A dying man in his forties recalls his childhood, his mother, the war and personal moments that tell of and juxtapose pivotal moments in Soviet history with daily life.
An account of the revolutionary years of the legendary American journalist John Reed, who shared his adventurous professional life with his radical commitment to the socialist revolution in Russia, his dream of spreading its principles among the members of the American working class, and his troubled romantic relationship with the writer Louise Bryant.
Workers in a factory in pre-revolutionary Russia go on strike and are met by violent suppression.
Spain, 1937. Ramón Mercader, a young communist combatant, is recruited and trained by the Soviet intelligence service to participate in a top secret mission ordered by the ruthless dictator Joseph Stalin: the assassination of his former political rival, Leon Trotsky, who is living in exile in Mexico.
On September 1st, 1939, Nazi Germany invades Poland, unleashing World War II. On September 17th, the Soviet Red Army crosses the border. The Polish army, unable to fight on two fronts, is defeated. Thousands of Polish men, both military and government officials, are captured by the invaders. Their fate will only be known several years later.
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.
An account of the peasant turned mythical military hero Vasily Chapayev, charting his campaign in the Red Army during the Russian Civil War.
St. Petersburg, Russia, December 30th, 1916. Grigori Rasputin is assassinated. The story of the humble peasant who became the most influential adviser to czarina Alexandra Feodorovna, wife of the last czar, Nicholas II Romanov.
Ukrainian journalist Katya Soldak, currently living in New York City and working for Forbes magazine, chronicles Ukraine's history: its strong ties to Russia for centuries; how it broke away from the USSR and began to walk alone; the Orange Revolution, the Maidan Revolution, the Crimea annexation, the Donbass War; all through the eyes of her family and friends settled in Kharkiv, a large Ukrainian city located just eighteen miles from the Russian border.
A chronicle of the Russian Revolution of 1917, from the bourgeois democratic February Revolution to the great socialist October Revolution and the final triumph.
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.
Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Iceland, July 9, 2016. The surprising discovery of a canister —containing four reels of The Village Detective (Деревенский детектив), a 1969 Soviet film—, caught in the nets of an Icelandic trawler, is the first step in a fascinating journey through the artistic life of film and stage actor Mikhail Ivanovich Zharov (1899-1981), icon and star of an entire era of Russian cinema.
The story of Russian writer and Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) and his masterpiece, The Gulag Archipelago, published in Paris in 1973, which forever shook the very foundations of communist ideology.
The defeated remnants of vile Ukrainian nationalists, headed by the leader of the Ukrainian liberation movement, Symon Petliura, cannot accept their historical fate and are plotting an insurrection against the Soviet regime in Ukraine. There is nothing Petliura and his cohorts would not do to win back control over Ukraine, including selling it to the highest bidder, in this case, the Polish dictator Jozef Pilsudski. A group of plotters are coordinating an insurrection in Kyiv with an attack from Poland headed by Petliura’s general Yurko Tiutiunnyk. Predictably, the invincible Red Army defeats the nationalist plotters and proves that the Soviet borders are impregnable.
The end of the Cold War did not bring about a definitive thaw in the former republics of the Soviet Union, so that today there are several frozen conflicts, unresolved for decades, in that vast territory. As in Transnistria, an unrecognized state, seceded from Moldova since 1990. Kolja is a silent witness of how borders and bureaucracy shape the lives of citizens, finally forced to lose their identity.
Petrograd, Soviet Union, 1920s. Boris Letush, devastated by a personal tragedy, feels the need to put his conscience and his principles before the demands of the cruel system he serves, where law and justice are systematically ignored.
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.
The extraordinary life and career of the Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, a brilliant and charismatic, but also rebellious, favorite son of the Soviet Union.
June 1941, during World War II. Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler orders the mass abduction of particularly well-bred young children from Poland and the occupied territories of the Soviet Union in order to be educated in German culture, by both state schools and German families…
A retrospective look at the youth cultures born in the German Democratic Republic. A celebration of the lust for life, a contemporary trip into the world of skate, a tale on three heroes and their boards, from their childhood in the seventies, through their teenage rebellion in the eighties and the summer of 1989, when their life changed forever, to 2011.