Spinning the moral compass
War is not known to produce many saints, at least not among its policymakers whose decisions often come down to negotiating degrees of horror. World War II is no exception and no other figure makes that so frighteningly clear as Josef Stalin.
Almost 20 years after the fall of communism and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, conventional wisdom concedes that Stalin was just as brutal a dictator as Adolf Hitler, ruthlessly deporting, imprisoning and murdering millions.
But he was also, along with Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt, a member of the Big Three and one of the main reasons the Allies were able to defeat the Germans.
“WWII Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, the Nazis and the West,” which begins tonight on PBS, is a riveting, revelatory and at times unsettling exploration of the role Stalin played in World War II, first as an ally of Nazi Germany and then of the United States and Britain.
For years, “Uncle Joe,” as he was called by Roosevelt and Churchill, was the only European leader with a will, an army and a winter strong enough to eventually push back the German forces. That he was also in the habit of murdering anyone he considered even vaguely a threat was something the British and American leaders were prepared to deny or ignore, at least until the war was won.
Lacing dramatic performances with archival footage, recently released documents and interviews with witnesses and participants, historian Laurence Rees (“Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State,” “The Nazis: A Warning From History”) has created a six-hour documentary that is as illuminating as it is exhaustive.
Watching the careful and congenial diplomacy between the three men -- Alexei Petrenko is Stalin, Paul Humpoletz is Churchill and Bob Gunton is FDR -- repeatedly belied by their subsequent actions, provides a lesson in the dangerous dance of world leadership that Arthur Murray would envy.
Although Stalin’s ambition had no boundaries, his political beliefs certainly did -- he would have been just as happy to divide up Poland with Germany as with the Allies. Despite his own betrayals, the Soviet leader seemed genuinely shocked that Hitler, who had signed the infamous Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact in 1939, soon violated its major terms including invading a promised piece of Poland and later Russia itself.
Two paranoid tyrants attempting to cut a deal is laughable in a twisted way -- some of the more chilling moments in “Behind Closed Doors” come when the Germans use images of dead Polish civilians to demonstrate the barbarity of the Russians. But when Stalin turned to the U.S. and Great Britain, things became a bit more morally complicated.
Britain had entered the war to protect Poland, and Churchill repeatedly reassured Polish military leaders that his goal was to maintain the territorial integrity of Poland. His orders, then, that British leaders simply ignore the thousands of murdered Polish soldiers discovered in the Katyn forest and his willingness to redraw the Polish borders with matchsticks for Stalin’s approval reveal the final cruelty of that war: to defeat one mass murderer, another must be appeased.
The personal maneuverings of these three men may be dramatized but the tone of “Behind Closed Doors” is academic objective, at times almost ruthlessly so. The film’s power derives, as it usually does, from the personal details.
It comes from the matter-of-fact tone a Russian officer employs in recounting the executions of Polish officers and listing the suicides that followed as a result among his men -- including his second-in-command and his driver. It comes too from the memories of the women who survived invasions by the Russians and the Germans.
At six hours, playing out over three nights, “Behind Closed Doors” requires a commitment from viewers, but for anyone interested in the complexities of WWII and, indeed, the moral impossibilities of war itself, it is a commitment worth making.
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‘WWII Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, the Nazis and the West’
Where: KCET
When: 9 tonight
Rating: TV-14 (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14)
