Josef Stalin adopts the model of an all-powerful centralized autocrat as he rules Russia with an iron fist. Collectivisation destroys the country's agriculture and leads to widespread famine - exploited by Stalin to destroy anti-soviet elements including 6 to 8 million Ukrainians who die of starvation.

Meanwhile Stalin's Five Year Plans, financed by heroic sacrifices on the part of the workers, transform a backward agricultural nation into a modern industrialised one at breakneck speed. Stalin taps into centuries old fears of Russian vulnerability: "We are 50 or 100 years behind the advanced countries. We must make up this distance in ten years... or they will crush us!". The creative arts are not free from Stalin's stifling grasp either, and Martin Sixsmith recalls speaking with those who lived through the persecution of the Stalin years - writers, composers and henchmen of the regime - to try to understand the role of art in a time of fear.

Stalin himself was becoming more and more paranoid. The murder of Sergei Kirov - head of Leningrad's Communist party - unleashes paranoia, terror and suffering for millions of people as Stalin begins his extermination of political enemies, real and imagined. The purges of the 1930s had disastrous consequences, not least that Stalin destroyed the cream of the Soviet Union's armed forces at the moment the clouds of world war were gathering on the horizon. The non-aggression pact signed with Germany does not save Russia from the war, "more brutal and more terrible than anything seen on the Western Front, perhaps even in the history of war," says Sixsmith. "It revived Russia's deep-seated fears of national annihilation and conditioned the way its people thought of their country and of themselves for many years to come."

Historical Consultant - Professor Geoffrey Hosking

Producer: Anna Scott-Brown & Adam Fowler
A Ladbroke Production for BBC Radio 4. Show less