'WWII Behind Closed Doors' Engages as it Misleads

WWII Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, the Nazis and the West, a PBS-BBC co-production that premieres in the US on May 6, engages, shocks – and misleads.

When someone at PBS sent the FPA Russia Blog an advance DVD of the series, I was both excited and puzzled by its audacious plunge into the well-trodden turf of such heavyweights as AJP Taylor, Robert Conquest, Richard Overy and Anthony Beevor.

Buoyed by factual accuracy, glossy re-enactments (featuring a pleasantly Georgian-accented Stalin-a nice touch) and eyewitness testimony from survivors, this ‘dramatic’ and ‘propulsive’ documentary (based on a book by Laurence Rees) appears at first glance to survive the encounter.

Unfortunately, that is not enough to redeem the series’ egregious lack of context, which results in massive distortion by omission.

The first episode, Unlikely Friends, explores the international diplomacy during the lead up to World War II, and centres on the Faustian Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939.

“Before he was allied to Churchill and Roosevelt”, reads a voice over dramatised footage of Molotov toasting Ribbentrop, “Stalin, who wanted to keep out of any impending war, offered to help Hitler and the Nazis…much more than the rest of the world knew. Cue swelling crescendo reserved for the entrances of movie villains.

With a sensationalised conspiratorial tone, the series goes to great lengths to portray an enthusiastic Soviet embrace of the Nazis, as opposed to the much more agonised and pained Western reluctance to enter the war.

See Stalin, Molotov and Nazi officials drinking champagne at dinner as they gleefully carve up a leg of lamb, and Poland! Watch as Stalin introduces the sociopathic NKVD chief Lavrenti Beria to the Germans with the words: ‘This is our Himmler! He’s also pretty good at his job!”

Later, as the film shows how Soviet ice-breakers had helped a Nazi warship sail through the Arctic to Asia, a German sailor is quoted saying: “The Russians were on our side, you could say that”.

All this subtlety, I’m guessing, was intended to hammer home some cliché or other about the mutual affinity and moral equivalence of far left and far right dictatorships; and the heart-rending reluctance with which the morally upstanding democracies of Britain and America chose appeasement.

But what was missing? Why was Stalin so eager to sign this pact with a man openly committed (cf Mein Kampf) to the eventual destruction of Russia and its people? Because the Soviet leader had just finished slaughtering his entire officer corps, decimating the army and leaving the USSR unable to engage a serious enemy such as Germany.

Stalin Great Purge

Curiously, this Great Purge (known as Yezhivschina, after the secret police chief who preceded Beria before being ‘purged’ himself) that claimed perhaps a million lives is completely absent from the first instalment of Behind Closed Doors; perhaps because such inconvenient nuances might undermine the USSR-NAZI equivalence at the heart of the film.

The truth is, however, that Stalin’s Russia differed from Hitler’s Germany in one profound way: it treated its own people with even greater savagery and impunity than its enemies and those it conquered.

This brings me to the film’s most serious flaw: its depiction of the division of Poland.

Much is done to visually pair footage of Polish suffering at the hands of Russian troops with images of opulent state dinners at which Soviet and Nazi leaders cemented the division of the country.

At one point, the narrator even suggests that part of Stalin’s brutality towards the Poles is due to his humiliating involvement in a 1920 defeat against that country (amidst such psychologising, little is made, however, of Stalin’s much more incontrovertible obsession with buffer zones and security against invasion).

For a start, for all its determination to equate the Nazis and the Soviets, the film devotes an overwhelming amount of time to the  Soviet (rather than  Nazi) atrocities, which, culminating in the Soviet execution of 22000 Polish officers and intellectuals at Katyn forest, were of course both undeniable and horrific.

Katyn Massacre

It’s impossible not to be moved and shocked as an elderly Galina Stavaskaya cries recalling her rape and beating at the hands of the NKVD secret police; however, by the time we hear from Anna Levitska – her mansion requisitioned by a Russian officer whose wife gleefully steals her nightgown! – it begins to feel a little like demonisation.

But the most damaging thing is not the film’s relative silence on Nazi abuses, but its refusal to contextualize this violence in light of contemporary events in the Soviet Union itself.

Why hadn’t the series taken the trouble to tell viewers that only a year before the gruesome murders of 22000 Poles at Katyn, Stalin had also ‘liquidated’ over 720000 Soviet officers, intellectuals, ‘class enemies’, politicians, secret policemen, and even leaders of the Bolshevik revolution itself?

Or that, while NKVD executioners (one of whom is chillingly interviewed on camera) shot 250-300 Polish prisoners every night at Katyn, they managed to shoot as many as 1000 Soviet citizens a night in Moscow in 1938.

How many Russian families had their houses seized and their belongings appropriated during the revolution, civil war, and later by their own secret police?

Unlike the Nazis, who had concertedly cultivated the favour of German (and Polish) nobility whilst committing atrocities against déclassé and racial enemies, Stalin unleashed indiscriminate violence against all levels of Soviet society, and of every other country under Soviet control: Polish officers and academics, Russian counterrevolutionaries and party loyalists, Ukrainian peasants and Crimean Tartars, Chechens and Georgians -you name it!

Thus, the idea of the Communist Party and the secret police as simply perpetrators in the Nazi sense is both narrow and shallow: the party and the NKVD themselves suffered disproportionate losses in the Hobbesian purges of all against all.

Telling this broader story does not make one a Stalinist sympathiser, but it does provide a disconcerting nuance lacking in this film’s monochrome moral clarity.

And it can be done. Orlando Figes, for one, managed just this in his magisterial history of the Russian Revolution entitled A People’s Tragedy. Figes – no communist fellow-traveller – devoted a large part of a book very critical of the Bolsheviks, to the context and background of Tsarism.

His vivid portrayal of pre-Revolutionary Russia’s untold brutality and barbarism – the anti-Semitic pogroms, the endemic rape and slavery in the villages, the squalor and casual brutality in its Dickensian cities – was invaluable in situating the subsequent terror and brutality of the Bolsheviks within a wider historical and social framework.

To gain some context, viewers are advised to read Catherine Merridale’s Ivan’s War, which describes the horror and deprivation of ordinary life in Stalin’s Red Army, in which “nearly three-quarters of the infantry started life as peasants, and many had suffered the traumas of forced collectivization”.

The uncomfortable truth is that the Soviets who pillaged Lvov and raped Berlin emerged from a system of total brutalisation in which they themselves were constant victims. After all, most of the soldiers in the Red Army of the time had grown up during the civil war, between the pendulum swings of Red and White Terror, followed by famine and a genocidal Nazi campaign to wipe out the Slavic race. Like African child-soldiers, they had known only violence their entire lives.

Moreover, for an American or English viewer, it is sometimes easy to view all of WWII as the voluntary, (arguably) honourable engagement based on an (arguably) principled position that it was for those two powers. By contrast, the Soviets, whose cities were overrun by German tanks, had no such decision to make; they were fighting to drive out a foreign invader to ensure their own imminent survival.

Naturally, none of this excuses what took place: countries were occupied and pillaged by Stalin’s forces, war crimes and crimes against humanity were committed. Yet, as one reviewer writes, “watching the TV series, the impression is given that the ruthless Soviet fight to liberate their own country was as evil as the German invasion and occupation. Remember when you read this book that 95% of the civilian victims in the USSR were killed one way or another by Germans”.

Regrettably, very little of that broader tragedy makes it into “Behind Closed Doors”, leaving the viewer with little more than a lopsided, deracinated portrait of Soviet brutality and gleeful collusion with Nazi Germany.

That is a shame, because there is much that is powerful and striking in the film, such as the testimony of Nikolai Dyukarev, a former NKVD officer who had been tasked with evicting and rounding up Polish families at Katyn:

“We were ordered to re-settle. It was a difficult task, very difficult. Then I was young and it was all, ‘do, do, do!’. But now when I think about it, to leave kids without milk or anything – it was a very hard thing to do. When I grew up, I started to think about it: what kind of task was that? Of course we shouldn’t have done that, when I think about it. And I thought about it then too, but it’s one thing to think, and another to do”.

This – the poignant web of personal complicity, apathy, silence, action, regret, memory and guilt – is the true secret history of WWII.

Why did they have to go and spoil it with the sinister music and ham-fisted histrionics?