Staline: Le tyran rouge

British comedy satirising Stalin's inner circle as an absolute monarchs court. In the face of rampant abuse of power and poisonous distrust some still manage to keep faith with the Bolshevist creed until the very end. In front of the firing squad a stalwart bolshevist of the first hour exclaims: "Even in the best democracy errors are being made!"

When dictator Joseph Stalin dies, his parasitic cronies square off in a frantic power struggle to become the next Soviet leader. As they bumble, brawl and back-stab their way to the top, the question remains — just who is running the government?

June 1946: Stalin invites Russian emigres to return to the motherland. It's a trap: when a ship-load from France arrives in Odessa, only a physician and his family are spared execution or prison. He and his French wife (her passport ripped up) are sent to Kiev. She wants to return to France immediately; he knows that they are captives and must watch every step.

In 1933, Welsh journalist Gareth Jones travels to Ukraine, where he experiences the horrors of a famine. Everywhere he goes he meets henchmen of the Soviet secret service who are determined to prevent news about the catastrophe from getting out. Stalin’s forced collectivisation of agriculture has resulted in misery and ruin—the policy is tantamount to mass murder.

A documentary on Soviet filmmaker Aleksandr Medvedkin, examining his tumultuous career, the rediscovery of his masterpiece Happiness, and Russia's struggles over the course of the 20th Century.

During the last days of Stalin's reign, a doctor (Marina Hands) tries to go unnoticed in a society of mutual dread where a neighbour or colleague might "denounce" you to the authorities at any moment.But tales of her healing touch have spread and one night she is taken away, not to the infamous Lubyanka prison, but to the Kremlin to attend the ailing Comrade Stalin himself. Uncle Joe (André Dussollier), an old man racked with pain but still as watchful and deadly as a snake.

The life and career of the brutal Soviet dictator, Josef Stalin.

Russia, 1917. After the abdication of Czar Nicholas II Romanov, the struggle for power confronts allies, enemies, factions and ideas; a ruthless battle between democracy and authoritarianism that will end with the takeover of the government by Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

The Katyn massacre, carried out by the Soviet NKVD in 1940, was only one of many unspeakable crimes committed by Stalin's ruthless executioners over three decades. The mass murder of thousands of Polish officers was part of a relentless purge, the secrets and details of which have only recently been partially revealed.

March 9th, 1953, 5 million people attend Stalin’s funeral. A revolutionary lacking in both charisma and stature, Stalin came to power almost by chance, and his 30-year reign saw him become the most Machiavellian and bloodthirsty of dictators. The man who insisted on being called “The Father of the People” massacred his own countrymen, and was responsible for the death of some 20 million people. Soon forgetting his former ideological stance, he mercilessly crushed anyone who opposed him, in both word and deed. His camps for reform through hard labor – known as “gulags” – turned 18 million Russians into slaves. He not only murdered his opponents but his best friends too, and even sometimes members of his own family. His cruelty knew no bounds. Through colorized archive material rich in previously unseen footage, and many accounts from the period including some from Stalin himself, this documentary tells the story of a man who turned a dream into a nightmare.

January 1953: On the eve of his death Stalin finds himself yet another imaginary enemy: Jewish doctors. He organizes the most violent anti-Semitic campaign ever launched in the USSR, by fabricating the "Doctors' Plot," whereby doctors are charged with conspiring to murder the highest dignitaries of the Soviet Regime. Still unknown and untold, this conspiracy underlines the climax of a political scheme successfully masterminded by Stalin to turn the Jews into the new enemies of the people. It reveals his extreme paranoia and his compulsion to manipulate those around him. The children and friends of the main victims recount for the first time their experience and their distress related to these nightmarish events.

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin, is remembered as the instigator of the October Revolution of 1917 and, therefore, as one of the men who changed the shape of the world at that time and forever, but perhaps the actual events happened in a way different from that narrated in the history books…

How could Hitler and Stalin, sworn ideological enemies, come to a secret pact in 1939? The captivating and detailed story of the diplomatic fiasco that led to the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact and its devastating consequences.

How the Soviet Union was able to copy the Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber, and the influence of the resulting Tupolev TU-4 on the Cold War.

Fluke Kelso, a dissipated, middle-aged former Oxford historian, who is in Moscow to attend a conference on the newly opened Soviet archives, receives in his hotel a very unexpected visitor.

A documentary television series of the Nazi-Soviet War, edited from over 3.5 million feet of film taken by Soviet camera crews from the first day of the war, 22 June 1941, to the Soviet entry into Berlin in May 1945.

The stories of the people of Villeneuve, a fictional subprefecture, in the Jura, in German–occupied France during the Second World War.

Documentary series using dramatic reconstructions and testimony from witnesses to reveal the 'behind closed doors' politics of the Second World War.

The acclaimed documentary series from 1991 that examined political in-fighting in the Soviet Union and the battle for perestroika.

The rise of Stalin, from his early beginning as a bankrobber to the cold-blooded leader of the Soviet Union.

Three years in the making, this comprehensive study of the Soviet dictator blends documentary footage and interviews with experts and surviving witnesses.

Follow the deadliest conflict in human history in real time, week by week, blow by blow.

How did 20th Century Europe's most liberal democracy fall into the hands of fascists? From Hitler's political scheming that turned Germany's parliament into a House of Cards, his War on Truth leading to book burning, and his scapegoating of minorities, this series explores in extraordinary detail the events leading up to the outbreak of World War II.

The story of this fantastic period of history between 1945 and 1991, which was defined by the confrontation of two worlds and two systems. The capitalist West, dominated by the ever-powerful United States, is pitted against the Communist East, the Soviet Empire.

A major political, historical, human and economic fact of the 20th century, the Gulag, the extremely punitive Soviet concentration camp system, remains largely unknown.

The documentary series explores different political figures throughout history.

June 1941, Hitler attacks the USSR: he wants to conquer this "Living space" which he dreams of for his Reich. It comes up against enemy realities: the vastness of the territory, the polar cold and the determination of a people with inexhaustible human resources. How far will Hitler take Germany?

Communism spread to all of the continents of the word, lasting through four generations and over seven decades. Hundreds of millions of men and women were affected by this political system, one of the most unjust and bloodiest in history. Using newly discovered propaganda films and archival photos, these four episodes explore the mysteries of this totalitarian political machine that lured its share of important followers into the fold. Known as the red church, communism seduced its ardent followers like some earthly religion.

What it felt like to live through the collapse of communism and democracy. A series of films by Adam Curtis.