The last millennium has seen a world shaped by waves of change at a blistering pace,
but there is one nation which perhaps more than any other
has been witness to a thousand years of explosive drama,
all concealed behind an iron curtain of intrigue and mystery.
Russia.
Russia has always had to invent history to legitimate itself
when the real story was not palatable.
So what is the real truth behind mighty Mother Russia and her hidden past?
It's a story that takes us from its earliest leaders to its most notorious...
Stalin proves that, let's face it, the 20th century was the perfect century for dictators.
..and on to its leader today. Vladimir Putin is a man with a mission.
His goal has been to make Russia great again.
It's the story of its proud people and the demands of their motherland,
from bloody revolution to a regime that demands loyalty at any cost.
The knock on the door at three in the morning.
Someone in your apartment block is being dragged away by the secret police.
Maybe because he was very close to some truth,
it was the last straw and he was killed.
From a mighty superpower to an empire on the brink of collapse...
This was really a disaster that nobody had ever seen before
and never really imagined at this scale.
..and now to a new global threat.
Despite all the obstacles that have been posed over the years,
Russia still is such an enormous player on the world stage.
There's such a wealth of opinions on what Russia is, what it should be.
The real victims in this game, in this drama, are Russians.
It's a melting pot of every single political system you could think of.
This is the epic story of one of the biggest and most extraordinary countries on the planet.
Churchill once described Russia as "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma".
And so it remains today.
In every sort of major modern period of Russian history
there have been significant barriers to actually knowing
what's happening inside the country.
We know this is a country of proud people who have a remarkable relationship with their motherland.
This idea of what Russia is, where it belongs,
has been something that's been discussed in the country publicly,
in literature, in politics, really all through time.
And yet, in the West, we are almost conditioned not to trust its leaders.
Our quarrel is with Putin's Kremlin.
Whether we like it or not, Russia appears to play a part in all our lives,
but why?
How do you begin to unwrap this mystery?
For some, the key is surprisingly simple.
Look at the map.
Russia's place in the world is staggering.
This has been a country that has always been pushing outwards.
It covers one-eighth of all the land on Earth,
stretching across the whole of northern Asia
and the eastern third of Europe.
One thing that I find endlessly fascinating is how much more there is to Russia
and I suppose the challenge of ruling over that vast land mass.
And when you start to dig down into the sheer range
of landscapes, peoples and culture all under one Russian flag,
it becomes all the more extraordinary.
Seventy times bigger than the UK, Russia is so vast
that when the sun rises in the west, at the same time it is setting in the east,
over 11 time zones away.
This is a country that spans half the globe.
It covers from the incredibly fun, metropolitan, 24/7 capital that is Moscow,
which is a rich, prosperous, European city,
all the way through to much, much more impoverished backwater villages.
Over the last thousand years,
much of Russia's vast wilderness has remained unchanged,
even back to the moment that Russia was little more than a loose confederation of tribes
ruled over by her patron saint, the Grand Prince Vladimir.
At the turn of the century, the Grand Prince had been in power for 20 years
and ruled over a kingdom known as Kievan Rus',
which had emerged after the conquest of the Rus' Vikings.
The Rus' were this whole selection of different, individual principalities and citystates,
most of which had very little power.
It's seen as being the cradle of Russian civilisation
and something that joins Slavic peoples together.
From the grand capital, which then was Kyiv,
Vladimir was to leave a lasting legacy on Russia,
one which still plays a key part in Russian life today.
Vladimir imposed Christianity quite literally at the point of a spear
on his own people, who were driven into the rivers in Kyiv to be baptised.
This allowed him precisely to be able to assert
that Kyiv was not just the biggest, most splendid city of the Rus',
but it was the heart of the new Rus' Christianity.
It is a core part of Russia a thousand years on.
Today it is estimated over 70% of Russians identify as Orthodox Christian.
And like the Grand Prince, President Putin professes a deep Orthodox belief.
This is a man who also believes the story of Russia that followed its founding father
has been grossly distorted by the West.
And he pointed to one of Russia's most divisive rulers as a case in point,
a man who, centuries on from the sacred Grand Prince,
would defeat the Mongol invaders and transform Russia
from a medieval state into a vast empire.
The man who first made Russia great. You just wouldn't want to argue with him.
There is a very strong myth within Russia itself
that what they need is a strong hand.
There are many leaders of Russia and the Soviet Union who would qualify as such.
And none more so than Ivan the Fourth, or Ivan the Terrible,
who was to become the first Tsar of Russia.
And he certainly earned his name.
The degree of ruthlessness with which Ivan dealt with
any perceived threat to himself was actually quite phenomenal.
This is a period in which you have enemies being dealt with,
whether they're being impaled in the centre of Moscow
or sewn into the skin of a bear and have the Tsar's hunting dogs unleashed upon them.
He regards brutality as being one of the central attributes of being a strong ruler.
The Tsar was important. He was master of everything.
Everybody else could be easily punished by him.
Even when he was 15, he had his kennel men
take one of the great boyars, who had been a particular power in the land, and beat him to death.
This is a guy who even at 15 was beginning to realise the power that came with his title.
Ivan the Terrible's reputation in Russia
is a good symptom of the distinctive way
in which Russians see strong leaders who terrorise them.
And yet, while he may have been terrible,
this was a strong leader who would change Russia forever.
This is a man who established the first real standing army
and then used it to fight off previous aggressors to the south, the Khanate of Kazan, for example.
This is a man who started the inexorable eastward sweep of Russian expansion across Siberia.
This is also the period in which, actually, for a while,
Ivan creates a whole kingdom within a kingdom.
Under Ivan's tyrannical rule,
Russia established itself as a vast empire
and at its very epicentre was Moscow.
I mean, Ivan is recognised as the monarch who established Muscovy, Moscow,
the symbolism of, "We are here to stay and this is a fortress."
People often talk about Russia as a fortress.
Ivan created a capital built around power,
around a leader and around fear.
This was an autocracy under an iron fist.
And in doing so, he was to begin a tsardom, which would grip Russia for centuries to come
and steer her towards an explosive entrance onto the world stage.
Russia.
How, over the last thousand years, did this sprawling, rural country
rise up the global pecking order to become a superpower?
It's an epic tale that would see the Russian people
dominated by a roll call of some of history's most notorious rulers,
but perhaps none more so than her almighty tsars.
A dynasty of 18 Romanovs would take to the Russian throne over 300 years
and each would leave their mark.
But three in particular - Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, and Nicholas II -
would leave legacies so seismic that they still define the people
and the great cities of Russia today.
This is one of the tallest statues ever created,
weighing in at a hefty 600 tons.
It's regularly voted one of the ugliest statues in the world.
Meet Peter the Great.
If you're in Moscow, you can't miss him.
This was a man determined for Russia to start looking outwards.
Peter the Great is always hailed as one of the great Russian modernisers.
He wasn't interested in the spiritual side of being a tsar,
he wasn't interested in the philosophical side of being a tsar,
he was interested in practicalities.
By the time Peter the Great became Tsar,
Russia was the largest country in the world,
stretching from Europe to the Pacific Ocean.
His was a country of 14 million Russians, many of whom worked the land to survive.
Peter wanted Russia to catch up and he was convinced the West had all the answers.
He'd even lived for four months in Deptford, London, to learn shipbuilding.
He wanted a Russia that could mirror its great armies, equal its maritime might,
even one that could follow European education and fashion,
and he wanted a brand-new capital to prove it.
He didn't like Moscow, so he wanted a new city
and one that absolutely would look like a Western European city.
Moscow was out and a new capital city, St Petersburg, was born.
It was to be Russia's window on Europe.
St Petersburg, in my view, looks even now
much better than Moscow.
St Petersburg is a very beautiful city,
it's a city that's associated with that period
around its foundation - Enlightenment ideals,
progressiveness, education.
All of these general themes are kind of associated with the city.
It's basically seen as Russia's cultural capital,
yet it was built on the backs of slaves who lost their lives.
Built on an inhospitable swamp, this is known as the city built on bones.
Historians believe under its foundations
are the remains of some 100,000 skeletons of the pressganged slave labourers
drawn from the length and breadth of the then Russian Empire.
This vast and gruesome enterprise gives some idea of the ambition
and the single-mindedness of the man behind it.
He brought in foreign architects and stonemasons
and engineers from Italy, from Britain, from Germany, from the Netherlands,
and they built him this beautiful, modern, airy city.
Peter the Great was one of the Russian leaders who has gripped this perpetual problem
of Russia being behind the West, particularly Europe,
recognising that Russia was drifting further and further
into irrelevance and seeking to do something about it,
particularly by emulating the West.
It's seen as the source of great progress, of opening up opportunities for Russia,
and of establishing Russia on an equal footing with the great powers of Europe.
I think that's why his period is seen as significant
because it really puts Russia on the map
as a genuine, global, great power.
So it's perhaps no surprise that President Putin recently claimed
that the man who founded the city he was born in was his favourite leader.
Just like Putin the Great, Peter was a man astride an empire
who wanted to expand Russia's influence and power.
And everything about his St Petersburg was designed to have that impact,
especially the grand Winter Palace,
which is now home to one of the most important and biggest museums in the world.
This is the Hermitage Museum.
It holds three million works of art, which means if you looked at each artwork for a minute,
you'd be there for nearly six years.
The walls which are now home to priceless works of art
were once home to the Russian royal family for almost 200 years.
And all this started out as a private art collection for one person,
the next great leader to make their mark on Russia,
Catherine the Great.
Whilst Putin may encourage comparisons with Peter,
many think that Catherine the Great would be nearer the mark.
Like Putin, Catherine was an unexpected ruler,
who would go on to become one of the greatest in its history.
The woman whom history would remember as Catherine the Great
wasn't actually called Catherine, and she wasn't even Russian.
She was born Princess Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst, a German backwater,
in what was then the Holy Roman Empire.
At the age of 16, she married the heir to the Russian throne, Peter III.
But by 1762, she had seized power in a daring coup
and became Empress of Russia, and her husband was secretly murdered.
She's seen as someone who was quite ruthless in disposing of her husband to take power.
One of the greatest female rulers of her age,
Catherine's reputation would come under sustained attack from that moment on.
Was she the promiscuous usurper?
Or a modernising force with the interests of her adopted nation at heart?
She was writing letters to Voltaire and getting letters from him.
She was very civilised and she did have a lot of lovers.
Certain stories about her are myths,
but it's fairly well documented that she did have various lovers,
and this was not actually unusual.
Throughout history, monarchs have taken lovers.
It tends to be talked about more if they are women monarchs.
The shape of Russia grew under her rule.
Some 200,000 square miles were added, including what's now Poland,
Crimea, Lithuania and Belarus.
Russia has always seen itself as a superpower,
but it's under the reigns of Peter and, subsequently, Catherine,
that Europe first started to be seriously alarmed about its power
and particularly about its intentions.
I think that it was a pretty glorious period in Russian history.
This is a period in which Russia was actually consolidating its military force,
it was continuing its pressure against the Ottoman Empire,
and so what's really interesting is that in this period you have a very, very distinct change
in how the outside world, how Europe rather, looks at Russia.
Catherine's triumph was how people thought about Russia
and the extent to which they believed it had changed.
And in politics, perception is everything.
She is generally talked about as being an enlightened autocrat,
somebody who was obsessed with the West,
with improving the ways in which Russian autocrats ruled.
But I do not know any leaders staying in power for 20, 30 and more years
was becoming better than he used to be or she used to be initially,
and I think Catherine the Great is a good example of this.
And yet, for the everyday Russian,
whilst Catherine may have brought enlightenment for the aristocracy,
they were still trapped in a system of serfdom,
and for the following century across a dynasty of the six tsars to follow
little would change in terms of the hardship and poverty of the Russian people.
This was still a country whose population was made up overwhelmingly of peasants
and the tsars wielded their considerable power over a vast empire
that extended across three continents.
By the 19th century, this autocratic way of running a country
was increasingly out of step with its people.
In the cities, the workers suffered appalling exploitation and squalor,
and its countryside was in turmoil after a devastating famine.
It was amidst this volatile cocktail of hunger and unrest
that a new tsar took power, Nicholas II.
His legacy would change Russia forever.
These are the last pictures of this unhappy man and his family.
This is the Alexander Palace.
Having fallen into disrepair, the favourite residence of the last tsar, Nicholas II,
has finally been restored. It is the symbol of a lost era.
Nicholas was born here in 1868,
the heir to a dynasty that had ruled over Russia for 250 years.
When his father, Alexander III, died suddenly in 1894,
a 26-year-old Nicholas stepped in.
To his cousin, he confessed...
Part of the reason that he struggled in the role as Tsar is because he was completely unprepared for it.
I think this is really reflected in the way he essentially kind of continued
without any real attempt to engage with the social trends that were emerging in that country
until it was really far too late.
With Nicholas II, they have, arguably, one of the least-fitted individuals to be leading Russia
at a time of extraordinary turmoil.
The peasants were still, in many ways, tied
to a very unfair system in which they did not own the land.
Urban living standards were very low, but the cities were becoming increasingly overcrowded.
Nicholas understood little of modern Russia
and its ever more educated, urban and agitated society.
They were on a collision course that would come to a head
on the infamous Bloody Sunday.
The essence of the 1905 Bloody Sunday massacre is that it came out of
a loyal petition, that thousands of Russians marched on the Winter Palace
in St Petersburg,
not to topple the Tsar, but to simply give him a petition.
Someone panics, shooting starts,
and before you know it there has been a massacre by the palace guards.
The country starts to seem to fall apart. The Tsar and the people around him, they panic.
He wasn't great enough to lead such a big country
at a time of troubles.
He was good father and good husband,
but we do evaluate leaders not by how good they are in their small families,
but how good they used to be with regard to the whole nation.
Amidst this, the Russian people began to see the Tsar and his family as something of a circus,
making other royals round the world shudder.
With his unpopular German wife, Alexandra,
and the increasingly influential Rasputin,
a Russian mystic and self-proclaimed holy man
who appeared to have an extraordinary hold on the inner circle.
Nicholas was, frankly, bad enough as a tsar.
The fact that he had an overbearing German-born wife
at a time when actually the Russians were going to find themselves facing the Germans
as their primary antagonists, did not help.
The fact that also, especially under pressure from his wife,
Nicholas for so long countenanced this charlatan Rasputin
and his various dissolute antics around the court,
dissolute antics that everyone read about enthusiastically
in all kinds of yellow papers,
again contributed to this sense that this was a tsar
who not only is out of touch and not on the side of the people,
but is actively harbouring hostile forces.
The Tsarina became dependent on Rasputin.
Rumours started to circulate there was more to their relationship than met the eye.
She allegedly wrote...
This was a family issue
that really influenced negatively how state affairs panned out.
A weak tsar,
over-reliant on this one particular adviser, somehow let everything slip.
But the royal soap opera was to become deadly
when Nicholas made the decision to take supreme command of the armed forces
as Russia entered the First World War.
With an estimated 2,000,000 deaths, once again the Russian people would have their loyalty severely tested.
And for the first time in centuries of tsarist rule,
they had reached their breaking point.
What would happen next would become one of the biggest events of the 20th century.
The revolutionary fire of the masses was finally unleashed.
Moscow. It's one of the world's largest cities.
It is grand, glittering and utterly imposing
and it's meant to be.
This is a monument to the global ambitions of its leaders, past and present.
Over the last thousand years, this has been a country defined by its all-powerful rulers.
And yet, for all its grand cities and decadent leadership,
in 1917 there was to be a political earthquake
that would shake the very core of Russia.
The people had had enough.
They had faced a devastating war, they were starving
and their loyalty to their leader was spent.
Into this power vacuum stepped a man who would trigger one of the biggest political upheavals
of the 20th century. But what would be the human cost of a revolution?
And what does it really mean to the Russia of today?
There is one man who is instantly recognised around the world by just one word - Lenin.
Lenin himself, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, who took that revolutionary codename Lenin,
was an extraordinary figure.
Today if you want to meet Lenin, his embalmed body awaits
in a mausoleum at the heart of Red Square,
but be prepared to queue.
Many people go to pay their respects not just to the man,
but to the ideals he still represents.
He was a man who did believe in an ideology that he thought would, ultimately,
possibly passing through rivers of blood,
but ultimately create this extraordinary world
of egalitarianism, with no hunger, no want, no oppression.
The vision that Lenin had was very simple -
bread, land, and peace, which was an almost-universal longing
of the Russian people after this disastrous participation in World War I.
And in Russia at the turn of the century,
this resonated with a country on its knees.
In February, 1917,
Russian people and soldiers took to the streets in St Petersburg,
originally as a peaceful demonstration.
So February to March, 1917,
there was an enormous upswell of a sense that something had to change,
that the political system had become dysfunctional,
that the Tsar was no longer listening to what the people wanted,
and in February, 1917,
what we would think of as a popular revolution happened.
It spontaneously grew into a general strike and outright mutiny.
After just seven days, Tsar Nicholas II had abdicated.
A provisional government stepped in.
There are all these kind of very excited responses
to revolution, which I think can be forgotten, in a sense, when we think of what came later.
In October, Lenin seized his chance. His followers, known as the Red Guard,
captured control in a bloodless coup
and put the radical Communist Party, the Bolsheviks, in power,
but it launched the country into a civil war.
There continued to be a situation of chaos as each part of Russia, and even individuals within Russia,
decided where their future was to be, or were just caught up
by one side or the other and forced to fight in the civil war.
On the one side was Lenin's Bolshevik Red Army,
and on the other was the White Army, made up of tsarist nobles and aristocrats,
and no mercy was shown on either side.
Tsar Nicholas and his family, who had been put under house arrest in Siberia,
were awoken on July 17th, 1918, by guards from Lenin's Red Army.
The entire family were made to gather in one room
and were then brutally shot.
The dynasty that had ruled Russia for three centuries had come to a horrifying end.
And yet it would not bring peace to the people of Russia
and they were plunged into an ever more brutal chapter.
In 2017, there was a really interesting reimagining
of the revolutionary period in Russia.
TV programmes came out that trashed the legacy of the Bolsheviks
and portrayed them as personally morally reprehensible
and the structures they created as being flawed from the start.
In 2017, Putin made it clear that the 100th anniversary of the Revolution
would not be an occasion for state celebration.
He even clamped down on unauthorised rallies.
Why?
For many, it's the sign of a distinctly anti-revolutionary and deeply apprehensive leader
for whom revolution represents a challenge to stability.
The idea of celebrating something which was in any way
a kind of mass overthrow of the existing regime is clearly uncomfortable.
For others, it may be because the civil war that followed
has given the Revolution a darker narrative.
The war devastated the country, causing an estimated 14 million deaths,
but after four long years it was finally over.
Civil wars rarely end neatly,
but pretty much by 1922, the fighting had been, had finished.
On the one hand, the Bolsheviks wanted to
essentially now move into nation-building mode.
And on the other hand, they wanted to mark their victory.
"We've won and we're building a new state."
Not just a new state, but a new kind of state.
And that new state was created when a treaty between Russia, Ukraine, Belarus
and the Transcaucuses formed the Union of Soviet Republics.
Lenin's vision for a new Communist state had arrived.
The Soviet Union was born,
but would it be the egalitarian paradise Lenin had once promised?
The truth was that having demolished the oppressive autocracy of the tsars,
an equally brutal leadership now took their place.
The communist leadership could start experimenting with different means
of actually making that state function,
but very swiftly defaulting to terror and repression
as once again the only way to govern a country like Russia.
Lenin ordered an all-powerful security service into being called the Cheka,
paving the way for what would become the notorious KGB.
The Cheka's function was to protect the fledgling Bolshevik state
and actually to destroy class enemies - aristocrats,
anti-revolutionaries,
people whom Lenin and Trotsky thought posed a sort of existential risk to communism.
And their role essentially was, putting it nicely, internal security,
but putting it as it was to smash enemies of the state.
Cheka agents exuded terror and control.
With his people under their control,
Lenin wanted to apply an equally firm hand to the running of the state.
He needed to chart a way for his new Soviet Union to recover from years of famine and war
and to do so might mean playing a little fast and loose with his Marxist ideals.
So there's a need to rebuild.
And Lenin very, very pragmatically adopts his so-called new economic policy,
which is in some ways a limited form of capitalism.
The state maintains the so-called commanding heights of the economy,
the big, heavy industries, the banks and so forth,
but on the other hand, the opportunities for small-scale capitalist enterprise,
farmers being allowed to grow extra and then sell it in markets.
The communist leaders found that their ideals, their Marxist ideas,
were in direct collision with actually managing a functioning state
and so a return to capitalism had to be a stop-gap measure to be sure the country didn't collapse altogether.
And so, a new form of communism was born,
one which could be adapted, re-interpreted and reinvented
to meet the needs of this brand-new Russia.
Its success at doing so would be tested time and time again over the next 70 years
and would come with an extraordinary human cost,
especially when placed in the hands of the man who would succeed Lenin.
It's fair to say that Russia today has a somewhat mixed relationship
with one of its most notorious leaders, Joseph Stalin,
and yet his rehabilitation has gathered pace
with a record 70% of Russians in a recent poll approving of his role in Russian history.
So who was he?
In 1924, the man who had made an indelible mark on the 20th century
and changed the fortunes of Russia, died.
Lenin was gone and whilst a host of loyal Bolsheviks jostled to take his place,
a lesser-known Party member was about to surprise them all - Joseph Stalin.
No-one beforehand thought it could be conceivable that Stalin
would become leader of the Soviet Union.
Lenin himself had advised against Stalin being his successor,
but Stalin did become his successor
and this was largely on the basis of taking out opponents.
He could basically ally with one against the other and then ally the other way,
play them all off very effectively until there was just one man standing.
In 1929, Stalin became the ruler of the Soviet Union.
To the outside world, this was a kindly, benevolent Uncle Joe,
a man to look after his fellow comrades.
Then shift to this very radical vision of a great leap forward
or a great break away from the new economic policy
and towards industrialisation, collectivisation,
class war. Russia was in for a shock.
Stalin proves that, let's face it, the 20th century was the perfect century for dictators.
The principle of terror, the Red Terror so-called of the Civil War,
had begun under Lenin
and there was no difference between Lenin and Stalin
when it came to the principle of repressing your enemies in very large numbers.
So the Cheka evolved. Its mission stayed the same,
which was to smash enemies of the Revolution.
Under Stalin, the Cheka became known as the NKVD.
It was the NKVD who carried out massive repressions
in which millions and millions of people were murdered and killed.
This was an era of the knock on the door at three in the morning.
Someone in your apartment block is being dragged away by the secret police.
Everyone just kind of keeps their head down because it could be you next time.
The NKVD was so ruthless that this era became known as the Great Terror.
For ordinary Russians across the country,
life under Stalin was one ruled by fear.
You couldn't even trust your own family.
There was the legend of Pavel Morozov,
who was a child who actually informed on his own parents to the secret police.
Why? Because they had been hoarding food to feed him at a time of famine.
This is a sense, I think, of the paranoia
that became part and parcel of everyone's lives in the 1930s.
Nighttime arrests, large-scale deportations.
Obviously, none of this is reported in the press.
What we have is the rhetoric of wreckers, enemies of the people.
This was a grievous, terrible period in Soviet history
where the secret police were themselves, ironically enough,
often consumed. They would be carrying out these executions, arresting people, often by quota,
and then would themselves be shot.
Others were farmed out to gulags where very many people perished,
or died constructing canals in the frozen north.
An estimated 18 million people are thought to have been imprisoned in work camps
known as the Gulag.
One of Stalin's strengths, in a way, was precisely that he could imagine things on a scale
that other people thought was just completely ridiculous.
The thought of building labour camps wherein you can have millions of people
being imprisoned and being worked sometimes to death.
Repressing individuals, deporting them to Siberia,
murdering them more or less at whim is a constant throughout Russian history,
it's just that under Stalin it was elevated to an all-pervasive system
which affected everybody in the country more or less indiscriminately.
People thought, "No, surely it can't be that extreme?"
If anything, it was more extreme than was thought.
There are almost no monuments
to those who were killed in Stalin's concentration camps,
although it's a very important part of Soviet history,
but this is a kind of hidden part of the history.
On Stalin's orders, 75% of the Supreme War Council are murdered in 1937.
That is, two out of five Marshals, 13 out of 15 Army Generals.
Out of a total of 6,000 high-ranking officers in the Red Army,
1,500 are executed during one purge.
So how and why in Russia has Stalin's image been gradually rehabilitated
from bloody dictator to an efficient leader?
Many have pointed towards a day that has grown into a major celebration of patriotism
under the presidency of Vladimir Putin.
Victory Day.
The story of Stalin's Russia was about to take an extraordinary turn
with the arrival of the Second World War.
Russia.
A country that has never been shy to rewrite its own history.
Spasibo!
Even if it's some way from the truth.
And Putin is a master of the craft.
He's plundering history
for the bits that fit his current political needs.
He can, essentially, reinvent Russia
for every single individual segment of the audience.
And there is one man in particular who appears to be having his legacy reworked for the next generation.
Under Putin, Stalin has made something of a comeback.
History has been rewritten
to the point where he's now portrayed in Russian textbooks for kids as "an efficient manager".
How could the man who some estimate was responsible for the death of as many as 20 million Soviets
now be remembered as a Russian hero?
In 1939, perhaps two of the greatest villains of modern history, Stalin and Hitler,
had initially entered a pact. The Soviets would help Germany in return for Poland.
But Stalin was double-crossed.
Within two years, Hitler scrapped the pact
and the Soviets found themselves facing the Nazi war machine.
Hitler attacked on the 22nd of June, 1941.
And so began a bloody war on the Eastern Front.
The German troops crossed the Soviet border
and thereafter follows a long period
of tremendously traumatic retreats,
huge loss of life.
After five months, the Nazis closed in on St Petersburg,
which had been renamed Leningrad,
beginning a siege of the historic city.
It would last two-and-a-half years and go down as one of the deadliest blockades in history.
The siege of Leningrad, of course, has become an iconic part of Soviet history.
People were reduced sometimes to cannibalism.
I mean, people were starving.
More people died in the defence of Leningrad
than the total British, American and French war dead through the entire war.
It is a moment in history that almost defines the sacrifice
that ordinary Russians would make for the victory of their country,
the loss of generations on a heartbreaking scale,
and yet it was indeed a huge turning point.
Eventually, the war on the Eastern Front fell in the Soviets' favour.
It's very difficult, I think, to get to terms
with just how vicious the struggle on the Eastern Front was.
When it comes down to it, Hitler's war machine was broken in the East.
That's where the majority of his divisions were deployed.
That's where the majority of his divisions were destroyed.
For the remainder of the war, the Germans were attacked from all sides by the Allies
and were never able to regain the initiative.
Then on the 8th of May, 1945, came the announcement everyone had been waiting for.
Yesterday morning, at 2.41am,
at General Eisenhower's headquarters,
General Jodl, the representative of the German High Command,
signed the act of unconditional surrender.
The war had been won,
at a huge cost to the Soviet Union.
An estimated 26 million Soviet citizens lost their lives.
If you go to Leningrad, as is now St Petersburg,
the massive Piskayovskoye cemetery,
all you see is mass grave after mass grave after mass grave.
The fact that Russia lost that many at the time of the Second World War is,
to a large extent, explained by the fact
that Russian military commanders and Stalin
did not economise on human lives.
In my case, I have not seen both my grandparents.
And it's not my unique family story. It's almost everywhere.
But despite this extraordinary cast,
without the Soviet Union the Second World War would have ended very differently.
The Allies emerged victorious and more powerful than ever before.
The Soviet Union bought global freedom
with Soviet soldiers' blood. Almost that the world
owes that victory to the ultimate sacrifice
that Soviet soldiers, that the Soviet people as a whole were willing to make.
Which is why, even in the height of a pandemic,
Putin decided that commemorating this moment in history with his Victory Day Parade
was what the country needed.
It's a symbol of strength, of Russian might,
of a turning point in the fortunes of the motherland.
This is the thing that distinguishes the Soviet participation in war from any other countries.
It's on a completely different scale and that this deserves to be commemorated on a world stage.
And so just when Russia could have looked at its weakest,
they were suddenly at their strongest.
Stalin was transformed and there was a new empire to build.
Stalin was not by nature a humanitarian,
nor an altruist, and he had fought the Second World War to preserve his country.
And he was likely also then to use this as an opportunity to extend his power as much as possible.
Soviet armies had penetrated deep into Europe,
all the way through to Berlin and so forth.
And basically what happened was that where Soviet troops had reached,
on the whole - there are some exceptions - but, on the whole, they were not withdrawn.
With the agreements made at the Yalta Conference in 1945,
Stalin was able to expand the Soviet Empire.
New satellite states emerged in Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary,
Czechoslovakia, Romania, Albania and East Germany.
This became known as the Eastern Bloc.
Stalin had succeeded in turning the fledgling communist state
into a giant force to be reckoned with.
And it made the West very uneasy.
The most notorious chapter in Russian history was about to begin.
Over the last thousand years, the Russian people have seen their history defined,
in part by their tumultuous relationship with the West.
It's fitting that their national symbol is that of the double-headed eagle,
one facing east and one west.
It's been said that if in Asia you feel European, and in Europe you feel Asian,
that means you are Russian.
This double identity stands Russians out in the world.
The great power identity is something that's been very important
during Russian Empire, during the Soviet period,
and in the contemporary time. That claim just isn't plausible.
Russia is nothing like the Soviet Union was.
Russia isn't equal, not economically,
it hasn't got Silicon Valley.
It's...decaying.
And yet, this is the kind of imperial fantasy
that Russia and the US are co-superpowers
in conflict with one another. Getting along with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing.
And yet, for the Russian people, this conflict feels very real.
For a generation of Russians, this hostility to the West is all too familiar,
thanks to an era when Russia didn't want to just measure itself against the West,
it wanted to beat it.
An era of spies, lies and an ever-looming threat
of nuclear annihilation.
In 1946, the now former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill
made a speech which is considered one of the opening volleys of the Cold War.
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.
All these cities and the populations around them
lie in what I must call the Soviet Sphere.
After four years of pretending this was benign Uncle Joe Stalin,
who was on their side, suddenly they had to explain the true nature of the Soviet regime
once it was becoming clear in its domination of Eastern Europe.
What had been presented as a friend was now undeniably an enemy and the greatest threat.
And with this threat came the looming fear of a new global conflict.
Who knew where Stalin and his Soviets would stop?
The leaders of Russia tell us their only concern is the defence of their own nation.
Is this so? Or are they ambitious for world conquest?
Stalin was now at the peak of his power,
or at least Stalin's Soviet Union was at the peak of its power.
And it was looking to expand.
The moment of no return had passed.
There was a new global order.
It was East versus West, communism versus capitalism,
with each side determined to outplay the other.
They secretly funded communist parties in Europe,
in France, in Spain, even in the US.
They tried to... They supported leftist leaders in Africa and Latin America.
The Cold War wasn't really cold for much of its history.
This was a real fight. There were small, nasty wars around the world as each side vied for influence.
Some of the biggest ones, of course, were Korea or Vietnam.
But just as distrust and hostility with the West hit an all-time high,
Russia was about to lose the man who had driven it all.
By the end of his life, Stalin was, ironically, on the one hand,
absolutely untouchable politically,
and on the other, more paranoid than at any point in his existence.
But, of course, he died in a way that obviously he was a victim of his own paranoia,
when he had a brain aneurism, because his guards were told that no one could disturb him.
He lay dying and wasn't able to actually get medical assistance until it was far too late.
That this person who had been presented for so many years
as superhuman, immortal,
the person on whom absolutely all Soviet life rested
had suddenly gone was an enormous shock.
What could possibly come after Stalin?
The Man of Steel was gone,
but Russia was about to enter an even more deadly chapter.
In just under ten years after his death,
the USSR and the West would reach the brink of an all-out nuclear war.
The Cold War was about to get even colder.
1950s Russia. New leader Nikita Khrushchev has skilfully seized power after Stalin's death.
The country was in the grip of the Cold War
and information was king.
If you knew what your enemies were up to, you could stay one step ahead.
The KGB had a specialist disinformation department.
They did all sorts of dirty tricks.
They would plant fake stories, they would forge letters.
Almost every major world event has been manipulated, affected, or changed by intelligence.
The Soviets operated under the old Chinese concept.
To win the war without a battle, that's the acme of any foreign operation.
And key to that operation was a newly developed secret service.
Out went the military thugs enforcing power.
And in came a new and far more sophisticated KGB.
They were the guys who were posh, who spoke foreign languages without accents,
who were sophisticated and who kind of roamed the world
trying to subvert the capitalist West.
The Soviets are attempting to intimidate the Western powers.
This is a dangerous tactic.
We're very familiar with James Bond, with MI6, with the CIA,
but actually the KGB had a pretty good run in the whole post-war era,
not least because they were helped by a bunch of clever, posh,
Cambridge-educated traitors, or double agents you could call them, people like Kim Philby,
who were in positions of influence, shipping British and American secrets to Moscow.
I'm debarred by the Official Secrets Act from saying anything
that might disclose to unauthorised persons
information derived from my position as a former government official.
And there was one area of intelligence gathering and espionage
that was of special interest to Russia.
The West had been the first to develop nuclear weapons and the Russians wanted in.
I thought that perhaps some of what I had access to
might be useful...in helping Russia
to keep abreast of Britain, America, and Germany.
At the age of 20, Melita Norwood worked as a secretary
for one of Britain's top secret nuclear research centres,
where she began to photograph classified files for the KGB.
Perhaps the most important female agent in the KGB's long history,
she had never been confronted with the evidence of her career as a spy
until the BBC secretly filmed her.
Melita seemingly lived an unremarkable life in Bexleyheath,
but would go down in history as the longest-serving Soviet spy in Britain
and helped to take Russia one step closer to what it longed to be -
a nuclear superpower.
The Soviet government's announcement that it has decided to resume nuclear tests
comes as a profound shock.
Once again the iron fist of the Soviet Union
has crushed the hopes of peace-loving people.
The Soviets, under the leadership of Khrushchev,
had been testing and developing atomic bombs
and in 1961 in the Russian Arctic they tested the largest nuclear weapon ever to be detonated -
the Tsar Bomba.
It produced the most powerful human-made explosion ever recorded.
It was designed to make the world sit up and notice, and they did.
As he said he would, Mr Khrushchev has exploded his giant bomb
in cynical disregard of the United Nations.
They have advanced no solid justification
for exploding this monstrous and unnecessary weapon.
It was obvious that the Soviet Union needed to have
some kind of thermonuclear capacity in order to deter the West.
This particular case, the Tsar Bomba, really reflects that.
It had very, very little military value,
but it had a great deal of psychological value.
For the first time in its centuries of squaring up to the West,
Russia finally wielded as devastating a power as its enemies
and it looked utterly capable of deploying it.
There are two kinds of attack - with warning and without any warning.
We think that most of the time we will be warned before the bomb explodes,
so there will be time for us to get into our homes, schools or some other safe place.
So what was to happen next would be a defining moment in the story of modern Russia.
In 1962, the stakes were raised to a war footing
when Russia attempted to place its shiny, new nuclear missiles
within a stone's throw of the United States in Fidel Castro's Cuba.
A victorious revolutionary enters Havana in triumph.
He promises his people freedom. Instead, he gives them bondage,
as Russia's first satellite in the Caribbean.
In one giant step, Russia is giving Cuba an offensive nuclear capability
that can strike at the heart of the United States.
The world held its breath.
It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba
as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States.
But at the very last hour, Kennedy and Khrushchev managed to come to an agreement.
On Sunday morning, a message reaches the White House from Moscow.
Press Secretary Salinger announces that Chairman Khrushchev has agreed to remove the missiles from Cuba.
The Cuban Missile Crisis really highlighted
Khrushchev's style of leadership, which was he was impulsive
and unpredictable.
Khrushchev, essentially, brought the country to the brink of war.
America and the West would be ingrained as the enemy of the state
for generations of Russians to come.
And with Russia's relationship with the West today at an all-time low,
and with defence budgets at an all-time high,
you could easily be fooled into thinking that the Cold War never went away.
But the truth is far more complicated.
The tale of Russia between the Cold War and now
is one of remarkable twists and turns.
By the 1980s, Russia would be about to face an extraordinary moment in its history,
one that would not only see the end of the Cold War,
it would see the end of the Soviet Union.
The story of the Russian people over the last millennium
is often one of extraordinary hardship and sacrifice
on behalf of a country forever racing to catch up with the world around it.
But during the Cold War, she had finally emerged as a nuclear-powered global superpower
to rival the United States.
The Russian-dominated Soviet Union encompassed 15 republics
with control over 293 million people.
And yet, in just a matter of decades,
the world's most powerful collection of states would dramatically implode.
So what happened?
For many people, the end of the USSR began
on the 26th of April, 1986,
in a town called Pripyat.
Hello. Very good morning to you. You're watching the BBC's Breakfast Time programme.
This morning, nuclear experts are assessing the extent and the dangers
of what's being described as the world's worst-ever nuclear disaster
in the short history of civilian nuclear power.
At the time of the accident, it was really the peak of the Soviet society.
Things were going very well, they're generating nuclear power,
really at the height of modernity.
It was a normal day in Pripyat. Workers went to the power station as usual,
families did their regular things.
At the unit, Reactor Number Four was scheduled a safety test.
It was a routine safety test
that needed to be completed for use of the reactor.
And a number of things went wrong during this safety test,
which led to the accident that we know of
and the explosion that ripped off the lid of the nuclear reactor,
sending radioactive particles into the local area
and a fire that burned for ten days, spreading a huge cloud of radioactivity,
not only over the city of Pripyat, but also over the whole of Europe.
This was really disastrous.
At first, the Soviets tried to suppress the accident.
They thought the panic would be worse than radiation if there was an evacuation.
Phone lines were cut in the town to prevent anyone from telling the outside world.
Life must go on.
They were allowed to go about their daily business,
going to shops and going out and about
even while there was radiation all around them.
And it wasn't just the local residents exposed to lethal doses of radioactivity.
Hundreds, then thousands and then, finally, hundreds of thousands of workers
were sent to the disaster zone.
This was really a disaster that nobody had ever seen before
and never really imagined at this scale,
so they had to develop new types of technologies and approaches to put out the fire,
including using a helicopter to dump sand and boron onto the nuclear reactor fire.
Teams dubbed liquidators raced to contain the exposed core
with soldiers taking turns to run onto the roof of the reactor to shovel off radioactive matter.
The radiation was so high they could only stay up there for 90 seconds,
but even in that time they received a lifetime dose of radiation.
Meanwhile, one helicopter fatally clipped a crane killing all four men onboard.
Eventually, after ten days of burning, it went out.
The radioactive lava that was seeping down through the building had to be dealt with.
They didn't want it to reach the ground below the reactor
and hit any ground water where it may have created another explosion.
Miners were enlisted and tunnelled 90 feet under the melted core to build a protective wall.
The real concern was that it would hit the water table
and that drinking water in the local area would be contaminated,
so the release of this radioactivity was really bad news for people specifically near the reactor,
but also those people who came into contact with the particles that were released into the atmosphere.
Finally, as international pressure mounted,
44,500 residents were evacuated from Pripyat.
Over the following two weeks,
they relocated another 75,000 more people from the surrounding 18-mile area,
labelled the Zone of Alienation.
Those in most danger were moved,
but the radioactive cloud spread across vast areas of Europe.
The extent of the fire at Chernobyl and all the radioactive particles contained in it
was really vast and it went very high up into the atmosphere.
The wind took the radioactive particles around Belarus and Ukraine
up to Sweden and Finland.
It then looped down all the way to Italy
and then back up across the UK to Sweden and Norway.
This was a global disaster.
And still the Soviet Union did not warn people to stay indoors during the emergency.
The fact that the rest of the world knew about what had happened at Chernobyl,
that there had been an explosion, well before the Soviet population heard about it,
people realised that actually the state didn't really care
about its own people enough to protect them.
They were doing as much as possible
in order to keep this under the carpet.
This was a failure of the entire state apparatus.
They were trying to do their best in order to hide everything.
Soviet officials announced to the world
they had put out the fire on the 6th of May,
but radioactive gases poured from the explosion site for another week,
peaking on the 11th of May.
The Reagan team confirmed world concern
at what they claim is the Kremlin's continuing refusal to come clean on the accident.
We don't think that they have provided as full and prompt information
as they should have.
For those in power, admitting responsibility meant admitting
that the image of the great Soviet Union was a lie.
The radioactivity released was 400 times greater than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
And the long-lasting effects on the health of the people exposed,
particularly children, is still being realised over 30 years on.
It could happen in other parts of the world,
but reaction would be different and this did manifest
this kind of approach of authorities of the government towards ordinary Russians,
and their eagerness to pay any price in terms of our lives.
The fact that it failed so catastrophically
and spread radiation across the entire country, something that people were very afraid of,
really shattered the illusion of the Soviet dream.
It brought home how necessary it was to tell the truth
and to reveal not just contemporary Soviet problems,
but to delve into all the lies that had been told about Soviet history beforehand.
The disaster would have a profound effect on the relationship between the Soviet Union and her people.
It was a loss of faith that still has a ripple effect today.
70 years on from Lenin's glorious revolution,
40 years on from Stalin's victory in the Second World War
and only decades from the heady heights of the Cold War,
and the first chink in the armour of the mighty Soviet Union had been broadcast to the world.
For almost 1,000 years, from Ivan the Terrible all the way through to Vladimir Putin,
Russia has had a complicated relationship with the concept of freedom.
But at the end of the 1980s,
the arrival of a new leader would usher in an autonomy the people had never experienced before
and Russia would never be the same again.
After years of dormant Soviet rule,
the Russian people were about to find out what freedom meant
with the arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev.
Gorbachev was not very well known at the time,
but he understood about the need for innovation.
He manages to win the leadership contest in 1985
and then very quickly starts to instigate
one of the most radical reform programmes that the Soviet Union has ever seen.
After almost 40 years of conflict,
Gorbachev signed a nuclear arms treaty with the US
that ended the Cold War.
He's exceedingly successful in international terms
in basically ending this very, very confrontational era.
But domestically, he's only beginning to realise
just how massive a challenge trying to reform
what really proves to be a pretty unreformable system is going to be.
Gorbachev's road map for change was packaged around two buzz words -
glasnost, which meant openness,
and perestroika, which meant a restructuring.
It appeared as if ordinary Russians had finally been given the right to use their own voice.
What we're seeing is throughout the Soviet Union,
different nationality groups speak out in a way we haven't really seen since the Revolution itself.
It was a most beautiful time.
This was real freedom and opportunity
for Russia to be changed. It was like life might be different.
The problem was that as soon as Gorbachev loosened restrictions
on what could be said publicly in Russia, a great deal could be said and not much of it was good.
And so his newly-empowered citizens made their feelings known.
He leans into it. He thinks, "OK, we do need to have more dramatic change."
Then what we get is demokratizatsiya. Democratisation.
In 1989, Gorbachev introduced free elections.
It was a momentous departure from the old communist system.
Ultimately, it is the people who will decide the fate of Gorbachev's revolution.
How much faith do you have in Gorbachev? He's on the right track.
We just have to make sure everyone listens to him.
Gorbachev had opened the floodgates.
Across the Soviet Union, a dramatic wave of revolution spread.
Then, on the 9th of November, 1989,
the Berlin Wall came crashing down.
For the hardliners of the Communist Party,
this was a leader who had lost control.
Gorbachev's challenge had always been how to deal with the hardliners
that he knew still controlled the so-called power agencies.
The military, the police, the KGB.
Once again, he became more radical.
He said, "What we're going to do is create a new union treaty,
"which is going to totally reshape the basis of the Soviet Union."
And this would also mean, frankly, the end of the unified Communist Party, the end of the KGB.
This was too much from the point of view of the hardliners.
They felt that if they allowed this union treaty to be signed, there was no going back.
And that's why we had, in August, 1991, their coup.
A reactionary group, led by the KGB, locked Gorbachev in his Crimean estate,
and on the 19th of August, 1991, sent tanks into Moscow in a bid to seize power.
They just thought, look, they would isolate Gorbachev in his palace, his dacha down in Crimea.
They would have the tanks out on the streets
and declare a temporary emergency committee would be in charge.
And they assumed that, frankly, as soon as they cracked the whip,
the people of the Soviet Union would basically just settle down,
which they didn't.
The KGB wanted to hold together the old communist USSR regime,
but the people fought back.
They're beginning to claim Moscow as their own.
Claiming it back from the communists, whose credibility has been destroyed,
whose power has been crushed by these demonstrators.
The crowds took on almost the feel of a carnival.
They would put flowers in tank barrels,
climb up onto the tanks in the streets of Moscow.
As soon as it became clear that the protesters could get away with protesting,
that, yes, there were tanks, but frankly protesters could clamber all over them
and no-one was going to shoot them, then all of a sudden everything shifted.
It became this symbol of "the time when they - the elites, the bosses -
"tried to control us and for once we said no." It became a revolution.
This was the defining moment.
The people had spoken.
The coup was over, but nothing would be the same again.
They not only rejected the hardliners,
but also the broken communist system presided over by Gorbachev.
On Christmas Day, 1991,
he stepped down as the eighth and last ever leader of the Soviet Union.
Mikhail Gorbachev, although he has played great role in world history,
did start things he was not able to control.
This huge, politically catastrophic disintegration of the USSR.
At the end of 1991, as his very last act as Soviet President,
Gorbachev signed the Soviet Union out of existence.
Mikhail Gorbachev inherited an empire maintained by the iron fist of central control.
He's leaving behind 15 independent states
which share only a disastrous economy and an uncertain future.
Power passed from the Kremlin to 15 new republics
and over six decades of communist rule came to an abrupt end.
This was a truly astonishing and momentous event.
The end of the Soviet Union, the rise of a new independent Russia.
The Russian public has decreed Gorbachev's dissolution of the Soviet Union
as a disaster bordering on treason.
In a recent poll of Russians, his approval rating stood well below even that of Stalin.
For many, the new Russia would bring with it an era of hardship and uncertainty,
but for a select few, the journey from communism to capitalism would see them become filthy rich
and herald in the era of one Vladimir Putin, the unlikely leader.
He was a kind of junior officer in communist East Germany in the 1980s.
He was never, though, a star. He was a good B minus.
He was everybody's favourite second-in-command.
So how did he go from a good number two
to allegedly one of the richest and most powerful men on the planet?
Life for ordinary people in modern Russia today
is dominated by one man, and he's everywhere you look.
Over the last 1,000 years, Russia's history has constantly returned to one of East versus West.
And today is no different.
Vladimir Putin is a man with a mission.
And bear in mind his background. He is KGB through and through.
He is a man who has mastered two martial arts.
Putin is kind of Russia's own Action Man, so there's the judo. He genuinely likes judo.
But also there are all sorts of other crazy stunts.
He's flown with cranes, he's scuba dived in the Mediterranean.
There's that famous shot of him riding topless on a horse.
He's believed to secretly be one of the wealthiest men in the world.
It's possible to say that Putin is the richest man in the world,
probably the richest man who has ever lived.
And has dominated Russian politics since he was first elected 20 years ago.
You know, here's this virile, strong guy.
It was a symbol of personal virility, but also of Russia as a strong, virile state.
Who is he? What does he want?
And what is the real story of Russia today?
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991,
Boris Yeltsin had come to power as Russia's first president,
but his attempts to bring in democracy and a capitalist market economy
had resulted in huge economic hardship for the Russian people.
Prices have jumped even more than the three, four or five times they'd expected.
This butter was selling for eight times the price it could have been bought for yesterday.
These are the sort of sums that make nonsense of the incomes of most Russians.
The weakness of the rouble meant your pension meant almost nothing,
where you had no idea what your job was going to be.
The struggle for day-to-day survival was extraordinary.
"I simply can't survive on a pension," declared one man.
"It's daylight robbery, stealing from the honest," complained another.
By the late 1990s, he had suffered a string of heart attacks.
He withdrew from public life and Russia was left spinning out of control.
And lurking in the shadows was an obscure politician called Vladimir Putin.
He comes to Moscow and becomes Director of the Federal Security Service, the FSB,
which is the closest thing there is to a successor to the KGB.
And then he becomes, in due course, Deputy Prime Minister and Prime Minister.
By this point, he's clearly been picked,
but he's picked because he's seen as efficient, young,
unlike Boris Yeltsin, sober,
but also, more to the point, reliable. He's a safe pair of hands, someone who you can trust.
On December 31st, 1999, with the dawn of a new millennium, Putin came into power.
Putin looked fit, looked healthy, sober and competent.
Putin has always based his claim to authority on being able to establish order,
some kind of regularity, some kind of predictability.
And he's very much made his name on being able to maintain order
both within Russia and in Russia's relations with the outside world.
During the 2000s, Russia began to change dramatically.
If you were lucky and had the right connections or the right muscle,
you could become a millionaire, a billionaire.
The economy boomed, the rich became richer
and Putin's popularity soared.
Russia is rife with oil, selling up to 11 million barrels a day.
Russia has been more prosperous,
the standard of living in Russia has been better than it's ever been.
Today it has more than 70 billionaires.
There was a new, flashy breed of oligarch who had cashed in under Yeltsin.
They had a whole series of auctions
and people were buying whole industries for pence on the pound.
They control oil, they control gas, they control minerals,
they control railways, natural resources...
And they have grown stupendously rich.
But the oligarchs were in for a shock with Putin.
What he was worried about when he came into power in 2000 was
that oligarchs had large amounts of money, which he didn't really control.
And so what he did in his first presidential term
was rein in some of the oligarchs and essentially say,
"Stay out of politics, obey the state,
"or I will take your fortune away."
Now, some of them ran away,
some of them were jailed - Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once Russia's richest man,
who spent ten years in a Siberian jail.
And others said, "OK, that's fine. What is mine is yours."
And if you look at the people who are now billionaires in today's Russia,
they are some of the wealthiest people on the planet.
They're not just billionaires, they're multi-billionaires.
And it's Kremlin Inc, it's corporatist.
And actually these days it's all KGB.
The big question is does the power and money really sit with Putin or with the KGB?
You can't be ex-KGB.
You can't because it's a system that keeps you forever.
And, of course, Putin can't be ex.
When Putin became Prime Minister, his first meeting was
with very high-ranked KGB officers.
And as a joke, he said, "Operation was successful."
We have, in Russia, an exceedingly sophisticated and well-funded
and, frankly, very powerful range of intelligence agencies,
which are both suppressing people within the country, but also, as we all know,
carry out all kinds of missions around the world.
In 2006, Russia passed new laws permitting the special forces
to carry out extra-judicial killings of extremists abroad.
And there was one mission in particular
that would define this next chilling chapter of Putin's reign.
An assassination that would leave a grieving widow demanding answers.
In Russia, it's very common to use different names.
Normally, I called him Sasha, of course, and old friends knew him as Sasha,
because it's more softer, it's...more lovely.
It's a very interesting connection
between Putin and my husband, Sasha.
Her husband was ex-KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko,
who had fled Russia with his family after becoming an enemy of the Kremlin
for speaking out against corruption.
Maybe he's...what they call betraying of the system,
maybe because he was very close to some truths.
On the 1st of November, 2006, Litvinenko met two men at the Millennium Hotel in London,
where he enjoyed a pot of green tea.
Little did he know, his tea had been deliberately contaminated
with a deadly poison - polonium-210.
The story is gruesome and yet darkly funny.
The two assassins sent by Moscow were not very good killers.
They left this billowing trail of radiation all across London.
They'd go on to contaminate restaurants, bedrooms, a pole-dancing club,
even Arsenal's Emirates Stadium.
Scotland Yard is convinced that Andrei Lugovoy, a former Russian security services officer,
murdered Litvinenko.
It was my right to call for inquest and try to find who behind. This is right for public inquiry.
But I'm very disappointed.
The killers of Alexander Litvinenko are both back in Russia,
Andrei Lugovoy, who co-poisoned Litvinenko, is a Duma Deputy, he's like an MP.
He's very rich. He appears on state TV chat shows all the time, he protests his innocence.
It's clear that they enjoy state protection.
I'm not in a political case. I'm a woman who lost her husband.
And I want to know what happened.
Litvinenko's death and the Salisbury poisonings in 2018
demonstrated to the world Russia will use extra-judicial force overseas to protect its interests.
But to what end? What does Putin want his new Russia to become?
For his people, the message is... he's making Russia great again.
In his speeches, Putin was saying Russia is a great power
and the West are not treating Russia as if it's a great power, the way he understands it,
which means they get away with the odd little war or invasion. That's what a great power does.
If one of these countries looks like it's getting out of hand, then something has to be done about it.
The world has seen Russia deploy its military strength and might
in the Ukraine, Crimea and in Syria.
But to understand Russia today is to understand a different kind of war,
a war by stealth.
What the digital world has done is allowed Putin and his spies to reach millions of people,
Americans, Brits, with fake stories, with polarising stories,
with all sorts of divisive stuff.
The playbook is the same, but the reach now is so much greater,
which in some ways makes Putin's regime and Putin's efforts be more scary than the KGB.
I's clever. And it's brutal.
And I don't think we have got to grips with it yet.
It is alleged special intelligence centres infiltrate the internet,
hack information systems and churn out fake news.
What they do, what they are very good at is identifying the existing fault lines
that are thrown up between communities or people who feel they've been left out.
In some ways, we give them the ammunition they use against us.
We generally hear about information warfare as something that comes from Russia
and is directed at us.
The funny thing is in Russia information warfare is taken to be what the West does
to undermine Russia in the international environment.
And today accusations of election meddling are just one of the latest iterations
of information warfare.
Recent disclosures of alleged hacked emails
are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts.
The intelligence community has concluded that they are almost certainly directed
by senior Russian government officials,
that Russia was interested in destabilising the US political system.
But for now there is a new story to be spun.
He has brought Russia up from its knees.
He's kind of brought pride back.
Over time, he has become more and more isolated and more insulated from the realities on the ground.
It remains true that, you know, for many ordinary Russians
other leadership is difficult to imagine.
The big problem for Putin is, ironically enough, the same problem
that other dictators and, indeed, Mafia bosses have.
It's how do you retire
when everything you are, everything you have is based on power?
And it looks neatly as if the history of Russia over the last thousand years
almost comes full circle.
From its founding father, Prince Vladimir,
to the father of Russia today, Vladimir Putin.
Its size and power makes Russia a baffling place, full of contradictions,
but the truth is this is a country with a rich, vivid history
and a people who have a unique connection and belief in their motherland,
one that has been tested to the extreme by its earliest rulers to its mighty Soviet ambitions.
And now with Putin securing new amendments
that could keep him in power until 2036,
the next chapter in the rollercoaster history of the Russian people
looks set to be just as dramatic.
Spasibo!
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