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The Documentary: The Red and the White: The Red and the White: Retribution

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The Red and the White: Retribution

31/10/2017 GMT

The Red and the White

BBC World Service - The Documentary, The Red and the White, The Red and the White: Retribution

The story of the Red Terror in the North of Russia nearly 100 years ago.

After the foreign intervention troops sailed home the White forces were left to face the Bolsheviks. Countless numbers were slaughtered in one of the world's bloodiest civil wars.

In the final episode, after the multinational force sailed away from Archangel, it was payback time for the Whites. Once the Red Army arrived in February of 1920, the mass executions of those who sided with the Allies began. Lucy Ash visits a 17th-century convent outside Arkhangelsk where thousands of so called counter revolutionaries were slaughtered during the Red Terror. Locals still find human remains scattered in nearby fields. Émigré memoirs contain terrifying accounts of mass drownings in the nearby river. A prominent Bolshevik close to Lenin called Mikhail Kedrov was in charge of the death camps in the Russian North. At one point his sadistic behaviour was so extreme that he had to be put into psychiatric care. His granddaughters in Moscow tell Lucy he was once an idealistic young man but changed after he witnessed atrocities committed by the foreign troops and the Whites. They and many other Russians believe that the painful legacy of the war between Reds and Whites persists to the present day.  

Producer Natalia Golysheva

(Photo: Memorial Cross for the victims of Red Terror at Kholmogory convent Picture: Kirill Iodas)

The Documentary: The Red and the White

Lucy Ash tells the story of a forgotten war fought by Western troops in Arctic Russia, and the mayhem which followed.

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