Russia's War - Blood Upon the Snow [DVD]

A brilliant documentary series that I saw on SBS TV in Australia some years ago. I missed the last 2 episodes and have looked online on off for a long time to see if it was available on DVD. Gives a great view of the war in the east. Excellent series.

I should have put 5 stars, because this documentary, (10 times 1 hour, lots of footage from those times), shows us in details the war from Russia's perspective and is just great in doing so. It starts a few years before 1939 and ends after WW2. At the end of each episode Kissinger gives a short speech.
Pardon me to use such words, but it is not "boring", it is "easy to watch" and "exciting": I know these words are not appropriate for this subject, but I thought a potential buyer would want to know...

In the West, we were told at school that it is the Americans who came and save us. I live in England and sometimes I get the impression that it was a war opposing Germany and Britain, with a few other countries a little bit involved too. No, the real action was between Germany and the Soviet Union. 25 million people died in the Soviet Union. If you add all US and UK casualties, you get 600,000 (i.e. less than the Leningrad blockade alone - about 1 million).
Why have we (in the West) been lied to? Because the day the war finished, the new enemy was the Soviet Union. And so their part in the war was minimised in the history books, and the part of the US/UK was exagerated.

So much suffering in Central and Eastern Europe. Before the war (the Great Famine in Ukraine is treated in the series. Grossman's "Everything flows" has an extremely moving chapter about it too), during the war, but also after the war (many soldiers were sent to the Gulag, and prisoners too- for Staline "there are no prisoners, only traitors"). This suffering must be told - I heard a book came out recently about, "Bloodlands".

So from the DVDs we get to see footage and witnesses tell us about the great purge in 1937 (many generals were assasinated), about Stalin not listening to spies telling him that Hitler was about to attack in june 41, about Stalin not believing it and staying in his dacha doing nothing, about the speedy advances of the Wehrmart, getting so close to Moscow.... The Soviet counter offensive early December 41....The many battles, including Stalingrad, Kursk are covered in details and with much footage. The part played by the partisans in Ukraine (at first some welcomed the Germans as they thought they could not be worse than Stalin, but then many changed their mind and fought against the Germans)...

Why am I not giving it 5 stars?
I am not a historian, but I found it a bit tiring that all the bad decisions were Stalin's, and the good ones were Zhukov's.
Don't get me wrong, I know of Stalin athrocities.
I am just asking: is it possible that re WW2 all his decisions were bad tacticaly and evil, and that Joukov's decisions were good tacticaly and good?
I guess that it s easier to tell a story by saying: here's the bad guy, everything he does is bad or stupid... But isn't it possible that some of the decisions he made helped for the victory?
Let me give 2 examples:
1. I understand that at Moscow and Stalingrad, NKVD troops were put behind the Russian front line and they were given the order to shoot their own camerades were they to retreat.
Now, Soviet soldiers at Moscow and Stalingrad are viewed as heroes. But at the same time we are told that Stalin was evil to give such orders... But didn' that order prevent the soldiers from retreating? And, by doing some search on the internet I found that Zhukov was also responsible for a similar/maybe worst order (Zhukov wikipedia page: "families of soldiers captured by Germans would be shot").
So it seems to me, the reality is not as black and white...
I am not saying it was a good order or a bad order, just that it is more complicated than that (in fact a veteran from Stalingrad in the DVD says that it was a good order, because after the Volga there was nowhere to retreat to - that comment is the only favourable to Stalin in the whole set). Also in "Their darkest hour" by Rees some veterans say that that order was good. In that same book one also said the turning point was in october 41 when Stalin decided to stay in Moscow rather than move further east.
2. Industrialisation and the Great Famine.
This is a moraly horrible question to ask.
The Great Famine in Ukraine it is 5 million people, about the same as the Holocaust. But more horrible - gas quicker than hunger. In Ukraine there are stories of people eating their own babies..
So the question is: did it improve the chances of winning the war?
Because the ultimate aim of this famine was - I understand - "industrialisation".
I do not know the answer to this question. And probably any human being would not allow such a thing (the famine) to happen, even if it improved the chances of victory in case of war. But this question exists...

So this DVD series tells us of WW2 from an angle that people in the West often don't know - the Russian angle. And that angle, for WW2, is extremely important.
The reason I didn't give 5 stars is probably due to the fact that I have a problem with History: it is hard to know the Truth, different historians have a different analysis - sometimes simplistic (X is bad, Y is good) for similar events and it is not clear who's right and wrong.

I have to say that I was very surprised by how good this documentary is. Initially I was put off by the fact that Henry Kissinger was involved, thought by some to be a great diplomat but what a droning monotonous voice! Luckily he only introduces each programme giving a brief synopsis of the political situation then we quickly move into the programme itself narrated, thank God, by Nigel Hawthorne.

As for the content, I have watched many many documentaries on WW2 (specifically the Rise and fall of the Third Reich, and that nasty piece of work A.H) so am now finding it difficult to watch documentaries without having seen most of the clips before, I was therefore pleasantly surprised when clip after new clip came up on screen. This surprise was deflated a little when the same pieces of footage, (Stalin strolling along with his cronies, his clapping himself with a really smug look on his face and, of course, his waving at people in the crowd he was about to have arrested and executed!) kept being shown, but then again this was countered by yet another clip previously unseen by me.

As for the historical content, of course it's all about the Russian experience, and being made by a Russian Director does reek a little of propaganda, As for the accuracy of the information, I know so little about this particular area of the war to comment, but as an armchair historian, I can say that this is a REALLY interesting and engrossing documentary and as such is probably a great place to start if you are like me becoming interested in the Russian experiences before, during and after the war.

A very worthy addition to any WW2 documentary collection