Stalin's Couch

Through unique and candid interviews the film tells the compelling and tragic stories of the six women – last survivors of the Gulag, the brutal system of repression and terror that devastated the Soviet population during the regime of Stalin.

After escaping Russia's communist revolution, Léon Theremin travels to New York, where he pioneers the field of electronic music with his synthesizer. But at the height of his popularity, Soviet agents kidnap and force him to develop spy technology.

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.

Through a first-person narrator, archival footage and photographs, and a contemporary camera, Pavel Lounguine uses the Moscow skyscraper where he grew up as a touchstone for looking back to Stalin and then examining today's Russia. This is Stalin's pyramid, his immortality. We visit people who have lived there for 50 years, see their flats (some modernized, others decaying), and listen to their histories: the son of a KGB man, a retired rocket scientist, a sculptor's son. an actor, seamstresses at a uniform shop, an ex-pat, and two artists. We see a kindergarten and remember marching; we watch parades and discuss surveillance. The commentary is wry: Putin emerges as Stalin's heir.

A secret Soviet Institute conducts scientific and occult experiments on animals and human beings to create the perfect person. The KGB general and his aides turn a blind eye to erotic adventures of the director of the Institute, scandalous debauches of prominent scientists and their cruel and insane research. One day, a radical ultra right-wing group arrives in the laboratory under the guise of test subjects. They get a task - to eradicate the decaying elements of the Institute’s community, and if needs be, destroy the fragile world of secret Soviet science.

As Russian writer Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) thinks it is impossible that his novel Doctor Zhivago is published in the Soviet Union, because it supposedly shows a critical view of the October Revolution, he decides to smuggle several copies of the manuscript out of the country. It is first published in 1957 in Italia and the author receives the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958, which has consequences.

Fiona Shaw narrates this exploration of Russia's medieval origins through to its bloody expansion to become the biggest country in the world. It's a tale that set the scene for one of the world's most enigmatic figures, and his vision of modern Russia. From a tyrannical grip on ordinary citizens to rampant corruption at the highest level, this film reveals the secrets behind holding the world's largest country together in a narrative that takes in the KGB and its ancestors as well as Stalin, murder and gulags.

French television documentary film by Mathieu Schwartz, Serge de Sampigny, Yvan Demeulandre and the historic consultant Nicolas Werth about the government of Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union.

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.

This program investigates the probes and projects sponsored by the KGB to look into paranormal matters. Viewers will learn much about the KGB's view of American history and the effects certain events had on it. Includes never seen before footage.

Jonathan Meades examines the cult of Stalinism through its buildings and monuments.

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.

The convoluted and moving story of Russian writer Vassili Grossman (1905-64) and his novel Life and Fate (1980), a literary masterpiece, a monumental and epic account of life under Stalin's regime of terror, a defiant cry that the KGB tried to suffocate.

Film director Sergey Paradjanov creates brilliant films. His nonconformist behavior conflicts with Soviet System. He is committed to prison for being eccentric. His indestructible love for beauty allows him to withstand the years of imprisonment, isolation and oblivion.

Set during the Cold War period in the 1980s, The Americans is the story of Elizabeth and Philip Jennings, two Soviet KGB officers posing as an American married couple in the suburbs of Washington D.C. and their neighbor, Stan Beeman, an FBI Counterintelligence agent.

Baking competition pitting teams of professional chefs against each other to create towering showpieces and multitudes of miniatures, under the scrutiny of two of the industry's top patissiers.

Pandora's Box is a six-part 1992 BBC documentary television series which examines the consequences of political and technocratic rationalism. The episodes deal, in order, with communism in The Soviet Union, systems analysis and game theory during the Cold War, economy in the United Kingdom during the 1970s, the insecticide DDT, Kwame Nkrumah's leadership in Ghana during the 1950s and 1960s and the history of nuclear power.

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.

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 Game" is a 1970s Cold War spy thriller set in the world of espionage. It tells the story of the invisible war fought by MI5 as it battles to protect the nation from the threats of the Cold War.

When starving mobs begin rioting in the streets of Moscow, Soviet leaders believe they have no recourse but to seize the Alaskan pipeline to force the United States to end the grain embargo that has brought turmoil to the U.S.S.R.

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.

The KGB has influenced world events on numerous occasions before. Assassinations, coup d’états, theft of nuclear secrets and sexpionage are just standard trademarks for an organisation that still sends shivers down the spines of politicians and military figures the world over. It may have changed its name on various occasions, from Cheka to SPD to OGPU to NKVD to MGB to KGB to an array of different names after the collapse of the Soviet Union to FSB and SVR today, but it will forever be known, internally and externally, as the KGB.

A definitive account of Putin's power and how it changed the modern world.

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

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.