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After the war, the soldiers of the Red Army fell into disgrace. As the Cold War began, Khrushchev rehabilitated the Army, which kept a purely repressive purpose. Revolts were suppressed in blood.
Following the Cuban Missile Crisis, the USSR and the Capitalist Bloc engaged in interposition conflicts. In the 1970s, the living conditions of soldiers deteriorated. The long intervention in Afghanistan definitively undermined the Soviet system. At the end of 1991, the USSR disappeared. The Red Army is now confined to a symbolic purpose, between nostalgia and nationalism.
Following the Cuban Missile Crisis, the USSR and the Capitalist Bloc engaged in interposition conflicts. In the 1970s, the living conditions of soldiers deteriorated. The long intervention in Afghanistan definitively undermined the Soviet system. At the end of 1991, the USSR disappeared. The Red Army is now confined to a symbolic purpose, between nostalgia and nationalism.
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00:00On December 25th, 1991, Christmas Day, President Mikhail Gorbachev went on television to announce
00:13his resignation. His speech marked the end of the Soviet Union.
00:30In the span of just a few minutes, the Soviet Empire had become history, and with it, the
00:46Communist Eastern Bloc, which had split post-war Europe in two. The Red Army, long revered for
00:56its victory over Hitler's Germany, was also relegated to the history books.
01:26By summer 1945, World War II in Europe had finally drawn to a close. Packed into crowded
01:38trains, nearly 9 million Soviet soldiers were heading home.
01:45One was Anatoly Genatulin.
01:54We were children of 17 or 18 when we went to war, with no memory of a first love that might
02:01have sustained us in that nightmare. We were denied the carefree years of youth, of young
02:07adulthood. We all returned from the war as cripples.
02:12The Red Army had emerged victorious from the Great Patriotic War. The returning soldiers
02:20believed they would be greeted as heroes. But in a country that had been laid waste by war,
02:26and 25 million people had been left homeless, their hopes of a hero's welcome was disappointed.
02:34Official promises of support proved hollow. Many veterans struggled to find work. Soldiers who
02:40returned home disabled had little choice but to throw themselves on the mercy of the black
02:45market, or turn to begging.
02:47Half the Soviet soldiers who had been taken as prisoners of war had perished, due to starvation,
03:02abuse and forced labour. Those who did survive German captivity were often met with accusations
03:08of treason back home. Igor Trapitsin recalled his welcome in July 1945.
03:17Machine guns, police dogs. We were rather taken aback by it all. The Russian counterintelligence service,
03:28SMASH, imprisoned us behind barbed wire. Red Army soldiers who had returned from German captivity
03:38were deemed a security risk and sent to Soviet filtration camps. Some were condemned to serve
03:51in the Red Army's penal battalions, where they were forced to live and work under terrible conditions.
03:59For Stalin, the glorious Workers' and Peasants Red Army was a thing of the past. He had come
04:14to fear the armed forces as a threat to his cult of personality. The Soviet dictator would
04:20share the glory with nothing and no one, not even the army that had defeated Germany.
04:26By December 1947, Stalin had imposed a series of measures intended to put the Red Army in
04:37its place.
04:43May 9th, celebrated as the day of victory over National Socialism, was abolished as a holiday.
04:50Privileges for decorated veterans were also abolished.
04:55Marshal Georgi Zhukov, the illustrious war hero of Stalingrad, had also fallen from grace.
05:07The pretext was Zhukov's war bounty, valuables he had looted from Germany, and his friendship
05:13with the Nazi collaborator Andrei Vlasov.
05:20General Vlasov, who had defected to the Germans during the war, was convicted of treason. On August
05:271st 1946, he was hanged in Lubyanka prison.
05:33By then, Zhukov had been removed as commander of the ground forces. Less than a year earlier,
05:40at the victory parade, Zhukov had galloped into Red Square astride a grey stallion, with Stalin
05:46watching from the stands. Now demoted, he was relegated to minor command posts in Odessa,
05:52China, and the Turkestan border region, as far away from Moscow as possible.
06:00In 1949, Stalin ordered Soviet cities cleared of beggars, war invalids, and other socially marginal groups.
06:11A severe blow for the Red Army. Grigori Pomeranz had volunteered in 1941 to defend Moscow at the front.
06:26Despite all our medals and awards, we were demoted to second class citizens, who could be trampled
06:32and abused at will. The authorities said to us, do you think you are something special? No, you are nothing.
06:48Even as the Great Patriotic War came to an end, a new conflict was emerging.
06:57The Potsdam Conference in July 1945 brought together Joseph Stalin, the new US President Harry S. Truman,
07:05and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. On July 26th, Churchill was replaced by the newly elected Prime Minister Clement Attlee.
07:13This last major conference of the wartime alliance was intended to amicably settle the terms of the post-war European order.
07:22Instead, it marked the beginning of a clash between two systems, communism and capitalism, and the start of the Cold War.
07:32Under the Marshall Plan, the Truman administration ultimately provided economic assistance to 16 Western European countries.
07:40The countries that had been liberated by the Red Army remained in the Soviet zone of influence.
07:47Germany was divided into four zones of occupation, as was the capital, Berlin.
07:57After an 11-month blockade in which Stalin tried to cut the western zones of Berlin off from vital supplies,
08:03the division of Germany became official, as did the division of Europe.
08:08An iron curtain divided the continent in two, into east and west blocks.
08:14The Cold War had the world firmly in its grips.
08:19On March 5th, 1953, Stalin died.
08:39Four days later, he was honoured with a state funeral.
08:48Soviet citizens poured in from all corners of the empire to pay their last respects to the dictator who had ruled over them for nearly 30 years.
08:58Lavrentiy Beria, who was head of the NKVD, and Nikita Khrushchev, who had helped organise the funeral, would soon embody the new generation of Soviet leadership.
09:11They immediately set about undoing Stalin's legacy.
09:15Marshal Zhukov was summoned from his exile in the Urals and ordered to return to Moscow.
09:38In May 1955, Zhukov's delegation signed the Warsaw Pact.
09:44The military alliance was intended as a counterweight to NATO.
09:48Marshal Zhukov was once again in the inner circles of power.
09:58Khrushchev appointed Zhukov Minister of Defence.
10:01Zhukov set about ensuring that the Great Patriotic War would remain alive in the collective memory.
10:07Monuments and memorials went up in Stalingrad, Leningrad and Minsk.
10:13On February 25th, 1956, at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev delivered what became known as the Secret Speech, in which he denounced Stalin's rule of terror.
10:34He also condemned Stalin's cult of personality and paved the way for the release of former POWs who had been imprisoned or sent to work battalions.
10:47One and a half million veterans had their pensions and benefits restored, revoked by Stalin ten years earlier.
10:56The text of the Secret Speech was soon leaked, translated and circulated widely.
11:02This helped raise hopes for political reforms in the Soviet bloc and a thaw in the Cold War.
11:12On June 28th, 1956, an uprising broke out in Poland.
11:17It soon inspired Hungarian protesters who demanded independence and democracy.
11:24Khrushchev and Zhukov sent in the Red Army to crush the revolution.
11:29On November 4th, 1956, thousands of Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest.
11:48Marshal Zhukov's orders were brutal.
11:55Disband the rabble and disarm the counter-revolutionaries.
11:59If we depart from Hungary, Khrushchev explained, it will be a boost to the Americans, the British and French, the imperialists.
12:10They will see it as a weakness on our part and go on the offensive.
12:14We have no choice.
12:33By mid-November, the Hungarian revolution had been crushed.
12:37An estimated 2,500 Hungarians were killed.
12:45More than 19,000 were wounded and some 10,000 arrested.
12:52In the turmoil of the uprising, an estimated 180,000 Hungarians fled to the west.
12:59The Red Army had proven itself in its new role as the enforcers of order.
13:11Georgiy Zhukov now felt strengthened in his aim to streamline and professionalise the Soviet military.
13:21Under Zhukov, the Soviet military modernised its equipment and weaponry to compete with the US arsenal.
13:28The arrival of the atomic bomb had replaced the idea of a balance of power with a balance of terror.
13:40Nuclear weapons meant the two superpowers could now annihilate each other properly.
13:46practically at the touch of a button.
13:47With the help of German scientists who had been brought to the Soviet Union, the NKVD program had succeeded in testing an atomic bomb in 1949.
13:59Now, Zhukov was instructed to ensure that the rapidly expanding nuclear program would remain a military priority.
14:12By the mid-1950s, the US had produced more than 3,000 nuclear warheads to the Soviet's 300.
14:25On September 14th 1954, a Soviet bomber dropped a 40 kiloton nuclear bomb south of the Urals, in what was called Operation Snowball.
14:50Operation Snowball
14:57.
15:25Alongside the nuclear arms race, the US and the Soviet Union were also engaged in a wholly
15:31new competition – the space race.
15:36A rocket engineer who had served as a colonel in the Red Army, Sergei Korolev, was the mastermind
15:42behind the Soviet space program.
15:44He convinced Marshal Zhukov that rockets would be able to penetrate the stratosphere and
15:49one day transport humans into outer space.
15:56The Russian space program was placed under the control of the Red Army.
16:12Sputnik 1 was successfully launched into a low Earth orbit on October 4th, 1957.
16:20It was joined by Sputnik 2 four weeks later, on November 3rd, 1957.
16:27A dog, Laika, was on board.
16:30A stray from the streets of Moscow, she became the first living animal launched into Earth
16:35orbit.
16:40Several hours after the rocket launch, Laika died.
16:43But she survived long enough to prove that a living passenger could survive the conditions
16:48of the launch and a near zero gravity environment.
16:59The US still lagged behind the Soviet Union in the race to space.
17:11To catch up, the US founded NASA and invested enormous sums in manned spaceflight.
17:17Between 1957 and 1961, the US increased NASA's budget seven times over.
17:24Nothing would stand in the way of catching up with the Soviets.
17:32But the Red Army program remained a step ahead.
17:40On April 12th, 1961, Radio Moscow interrupted its scheduled broadcast to make a historic announcement.
17:47The US said Moscow.
17:48The US said Moscow.
17:49The US said Moscow.
17:50The US said Moscow.
17:51The US said Moscow.
17:52We are sending the TASS messages on the first flight in the world of human flight in the
17:54world of a human space.
18:03Yuri Gagarin, a 27-year-old lieutenant in the Soviet Air Force, had been blasted into orbit.
18:10His spacecraft reached a maximum speed of 28,260 kilometres per hour.
18:17108 minutes later, he had made a single orbit around Earth.
18:22Not quite two hours later, Gagarin parachuted back to ground.
18:26Lieutenant Gagarin was an international star, a legend.
18:32Margarita Pograbitskaya was an eyewitness.
18:37We were all out on the street.
18:39They laughed, they hugged each other, and wept.
18:47Another eyewitness, Svetlana Alekseyevich, recalled her father's reaction.
18:54He began to believe in communism.
18:56Thanks to Gagarin, we were the first.
18:58For us, nothing was impossible.
19:00In 1962, a year after the Berlin Wall went up, and a year after John F. Kennedy took office
19:20as the 35th President of the United States, the world watched and held its breath.
19:25Good evening, my fellow citizens.
19:29This government, as promised, has maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet military
19:35build-up on the island of Cuba.
19:39The Cuban Missile Crisis pushed the two superpowers to the brink of nuclear war.
19:49To solve the crisis, President Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev proposed a policy
19:55of detente in which diplomacy would pave the way for dialogue.
20:02But the US and the Soviet Union continued to engage in a series of proxy wars in Vietnam,
20:09the Near East, and Latin America.
20:25Soviet propaganda proclaimed its support for the battle of the oppressed.
20:35And the Red Army supplied their chosen sides with Kalashnikov rifles, ground-to-air missiles,
20:41fighter jets, and military trainers.
20:47Young people in the Soviet Union thrilled to the idea of internationalism, especially Fidel
20:52Castro and his Cuban revolution.
20:57But these dreams of freedom would soon come home to roost in Moscow.
21:13In Czechoslovakia, the Prague Spring posed a direct challenge to the Kremlin.
21:24Alexander Dubček, who was the first secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, promoted
21:30the idea of socialism with a human face.
21:34His reforms included an abolition of censorship, the introduction of a multi-party system, and
21:41curtailing the powers of the secret police.
21:51Once again, history repeated itself.
21:57On the night of August 20th, 1968, as many as 300,000 Warsaw Pact troops marched into Czechoslovakia.
22:10Khrushchev's successor, Leonid Brezhnev, sent in the Red Army to restore order.
22:20Boris Shmelyov, a Red Army soldier, had imagined returning home a hero.
22:31We thought that we were dealing with a pitiful group of counter-revolutionaries, who we would
22:35quickly put in their place.
22:38And that the Czech population would greet us with joy and gratitude.
22:42But they would throw flowers in front of our tanks, like in 1945.
22:55The Soviet tank crews did not realize that most Czech citizens supported the reforms being
23:01carried out by Alexander Dubček.
23:09The expressions of the people on the street darkened.
23:15Why are you here?
23:16They asked and examined our military gear.
23:20To put down the counter-revolution.
23:23But look around.
23:24The people here were happy and content.
23:27There is no counter-revolution.
23:30Conversations like this one, bridging a gulf of incomprehension, were repeated at every
23:36intersection and next to every tank.
23:45At first, the situation remained peaceful.
23:48But within just a few hours, it escalated.
23:51The Prague radio building became the center of resistance.
24:04Protests against the invasion continued.
24:14The Warsaw Pact troops opened fire.
24:31The Warsaw Pact troops opened fire.
24:41The Warsaw Pact troops opened fire.
24:46Alexander Dubček was summoned to Moscow and arrested.
24:50His friend Leonid Brezhnev applied increasing pressure.
24:54Dubček capitulated.
24:56The Prague Spring was over.
24:58Moscow left its troops on Czechoslovakian soil.
25:14The Red Army was in turmoil.
25:17Some officers were convinced that the protesters had been spurred on by Western agitators,
25:23and that the Soviet military had prevented a third world war.
25:28Others believed that the repression of Prague had sullied the reputation of the Red Army,
25:33which could lead to further unrest.
25:39Meanwhile, violence, assaults and rapes were the order of the day on Soviet military bases.
25:45Racism was rampant and brutal.
25:47Most of the officers were Russian.
25:54Soldiers from other Soviet republics were relegated to the lower ranks.
26:06The reputation of the Red Army was in tatters.
26:29The reputation of the Red Army was in tatters.
26:31The educated elites did everything they could to avoid military service.
26:42From 1954 to 1958, the number of young people who wanted to avoid conscription
26:49increased more than fourfold, from 9% to 38%.
26:53Most recruits now came from working-class families, laborers and low-level office workers.
27:05Most couldn't care less about defending communism or supporting the fight against imperialism.
27:13For the new generation of Korea soldiers, military service meant little more than steady work and
27:18decent benefits. A regular paycheck and military housing. A bulwark against the looming economic crisis.
27:33But by the late 1970s, the crisis in Afghanistan reverberated through the ranks of the Red Army.
27:39Nua Mohammad Taraki, who had become President and Prime Minister of Afghanistan in 1978,
27:52was supported by the Soviet Union.
27:57On September 14th, 1979, he was toppled by his deputy, who was less favorably inclined towards Moscow.
28:05The Kremlin was dismayed and threatened a military invasion.
28:12Leonid Brezhnev, who had led the Soviet Union for 15 years, was 73 years old and in poor health.
28:21Yuri Andropov, the head of the KGB, was his only confidant.
28:26Andropov assured him that a military intervention in Afghanistan would be over within just a few weeks.
28:35In late 1979, the first two airborne divisions arrived in Kabul.
28:45On December 27th, 1979, President Hafizullah Amin was assassinated by Soviet operatives.
28:52The Soviet military seized control of the country's airports.
28:57Three days later, 20,000 soldiers in tanks and armoured vehicles rolled into Kabul and other Afghan cities.
29:05The Kremlin installed a government favourable to its own interests and placed its advisers at every level of government.
29:14On January 1st, 1980, 55,000 Soviet soldiers were in Afghanistan.
29:31Three months later, there were 85,000.
29:34Three months later, there were 85,000 soldiers in Afghanistan.
29:55For the first time since 1945, the Red Army was now at war.
29:59The Soviet invasion sparked an outpouring of patriotism in Afghanistan, as well as a revival of religious feeling and belief.
30:17The Soviets were seen as atheist invaders who were trying to force unbelief on a Muslim nation.
30:23Insurgent groups, collectively known as the Mujahideen, mobilised to ward off the attack.
30:35Unlike the invaders, the Mujahideen were intimately familiar with the rugged terrain.
30:41They knew the local communities down to the smallest village.
30:44With the help of weapons supplied by the US and Saudi Arabia, they waged a successful guerrilla war.
30:52The heavy Soviet tanks didn't stand a chance against the Mujahideen's ambushes.
30:57For the Red Army, the war in Afghanistan became a quagmire.
31:02By 1983, an estimated 50% of schools in Afghanistan had been destroyed, along with 60% of hospitals and 70% of the country's agricultural cooperatives.
31:28The number of civilian casualties remains unknown.
31:50Soldiers like Yevgeny Koltenikov increasingly found themselves plagued by doubt.
31:55I was the one who, in the conscription office, asked to be deployed to Afghanistan.
32:03In our political education seminars, we were told tales of military heroism and bravery.
32:08How could I have been so naive?
32:10In the black tullebany, those who are in the task,
32:17again led to the loss of the army in Shindand, in Kandagari and in Bagram.
32:25Hazing, abuse, and the brutal exploitation of young conscripts by older soldiers was rampant.
32:32The fight in Afghanistan was disorienting and demoralizing for the Soviet military.
32:37At the end of their tour, conscripts like Yevgeny Koltenikov were given explicit instructions
33:00about what they were allowed to say in public.
33:06We were not permitted to mention the failures because we were a great and powerful army.
33:12We did not shoot, we did not bomb, we did not carry out poisonings.
33:16We were a great, powerful and morally unblemished army.
33:28Back home in the Soviet Union, disillusionment and discontent had set in.
33:33Every family had a son, brother or cousin in the military.
33:39News outlets continued to report on battlefront victories,
33:43but the withdrawal of Soviet troops was repeatedly postponed.
33:48Anyone who dared express public criticism, however small, risked attracting the attention of the KGB.
33:55Families of soldiers were left isolated and uncertain, something the authorities skillfully exploited.
34:09At a cemetery on the outskirts of Minsk, a father was filled with reproach.
34:13I wanted to write on my son's grave marker, fell in Afghanistan, but that was not permitted.
34:23We paid the stonemason to add the letters D-R-A as an abbreviation for the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan.
34:31Because of those three letters, I was summoned to the authorities repeatedly for an entire year.
34:38In the same cemetery, a mother removed the official inscription on her son's grave
34:43and had it replaced with the question, in the name of what.
34:51The war dragged on.
35:05In the mid-1980s, US President Ronald Reagan earmarked 280 million dollars in military aid
35:12to the Afghan rebels.
35:15The Soviet Union was being bled dry.
35:18Widespread shortages had reached a breaking point.
35:22Discontent reigned.
35:26Mikhail Gorbachev, the new General Secretary of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union,
35:31realised the war could not be won.
35:33He tried to find a way out of the conflict.
35:36He tried to find a way out of the conflict.
35:36As the first troops began their withdrawal from Afghanistan,
35:45the families of 500 soldiers turned out to ask what had happened to their children.
35:51The Committee of Soldiers Mothers of Russia was a mass movement and another crack in the Soviet edifice.
35:58Under Glasnost, the policy of openness and transparency instituted by Mikhail Gorbachev,
36:16media censorship was relaxed.
36:20New revelations came to light almost daily.
36:24The silence of those in power, the strategic errors, the abuse, racism and rapes.
36:48All of the violence and victimisation that was endemic in the Soviet military was now exposed.
37:18Do you not give any children to your children?
37:20I will not give you children to your children.
37:21I am one of them.
37:29On February 15th, 1989, the Soviet military threw in the towel.
37:35The last tanks withdrew from Afghanistan.
37:40The war had lasted nearly a decade, twice as long as the Great Patriotic War.
37:48History was at a turning point.
37:58On November 9th, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, marking the first step in what would become German reunification.
38:09On September 30th, 1990, East Germany left the Warsaw Pact.
38:14The People's Republics demanded the withdrawal of Soviet troops.
38:29More than 650,000 Soviet soldiers and their families returned home.
38:35And the Soviet Union ceased to exist as a continental power.
38:39The world's largest country had become a house of cards.
38:45And the Red Army collapsed along with it.
38:47The Red Army was in the middle of the war.
39:04Mikhail Gorbachev tried to save what he could, but it was too late.
39:08On August 18th, 1991, the heads of the armed forces, the KGB and the Interior Ministry staged a coup in Moscow.
39:22This time Soviet tanks were not rolling down the streets of Prague or Budapest, but were being turned against their own people.
39:44Boris Yeltsin, who had just been elected as president of Russia, coordinated the resistance.
40:06He succeeded in warding off the coup.
40:14The next year, the Red Army formally became the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.
40:20In its final year, the Soviet Army numbered nearly three million active duty soldiers.
40:26After decades of restructuring and cost-cutting, the Russian army now has around a million soldiers on active duty.
40:42Vladimir Putin took over from President Yeltsin after he unexpectedly resigned on New Year's Eve in 1999.
40:48Putin continued the restructuring program launched by his predecessor.
40:56Putin was determined to rewrite history and set out to revitalize Russia's military.
41:02For Putin, the Red Army was a symbol of a proud past dating back to the Tsars.
41:08An ideal vehicle for promoting patriotism and love of country.
41:14The Red Army had been dissolved along with the Soviet Union, but its founding myth remained.
41:24A story of the heroism of a people and the fate of a nation.
41:28Of an eternal Russia, a country that had overcome the tragedies of history.
41:34The Red Army, a country that had conquered Europe in last year.
41:36The Red Army!
41:40The Red Army!
41:50The Red Army!
41:52The Red Army!
41:54The Red Army!
41:56The Red Army!
41:58The Red Army!
42:02Transcription by CastingWords
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