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Directed by: David Pultz
Produced by: The National Film Network
Running time: 82 minutes
During the 1930s and 1940s, "social surgery on a monumental scale" was practiced in the USSR by the Stalinist regime: 20 million died in labor camps, of famine, or in wholesale executions. Memories of this tragic period are preserved in the ritual exhumation and reburial of innumerable mass graves, by the riveting testimony of survivors.
Narrated by Meryl Streep, this award-winning documentary examines the Stalinist purges and terror in the former Soviet Union during the 1930s and ’40s, when an estimated twenty million people lost their lives-some in labor camps, others starved in state-induced famine, and many others executed for “crimes against the state.” Focusing on Ukraine, the film incorporates historical footage, interviews with witnesses and survivors, public officials, and historians, including former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, Roman Szporluk of Harvard University, and Robert Conquest, author of The Great Terror: A Reassessment.
