,
the Red Army, pressed up against the canal,
has nowhere left to retreat.
They have one last hope, that the weather will save them.
Sleet is turning to snow.
The ground, frozen at night, is now a quagmire during the day,
paralyzing Hitler's overstretched war machine.
On the 2nd of December,
German units reach Krasnaya Polyana,
17 miles from the center of Moscow.
They halt at the anti-tank defenses erected by Moscow citizens.
The Soviet capital is well within the range
of their heavy artillery.
But German generals know
they no longer have time on their side.
Hitler has gambled that Russia will be beaten
before the winter strikes.
And his armies are not designed for this bitter cold.
As the weather intensifies and temperatures plummet,
the bleak truth is that the Germans have only days now
before time turns decisively against them.