This program shows the logic of the events that led from the failure of czarist leadership-from repression, economic unrest, massive war casualties, and seemingly uncaring behavior by the government-to the success of the Bolsheviks and the installation of Lenin. It covers the 300-year-old Romanov dynasty: ineffectual Nicholas, Alexandra with Rasputin; the events of March 1917; the abdication of the Czar and the new leadership: Kerensky, Trotsky, Lenin,...

Filmed at the end of the Soviet era, this classic film is a portrait of elegant Leningrad, the Baltic seaport established by Peter the Great in the 18th century. This riveting cultural survey shows a city in social, economic, and political transition. Characterized from its birth by a boldness of vision, Leningrad today is in the forefront of changes sweeping the Soviet Union. Meet a talented young ballerina, an animated rock guitarist, hard-working...

When atheistic Joseph Stalin assumed power, he put to use his training as a Russian Orthodox priest to redirect his people's devotional fervor and to cast himself as a secular god. Using eyewitness accounts, reenactments of key events in Stalin's life, and examples of Soviet film, art, music, and architecture, this provocative program demonstrates how Stalin ennobled communism and elevated it to the level of a state religion. Neo-Stalinists, nostalgic...

Journalism has become an integral feature of modern war, but during the Russian-Georgian conflict it was propaganda more than information that dominated the Russian press. This documentary exposes Russia's abuse of mass media in reporting on what really happened during the 2008 South Ossetia conflict. When channel CCTV let citizens know that "the military was forced to undertake police actions to keep order," it was Georgian civilians who were desperately...

Is there a light at the end of the Balkan conflict's long, dark tunnel? Or does Kosovo represent an end game for the hatred between ethnic Serbians and Albanians? This program searches for answers as it travels through the bleak, war-torn region, presenting the expertise of politicians, activists, peacekeepers, and ordinary citizens. With animated maps that clarify focal points in the struggle over Kosovo, the film sheds light on regional history,...

This is the documentary story of the man who subverted the Russian Revolution: born in 1879 in Georgia, a region colonized by Russia at the beginning of the 19th century; studied for the priesthood but soon abandoned piety for insurrection and agitation. By the time of the Revolution, his unique skills had emerged: to be in the right place at the right time and leave the speechifying to others while accumulating political power behind the scenes....

When Senegalese student Lamzar Samba was gunned down in cold blood by skinheads in St. Petersburg in 2006, his death became a symbol of the swiftly-growing rate of hate crimes there. Are white supremacists, determined to preserve the purity of the Slavic race, turning St. Petersburg into the neo-Nazi capital of the world? This program profiles Samba's death, just one in a long series of racially-motivated attacks against foreigners in Russia, and...

The end of World War II brought a desolate European landscape with two countries and two ideologies in an epic face-off. Sir David Frost and noted historian Michael Beschloss examine a multitude of essential topics and events of the period, including the roots of the Cold War, the early challenge to Truman, the Berlin Airlift, the Korean War and the spread of "red scare" paranoia, the arms race and the threat of nuclear Armageddon, Khrushchev, the...

On the night of October 24, 1917, a police patrol stopped two men on the streets of St. Petersburg, but failing to recognize their quarry, the police let them pass. One of them-disguised as a tramp-was the future founder and leader of the Soviet Union: Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. In this program, Cambridge University's Orlando Figes, author of A People's Tragedy, and Vitaly Startsev, of St. Petersburg Herzen University, investigate the circumstances of...

In the midst of the trauma of the Vietnam War, a U.S. diplomatic strategy evolves that begins the unraveling of the Soviet Empire. This program on the Cold War of the 1970s and 80s, hosted by David Frost and featuring historian Michael Beschloss, focuses on such key events and tactics as detente, the manipulations that sparked Middle East tensions between Soviet-supported Egypt and American-backed Israel, Nixon's historic trip to China, the SALT talks,...