The 13 Days That Almost Ended the World in 1962

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:03]In 1922, the Soviet Union was formed, a new nation that would have a profound impact on the entire globe.

[00:00:11]It would emerge from the remnants of the Russian empire after a long and bloody civil war.

[00:00:18]Russia, in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, was a country in absolute turmoil, a brutal and bloody clash of arms t rying to wipe out this new regime before it can take control of the country.

[00:00:31]The Bolsheviks finally succeeded in about 1922, and then came the hard work of trying to create, for the first time ever, a new socialist country.

[00:00:40]From out of nowhere, Vladimir Lenin had become the leader of the largest nation on Earth and was now imposing his will.

[00:00:49]Lenin won the war.

[00:00:50]Lenin won the revolution.

[00:00:52]Lenin's one of those amazing figures who really are decisive in history.

[00:00:56]One's got to understand that Lenin was an autocratic character who really didn't want anyone to succeed him.

[00:01:02]That's true of most autocratic characters in history.

[00:01:06]But Lenin would have a successor who proved to be the most ruthless of all figures when dealing with both his own people and his foreign enemies.

[00:01:16]They realized after the revolution that the Soviet Union was surrounded by enemies, didn't have a friend in the world.

[00:01:22]They felt that way and they were probably right.

[00:01:25]And the only defense was to build an enormous army with a lot of tanks and a lot of aircrafts and a lot of ships, which they did.

[00:01:34]In the aftermath of World War II, the Soviet Union emerged as a new global superpower that matched the once mighty Russian Empire of old.

[00:01:49]All of us who were then young, we were saying, great achievements by the Soviet Union.

[00:01:55]They launched the Sputnik satellite, a fantastic scientific achievement.

[00:01:59]They put the first man into space.

[00:02:01]Yuri Gagarin.

[00:02:02]Fantastic achievement.

[00:02:04]And so people were saying they saw the Soviet Union as a genuine, comparable competitor with the United States.

[00:02:15]Now, a century from its formation, the Soviet Union seems to define, the home of the 22th century.

[00:02:41]THE SOVIET UNION, 100TH ANNIVERSARY 1922 On the June 22, 1941, Adolf Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, a gargantuan military invasion of the Soviet Union.

[00:03:05]The eastern front of World War II had been opened, and for a while, it looked as if the Soviet Union might be doomed.

[00:03:15]The first days and weeks and months of the German invasion of the Soviet Union were a military catastrophe, but, Russia was so vast, and Russia's armies were so enormous that, even though the Germans keep advancing and advancing, that it's not enough.

[00:03:35]As time went on, this Nazi war machine was stopped. It was stopped in front of Leningrad.

[00:03:41]It was stopped in front of Moscow.

[00:03:43]And he was absolutely imperative for the Nazis to capture Moscow before winter began.

[00:03:50]And it looked like they were going to achieve this. They captured notably the towns of Vyazma and Bryansk. These are very close to Moscow.

[00:03:58]And this happened shortly before the winter set in. And it looked very likely that they would seize Moscow as well.

[00:04:04]But Stalin ordered that Moscow was to be held at all costs. He saw that this was a great prize for Hitler, and he was determined to ensure that Hitler did not capture Moscow.

[00:04:15]And so you have this incredible counter-defense of the capital city.

[00:04:21]It's hard to think of any single occasion when another nation has successfully invaded Russia. And come to a place where even the Mongols couldn't get any further than the forests and the bogs.

[00:04:33]And Napoleon, of course, made some terrible mistakes with the weather reports.

[00:04:37]Hitler made the same mistake and has said Russia is a very easy country to get into but an impossible country to get out of.

[00:04:45]So that was a part of it. There was just unlimited manpower.

[00:04:49]This was the first time they had a genuine enemy.

[00:04:51]They'd had false enemies that Stalin invented.

[00:04:54]Now they had a real one.

[00:04:56]Amazing achievement of the war was in the first 4 months or so of the war to evacuate heavy industry from Ukraine, which was the city of Kharkov especially which was going to be under attack, moved hundreds and hundreds of kilometers to safe haven behind the Urals.

[00:05:13]And within a matter of months, for example, the Kharkov Tractor factory was up and running, producing tanks despite the disruption.

[00:05:21]How it was done is a miracle.

[00:05:23]Heavy industry, dismantled, put on trains, moved to the Urals, re-erected and working.

[00:05:30]And then they produced tanks that were actually superior to German tanks, the T-72, which I think still rolls about today, which bounced shells just bounced off them.

[00:05:40]The Soviet Union is not the hollow shell that Hitler convinced himself that it was before he launched Operation Barbarossa.

[00:05:49]This is a vast, fantastically powerful, fantastically motivated country and society which can do things that we have never dreamed of.

[00:06:00]And so those German generals who had not been frightened by the British or the French, or the Poles, suddenly they feel this sense around the heart.

[00:06:10]They feel these Russians, this is something far more formidable, far more frightening than anything we've hitherto had to face.

[00:06:21]And as those winter battles began around Moscow in the autumn and winter in October and November of 1941.

[00:06:32]Even though Hitler was far from admitting it, most of the smartest people in the inner circle of the Third Reich realized that terrifying iron hand of defeat was staring them in the face.

[00:06:48]In order to help guarantee eventual victory, the Soviet Union quickly made a new alliance with the Western powers that had once treated it with enormous suspicion.

[00:07:00]An alliance of pragmatism was formed.

[00:07:03]Once they met together, in August 1942, Churchill went over to see Stalin. And Stalin was actually at the greatest crisis of the war.

[00:07:14]He looked like he was going to lose the whole South, the oil field, Stalingrad and the Caucasus.

[00:07:19]Churchill arrived, and they made a sort of deal, they became kind of, they respected each other.

[00:07:27]And Churchill told them that they weren't going to do an invasion of Europe, an invasion of France yet, but that they would ultimately.

[00:07:35]But for the moment, they had to build trust among themselves.

[00:07:39]And so the 3 of them met at Tehran for the first time in 1943.

[00:07:45]There they really began to build a sort of rapport between the 3 of them, particularly Roosevelt and Stalin.

[00:07:52]And they agreed on enough to proceed with the war and to win the war. They decided on conditional surrender and the future shape of what Europe would look like.

[00:08:02]Here, the chief executives of Britain and the United States met for the first time with Marshal Stalin.

[00:08:09]They reaffirmed their country's determination to work together in the war and in the peace to follow.

[00:08:17]The battles that the Soviet Union fought on the eastern front were on an almost unimaginable scale and would turn the tide in favour of this new alliance.

[00:08:31]These battles inside the Soviet Union were on a scale that had never been seen before in the history of warfare.

[00:08:37]These huge Titanic struggles, the struggle for Leningrad, the struggle for Stalingrad, the massive tank battle, the greatest tank battle in history that took place at Kursk.

[00:08:48]The death toll in these battles were absolutely enormous.

[00:08:51]Millions and millions of Soviet soldiers would lose their lives on these battlefields.

[00:08:56]It was a people's war.

[00:08:58]The people's homeland was being invaded, and so they resisted.

[00:09:01]There were partisan groups behind nazi lines.

[00:09:04]Everybody, whether or not they had been victimized by the purges or not, or liked Stalin or didn't, they wanted to defend the homeland.

[00:09:12]Tremendous numbers of victims are a whole generation of young men was lost to the Soviet Union, and economic destruction, the burning of fields, of factories, tremendous losses.

[00:09:27]In the beginning of 1945, when it was clear that the allies were going to win the war, the big 3, Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt, met at Yalta to thrash out a new world order.

[00:09:40]They were to decide, really, what was to happen to the world once nazi Germany had been defeated.

[00:09:51]The 3 parties reach a firm accord on military and political points.

[00:09:55]Coordinated plans are made for great new blows against Germany from all directions.

[00:10:01]Reaffirming the resolve of the United Nations to cooperate fully after the war, Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin reach agreement on the foundations of European peace.

[00:10:11]Germany shall be disarmed.

[00:10:13]German militarism and nazism will be destroyed.

[00:10:18]Just over 2 months after the Yalta Conference, Soviet forces reached Berlin and raised the victory banner.

[00:10:25]over the Reichstag.

[00:10:27]Only a few hundred yards away, Adolf Hitler had committed suicide in the Führerbunker.

[00:10:32]The European theater of World War II had come to a decisive end, but the battle lines of the Cold War were already being drawn.

[00:10:53]In July 1945, the Potsdam Conference began.

[00:10:58]The leaders of the victorious allied countries met in Germany, which had unconditionally surrendered just nine weeks earlier.

[00:11:06]It would be the last time Stalin ever left the Soviet Union.

[00:11:12]Stalin and the Soviet Union emerged from the war, both weak and very powerful.

[00:11:18]Weak in the sense that huge swathes of the Soviet Union had been totally destroyed by the German army, but powerful in the sense that the Red Army had steamrolled into eastern Europe. And that Stalin now controlled many of the territories he'd always coveted.

[00:11:34]This placed him in a very, very powerful position.

[00:11:37]Germany itself was to be split into 2 separate parts.

[00:11:41]The Soviets, Stalin was going to control the east of Germany, and the western allies, Britain, France   and America were to control the western sector of Germany.

[00:11:51]And they were going to do likewise for Berlin.

[00:11:54]Quick progress, the Berlin Conference.

[00:11:57]Preparations settled, boundaries adjusted, peoples relocated.

[00:12:04]New problems will still arise tomorrow, but today we have an international organization to work them out so that problems do not become conflicts.

[00:12:17]The big 3 changes, but the big 3 goes on.

[00:12:23]President dies, another ably takes his place.

[00:12:29]The Prime Minister leaves the conference to stand a free election.

[00:12:33]By the choice of his people, a new prime minister returns to his seat.

[00:12:38]But the conference goes on.

[00:12:42]Promise made at Tehran, reaffirmed in Berlin as kept on schedule.

[00:12:55]The battles of World War II still continued in the Pacific, and the Soviet Union formally declared war on Japan.

[00:13:02]But it would not be long before they surrendered, following the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

[00:13:10]The allies were now fully victorious in World War II.

[00:13:13]But things ended very differently for the big 3.

[00:13:17]Roosevelt died before the end of the war.

[00:13:20]Stalin was now stronger than ever, and Churchill feared the Soviet Union's power over Europe.

[00:13:28]Churchill came out of the Second World War a very bitter man.

[00:13:32]Because he felt that the only national leader who'd emerged from the struggle with exactly what he wanted was Stalin.

[00:13:41]And Stalin had got his prizes, furthermore the Pacific, with the Sakhalin islands and access to Pacific ports.

[00:13:50]Besides, of course, he'd seized most of eastern Europe and Churchill's frustration and bitterness.

[00:13:57]And so he instructed the British chiefs of staff to draw up a plan, which was codenamed : Unthinkable.

[00:14:04]For the recapture of Poland from the Red Army by 42 American and British divisions, with the aid, absurdly, of the rump of the Wehrmacht.

[00:14:17]And this document, which is still in Britain's National Archive, an amazing document, I forget, it runs about 150 pages, detailed description of exactly how this was to be done.

[00:14:28]But the chiefs of staff, they used the word hazardous 23 times to describe it because they said, if the Russians want general war, they are in a position to have it.

[00:14:41]They knew that the Red Army was incomparably stronger than the Western Allied armies.

[00:14:47]And, of course, they also knew that the British and American armies, their soldiers, hadn't the slightest desire to fight the Russians.

[00:14:54]They'd been told the Russians were heroes for the last 4 years.

[00:14:57]So, the whole idea was obviously absurd, but the unthinkable plan, which is one of the most routing postscripts of the Second World War, that it was a reflection of how absolutely appalled Churchill fought by the spectacle of the Soviet Union coming out of the war, having seized eastern Europe.

[00:15:20]Stalin was always determined that all the countries that he occupied with the Red Army would become, somehow become Soviet satellite states. And he said, you know, whatever we discuss with the Westerners, the old rule will be true, you know, whoever has their army there will install their own system, and that's what happened so, very quickly, he installed a system t  hrough all those countries, you know, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Yugoslavia, first, all became people's democracies.

[00:15:50]Later, there was a rift with Tito in Yugoslavia.

[00:15:55]But basically, he remained in control of this kind of huge part of eastern Europe.

[00:16:02]In 1946, Churchill would voice his concerns publicly with his famous Iron Curtain speech.

[00:16:12]From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.

[00:16:22]Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of central and eastern Europe.

[00:16:31]Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest, and Sofia.

[00:16:41]All these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere.

[00:16:50]One of the key moments in the post-war period came in the spring of 1946, when Winston Churchill, no longer Prime Minister at this point, traveled to America. And with President Truman, he went to Fulton, Missouri, and made his famous Iron Curtain speech.

[00:17:07]He says "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended over Europe."

[00:17:15]Now remember, at this time, the Western allies wanted to try and retain their alliance with Stalin. They were hoping that this military alliance that had worked so well during the war could be continued into this post-war period.

[00:17:28]But Churchill realizes that everything has changed, that Stalin is no longer a reliable ally and so he makes this speech.

[00:17:36]It's an explosive speech.

[00:17:38]It sends shockwaves around the world because Truman, Attlee in England, they're trying to maintain this alliance.

[00:17:44]And Churchill has effectively lobbed a stick of dynamite into this.

[00:17:49]Well, Churchill's speech acknowledged what was already happening, that Communist governments were taking over in one country after another.

[00:17:57]There was a lot of suspicion between the East and the West.

[00:18:00]So the Cold War didn't begin all at once.

[00:18:03]It was a series of maneuvers and then responses.

[00:18:07]A big factor in the hardening of the Cold War was the Marshall Plan, inaugurated by the United States, which pledged millions and millions of dollars to rebuild Europe.

[00:18:18]They offered Marshall Plan aid to the East European countries as a way to entice them to come over to the side of the West.

[00:18:26]But also knowing that Stalin wouldn't let them accept that.

[00:18:31]So it was... Stalin saw the Marshall Plan as a direct attack on the autonomy of the Soviet Union, and that led to further repercussions, the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in response, then the Warsaw Pact Alliance in response to that. So there was a gradual closing down of contacts between East and West, and a gradual increase in fear and suspicion.

[00:18:56]The Soviet Union would launch the Molotov plan as a response to the Marshall Plan, and propaganda films were dispersed in retaliation to the actions of the United States.

[00:19:10]In Washington, the Marshall plan has announced, an aid program for the world?

[00:19:15]No, for America's capital.

[00:19:19]Truman's new budget?

[00:19:21]2,5 billion for social welfare, 21 billion for armaments.

[00:19:27]Economic and political enslavement of foreign countries, hunger and unemployment in their own country.

[00:19:33]That's the real Marshall Plan.

[00:19:35]The Stock exchange, the headquarters of the true Masters of America.

[00:19:40]Here sit the Americans who run the opinion factories.

[00:19:47]Well, the next thing is to decide whether to make war on the Allies.

[00:19:52]And they have the atom bomb, and he has not.

[00:19:57]And so the most important thing is to get an atom bomb.

[00:20:00]Beria supervised the atom project brilliantly, absolutely brilliantly. It's one of the most extraordinary I think.

[00:20:07]He found all the materials in Germany, the bismuth, the uranium that he needed, got it all shipped.

[00:20:13]He built special cities to build it in. He gave the scientists luxurious villas.

[00:20:18]And there was a little book in which the rewards were listed if the atom bomb worked, what they would get.

[00:20:25]A nice car, a house, country cottage, and so on.

[00:20:29]And the punishment they would get if it didn't work, shooting.

[00:20:32]So there was a great reason to get that atomic bomb working, and it did.

[00:20:36]And once he had the atomic bomb, then the question was what to do next.

[00:20:42]And perhaps fortunately for us, the Chinese revolution happened, and for Stalin, it's more important to help that and start the Korean war than to attack the West, again but, certainly in his mind was, why stop at Berlin, why not go to the Atlantic?

[00:21:01]The battle lines of the Cold War that was developing across the globe took another dramatic turn when the communists under Mao Zedong were finally victorious in the Chinese civil War.

[00:21:14]Now, 2 of the world's great former empires were under Communist rule, and the first true proxy battle of the Cold War would take place in Korea.

[00:21:28]There is no margin for error when the chips are down, when the bullets and projectiles that fly overhead are real.

[00:21:34]A situation soon to come in the summer of 1950.

[00:21:42]Thousands of miles away, on the other side of the Pacific, trouble was being prevented.

[00:21:47]North Koreans plotted by the Communists, were massing strength for a war against the Democratic government of Korea.

[00:21:53]A war which threatened the peace of all nations.

[00:21:58]1953 would prove a pivotal year.

[00:22:01]The Korean war would end in a stalemate, and Joseph Stalin's rule over the Soviet Union came to a dramatic close.

[00:22:19]On March 5, 1953, the Soviet Union announced that its leader, Joseph Stalin, had died.

[00:22:29]Stalin is dead.

[00:22:33]The Kremlin's cold stone walls, the eerie face of Moscow, a howling wind and snow adding to the somber picture is the description accompanying the announcement that the most powerful dictator in history has come to the inevitable end.

[00:22:47]The scramble for power is the next chapter.

[00:22:50]There were no immediate indications of who would succeed Stalin.

[00:22:53]Molotov or Malenkov.

[00:22:55]Their names fitted into the pattern of the struggle for Stalin's mantle, as did the name of Beria.

[00:23:01]As this newsreel went to print, the word had not yet come from Moscow.

[00:23:05]But Stalin's life was history.

[00:23:07]Intrigued, ruthless, ambition, absolute power.

[00:23:11]Rather like with Lenin, there was no kind of obvious successor to Stalin. And Stalin, like Lenin believed he was indispensable and no one could succeed him.

[00:23:20]And that wa s to a certain extent true because, just as there was never another Lenin, there was never another Stalin.

[00:23:26]But what he left behind were a bunch of terrified apparatchiks who were used to being under Stalin's thumb.

[00:23:33]The leading successor, it seemed, was going to be Malenkov, who was a rather fat, young and ruthless apparatchik who'd served Stalin and done a lot of dirty work.

[00:23:45]Khrushchev was much more dynamic.

[00:23:47]No-one thought he would succeed Stalin, least of all Stalin, because he was coarse, semi-literate, a ruffian, a badly educated and therefore could never be an ideologist.

[00:23:59]But it didn't matter because he seized power and he destroyed the really the most powerful person in the government after Stalin's death who was Lavrentiy Beria, long-serving secret police chief, and overseer of the nuclear project to get a nuclear bomb, which he'd successfully done.

[00:24:17]So, he arrested him, had him shot, had all his people shot, and really ended the period of kind of brazen terror in the leadership.

[00:24:28]So there was a competition.

[00:24:30]Khrushchev was one of these people who appeared to be a clown.

[00:24:34]One of the reasons that Stalin liked him, he posed no threat. He did as he was told.

[00:24:39]He was a fellow student of Stalin's wife.

[00:24:42]He said all the right things. He did all the right things.

[00:24:45]In the war, he was quite effective.

[00:24:47]He only put 1 foot wrong. His son was going to be executed for shooting another officer.

[00:24:52]But managed to fly a plane into Germany in time and was captured.

[00:24:58]And got back into Russia by escaping and Khrushchev went on his knees to Stalin and said "spare my son" and Stalin refused.

[00:25:08]I don't think Khrushchev ever forgave Stalin for the shooting of his son.

[00:25:12]And that may be one of the motives for his anti-Stalin speech.

[00:25:16]It may be personal.

[00:25:18]But anyway, that 20th Party Congress, which shook the entire communist world when they admitted that Stalin was a criminal and they themselves had all danced to his tune.

[00:25:29]That was a very brave thing to do, but it did actually establish Khrushchev in power because it meant he could get rid of his enemies. He didn't shoot them.

[00:25:38]Molotov was made ambassador to Outer Mongolia.

[00:25:42]Malenkov, I think, was put in charge of an electric power station in Siberia.

[00:25:47]Not very nice punishments, but better than death, I suppose.

[00:25:52]Nikita Khrushchev's shocking 1956 speech, in which he denounced the cult of personality that had formed around Stalin, would be a major contributor to the Sino-Soviet split.

[00:26:05]But although relations with the other great communist world power were now soured, Khrushchev would also soon earn major political victories for the Soviet Union.

[00:26:17]And on October 4, 1957, a world-stirring event took place.

[00:26:42]A man-made celestial body for the first time in history overcame terrestrial gravity and flew into space.

[00:26:51]During the early to mid-50s, the Americans had been developing their space program, and they announced that they were soon to launch a satellite into space.

[00:27:01]This was a huge moment and a huge triumph.

[00:27:04]But what did the Soviets do?

[00:27:05]They had been developing their own satellite as well, and they got there first.

[00:27:10]This was Khrushchev's great triumph was to launch Sputnik before the the Americans.

[00:27:16]It was a public relations coup.

[00:27:19]The Space Race was one example of a great Soviet success story.

[00:27:23]The economy was improving after the war but, it wasn't running on all cylinders at this time.

[00:27:29]But the space race began as a quasi-arms race, knowing that the Americans were trying to build rockets.

[00:27:38]The Soviet Union mobilized all of its resources into launching a satellite and then to launching a man into space.

[00:27:45]So that they could be the first.

[00:27:46]So when they were able to mobilize all resources toward this one goal, and they had brilliant scientists, they also had scientists who had been Germans, who had been gone over to the Soviet Union, they had tremendous brain power and tremendous technological capability, and with all the resources at their disposal they were able to be the first into space.

[00:28:10]The launch of the Sputnik satellite generated frenzied attention around the world.

[00:28:15]But at the same time, an arms race was in full effect, and acts of espionage were at extraordinary levels on both sides.

[00:28:23]A crisis point was reached when pilot Francis Gary Powers took off from Peshawar in Pakistan in 1960, and his U-2 spy plane was brought down by Soviet Air defenses.

[00:28:38]Secret reconnaissance of Russia by high-flying American U-2 jets ended when one was downed, deep in Soviet territory.

[00:28:46]Its pilot, Francis Powers, was made the subject of a showcase trial.

[00:28:51]Powers' family was in the courtroom as Russia began massive exploitation of this propaganda windfall.

[00:28:57]Powers' conviction was inevitable, and the U-2 affair became Khrushchev's pretext to torpedo the Paris summit conference.

[00:29:05]So in September of 1959, Khrushchev had met Eisenhower at Camp David in America.

[00:29:12]And the 2 men had agreed to meet again in Paris in the following spring.

[00:29:16]And this was duly to go ahead.

[00:29:18]But something intervenes in the meantime, something that causes a crisis in relations between the Soviet Union and the United States.

[00:29:26]And this is the shooting down of a U-2 spy plane piloted by Gary Powers.

[00:29:32]Khrushchev gave a personal order to his air defences to shoot down an American U-2 spy plane over Soviet airspace.

[00:29:43]For 3 or 4 years, American planes have been intruding over Russian airspace freely, at very high altitude, and the Russians had no fighters or missiles that could reach them.

[00:29:56]By 1960, they did.

[00:29:59]And he thought, and who can blame him, that for the Americans to spend a supply plane flying over their airspace on May the 1st, May Day, the most sacred day in the Soviet Bolshevik calendar, to fly over his airspace was a deliberate insult.

[00:30:17]And so he gave the order to shoot it down.

[00:30:19]Khrushchev played his cards very skillfully and ruthlessly.

[00:30:23]But initially, he announced the shooting down the plane.

[00:30:28]But he did not admit that he captured its pilot, Major Gary Powers.

[00:30:33]And so the Americans got themselves deeper and deeper into a tissue of lies about this being a weather plane and so on, and so forth.

[00:30:41]And only 2 days later did Khrushchev reveal that they had major Gary powers and announced triumphantly to the world, and our cameras are better than the American cameras that we found on the U-2.

[00:30:53]So the humiliation was terrific.

[00:30:55]This throws relations between the 2 countries into absolute crisis.

[00:31:01]Khrushchev storms off back to Moscow. He won't have anything more to do with these talks.

[00:31:06]And he cancels the intended visit of Eisenhower to Moscow.

[00:31:10]Eisenhower is very disappointed. He was really looking forward to gain but this is cancelled and relations between the two countries descend once more into crisis.

[00:31:20]The U-2 incident was eventually resolved by an exchange of Gary Powers' for a Soviet spy named Rudolf Abel, who'd been captured in the United States.

[00:31:30]The technological war would continue though, and the Soviets struck another victory when they launched the first man into space in 1961, Yuri Gagarin.

[00:31:41]The space race became incredibly public competition between the 2 superpowers as to who could display their technology, their sophistication, their ambition in a new realm space.

[00:31:55]And that was really what the space race was about, and why both countries put massive amounts into sending people into space and competing in that way.

[00:32:03]And of course, you know, the Soviet propaganda machine made all the cosmonauts into massive heroes, just as the Western American propaganda machine made their astronauts into huge heroes.

[00:32:15]And I certainly think for a while, the public was pretty fascinated, probably in both worlds.

[00:32:25]Gagarin was an Ace pilot and he was very well trained, and he was an extraordinarily fearless man.

[00:32:31]And he became like a film star idol, an international thing so the Gagarin squares, not only in Russia, but you find them all over Africa.

[00:32:39]It had an enormous effect on the American psyche of course.

[00:32:43]Again, a triumph for the Soviet Union. It just demonstrates their capabilities, what they've achieved in this space program.

[00:32:51]And it's a humiliation for the Americans who publicly congratulate the Soviet but in private they're seething.

[00:32:59]What do they do? One of the first things they do is they form NASA.

[00:33:03]They are determined to regain the upper hand in the space race.

[00:33:07]The achievement by the USSR of orbiting a man and returning him safely to ground is an outstanding technical accomplishment.

[00:33:18]We congratulate the Soviet scientists and engineers who made this feet possible.

[00:33:25]The exploration of our solar system is an ambition which we and all mankind share with the Soviet Union, and this is an important step toward that goal.

[00:33:37]Our own Mercury Man in Space program is directed toward that same end.

[00:33:44]The end of the 1950s and the beginning of the new decade seemed at first to be an era of unbridled success for the Soviet Union with their dramatic lead in the space race.

[00:33:55]But huge crises in both Europe and North America were just over the horizon.

[00:34:10]The early 1960s would prove to be the height of Cold War tensions, both in Europe and in the United States.

[00:34:17]A Communist revolution had taken place just off America's borders in Cuba.

[00:34:22]And the Bay of Pigs Invasion  intended to overthrow this new government of Fidel Castro, had failed.

[00:34:29]And in Berlin, where the allies had converged after their victory in World War II, the iron curtain was becoming a literal wall.

[00:34:41]Khrushchev exercised absolute control over the eastern Bloc.

[00:34:46]But at the same time, he was very susceptible to pressure.

[00:34:50]And one must remember that in the late 1950s and early 1960s, first of all China, was ascendant at arrival.

[00:34:58]For the leadership of the socialist world, and more and more, especially in the early 1960s, the Chinese of Mao Zedong were publicly denouncing Khrushchev as betraying socialism.

[00:35:11]So he had that pressure.

[00:35:13]And he also had pressure from, for example, the East German leadership, who were constantly urging him to take a much tougher line with the West.

[00:35:21]One of the key troubles in East Germany in the late 50s and the very early 60s was the flood of East Germans who were crossing the border into West Germany.

[00:35:31]And this had, as its nexus was taking place in Berlin, where it was relatively easy for East Germans who wanted to move on, who wanted to get on in life, to cross the frontier.

[00:35:42]Khrushchev saw this as a very real problem.

[00:35:44]You know, several million Germans had poured over into West Germany, leaving the East German state.

[00:35:50]And so what did he do?

[00:35:51]He sanctioned Walter Ulbricht, the leader of East Germany, to build the Berlin Wall.

[00:35:57]This effectively put a stop to the massive immigration taking place from East Germany into the West.

[00:36:04]But it also was a PR disaster.

[00:36:06]It did not look good to have to build a wall to keep your own people in.

[00:36:12]The East Germans don't seem to have guards enough to plug every hole.

[00:36:16]When a soldier's attention is diverted by others, a hole is cut in the barbed wire and Khrushchev's face is slapped again.

[00:36:39]Not long after the Berlin Wall was constructed, another flashpoint in the Cold War emerged when it was revealed to the world that the Soviet Union had placed nuclear weapons on the territory of newly communist Cuba.

[00:36:53]The world watched with bated breath as the 2 superpowers faced off.

[00:36:59]The Cuban missile crisis is a hugely complicated episode, and historians are still uncovering archives and trying to understand what exactly happened.

[00:37:10]I think Castro played an important role in this, or at least Khrushchev blames Castro for goading him into sending missiles to protect Cuba against another United States invasion.

[00:37:22]The Soviet Union miscalculated the United States' response to the presence of these missiles. They didn't realize that they had been found out.

[00:37:31]So there was a real danger during these 2 weeks in October that the world would go up in a nuclear war because of this tension.

[00:37:39]The greatest crisis between the Soviet Union and the United States, and indeed, I think, one of the great crises of the entire Cold War, this was sparked by America placing missiles, its own missiles, on Italian and Turkish soil.

[00:37:54]In retaliation, Khrushchev wanted to replace Soviet missiles on Cuban territory, very close to the United States.

[00:38:02]Thus began a standoff.

[00:38:03]Kennedy said that this was totally unacceptable to have these missiles so close to the United States.

[00:38:09]Khrushchev said it was totally unacceptable for the Americans to have missiles on Italian and Turkish territory.

[00:38:16]The world at this point is in deep crisis. We are very, very close to a nuclear war being declared.

[00:38:22]And it is only through wiser counsel, wiser heads prevail, a deal is done between the 2 powers that enables them to back down.

[00:38:31]Khrushchev, you know, launched the Cuban missile crisis as a way to break the impasse that he felt, the sort of stagnation that he felt was taking place in the rivalry between the 2 superpowers.

[00:38:42]He thought that if he needed to do something to up the ante, and he'd convinced himself that, you know, taking a risk, a gamble would, would turn the whole course of the Cold War.

[00:38:56]And he'd seen a hint of it when in 1956, during the Suez Crisis, he'd threatened that if Britain, France, and Israel didn't withdraw from Egypt, he would use nuclear weapons.

[00:39:09]And it's a moment that's often forgotten and America had forced them to withdraw.

[00:39:14]So he saw that as evidence that nuclear brinksmanship really worked.

[00:39:20]And so what better way to break the impasse and to overcome American power and wealth, than to place weapons right in America's backyard and to defend the new fraternal revolution in Cuba and so that's why he did it.

[00:39:35]He was also a member, you know, one of the World War II generation like all the Soviet leaders, and they were actually very, very afraid of war. They'd seen what war did, even conventional war. And so, you know, he thought he'd win that point.

[00:39:50]Call on the chairman of the Council, Minister of the Soviet Union, on a point of order.

[00:40:05]Why then this jerk, this huge of American imperialism here, who is speaking for you he, is touching upon questions which are obviously not procedural ones? And why the president, who is sympathizing with these colonialists and colonial dominants, obviously is not stopping him?

[00:40:31]He had a quality of an act "I'm taking off your shoe and banging it" the United Nations does get attention.

[00:40:38]And in the Cuban missile crisis, I think he won.

[00:40:43]It was very cunning, very risky, but we were more frightened than they were.

[00:40:50]I remember I was a student at the time, and I seriously thought in Cambridge this might be my last day on Earth with the missile crisis and Kennedy holding out but in fact Khrushchev had a bargaining chip and he was willing to take those armed rockets away if America withdrew its rockets from Turkey.

[00:41:09]That wasn't made public at the time, but it's clear there was a bargain and the Soviet Union won it. They, they had no atomic weapons near their borders.

[00:41:20]As a result that was one of Khrushchev's great achievements.

[00:41:23]It was very risky, but I don't think anyone in Russia held it against him.

[00:41:27]And despite all these expensive intelligence services in the West, nobody fully understood that when Khrushchev threatened to bury us all, when Khrushchev was telling Western ambassadors that he'd earmarked 20 nuclear weapons for Britain, and he was confident that would be enough, that all of this, it was boasting of an almost deranged a kind.

[00:41:52]And Khrushchev thought he was playing a brilliant hand, and Khrushchev thought rightly that he was frightening the West, but what he failed to see was that he very, very nearly overdid it, because he frightened the West too much.

[00:42:11]The retreat to Moscow.

[00:42:13]Russian ships steam out from Cuban ports with their decks loaded with missiles the Soviets are withdrawing under pressure from the New World.

[00:42:20]It's one of the last chapters in the offensive threat from Cuba that led the United States to throw a quarantine around that island and force the Russians to dismantle their medium-range rocket installations.

[00:42:30]U.S. planes and picket ships have counted 42 rockets on Russian-bound ships.

[00:42:35]What's still unresolved is the question of the jet bombers in Cuba.

[00:42:39]Castro claims they belong to him and that he will not give them up.

[00:42:42]The U.S. insists, the Russians must remove them before the quarantine will be lifted.

[00:42:48]The headlines in the Soviet newspapers said the Soviet Union has saved the world by the deal that it made with the United States. So they took all the credit for easing this tension.

[00:42:59]And that's what the Soviet readers saw, that this was a victory for Soviet diplomacy.

[00:43:04]The following is the text of President Kennedy's statement of noon.

[00:43:11]I welcome Chairman Khrushchev's statesmanlike decision to stop building bases in Cuba, dismantling offensive weapons, returning them to the Soviet Union under U.N. verification.

[00:43:28]This is an important and constructive contribution to peace.

[00:43:34]Both the U.S. President John F. Kennedy and the first secretary of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, would not have much longer in office after the de-escalation of tensions from the Cuban missile crisis.

[00:43:47]JFK was infamously assassinated in November 1963, and Khrushchev would be maneuvered from power the following year.

[00:43:57]It was soon to be the era of Leonid Brezhnev in the Soviet Union.