S2.E2 ∙ Internet Killed the Video Store

Documentary on the First World War as fought on the Russian front. The film features footage of Russian women training for combat, soldiers in the field, and Lenin and Trotsky in revolutionary Petrograd.

The "Battle for Moscow" began 80 years ago in October. The Wehrmacht tried to take Moscow. The film tells the story of a fateful year - Moscow 1941, when the survival of the Soviet capital was on the knife's edge - when the war front approached ever more threatening. The film tells from a perspective from which the epochal drama has never been seen: a chorus of voices from Moscow, official and private statements recorded in letters, statements, but above all diary entries. They reflect everyday Moscow life in the last months of peace and in the first months of the war. Experiences, feelings, moods, hopes and expectations, worries, fears and fears. Diaries provide valuable historical evidence Private notes and letters in the Soviet Union were often destroyed by their authors or by family members. For fear of searches, arrests, confiscation or theft. Anyone who wrote made himself suspicious. The few diaries that have survived to this day are all the more valuable. Amazing historical and psychological evidence. A wealth of observations, thoughts and reflections, often of high narrative quality. What was it like in Moscow when preparations for the Barbarossa company were in full swing in Berlin? How did the city respond to the news of the German attack on June 22nd? And the days after that - with the enemy bombing raids and vague reports from the front? And how was it in the Soviet metropolis on October 16, when the situation at the front seemed hopeless and it was said: "Save yourself, who can"? Until finally, on November 7th, Stalin appeared before the people with a persistent speech. The Soviet counter-offensive began a month later.

An extended interview with Polish resistance fighter Jan Karski, consisting largely of footage gathered for but not included in Claude Lanzmann's epic 9-hour documentary "Shoah".