Royal history is at the heart of the stories we tell
about the past.
We often think it's definitive.
Kings and queens, dates and facts,
all unchanging and fixed.
But it's not like that at all.
History is a cacophony of voices, all of them competing
to tell their own version of the story.
And when revolution is in the air...
...that competition gets really intense.
In this series, I'm investigating the fibs
about three royal houses fighting for survival.
Did Marie Antoinette really cause the French Revolution?
"Let them eat cake!"
Was Georgian Britain as genteel and well-ordered as we think?
GUNFIRE
And this time, the tragic end of a powerful dynasty - the Romanovs,
and the real Russian Revolution.
"Down with hunger!
"Down with the war!
"Down with the Tsar!"
It was one of the defining events of the 20th century
but this story is rich with fabrications,
with manipulations,
and with some quite fantastic fibs.
Was Lenin really the leader of the revolution?
Did false rumours about the Tsarina and the mad monk Rasputin
help bring down the Russian monarchy?
And how did the Bolsheviks rewrite the story
of the October Revolution?
There have been more fibs told about the history of Russia
than about the history of any country in the world.
Russia's revolution of October 1917
has gone down in history as an inspiring uprising,
getting rid of the cruel royal family,
giving power to the people, sweeping away inequality,
transforming Russia forever.
Or...so the story goes.
October 1917.
The First World War raged.
The future of Europe's monarchies hung in the balance.
And in St Petersburg, the historic capital of Russia,
a revolution was shaking the world.
We all think we know what happened.
Hordes of revolutionary workers and soldiers
stormed the Winter Palace.
The Tsar was swept away and a new communist regime was born.
The October Revolution promised a future of equality
and prosperity for all.
Russia would never be the same again
and neither would the rest of the world.
The first socialist revolution
would transform politics and society.
This day in October 1917
would be remembered forever.
Films and books present the event as truly epic
but the story of the great October Revolution
has been exaggerated, glamorised,
and shrouded in fibs.
It established Lenin as the heroic revolutionary leader.
And this was the foundation stone of a powerful mythology
that would sustain the Soviet leaders in power for 74 years.
It's a mythology that still to this day
masks just how and when the Russian Revolution got started.
The revolution was fuelled by growing hatred
of the Romanov dynasty, that had ruled for 300 years.
As Tsar, Nicholas ll was head of the powerful
Russian Orthodox Church.
He was also notorious for the bloody suppression
of protests that even hinted at democracy.
Nicholas' wife was Alexandra,
a German princess who converted to the Russian Orthodox Church
when she married him.
The new Tsarina never really fitted in to the Russian court.
She was always distrusted as a foreigner.
And this got worse when Russia went to war with Germany.
In 1914, the royal families of Europe were all closely related.
Britain's George V was first cousin to both the Tsar of Russia
and the Kaiser of Germany.
In photos, George and Nicholas look almost like twins.
But all these close ties across Europe
would count for...pfff...nothing when it came to the First World War.
In the fight against the Kaiser, his German cousin,
the Tsar, allied Russia with Britain and France.
GUNFIRE AND EXPLOSIONS
But by the end of 1916, the Russian army was collapsing.
Over a million soldiers had been killed.
Many deserted from the front and were causing unrest in the cities.
As commander in chief, the Tsar was blamed for the military disasters.
REPORTER: At the front, defeat,
disorganisation and lonely dead.
Anti-tsarist feeling was driven further
by an infamous character of the time.
Grigori Rasputin.
He was adviser to the Tsar and Tsarina,
but gossip about the Tsarina and Rasputin
set the royal family up for a monumental fall.
He's gone down in history as the sex-crazed mad monk.
For a start, Rasputin wasn't a proper monk.
He portrayed himself as a mystic
but he'd never officially been in holy orders.
And then there were the rumours that the sex-mad monk
was having an affair with Alexandra.
The gossip that Rasputin was the queen's lover
was spread by Russian radicals to undermine the monarchy.
It's still doing the rounds in popular culture.
# Ra- Ra- Rasputin
# Lover of the Russian queen
# There was a cat that really was gone
# Ra- Ra- Rasputin
# Russia's greatest love machine... #
Historian Frances Welch is keen to separate fact from fiction.
Now, Frances, you strongly believe that Alexandra and Rasputin
weren't having an affair.
Where did these rumours come from, in that case?
The central problem was that Rasputin was going to the palace,
visiting the palace, quite a lot.
Nobody knew why, and the reason was that the Tsarina's son, Alexei,
had haemophilia, but somehow Rasputin was able
to calm the boy down and bring about some cure.
The Tsarina didn't want anyone to know
that Alexei was ill.
The public could not be told, and they couldn't explain
why Rasputin would keep coming to the palace.
There were cartoons everywhere,
showing her misbehaving with Rasputin.
Everyone seemed to think it was happening.
Why do you believe that in fact they weren't?
Well, I think she wasn't because she was so proper,
really profoundly proper.
Sort of haughty, stand-offish.
And the idea of her, sort of, fraternising in that way
with Rasputin, I can't imagine.
She was also incredibly in love with her husband.
She wrote, sort of, love letters to him the whole time.
They had a wonderfully loving relationship
and I don't believe that the Tsarina ever slept with Rasputin.
By 1917, the royal family was seen as the root
of all that was wrong with Russia.
The hunger, the poverty, the casualties on the front,
and their dependence on the sex-mad monk
had been an easy target for those hoping to trigger a revolution.
And in the end, you had these cartoons
with a sort of grotesque picture, a giant Rasputin,
with the Tsar on one knee and the Tsarina on the other knee.
The caption was, "Russia's ruling house."
# Oh, those Russians. #
The Russian Revolution began in February 1917,
when workers in St Petersburg started rioting
about bread shortages.
They also blamed the Tsar for the continuation
of the disastrous war.
We tend to think of the revolution as being masterminded
by Vladimir Lenin, the radical leader of the Bolsheviks,
but that's not what happened.
It wasn't the Bolsheviks who started the February uprising.
It wasn't even men.
Key to the whole revolution was a group of female workers.
Thursday the 23rd of February 1917
was International Women's Day.
At noon, crowds of textile workers began marching
in to the centre of St Petersburg to make their voices heard.
"Down with hunger!
"Down with the war!
"Down with the Tsar!"
They went from factory to factory.
They were banging on the gates and throwing snowballs at the windows,
trying to get the men to come out to join them.
They needed to persuade the men that this wasn't just another bread riot.
This was different.
And they were successful. By the end of the day,
the protesters numbered 100,000 people.
What started as a local women's strike
was turning into a revolution.
The next day, 200,000 workers joined in,
armed with knives, with hammers, and iron bars.
By the third day, red flags appeared.
The Tsar ordered the army to suppress the rioters.
But the women were a step ahead.
A few clays earlier, the female tram workers had gone to the barracks
to talk to the soldiers about the strike
and they got them to agree that when the moment came,
they'd hold their fire.
This is exactly what happened.
Even the mighty Cossack troops put down their arms.
This was such an important moment.
One of the women, Alexandra Rodionova, later said that,
"All at once, the unknown future became real."
Katy Turton has studied the role of women
in starting the February Revolution.
How was it reported in the newspapers?
Well, they sing their praises, in fact.
"Glory to Women" features several times as a slogan.
And really interestingly, they talk about women in Moscow,
in many cases deciding the fate of the battles on the street.
They are the ones who go out to the soldiers and say,
"Don't fire on our demonstrators. We're all on the same side."
And, fundamentally, the women are central
to the soldiers themselves mutinying
and not shooting down and dispersing the demonstrators.
What happened to accounts of February as time went by?
Male participants in the revolution turn historian
and begin to write their own memoirs about what had happened.
We've got a really interesting memoir by Nikolai Sukhanov,
who is very dismissive of women's involvement in the revolution.
He's sitting in his office listening to women typists saying,
"Do you know, if you ask me, it's the beginning of the revolution."
And his response is that these girls didn't understand
what a revolution was, and goes on to talk about them as philistines.
The typists were actually completely right - they called it.
Yeah, they were spot on. Absolutely.
What were the official Bolshevik leaders doing then?
They weren't anywhere to be found.
Lenin was in Switzerland, Trotsky was in America,
and Stalin was in exile in Siberia,
so, in fact, the Bolshevik Party consisted of local activists
who were on site and they, in fact, were highly disapproving
of the women going out on International Women's Day
and actually told the women not to demonstrate. Amazing.
So these women went out onto the streets
in the teeth of the instructions of the Bolsheviks?
Yes, it was entirely their own decisions.
GUNFIRE
The women had ignited the revolution,
but it wasn't long before men took charge.
Alexander Kerensky, a lawyer, would soon be leading
the revolutionary Provisional Government
while waiting for Russia's first democratic elections.
Kerensky was less radical than Lenin
but he was committed to a more equal society.
And in this new Russia, there was no room for the Tsar.
In early March 1917,
just a week after the women had first taken to the streets,
the Tsar's own generals warned him that if he didn't abdicate,
Russia would collapse into anarchy.
The Tsar wrote in his diary -
"l agreed.
"All around is treason and cowardice and deceit."
REPORTER:
The monarchy had been swept away with no involvement from Lenin.
Now, one of the most extraordinary episodes
of the revolution would unfold,
and a pivotal role was played in it by...
...the King of Great Britain.
It's a story full of cover-ups
and lies.
The Russian Provisional Government wanted the Tsar and his family
to leave the country.
The British Ambassador, Sir George Buchanan,
was asked if they could seek safety in Britain.
The British government agreed, and on the 23rd of March,
made an offer of asylum.
What George V felt about his cousin coming to Britain
was hushed up for over 60 years, to protect the King's reputation.
Historian Helen Rappaport
has investigated what really happened.
Whoa.
What's this letter, then, from Windsor Castle in 1917,
what does this say about the offer?
Britain's offer of asylum to the Romanovs was never
formally withdrawn, but nor was a rescue plan put into action.
Thanks in part to Britain's diplomatic betrayal,
the Russian royal family remained trapped in Russia.
And Lenin was still nowhere to be seen.
Lenin had dedicated his life to Marxism
and to making revolutionary plans for Russia.
He was also on the run from the Tsar's secret police.
In February 1917, he was living in exile in Zurich.
Lenin covertly enlisted German help
in a scramble to get back to Russia.
The Germans had their own motives for getting involved.
If Lenin returned, he might help pull Russia out of the war.
A special train was arranged for Lenin, his wife
and 30 fellow revolutionaries.
The carriage would be defined as Russian territory
and nobody allowed on or off.
This was to ensure that Lenin avoided any contact
with the Germans, otherwise he might be branded a traitor.
It's gone down in history as Lenin's sealed train.
Lenin said goodbye to a friend out the window.
"In three months...", he said,
"..either we'll be swinging from the gallows or we'll be in power."
The train travelled from Zurich to the Swiss border with Germany.
Here, they transferred to another train,
for the controversial part of the journey -
right through enemy territory.
But did this sealed train live up to its name?
Now, this sealed train wasn't all that well sealed.
The Russian zone was only demarcated by a chalk line on the floor
and they left one of the carriage doors unlocked,
which meant that the revolutionaries could pop on and off.
At Frankfurt, one of them went to get some newspapers and some beer.
And in north Germany, Lenin himself got off
to spend a more comfortable night at a hotel.
Soviet historians would always exaggerate the level of security
on Lenin's sealed train, to protect his reputation.
From a port in northern Germany, they took the ferry to Sweden...
...and then another train across Sweden and Finland.
Next stop, St Petersburg.
During his journey, Lenin started to think about the importance
of his own appearance as propaganda.
He took off his rather bourgeois-looking homburg hat
and he replaced it with the cap of a proletarian worker.
Now he looks much more like a proper revolutionary.
TRAIN WHISTLES
The train reached the Finland Station in St Petersburg
on the 3rd of April 1917.
A month after the removal of the Tsar.
According to later accounts and films by the Bolsheviks,
Lenin arrived to a hero's welcome.
But this didn't tell the full story.
Lenin immediately launched into a scathing attack
not on the Tsar, but on his fellow Bolsheviks.
He was furious they'd collaborated with the Provisional Government.
Some Bolsheviks thought Lenin too radical.
A few even believed him deranged.
Opinions that were all quietly glossed over
once Lenin came to power in October.
And there was another reason that Lenin's return was controversial.
His enemies - Kerensky, the tsarists -
put it about that because Lenin had had German help
getting back to Russia, perhaps he was a German spy
who'd taken German gold to bring Russia down.
Some people even said that Lenin was a German army officer in disguise.
All these fibs were used to discredit Lenin.
He was soon on the run again, this time from Kerensky's secret police.
He fled St Petersburg.
In October, to launch his coup against Kerensky,
Lenin would need yet more subterfuge.
To get back to Bolshevik headquarters in St Petersburg,
there was only one thing for it - a disguise.
He put on a wig and scruffy clothes, he wrapped his head in bandages,
he put his cap on top, and then he set off into the dark streets.
But government troops spotted him.
If Lenin were arrested now, his plans for a coup would be over.
But Lenin's disguise worked really well.
The two soldiers checked him out in his get-up
and they thought, well, he's just a harmless drunk.
And they sent him on his way.
The Bolsheviks had taken over a former school for young ladies,
called the Smolny Institute.
Here, Lenin joined the other top Bolsheviks,
Stalin and Trotsky.
They all agreed with Lenin that they must replace Kerensky's government.
While they were making their preparations for their coup
against the Provisional Government, Lenin and his comrades
had a meeting to discuss what they were going to call themselves
when they were in power.
Ministers, they thought, sounded a bit weak.
But then Trotsky came up with a suggestion
of the people's commissars.
"Yes", said Lenin. "That's brilliant.
"That smells of revolution."
Because they'd missed the one in February,
they were determined that their own revolution should be perfect.
It had to look right, it had to sound right,
it even had to smell right.
Good work, comrades.
On the 25th of October 1917,
Lenin and the Bolsheviks mobilised
to snatch power from Kerensky.
This has become one of the most mythologised moments
in 20th-century history.
And the February triumph would be swept under the historical carpet.
The Bolshevik version of events was preserved in a film
made ten years later, by director Sergei Eisenstein.
Called October 1917,
it featured his characteristic super-quick cutting.
Some shots lasting no longer than a single frame.
In Eisenstein's hands, film had the power
to make fibs seem like revolutionary truth.
The film's got so much energy and drama to it
that you think, yes, this must really capture the passion
they must have felt in October 1917,
and it's become, I think, the most powerful image of the revolution.
The film demolishes the women's triumph of February
by depicting it as the work of the corrupt middle classes,
and pious bishops in league with the Tsar.
The message was clear.
The February Revolution was bogus.
It had only resulted in the useless bourgeois Provisional Government,
not a proper workers' revolution at all.
The Provisional Government was based in the Winter Palace -
a former royal residence.
The film shows Kerensky strutting around
in the Tsar's old apartments, attended by footmen.
The climax of the film is the night of Lenin's Bolshevik coup.
You get to see the storming of the Winter Palace,
the toppling of the government...
...and the triumph of the people, here they come,
led by the Bolsheviks. Whoa, in they go!
Here are the opulent palace interiors.
Then, outside, the hungry masses, and I mean masses. It's epic.
Eisenstein placed an advert for 60,000 extras.
There he goes, over the railings.
"Forward!", he's shouting. "Forward! In we go!"
Then rushing up the stairs.
GUNFIRE
Guns are going off.
Bang. You're dead.
Watching it unfold, St Petersburg appears to be a cauldron
of violent insurrection.
But this was propaganda.
Christopher Read has studied the real story on the streets.
Can you give me a quick rundown about what happened
on the 24th and the 25th of October 1917?
I suppose the simple answer is to say, nothing very much.
The actual events were very confined to a very small part of Russia.
Lenin appears in the middle of all this
and they decided it's time to think about seizing power,
and they proclaim the seizure of power.
But, as eyewitnesses said, the trams never stopped running.
Ha! One person at the time said, "Well, the Bolsheviks didn't seize power.
"They found it lying in the street and picked it up."
They sort of realised, well, we've proclaimed Soviet power,
but we haven't actually arrested the government.
They're still there.
And Kerensky, the Prime Minister, had taken advantage of that
to leave the city.
But there was no real storming of the Winter Palace
because they surrounded it and there was not really very much defence.
There was a bit of argy-bargy between the defenders
and the outside... Not armed. just an argument more than anything else.
One of the doors was open, people were going in and out,
a detachment went in, they found the government,
they arrested them and took them off to the fortress.
Lenin and the Bolsheviks were determined to turn
this minor skirmish into the most dramatic moment of the revolution.
Chris, how did the Bolsheviks differentiate
their October Revolution from the February one?
The February Revolution was not their revolution.
The February Revolution was the bourgeois revolution, so it wasn't their deal.
Once they'd actually seized power in October,
the February Revolution became completely irrelevant.
October, that was the revolution that really mattered -
the one that should be remembered.
That little business in February,
that wasn't a proper revolution, that was just, sort of, a taster.
Lenin's Bolshevik coup was now established
as the real revolution.
It promised a future shaped by peace, by plenty,
and Marxist ideals.
Lenin's doctrines rejected both religion
and the Romanovs.
Churches were destroyed...
...and the Tsar and his family remained under house arrest.
But the Tsar was a figurehead for die-hard royalists,
and by 1918, a violent civil war had erupted
between the Reds, that's the Bolsheviks,
and the counter-revolutionaries, known as the Whites.
This was the first civil war in which tanks were used.
Trotsky led the Red Army really well.
He modernised it, he motivated it.
But the civil war was made more intense by foreign intervention.
Japan, America, Britain -
they all sent help to the White Russian Army.
Trotsky's Red Army fought back.
They controlled the heart of Russia and held the key cities
of St Petersburg and Moscow.
The various White armies were
around the borders of Russia,
coming in from the north,
from Eastern Europe,
the south, and even from Siberia.
Winston Churchill, the British War Minister,
sent support to the Whites to fight the Reds.
He said he wanted to strangle Bolshevism in the cradle.
The British ended up sending 6,000 troops
and 8O tanks to Russia.
To put that in perspective, Germany in World War I
only had seven tanks altogether.
The fighting in Russia wasn't confined to the battlefield.
It was also a propaganda war
full of exaggeration and downright lies.
Bolshevik trains crisscrossed the country,
spreading THEIR version of the revolution.
Strong pictorial messages were essential
because so many peasants were illiterate.
Art historian Natalia Sidlina
is an expert on Bolshevik propaganda.
You take a train, you paint the carriages in the bright colours,
you put the posters on them and propaganda messages,
the slogans and banners,
you put the little cinema in one of the carriages,
maybe a doctor in another one,
a specialist in agriculture in the third one,
and you win people through this positive message,
through drawing them in and showing them that the new power
and the new government is all about them.
It's brilliant. So, if this fancy train stops at your local station
and you could get health care and you get agricultural advice,
and a cinema show, you're actually being brainwashed. Absolutely.
What's going on in this poster here? What's the big red triangle?
It's a brilliant example of the usage of a modernist language
for propaganda.
So, we have the red wedge, which is the Red Army,
which attacked floppy, soft, white, static force,
represented by this circular form here.
So this is the Red Army of the revolutionaries
and this is the White Army of the old Russians, the tsarists,
the opposition to the revolution? Absolutely.
Red Army really consolidated one message, one government,
and you can see, it's penetrating, it's dynamic, it's winning.
But cool modernist posters concealed the chaotic brutality of this war.
Prisoners on both sides were executed out of hand.
Lenin came to power promising that the death penalty
of the tsarist era would never return.
But nothing could be further from the truth.
Lenin's secret police, the Cheka, executed tens of thousands
more Russians than the Tsar's secret police had ever done.
They would denounce members of the opposition as enemies of the people.
Enemy of the people number one was the Tsar.
He'd now been moved to the city of Yekaterinburg with his family.
Their prison was ominously called the House for Special Purposes.
By July 1918, White forces were closing in on Yekaterinburg
to rescue the Tsar and his family.
The Bolsheviks decided to act.
Nicholas had no idea that he and his family's lives were in danger.
The last entry in his diary reads -
"The weather is fine and warm.
"We've had absolutely no news from outside."
Three clays on, very late on the night of the 16th ofjuly,
the Tsar and his family were taken down to the basement of the house.
What took place next, would be shrouded in lies for over 70 years.
The head guard, Yakov Yurovsky, left an account of what happened.
The royal family were told that a truck had come
to take them on the next leg of their journey.
This was half true - a truck had come to take them away,
but only after they'd been killed.
First to be shot was Nicholas, at point-blank range.
When the bullets reached his wife, Alexandra,
she was in the process of making the sign of the cross.
These two died instantly.
Not so with the children.
Here, the guns were somehow ineffective,
and they had to turn to bayonets to finish the job.
The gruesome work took 20 whole minutes.
Officially, it was the local Soviets' decision
to execute the royal family, not Lenin's.
But Helen Rappaport is sceptical.
Helen, what's the evidence that Lenin was involved
in this decision to kill the Romanovs?
It's quite clever. The telegram doesn't say,
"We're going to kill them."
It says, "We're going to do what we agreed earlier."
The next day, the Soviet authorities released a statement to the press
that Nicholas Romanov had been executed.
But the telegram continued with a lie.
Depending on your point of view, the execution of the Romanov family
was either a spiteful act by a group of thugs,
or it was a political necessity for the success of the revolution.
But Lenin really needed to cover it up because if news got out
about the slaughter of innocent children, it would instantly
attract international condemnation.
The bodies of the Romanovs were buried in a nearby forest.
The lies told about the royal family led to a lingering belief
that the youngest daughter, Anastasia, had somehow survived.
If the princess were alive, then she'd become the last hope
for a restoration of the Romanov of dynasty.
The true fate of Anastasia would remain a mystery for decades.
The Reds won the civil war in 1922.
But Lenin didn't have long to enjoy the triumph.
Within a few months, he'd suffered three strokes.
And in January 1924, Lenin died.
To maintain order,
the Bolsheviks had to demonstrate a seamless transition of power.
In fact, it was anything but.
Now, the official line on Lenin's death is that Stalin
was his anointed heir.
This isn't true at all.
In fact, it's a whopping fib!
And we can prove this from an impeccable source.
Lenin himself.
Before he died, Lenin dictated his concerns about the future
of Russia to his secretary.
These documents are known as Lenin's Testament.
When he knew that he was about to die,
he decided to warn his comrades about Stalin.
"Comrade Stalin," Lenin says, "having become Secretary General,
"has unlimited authority concentrated in his hands.
"And I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using
"that authority with sufficient caution.
"L suggest," Lenin says, "that the comrades think
"about removing Stalin and appointing another man."
That's not exactly a ringing endorsement, is it?
I think we'd better bury these.
Lenin's Testament was hidden away in a top-secret vault.
To gain power, Stalin spread the word that he was Lenin's choice.
And to secure it, he began turning Lenin
into a Bolshevik secular saint.
GUNS FIRE
And what better way than by embalming Lenin's body
and exhibiting it for posterity in a mausoleum in Red Square?
This idea of putting her husband's dead body on display
horrified Lenin's widow.
She wrote that it filled her with terrible indignation.
They should have buried him with his comrades.
Now, this inconvenient letter had to be added to the government
file marked "Completely Secret", and locked away.
This file's getting quite fat now, isn't it?
With Stalin as chief pallbearer,
the carefully stage-managed funeral went like clockwork.
After the funeral, one of the senior communists said,
"Lenin is dead, Leninism lives."
Lenin had achieved immortality.
He'd become an idea, and Stalin's creation of this cult of Lenin
worked really well for him.
It helped him see off his rivals, like Trotsky,
and it helped him gain total control of the Soviet Union.
STATE ANTHEM OF THE SOVIET UNION IS SUNG
Stalin built on the Bolshevik falsification of the history
of the revolution to bolster his own grip on power.
Natalia Sidlina has studied how he did this.
What's going on in this picture of Lenin arriving
at the Finland Station in order to kick off the triumph of Bolshevism?
This particular painting was created 20 years after the event.
He has his iconic cap in one hand.
Yes. And behind him is Joseph Stalin.
Now, that didn't happen.
It's like Stalin has retrospectively photobombed Lenin's arrival
at the Finland Station.
Stalin is in every single
historically significant moment.
And if that moment didn't exist, there's always the painting.
And whoever creates the picture
is the person who makes history.
No image, no history.
Paintings are easy enough to fake, but surely photographs
were more of a challenge back then?
Here we have probably one of the most famous photographs
of Lenin, he's addressing troops
about to depart for the front during the civil war.
You can see he's mid-flow, isn't he?
Absolutely. He's making a speech.
And waiting for their turn are two very important politicians
of the post-Revolutionary Russia,
Lenin's number two, Leon Trotsky,
and then behind him is Kamenev.
And then we look at the photograph which appeared
in the press during the Stalin time.
And can you spot the difference there?
It's pretty obvious Trotsky has disappeared!
And Kamenev is not there either. As well! Yes.
So, that's brilliant work of the photographers
who did the airbrushing of the images on an industrial scale.
Nowadays, we take image manipulation for granted,
but we still often fall for it.
Even in the 1920s, though, Stalin could make anyone disappear,
or even pop up magically as a fellow comrade in Red Square.
During Stalin time,
the glorification of Lenin began in earnest.
And some of the historical photographs of important speeches
by Lenin, as far as Stalin was concerned,
were not impressive enough.
So, in some of them, larger crowds would be added.
Stalin now wielded more power than even the tsars.
In 1928, he announced the collectivisation of farms.
No more landowners. Instead, farms and their produce
would be shared by all.
It would be a disaster...
...but many Western radicals believed Stalin's fibs
about his latest triumph, and came to see it in action.
They came from all over!
There was HG Wells, the writer,
Arthur Koestler, the philosopher,
Beatrice and Sidney Webb, who set up the Fabian Society,
and George Bernard Shaw.
He was a big fan of the revolution in general,
and of Stalin in particular.
The Russian Revolution became a kind of touch point
for all kinds of left-wing intellectuals.
George Bernard Shaw and others in the 1930s,
they wanted to believe that there's a new, rational kind of society
being built in accordance with kind of Enlightenment principles
of reason and organisation, rather than the madness of the market
and capitalism, and so on.
And did Stalin welcome these visitors?
They were always very pleased to kind of show off
their achievements and to show how successful they claimed to be.
When George Bernard Shaw visited Russia, he was quick to accept
Stalin's proud boasts about his new policies.
"Hunger, in Russia?" asked Shaw, "Nonsense!
"L've never been fed as well anywhere, as I was in Moscow."
But Shaw had been taken in.
He'd been sent on these excursions to see happy, well-fed farmers.
But while he was being wined and dined in Moscow, in fact,
a devastating famine was killing peasants in Ukraine
and other parts of the Soviet Union.
Stalin tried to cover up the famine caused by collectivisation,
but some in the West saw through his lies.
Journalist and author George Orwell was one of them.
This is Manor Farm in Hertfordshire. It's the place that partly inspired
George Orwell's story, Animal Farm.
He lived just down the road, and he once spoke about an event
that had triggered the idea. He'd seen a little boy
driving a huge cart horse down a narrow path by whipping it.
And Orwell said - if only such animals knew their strength,
we would have no power over them.
Men exploit animals much in the same way as the rich
exploit the proletariat.
Orwell described his story as a fairy story.
It's a satire, and in it, the clever pigs
incite all the other animals on the farm
to rise up against the cruel, human farmer.
But the pigs get drunk on power
and they end up acting just as badly as the original farmer had done.
Animal Farm came out in 1945.
In his allegory, Orwell exposed Stalin
as an enemy of the democratic left.
Even worse than his tsarist predecessors.
DRAMATIC SCORE
But the United States government would soon see the story's potential
as a political weapon in the Cold War.
In the early '50s, the CIA secretly bought the rights to turn
Animal Farm into an animated feature film. They were using it
as anti-communist propaganda.
Comrades, I have made a terrible discovery!
There are traitors among us.
Orwell's warning about Stalinism was now harnessed as an argument
against the left in general.
And the line, "Some animals are more equal than others,"
has been used to brand socialist leaders as hypocrites ever since.
Many of Stalin's crimes would remain hidden
from the world for decades.
His terrible excesses glossed over after his victory against Hitler.
In Russia, he was celebrated as a hero.
Stalin's death in 1953
marked the end of the first revolutionary generation.
But in the years that followed, the memory of the Romanovs
continued to haunt Russia.
In 1979, two amateur detectives, Alexander Avdonin
and Geli Ryabov came to a forest near Yekaterinburg.
They had a tip-off about where the royal bodies might be buried.
Avdonin said that his task was to restore "one of the pages
"of our history," but he also knew that this was extremely dangerous.
"If this gets to the KGB," he said, "it will end very badly for me."
Even so, they started digging.
They found bones and, pretty soon, three skulls.
One skull had a bullet hole in it.
Another had several gold teeth, just like the Tsar.
The men contacted scientists in Moscow to confirm their find,
but no-one would dare touch it.
This was Soviet Russia in the 1970s.
People were terrified of the authorities. Avdonin said,
"We could have been sent to prison,
"we could even have just been disappeared."
The Soviet regime had been covering up this business
since the very first year of the revolution.
So, they lost their nerve.
They went back to the forest and they reburied the skulls.
History would have to wait a little bit longer
for the truth to be revealed.
But not as long as the two men feared.
In the 1980s,
Mikhail Gorbachev attempted to reform the Soviet Union
with a new spirit of openness.
But by challenging the fibs of the past, Gorbachev unleashed
an unstoppable force that swept Soviet power away altogether.
On Christmas Day 1991, the red flag above the Kremlin was lowered
for the last time,
to be replaced by the old Russian imperial colours.
Russia was now a democratic republic.
74 years of Bolshevik rule were over.
The Russian Orthodox Church flourished once more.
A cathedral was built
on the site of the Romanov executions in Yekaterinburg.
Over the years, Bolshevik lies about the fate of the Tsar's family
had allowed the story of Anastasia's survival to flourish.
Books and films were made about the heir to the Romanov throne,
who'd supposedly made it to the West.
Several women even claimed to be Anastasia.
In 1991, the bones in the woods were dug up again and later
analysed by scientists.
The DNA tests confirmed that the bodies were the Russian
royal family, and from their number,
it was clear that Anastasia was among them.
She hadn't escaped the murders, after all.
The celebrated myth of Anastasia could finally be put to rest.
In the year 2000,
the Russian church declared the Russian royal family to be saints.
In Vladimir Putin's new Russia, tens of thousands go on marches
and pilgrimages commemorating the Romanovs, every year.
Former BBC Moscow correspondent Martin Sixsmith
has witnessed the extraordinary rewriting of the story
of the revolution.
The Tsar and the tsarist dynasties, the Romanovs
and those who preceded them, have made a fantastic and quite
remarkable comeback in the last 30 years, since 1991.
Under communism, they were the tyrants who were overthrown
by the force of the people,
the socialist uprising of 1917.
Suddenly, now, they're saints.
They are literally sanctified.
And that's all to do with Putin co-opting the legacy
of the Romanovs, which was a strong, centralised Russia.
But it's also to do with co-opting the power
of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Putin has embraced this new veneration of the Tsar
and he rejects the legacy of the October Revolution.
Political commentator Arkady Ostrovsky has studied
Putin's approach to Soviet history.
The Bolshevik revolution is,
if anything, is a negative event for him.
It's omitted from the official Russian calendar.
It's no longer marked because it's a divisive event.
The fact that the Lenin's mausoleum is draped off during the parades
in the Red Square actually speaks volumes
about his attitude to those events.
As an autocrat who built his legitimacy around the idea
of Russian imperial history, expansion of territories,
revolutions are not comfortable events.
And that's the big change from, of course, the Soviet period,
which was all based on the idea of the Bolshevik revolution.
And that was the source of legitimacy of the Soviet rulers
up till and including Gorbachev.
For Putin, it's the idea of the empire, which is much more important
than the idea of the communist ideology.
So, suddenly, a revolution is uncomfortable because it's...
Part of the reason they're omitting it
is that it raises some of the very, very similar questions
about Russia's future... ls it time for another one? Yes.
And, in a sense, that Russia is battling with the same dilemmas
as it did in 1916, just before the revolution.
Vladimir Putin is marginalising Lenin and the Russian Revolution.
He's happy to create his own narrative
and brush aside unwelcome facts.
It's an art perfected by the Bolsheviks.
There have been more fibs told about the history of Russia
than about the history of any country in the world.
We look at fake news today.
We look at politicians who say one thing today,
and then, the following day deny that they'd said it.
But they look like amateurs compared to the Bolsheviks.
The Bolsheviks rewrote whole swathes of history,
decades of history, and they rewrote it in the way that suited them best.
So, they became the heroes.
Everybody else became the villains.
Royal history is always being written and rewritten
to suit those who are telling it.
For many decades, Russians were told it was the October Revolution
that saved the nation, that Lenin was a national hero.
Now he's been sidelined.
As for the Tsar and his family,
well, today in the new Russia, they are royal martyrs.
And tomorrow, who knows?
Only one thing's for sure -
the future is just as uncertain
as the ever-changing story of the past.