Red Files4x60' | PBS | International Distribution by Buena Vista RED FILES exposes the Soviet view of recent history through interviews with key Soviet participants, never-before-seen archival film and declassified dossiers. Many of these compelling stories of personal and political intrigue were hidden from the West--and even fellow Russians--for generations. The four-part series looks at the Americans who willingly provided atomic secrets to the KGB in what was the greatest intelligence coup of all time; the Soviet sports machine and the toll it took on its young athletes including gymnasts Olga Korbut and Larissa Latynina, long-jumper Igor Ter-Ovanesyan and hockey player Anatoly Firsov; the secret mastermind behind the Soviet space program, Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, and the historian and rocket engineer, Dr. Sergei Khrushchev (son of Nikita), who now sheds new light on the space race; and the propaganda wars from the Bolshevik Revolution to the end of the Cold War, with commentary by journalists and government officials, including former Secretary of State Alexander Haig. RED FILES is an InVision Production with Abamedia in association with Devillier Donegan Enterprises and PBS.
The critics speak:
 EPISODE I: "Secret Victories of the KGB"To the West, they were traitors. To the Soviet Union, they were heroes. This program tells a twisted tale of intrigue and ideological obsession, in which men and women betrayed the West to spy for the KGB. These spies, from the Cohens and Rosenbergs to Kim Philby and George Blake, secured everything from atomic secrets to submarine technology. Now free to speak, Western and Soviet agents - including KGB master spy George Blake in his first interview since the collapse of the Soviet Union - paint a portrait of one of the greatest espionage conspiracies in history. With uncanny relevance to today's headlines, the episode shows how easily spies penetrated the Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory in New Mexico during wartime. It reveals for the first time the full story of American KGB spies Morris and Lona Cohen and their direct link to the most-wanted U.S. traitor, Soviet code-name "MLAD" (Russian for "youngster"). Nineteen-year-old physicist Ted Hall literally handed Lona the crucial secrets of America's A-bomb, which she then hid in a Kleenex box and carried openly across the country to deliver to Stalin's agents. The program raises questions as to why Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed while Hall and the Cohens were spared. This segment features rare footage from the KGB debriefing of Morris Cohen. "I justified it in my mind by believing that I was helping, in a small way, in building a new society.... But I think it is never wrong to give your life to a noble ideal and to a noble experiment, even if it didn't succeed." --George Blake, KGB master spy (formerly British Intelligence Service) Featured Interviews:
EPISODE 2: "Soviet Sports Wars"In the early 1950s, Stalin launched a massive Soviet sports program to demonstrate to the world that communism was superior to capitalism. This program presents the bittersweet stories of four premier Soviet athletes: Igor Ter-Ovanesyan (long jump), Olga Korbut and Larissa Latynina (gymnastics) and Anatoly Firsov (hockey). Although they took Soviet athletics to the height of greatness and were adored by the public, each eventually came to learn a brutal truth: They performed not for themselves or their fans but for the state. "I was small, very strong...I was different," says Ms. Korbut about her youth and diminubve stature - then unprecedented in gymnastics - and unorthodox style. "That's why they didn't like me and don't like me now." She won three gold medals at the age of 17 during the 1972 Munich Olympics, toured the United States and went on to win gold at the 1974 World Championships. But the fame and adulation she won abroad bred resentment at home. At the 1976 Olympics, she was overshadowed by 14-year-old Nadia Comaneci and was barred by the Soviet government from traveling abroad. "I realized I competed for the government, not for myself, not for [the] public," she says. After the fall of communism, Ms. Korbut emigrated to America. "I'm proud that in those difficult days I was strong enough to keep my soul and my health and my mind. I'm proud that we are sitting here and we are openly talking...and I'm proud that I was one of those who destroyed and helped to change the system." - Igor Ter-Ovanesyan, long-jumper who won against America's Ralph Boston Featured Interviews:
EPISODE 3: "Secret Soviet Moon Mission"This episode presents the story of the secret mastermind responsible for the entire Soviet space program: Sergei Pavlovich Korolev. He spent his life in obscurity and worked while enduring almost a decade in Stalin's gulags after being falsely accused in 1935 of plotting against the state. Yet under his leadership, the Soviets achieved amazing triumphs in rocket science: the world's first satellite launch; the first dog, man and woman in space; and the first spacecraft to reach the moon. This episode shows one of the Cold War's best-kept secrets - Mr. Korolev's lunar lander - on film for the first time. With the dawn of the Cold War, both America and the Soviet Union wanted rockets powerful enough to deliver the ultimate weapon. When Nikita Khrushchev came to power in 1953, he told Mr. Korolev to build a nuclear missile that could reach America. "All the people were very scared," says his son, Sergei Khrushchev, who became a rocket engineer. "It was the beginning of the Cold War, but it was not long after the real war where half of [the] Soviet Union was destroyed." In August 1957, the world's first intercontinental ballistc missile was flown and soon, the first satellite, Sputnik, was launched. In April 1961, the world's first manned spaceship, with pilot Yuri Gagarin, circled the earth. But Americans had one race they could still win, and on July 20, 1969, a year and a half after Mr. Korolev's death and 17 days after his N-1 unmanned moon rocket exploded on takeoff, Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon. "When we talk about the race to the moon, I think that [the] Soviet Union spent this money and they lost everything," Dr. Khrushchev says. Despite his astonishing achievements, Mr. Korolev died with his greatest dream unfulfilled: to land a Soviet citzen on the moon. "I went to Red Square with some friends. One of them turned to me and said, 'I would love to know who was this Chief Designer who launched Gagarin.' I was desperate to tell them that this was my father, but I couldn't because his name was secret, and I had been told never, not under any circumstances to reveal what my father really did." - Nataliya Koroleva, Korolev's daughter Featured Interviews:
EPISODE 4: "Soviet Propaganda Machine"After World War II, as the world longed for peace, the Soviets and West were preparing for a new kind of war: a propaganda war to control the hearts and minds of their own people. The program weaves observations - including those of Pravda's political cartoonist from 1922 to 1980, Boris Yefimov, Russian television journalist Vladimir Pozner, former American Secretary of State Alexander Haig, and Vietnam veteran Jan Scruggs - with archival film to trace the more than 70-year history of the communist propaganda machine and the West's subsequent propaganda efforts. "The Cold War was really a propaganda war in which all sides participated very, very actively," says Mr. Pozner of the period that started after World War II. "It was a struggle for people's minds." The message to the Russian people was clear: The new fascists were the warmongering Americans and grasping capitalists. Events like the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion and the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis were propaganda bonanzas for both sides. "It confirmed what the Soviet Union had always said, which was that American imperialism would use force against anything that it saw as a threat," says Pozner of the Bay of Pigs. Alexander Haig gives his perspective of the Cuban Missile Crisis: "The American people were told that but for a few heroic moments by a Democratic American President - Jack Kennedy - the world was saved the catastrophe of a nuclear holocaust. That's nonsense." "I think
that propaganda is the tool of governments, of power, and in the long
run, it is average people who pay for it, and it's not soon that you're
going to find people with any real kind of political ideals in Russia.
They've been lied to so terribly that they no longer have the desire
to believe in anything." Featured Interviews:
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