Summary: Examining Ukraine's past and present politics, this program features firsthand accounts from six Ukrainians who witnessed and took part in the 2004 Orange Revolution-a climactic chapter in the country's transition to a free, self-governing state. An in-depth look at Ukrainian history is provided, while candid interviews reflect both the optimism of citizens who welcome brand-new freedoms and...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2008
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Summary: Chechnya's war of independence has raged for years, but Americans rarely see the human face of the conflict. This Wide Angle report illuminates the ruined-yet still inhabited-cityscape of Grozny and its surrounding countryside, sifting through both Russian and Chechen perspectives on the ongoing clash. The program depicts Russian troops conducting "cleansing missions" through a rural Chechen...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
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Summary: Although rich in oil, gas, lumber, and many other natural resources, Russia is experiencing difficulty building a free-market economy. From the heart of Moscow and nearby areas, this program investigates major challenges that Russian companies face following the breakup of the Soviet Union. Interviews with resource managers and business leaders-along with spectacular views of the Kremlin, Red...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
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Summary: This program documents the achievements of the Russian avant-garde movement and the impact of the Russian Revolution, which at first nurtured modern art as an emblem of communist culture and then banned it in favor of socialist realism. Set within the context of the life of the pivotal art critic Nikolai Punin, the key events of the Lenin/Stalin years and the contributions of major artists such...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2008
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Summary: As a movement, socialism thrived in Europe-but America was its cradle. This program explores the origins of socialist principles and how they evolved into military revolution in Russia and political strife in the United States. Recounting Robert Owen's New Harmony experiment, the program details the intellectualization of socialism by Marx, Engels, and Bernstein, followed by the rise of Lenin...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
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Summary: Is there a light at the end of the Balkan conflict's long, dark tunnel? Or does Kosovo represent an end game for the hatred between ethnic Serbians and Albanians? This program searches for answers as it travels through the bleak, war-torn region, presenting the expertise of politicians, activists, peacekeepers, and ordinary citizens. With animated maps that clarify focal points in the struggle...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
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Summary: Soviet film studios worked hard to portray their government's system as idyllic and forward-looking. This program showcases animated films designed to promote that utopian vision. Soviet Toys, the earliest known example of Soviet animation, condemns Lenin's New Economic Policy; The Victorious Destination celebrates the achievements of Stalin's first five-year plan; Samoyed Boy praises the...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
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Summary: Instigated in the name of the Russian people, the overthrow of Tsar Nicholas II was actually guided by moderates and aristocrats. What parallels can be drawn between the February and October Revolutions, and in what ways did the two events differ? Did the Tsar's ouster set the stage for Lenin's rise to power, or was it an attempt to stem the tide of true radicalism? This program provides...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2008
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Summary: After meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin for more than two hours at a castle in Slovenia in 2001, President George W. Bush commented: "I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy.... I was able to get a sense of his soul." Since then, the trust has eroded on both sides, as the United States accuses Putin of subverting democracy, corruptly enriching...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
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Summary: This comprehensive ten-year history of Russia following glasnost and perestroika presents a dismal picture of a nation in disarray, battling with seemingly insurmountable economic, social, and political problems. Major topics include the election of Mikhail Gorbachev; dissolution of the gulag system; Boris Yeltsin's opposition to Gorbachev's initiatives; environmental legacies, including the...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
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Summary: Racism, unemployment, aggression, excess-the USSR's animation studios frequently took aim at these aspects of American culture. Representing five decades of animated Soviet propaganda, this program features short films that blast the United States and its perceived evils. Black and White and Mister Twister extol the absence of bigotry in Soviet society, while Someone Else's Voice portrays jazz...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
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Summary: Boris Yeltsin dismantled the Soviet Union and destroyed the Communist Party-and then resigned before he could create a political party to continue his vision or build the institutions necessary for democracy. This intriguing program traces Yeltsin's climb to the top of the Communist Party and his personal power struggle with Mikhail Gorbachev. Interviews with opposition leaders as well as many...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
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Summary: Just as America envisioned Communist threats during much of the 20th century, the specter of capitalism loomed large in the Soviet Cold War psyche. This program surveys Soviet animated propaganda embodying that fiercely anti-capitalist spirit. Foreshadowing the space race, Interplanetary Revolution depicts a Communist triumph over free-market forces on Mars; China in Flames warns against...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
View online at AVOD
Summary: The execution of the Romanovs, in 1918, marked Russia's irrevocable shift from a monarchy to a communist state. The destruction of the Berlin Wall, in 1989, signified the collapse of that state and its Marxist ideology. This gripping, highly realistic program cinematically dramatizes the events of these two historic watersheds: indelible emblems of the birth pains and death throes of the Soviet...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
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Summary: It's a super provocative power-play that's brought Russia eye-ball to eye-ball with the rest of the world in a high-stakes battle of wills. Who'll blink first? Vladimir Putin has ordered his military to seize a big chunk of neighboring Ukraine and is actively surveying other parts of that country while all but daring Europe and America to take him on. Crimea - once a sort of cheery sea-side...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2014
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Summary: How did a single wayward intellectual become the father of the Soviet Union? This program examines the unlikely alignment of forces that enabled Lenin to return from exile and to take power over a vast nation fully engaged in a world war. With the help of rarely seen archival clips, photographs, and artworks, the film guides viewers through developments that anticipated the October Revolution,...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2008
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Summary: In many ways, including artistic ones, Russia appears forever on the brink of revolution. This program examines Russian visual art as it progressed-or regressed, depending on one's opinion-during the 20th century. Host Andrew Graham-Dixon roots out portraits of Stalin stashed in museum storerooms, notes the transformation of the Moscow Metro into a public art gallery, and visits a stunning...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
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Summary: Children too have to deal with the consequences of the political upheaval in the former Soviet Union. This sad and charming documentary, which features children from the Siberian city of Kemerovo, shows how perestroika and glasnost have affected the children: the Pioneers, which used to have so much influence on their lives, has been disbanded; much of what they were taught has turned out to be...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 1992
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Summary: Drawing on sixty volumes of diaries and other recently revealed archival materials, this program presents the struggle between Joseph Stalin and Sergei Eisenstein, who fought for freedom of expression in a climate of exiles and executions. Rare clips of the preeminent Russian director's controversial films-including the deleted Trotsky scene in October, the original ending of The General Line,...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
View online at AVOD
Summary: Hitler's invasion of Russia and Germany's post-WWII partition inspired a great deal of animated Soviet propaganda. This program presents short films that disparage fascist aggression and America's supposed continuation of it. Fascist Boots and Cinema Circus vilify Hitler and the Nazi invaders; A Lesson Not Learned plays on Russian fears of a reunited, vengeful, and American-supported Germany;...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
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Summary: This program uses Lenin's own words to tell the story of the Bolchevik rise to power: the overthrow of the Tsar and of the Kerensky government, the efforts at world Communist revolutions and the readiness to compromise in order to save the revolution in the Soviet Union, the ascendancy of the struggle against socialism over the struggle against capitalism. Thus the program explains the...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
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Summary: Alexander Solzhenitsy's 1970 Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech is the text for this program, which exhorts viewers to shoulder their responsibilities as citizens to fight untruth, injustice, and repression wherever they arise and before they become too powerful to overcome. Never delivered because he was not permitted to leave the Soviet Union in time, the speech is read by Solzhenitsyn in Russian...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2010
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Summary: This program details the nature of the Swedish Empire in the 17th and beginning of the 18th centuries and draws a fascinating portrait of Charles XII. But the major part of the program is devoted to a portrait of the extraordinary and contradictory Tsar Peter the Great, the Oriental Russia into which he was born and the ways in which he turned Russia toward Europe, the problems he faced and the...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
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Summary: When atheistic Joseph Stalin assumed power, he put to use his training as a Russian Orthodox priest to redirect his people's devotional fervor and to cast himself as a secular god. Using eyewitness accounts, reenactments of key events in Stalin's life, and examples of Soviet film, art, music, and architecture, this provocative program demonstrates how Stalin ennobled communism and elevated it...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005