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The past in reconstruction
Published 13 November 2008
Why spice up history? Secret Soviet deals with the Nazis is fascinating enough
World War II: Behind Closed Doors BBC2
Churchill (Paul Humpoletz) meets Stalin (Alexei Petrenko)
The past in reconstruction
As BBC documentaries go, World War II: Behind Closed Doors is rather significant. Not only is it the last series that will be written and directed by Laurence Rees, the BBC's creative head of history (Rees, who brought us such magnificent films as The Nazis: a Warning from History and Auschwitz, is leaving the corporation to devote himself to writing), it also signals the climax of the inexorable march within the BBC towards "presenter-led" history documentaries. From now on, we can expect to see fewer sombrely narrated films featuring grainy archive material and talking heads, and a lot more . . . what? A lot more hand-waving is what it boils down to. The talk within the BBC is of "resonance". Apparently, we, the audience, only care for history that directly speaks to us, to our own situations, and it will be the job of the presenter, be it Bettany Hughes (The Spartans) or Dan Snow (co-presenter on 20th Century Battlefields) to articulate these "parallels". Needless to say, I find this idea mighty depressing. Why can't something be allowed to be interesting for its own sake? Why, moreover, can't we be trusted to find the contemporary resonances in history for ourselves? Personally, I think I'm more than capable.
This is not to say that an old-school documentary like Behind Closed Doors is without its flaws. Though it lacks a presenter (it is narrated by Samuel West), and therefore doesn't patronise - sorry, I mean, extemporise - or excitedly flap its arms, it does rely heavily on somewhat hammy dramatic reconstructions, and in this particular instance, they sit a little uncomfortably beside interviews with people who actually witnessed the terrible events that the series seeks to uncover: the secret deals that the Soviet Union struck with the Nazis before and during the war - deals that enabled Stalin to invade Poland from the east even as Hitler entered it from the west. The Soviet treatment of the Poles was every bit as awful as Germany's; the Poles had defeated Russian Bolsheviks in battle in the 1920s, so for Stalin, an element of revenge was in play. His troops rounded up middle-class Poles, stole their property, and exiled them. Those who were suspected of being involved in the resistance were tortured. Polish army officers were imprisoned and then shot by soldiers who wore long, leather aprons.
An old woman, Galina Stavarskaya, recalled the day she was taken in by Russian secret police, who suspected her of being a messenger for the resistance. She described how they beat her, and said: "It was like being in hell . . . it is very painful to remember it." Her face then seemed to fold inwards. She sobbed, and began clawing at her hair so violently that I could hardly bear to watch. The police, she finally managed to explain, had pulled out her hair in great handfuls until she was left completely bald. This interview, so appalling and so moving, seemed somehow belittled by being placed between clips of a heavyset actor in a big moustache pretending to be Joe Stalin. He and the German foreign minister, von Ribbentrop (an actor with a smooth pate and tight lips) began to feel more than ever like stage baddies, especially when we saw them toasting their little agreement with champagne - and they emphatically were not stage baddies. The proximity of Stavarskaya's painful testimony to such fakery felt like a kind of insult. I'm fascinated to discover that the Russians allowed a German ship to be based north of Murmansk once the war broke out, and that Russian ice-breakers later allowed a German ship passage through Soviet waters into the Pacific where it was then able to attack the allied fleet. But I don't need to see an anxious-looking German naval captain writing his journal in the freezing Russian night to grasp the significance of this information. Will I watch next week? Of course. Rees is a master of narrative, and it has taken him three years and £3.6m to put this six-part epic together. But I cannot pretend that a taster of part two featuring another actor as Churchill hasn't put me off. He sounded just like the late Bill Deedes. Oh dear. There's just no pleasing me, is there?
Pick of the week
I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here!
16 November, 9pm, ITV
To avoid addiction, turn away now.
The Ascent of Money
17 November, 8pm, Channel 4
Neat timing for Niall Ferguson's history of the financial system.
The Devil's Whore
19 November, 9pm, Channel 4
Civil War drama by Peter "Our Friends in the North" Flannery.
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