Stalin: Inside the Terror

I Was Stalin's Bodyguard

December 1989 •Russian

This controversial documentary created a storm in Russia by taking the cloak off a violent, repressive period of Soviet history. Filmmaker Semyon Aranovich found the last surviving personal bodyguard of Joseph Stalin, Alexey Robin, who began working for the dictator in the 1930s.

The Hitler–Stalin Pact

January 2019 •French

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.

People of Russia

December 1942 •English

This FitzPatrick Miniature visits the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the largest geographically unbroken political unit in the world, covering one-sixth of the world's land mass.

Barbarossa: Hitler Turns East

August 2007 •Hungarian

Hitler's invasion of Russia was one of the landmark events of World War II. This documentary reveals the lead-up to the offensive, its impact on the war and the brinksmanship that resulted from the battle for Moscow. Rare footage from both German and Russian archives and detailed maps illustrate the conflict, while award-winning historian and author John Erickson provides insight into the pivotal maneuvers on the eastern front.

Silent Displacement – The Unknown Deportation of Ingria

December 2018 •Swedish

"It Happened in Ingermanland" - about a forgotten people's displacement that took place during the Stalin's reign of terror in the Soviet Union. During the WW2, when the Nazi army arrived in the area of St. Peterburg/Leningrad about 63 000 Ingermanlanders was deported to Finland. In 1946 Stalin wanted them back for his work camps. About 5 000 fled to Sweden and settled there.

Monstrum

May 2017 •Czech

Hitler & Stalin: Portrait of Hostility

April 2009 •German

A double portrait of two dictators who were thousands of miles apart but were constantly fixated on each other.

Cannibal Island

June 2009 •French

A disturbing chapter in Russian history is explored in this documentary. In 1933, Joseph Stalin sent 6000 "unwanted" citizens of Moscow and Leningrad to a desolate Siberian island - with no food or clothes to speak of. Decades later this documentary returns to the island.

Gulag

July 1999 •English

Documentary examining Stalin's Gulag. Between the October Revolution and Stalin's death in 1953, millions of people died in the camps. The film explores the Gulag legacy, hearing from victims and perpetrators of the system.

The Last Freedom of Georgy Konstantinov

April 2019 •Bulgarian

A film about the dramatic and extraordinary fate of the lonely man who confronted the meat grinder of the communist regime. Georgy Konstantinov, 19 years old, blew up Stalin's monument in Sofia and death passed him by only because the dictator died two days later. He miraculously survived 10 years in prison and psychiatric wards and managed to escape to France. His State Security file numbers more than 40,000 pages. Even today, he does not cease to expose the crimes of the regime with the strength of truth and of his character.

Stalin: Man of Steel

January 2003 •English

Emmy Awards nominee for "Outstanding Individual Achievement in a Craft: Research: Multi-faceted portrait of the man who succeeded Lenin as the head of the Soviet Union. With a captivating blend of period documents, newly-released information, newsreel and archival footage and interviews with experts, the program examines his rise to power, deconstructs the cult of personality that helped him maintain an iron grip over his vast empire, and analyzes the policies he introduced, including the deadly expansion of the notorious gulags where he banished so many of his countrymen to certain death.

Stalin's Last Plot

August 2011 •French

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.

Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) - Muse of Keening

November 2011 •English

A short film by Barry Lowe and Dino Mahoney, starring Pauline Burton as Anna. The film is an introduction to the great Soviet era modernist poet, Anna Akhmatova; shot in winter in Saint Petersburg (Leningrad), it contains rare interviews with people who knew her, academics, and dramatized readings of some of her poems.

Geheimes Russland: Moskaus Unterwelten

July 2018 •French

Who Is Mister Putin

December 2015 •Russian

Based on investigations by independent journalists, the film documents the origins of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s private wealth and subsequent rise to power, demonstrating his ascension to the Russian presidency after an alliance built in the early 1990s between himself, certain friends from Leningrad’s KGB, and mafia groups.

Song of Heroes

December 1932 •Russian

The building of blast furnaces Magnitogorsk and the Kubas Basin by Komsomol, the Communist Union of youth, as part of Stalin’s first five-year plan.

Women of the Gulag

November 2017 •Russian

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.

Stalin, the Red Tyrant

March 2007 •French

On March 9, 1953, Joseph Stalin was buried in Moscow in front of a million people. His funeral is that of a demi-God. Ultimate paradox for one of the greatest criminals in History who brought misfortune to his people while arousing collective admiration.

The Ruler

Invalid date •English

Stalin’s statue in the garden of a nunnery provokes discussion – plenty of it – in a small Georgian village. Some of the locals used to know Stalin personally because he visited the village several times when he was young, and they continue to see him as a benign ruler from the good old days rather than the brutal dictator he was. Whenever an episode of purge shook the Soviet Union’s republics, they hid the statue in the woods. The church also plays an important role in people’s lives. All in all, the film reveals a fundamental conflict in Georgian society.

Afterimage

October 2016 •Polish

In 1945, as Stalin sets his hands over Poland, famous painter Wladislaw Strzeminski refuses to compromise on his art with the doctrines of social realism. Persecuted, expelled from his chair at the University, he's eventually erased from the museums' walls. With the help of some of his students, he starts fighting against the Party and becomes the symbol of an artistic resistance against intellectual tyranny.