A&E special on Stalin to note famine (03/03/96)

A&E special on Stalin to note famine

NEW YORK - A&E's "Madmen at War" week on Biography will continue on March 7 with the saga of the cobbler's son who became the ruthless "Man of Steel."

"Biography: Joseph Stalin: Red Terror" is about the tyrant who held absolute power over his people for 29 years. The tyranny of Stalin was unsurpassed by any despots in history, arguably including Hitler's. Over 20 million people died as a direct result of Stalin's actions. His rule was a time of mass paranoia, favored denouncements and mysterious disappearances.

Stalin succeeded his hero, Lenin, to power in 1924. He induced widespread famines to enforce farm collectivization and created massive purges at every level of Soviet society to eliminate real and imagined enemies.

A wide array of people who were directly affected by Stalin were interviewed by the A&E program, including Mikhail Gorbachev, the first Soviet leader to abolish the death camps; Dr. Janusz Bardach, a gulag survivor and now a doctor in Iowa; Dr. Valentin Berezhkov, Stalin's interpreter, who survived the Ukrainian famine; and Yevgeny Dzhugashvili, Stalin's grandson and current proponent of a return to Stalinism in Russia.

The one-hour special includes:

Mr. Gorbachev's observations on the effect of Stalin's repression on the fall of the USSR;

first-hand accounts of Stalin's regime of death and destruction;

first-ever documentary compilation of the holocaust-like actions of Stalin, with rarely seen footage;

historians' revisionist take on "what we didn't know" about Stalin.

The special is produced by History Television Network Productions and is hosted by Jack Perkins.

As reported by the Ukrainian Canadian Research and Documentation Center, A&E's biography of Stalin will explore Stalin's connection to the 1932-1933 man-made famine in Ukraine.

According to Andrew Gregorovich, UCRDC executive director, information and material supplied by the center are to appear in this new A&E documentary. The center had assembled documentary material for its 1984 prize-winning film "Harvest of Despair," and these research materials were made available to A&E.

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