-October 1917.

The First World War raged.

The future of Europe's monarchies hung in the balance.

And in St. Petersburg, the historic capital of Russia, a revolution was shaking the world.

We think we know what happened.

Lenin got the proletariat to rise up.

He got rid of the autocratic tsar.

He set up the whole new political system of communism.

Russia's great uprising made icons of Vladimir Lenin, the revolutionaries storming the Winter Palace, and the tragic story of Princess Anastasia, daughter of the tsar.

It was one of the defining events of the 20th century.

But this story is rich with fabrication, with manipulation, and with mythology.

Was Lenin really the leader of the revolution?

-Lenin wasn't even in the country.

The Russian Revolution, the grassroots popular revolt, happened without him.

-Did false rumors about the tsarina and the mad monk Rasputin help bring down the Russian monarchy?

And how did the Bolsheviks rewrite the story of the October Revolution?

-There have been more fibs told about the history of Russia than about the history of any country in the world.

[ Crowd cheering ] -Russia's revolution of October 1917 has gone down in history as an inspiring uprising, getting rid of the cruel royal family, giving power to the people, sweeping away inequality, transforming Russia forever, or so the story goes.

♪♪ [ Crowd roaring ] -We all think we know what took place that October night in 1917.

Hordes of revolutionary workers and soldiers stormed the Winter Palace.

The tsar was swept away, and a new communist regime was born.

The October Revolution promised a future of equality and prosperity for all.

Russia would never be the same again, and neither would the rest of the world.

The first socialist revolution would transform politics and society.

This day in October 1917 would be remembered forever.

♪♪ Films and books presents the event as truly epic.

But the story of the great October Revolution has been exaggerated, glamorized, and shrouded in lies.

It established Lenin as the heroic revolutionary leader, and this was the foundation stone of a powerful mythology that would sustain the Soviet leaders in power for 74 years.

It's a mythology that still to this day masks just how and when the Russian Revolution got started.

♪♪ The revolution was fueled by growing hatred of the Romanov dynasty that had ruled for 300 years.

As tsar, Nicholas II was head of the powerful Russian Orthodox Church.

He was also notorious for the bloody suppression of protests that even hinted at democracy.

♪♪ Nicholas' wife, was Alexandra, a German princess who converted to the Russian Orthodox Church when she married him.

The new tsarina never really fitted into the Russian court.

She was always distrusted as a foreigner.

And this got worse when Russia went to war with Germany.

♪♪ In 1914, the royal families of Europe were all closely related.

Britain's George V was first cousin to both the tsar of Russia and the kaiser of Germany.

In photos, George and Nicholas look almost like twins.

But all these close ties across Europe would count for nothing when it came to the First World War.

♪♪ In the fight against the kaiser, his German cousin, the tsar allied Russia with Britain and France.

[ Explosions ] But by the end of 1916, the Russian army was collapsing.

Over a million soldiers had been killed.

Many deserted from the front and were causing unrest in the cities.

As commander in chief, the tsar was blamed for the military disasters.

-At the front, defeat, disorganization, and lonely dead.

♪♪ -Anti-tsarist feeling was driven further by an infamous character at the time, Grigori Rasputin.

He was adviser to the tsar and tsarina.

But gossip about the tsarina and Rasputin set the royal family up for a monumental fall.

He's gone down in history as the sex-crazed mad monk.

For a start, Rasputin wasn't a proper monk.

He portrayed himself as a mystic, but he'd never officially been in holy orders.

And then there were the rumors that the sex-mad monk was having an affair with Alexandra.

♪♪ Historian Frances Welch is keen to separate fact from fiction.

Now, Frances, you strongly believe that Alexandra and Rasputin weren't having an affair.

Where did these rumors come from in that case?

-The central problem was that Rasputin was going to the palace, visiting the palace quite a lot.

Nobody knew why.

And the reason was that the tsarina's son, Alexis, had hemophilia.

But somehow Rasputin was able to calm the boy down and bring about some cure.

The tsarina didn't want anyone to know that Alexis was ill.

The public could not be told, and they couldn't explain why Rasputin would keep coming to the palace.

There were cartoons everywhere showing her misbehaving with Rasputin.

Everyone seemed to think it was happening.

-Why do you believe that, in fact, they weren't?

-Well, I think she wasn't, because she was so proper, you know, sort of haughty, standoffish.

And the idea of her sort of fraternizing in that way with Rasputin, I can't imagine.

She was also incredibly in love with her husband.

She wrote sort of love letters to him the whole time.

They had a wonderfully loving relationship.

And I don't believe that the tsarina ever slept with Rasputin.

-By 1917, the royal family was seen as the root of all that was wrong with Russia.

The hunger, the poverty, the casualties on the front, and their dependence on the sex-mad monk had been an easy target for those hoping to trigger a revolution.

-And in the end, you had these cartoons with a sort of grotesque picture of giant Rasputin with the tsar on one knee and the tsarina on the other knee.

The caption was "Russia's ruling house."

♪♪ -The Russian Revolution began in February 1917, when workers in St. Petersburg started rioting about bread shortages.

They also blamed the tsar for the continuation of the disastrous war.

We tend to think of the revolution as being masterminded by Vladimir Lenin, the radical leader of the Bolsheviks, but that's not what happened.

It wasn't the Bolsheviks who started the February Uprising.

It wasn't even men.

Key to the whole revolution was a group of female workers.

♪♪ Thursday, the 23rd of February, 1917 was International Women's Day.

At noon, crowds of textile workers began marching into the center of St. Petersburg to make their voices heard.

Down with hunger!

Down with the war!

Down with the tsar.

[ Crowd roaring ] They went from factory to factory.

They were banging on the gates and throwing snowballs at the windows, trying to get the men to come out to join them.

They needed to persuade the men that this wasn't just another bread riot.

This was different.

And they were successful!

By the end of the day, the protesters numbered 100,000 people.

♪♪ What started as a local women's strike was turning into a revolution.

The next day, 200,000 workers joined in, armed with knives, with hammers and iron bars.

By the third day, red flags appeared.

The tsar ordered the army to suppress the rioters, but the women were a step ahead.

A few days earlier, the female tram workers had gone to the barracks to talk to the soldiers about the strike.

And they got them to agree that when the moment came, they'd hold their fire.

This is exactly what happened.

Even the mighty Cossack troops put down their arms.

This was such an important moment.

One of the women, Alexandra Rodionova, later said that all at once, the unknown future became real.

Katy Turton has studied the role of women in starting the February Revolution.

How was it reported in the newspapers?

-Well, they sing their praises, in fact.

"Glory to women" features several times as a slogan.

And really interestingly, they talk about women in Moscow deciding the fate of the battles on the street.

They are the ones who go out to the soldiers and say, "Don't fire on our demonstrators.

We're all on the same side."

And fundamentally, the women are central to the soldiers themselves mutinying and not shooting down and dispersing the demonstrators.

-What happened to accounts of February as time went by?

-Male participants in the revolution turn historian and begin to write their own memoirs about what had happened.

We've got a really interesting memoir by Nikolai Sukhanov, who is very dismissive of women's involvement in the revolution.

He's sitting in his office listening to women typists saying, "Do you know, if you ask me, it's the beginning of the revolution."

And his response is that these girls didn't understand what a revolution was and goes on to talk about them as Philistines.

-So, the typists were actually completely right.

They called it.

-Yeah, they were spot on.

Absolutely.

-What were the official Bolshevik leaders doing then?

-They weren't anywhere to be found.

Lenin was in Switzerland, Trotsky was in America, and Stalin was in exile in Siberia.

So in fact, the Bolshevik Party consisted of local activists who were on-site.

And they, in fact, were highly disapproving of the women going out on International Women's Day and actually told the women not to demonstrate.

-Amazing.

So, these women went out onto the streets in the teeth of the instructions of the Bolsheviks.

-Yes, it was entirely their own decisions.

-That women had ignited the revolution, but it wasn't long before men took charge.

Alexander Kerensky, a lawyer, would soon be leading the revolutionary provisional government while waiting for Russia's first democratic elections.

Kerensky was less radical than Lenin, but he was committed to a more equal society.

♪♪ And in this new Russia, there was no room for the tsar.

In early March 1917, just a week after the women had first taken to the streets, the tsar is under pressure to abdicate.

♪♪ Nicholas has been hoping to cling onto power, but these telegrams are from his advisers, his generals, even his cousin, and they're all urging him to give up the throne.

It's a crushing blow for Nicholas.

Even his closest allies think that he should step down.

♪♪ ♪♪ Now two government officials arrive to seal the deal.

Both are nervous, about having to make such an unprecedented demand and about being players in such a momentous event in history.

Get this wrong, and it could end in their execution.

♪♪ -Your Imperial Majesty, with army in revolt, Russia risks to be overrun by Germany.

There are calls from people for a republic.

Both can be prevented.

You must carry on the advice you are being given.

That advice is to abdicate.

♪♪ ♪♪ Now, these two government officials were expecting a bit more resistance than that to their demand that Nicholas should abdicate, but he knows he's lost the support of his army.

He'd already made up his mind.

And with that nod, 300 years of Romanov rule in Russia came to an end.

♪♪ But what would become of the tsar and his family?

♪♪ Now, one of the most extraordinary episodes of the revolution would unfold, and a pivotal role was played in it by... the king of Great Britain.

It's a story full of cover-ups and lies.

♪♪ The Russian provisional government wanted the tsar and his family to leave the country.

The British ambassador, Sir George Buchanan, was asked if they could seek safety in Britain.

The British government agreed and, on the 23rd of March, made an offer of asylum.

What George V felt about his cousin coming to Britain was hushed up for over 60 years to protect the king's reputation.

Historian Helen Rappaport has investigated what really happened.

-George was very panicked about the idea of having someone as unpopular as Nicholas, the tsar of Russia, known as "Nicholas the Bloody," in England at that time.

There was a huge amount of hostile reporting in the press.

And after all, you've got to remember that the Labor movement in Britain had greeted the revolution.

And the last thing they wanted to see was Nicholas the Bloody and worse, his German wife... -Whoa.

-...being brought to Britain, because this is the other huge stumbling block in the -- in the whole issue, was that Alexandra was a bosh, to put it bluntly.

-What's this letter, then, from Windsor Castle in 1917?

What does this say about "the offer"?

-This letter was sent on the 6th of April by Lord Stamfordham, King George's private secretary, to Balfour, the foreign minister.

The key part of the letter comes at the end, where Stamfordham says, "Buchanan," i.e.

British ambassador, "ought to be instructed to tell Milyukov," the foreign minister, "that the opposition to the emperor and empress coming here is so strong that we must be allowed to withdraw the offer."

♪♪ -Britain's offer of asylum to the Romanovs was never formally withdrawn, but nor was a rescue plan put into action.

-So time passed very quickly the point of no return at which it would have been impossible to get them out.

So the offer effectively just withered on the vine.

-Thanks in part to Britain's diplomatic betrayal, the Russian royal family remained trapped in Russia.

And Lenin was still nowhere to be seen.

Lenin had dedicated his life to Marxism and to making revolutionary plans for Russia.

He was also on the run from the tsar's secret police.

In February 1917, he was living in exile in Zurich.

♪♪ Lenin covertly enlisted German help in a scramble to get back to Russia.

The Germans had their own motives for getting involved.

If Lenin returned, he might help pull Russia out of the war.

♪♪ A special train was arranged for Lenin, his wife, and 30 fellow revolutionaries.

The carriage would be defined as Russian territory and nobody allowed on or off.

♪♪ This was to ensure that Lenin avoided any contact with the Germans.

Otherwise, he might be branded a traitor.

It's gone down in history as Lenin's sealed train.

Lenin said goodbye to a friend out the window.

"In three months," he said, "either we'll be swinging from the gallows, or we'll be in power."

♪♪ The train traveled from Zurich to the Swiss border with Germany.

Here, they transferred to another train for the controversial part of the journey, right through enemy territory.

But did the sealed train live up to its name?

Now, this sealed train wasn't all that well sealed.

The Russian zone was only demarcated by a chalk line on the floor, and they left one of the carriage doors unlocked, which meant that the revolutionaries could pop on and off.

At Frankfurt, one of them went to get some newspapers and some beer.

And in North Germany, Lenin himself got off to spend a more comfortable night at a hotel.

Soviet historians would always exaggerate the level of security on Lenin's sealed train to protect his reputation.

From a port in Northern Germany, they took the ferry to Sweden and then another train across Sweden and Finland.

Next stop, St. Petersburg.

During his journey, Lenin started to think about the importance of his own appearance as propaganda.

He took off his rather bourgeois-looking homburg hat, and he replaced it with the cap of a proletarian worker.

Now he looks much more like a proper revolutionary.

[ Train whistle blows ] The train reached the Finland station in St. Petersburg on the 3rd of April, 1917, a month after the removal of the tsar.

[ Crowd roaring ] According to later accounts and films by the Bolsheviks, Lenin arrived to a hero's welcome.

But this didn't tell the full story.

Lenin immediately launched into a scathing attack not on the tsar, but on his fellow Bolsheviks.

He was furious they'd collaborated with the provisional government.

♪♪ Some Bolsheviks thought Lenin too radical.

A few even believed him deranged, opinions that were all quietly glossed over once Lenin came to power in October.

The Bolsheviks had taken over a former school for young ladies called the Smolny Institute.

Here, in late October, Lenin joined the other leaders, Stalin and Trotsky.

By now, they agreed with Lenin that they must replace Kerensky's government.

While they were making their preparations for their coup against the provisional government, Lenin and his comrades had a meeting to discuss what they were going to call themselves when they were in power.

Ministers, they thought, sounded a bit weak.

But then Trotsky came up with a suggestion of the people's commissars.

"Yes," said Lenin, "that's brilliant."

That smells of revolution."

Because they'd missed the one in February, they were determined that their own revolution should be perfect.

It had to look right.

It had to sound right.

It even had to smell right.

Good work, comrades.

On the 25th of October, 1917, Lenin and the Bolsheviks mobilized to snatch power from Kerensky.

This has become one of the most mythologized moments in 20th-century history.

♪♪ And the February triumph would be swept under the historical carpet.

The Bolshevik version of events was preserved in a film made 10 years later by director Sergei Eisenstein.

♪♪ Called "October 1917," it featured his characteristic super-quick cutting, some shots lasting no longer than a single frame.

In Eisenstein's hands, film had the power to make lies seem like revolutionary truth.

♪♪ The film's got so much energy and drama to it that you think, "Yes, this must really capture the passion they must have felt in October 1917."

And it's become I think the most powerful image of the revolution.

♪♪ The film demolishes the women's triumph of February by depicting it as the work of the corrupt middle classes and pious bishops in league with the tsar.

The message was clear -- The February Revolution was bogus.

It had only resulted in the useless bourgeois provisional government, not a proper workers' revolution at all.

♪♪ The provisional government was based in the Winter Palace, a former royal residence.

The film shows Kerensky strutting around in the tsar's old apartments attended by footmen.

♪♪ The climax of the film is the night of Lenin's Bolshevik coup.

♪♪ You get to see the storming of the Winter Palace, the toppling of the government, and the triumph of the people -- Here they come -- led by the Bolsheviks.

Whoa.

In they go.

Here are the opulent palace interiors, and outside, the hungry masses.

And I mean masses.

It's epic.

Eisenstein placed an advert for 60,000 extras.

♪♪ Watching it unfold, St. Petersburg appears to be a cauldron of violent insurrection.

But this was propaganda.

♪♪ Christopher Read has studied the real story on the streets.

Can you give me a quick rundown about what happened on the 24th and the 25th of October, 1917?

-I suppose the simple answer is to say nothing very much.

The actual events were very confined to a very small part of Russia.

Lenin appears in the middle of all this, and they decided it's time to think about seizing power, and they proclaim the seizure of power.

But as eyewitnesses said, the trams never stopped running.

-Ha!

-One person at the time said, "Well, the Bolsheviks didn't seize power.

They found it lying in the street and picked it up."

They sort of realized, "Well, we proclaimed Soviet power, but we haven't actually arrested the government.

They're still there."

And Kerensky, the prime minister, had taken advantage of that to -- to leave the city.

But there was no real storming of the Winter Palace.

They surrounded it, and there was not really very much defense There was a bit of argy-bargy between the defenders and the outsiders -- not armed, just argument more than anything else.

One of the doors was open.

People were going in and out.

A detachment went in.

They found the government.

They arrested them and took them off to the fortress.

-Chris, how did the Bolsheviks differentiate their October Revolution from the February one?

-The February Revolution was not their revolution.

The February Revolution was the bourgeois revolution.

So it wasn't their deal.

Once they actually seized power in October, the February Revolution became completely irrelevant.

♪♪ -October -- That was the revolution that really mattered, the one that should be remembered.

That little business in February, that wasn't a proper revolution.

That was just a sort of a taster.

Lenin's Bolshevik coup was now established as the real revolution.

It promised a future shaped by peace, by plenty and Marxist ideals.

-[ Speaking Russian ] -Lenin's doctrine's rejected both religion and the Romanovs.

Churches were destroyed.

♪♪ And the tsar and his family remained under house arrest.

♪♪ But the tsar was a figurehead for diehard loyalists.

And by 1918, a violent civil war had erupted between the Reds -- That's the Bolsheviks -- and the counterrevolutionaries known as the Whites.

♪♪ This was the first civil war in which tanks were used.

Trotsky led the Red Army really well.

He modernized it.

He motivated it.

But the civil war was made more intense by foreign intervention.

Japan, America, Britain, they all sent help to the White Russian army.

♪♪ Trotsky's Red Army fought back.

They controlled the heart of Russia and held the key cities of St. Petersburg and Moscow.

The various White armies were around the borders of Russia coming in from the North, from Eastern Europe, the South, and even from Siberia.

The fighting in Russia wasn't confined to the battlefield.

It was also a propaganda war.

Bolshevik trains crisscrossed the country, taking the revolution to the peasants.

Art historian Natalia Sidlina is an expert on Soviet propaganda.

-You take a train.

You paint the carriages in the bright colors.

You put the posters on them and propaganda messages, the slogans and banners.

You put the little cinema in one of the carriages, maybe a doctor in another one, a specialist in agriculture in the third one.

And you win people through this positive message, through drawing them in and showing them that the new power, new government is all about them.

-It's brilliant.

So if this fancy train stops at your local station, and you could get healthcare, and you could get agricultural advice, and you get a cinema show, you've actually been brainwashed.

-Absolutely.

-What's going on in this poster here?

What's the big red triangle?

-It's a brilliant example of the usage of a modernist language for propaganda.

So, we have the red wedge, which is the Red Army, which attacked floppy, soft, white, static force represented by this circular form here.

-So this is the Red Army or the revolutionaries, and this is the White Army of the old Russians, the tsarists, the opposition to the revolution.

-Absolutely.

Red Army, really consolidated, one message, one government.

And you can see it's penetrating.

It's dynamic.

It's winning.

♪♪ -But cool, modernist posters concealed the chaotic brutality of this war.

Prisoners on both sides were executed out of hand.

Lenin came to power promising that death penalty of the tsarist era would never return.

But nothing could be further from the truth.

Lenin's secret police, the Cheka, executed tens of thousands more Russians than the tsar's secret police had ever done.

They would denounce members of the opposition as enemies of the people.

Enemy of the people number one was the tsar.

He'd now been moved to the city of Yekaterinburg with his family.

That prison was ominously called the House for Special Purposes.

By July 1918, White forces were closing in on Yekaterinburg to rescue the tsar and his family.

The Bolsheviks decided to act.

♪♪ Nicholas had no idea that he and his family's lives were in danger.

The last entry in his diary reads, "The weather is fine and warm.

We've had absolutely no news from outside."

Three days on, very late on the night of the 16th of July, the tsar and his family were taken down to the basement of the house.

♪♪ What took place next would be shrouded in lies for over 70 years.

The head guard Yakov Yurovsky left an account of what happened.

The royal family were told that a truck had come to take them on the next leg of their journey.

This was half true -- A truck had come to take them away, but only after they'd been killed.

First to be shot was Nicholas, at point-blank range.

When the bullets reached his wife, Alexandra, she was in the process of making the sign of the cross.

These two died instantly.

Not so with the children.

Here, the guns were somehow ineffective, and they had to turn to bayonets to finish the job.

The gruesome work took 20 whole minutes.

[ Distant scream ] ♪♪ Officially, it was the local Soviets' decision to execute the royal family, not Lenin's.

But Helen Rappaport is skeptical.

Helen, what's the evidence that Lenin was involved in this decision to kill the Romanovs?

-It's very difficult to actually really confirm it in terms of hard, physical paper evidence, because the whole objective of Soviet historiographers ever since was to protect Lenin's reputation and make out that he was always the good guy of the revolution.

He wouldn't murder little children, would he?

But Lenin certainly was a control freak.

He was in charge.

In this telegram sent on the 16th, "The word comes from Yekaterinburg to Lenin.

Tell him we can't wait any longer.

Our city's going to fall.

We need to go ahead with the sud," which was the sentence that they had agreed previously in Moscow that the families should be murdered because the city was going to fall.

And it says, "If you don't agree with us going ahead with it, let us know quickly," pretty much.

So that was telling Moscow that they were going to go ahead, and, effectively, they did that night, the 16th.

-So it's quite clever.

The telegram doesn't say, "We're going to kill them."

-No, no, no.

-It says, "We're going to do what we agreed earlier."

-What we agreed.

Yeah.

[ Telephone ringing ] ♪♪ -Having executed Nicholas, as well as his wife and children, the Bolsheviks might have eliminated one problem.

But they've created a brand-new one, as well.

♪♪ Murdering a royal mother and her children was going to provoke international condemnation of the new communist regime.

♪♪ [ Sighs ] And here comes one of the biggest lies of the whole revolution.

This press release will be picked up by newspapers all around the world, and it says the ex-tsar has been shot on the orders of the local Soviet and that Nicholas Romanov's wife and son have been taken to a secure place.

Now, that's not true.

And it's chilling.

♪♪ [ Bird cawing ] The bodies of the Romanovs were buried in a nearby forest.

The lies told about the royal family led to a lingering belief that the youngest daughter, Anastasia, had somehow survived.

If the princess were alive, then she'd become the last hope for a restoration of the Romanov dynasty.

The true fate of Anastasia would remain a mystery for decades.

♪♪ The Reds won the civil war in 1922.

♪♪ But Lenin didn't have long to enjoy the triumph.

Within a few months, he'd suffered three strokes.

And in January 1924, Lenin died.

To maintain order, the Bolsheviks had to demonstrate a seamless transition of power.

In fact, it was anything but.

Now, the official line on Lenin's death is that Stalin was his anointed heir.

This isn't true at all.

In fact, it's a whopping lie.

And we can prove this from an impeccable source -- Lenin himself.

♪♪ Before he died, Lenin dictated his concerns about the future of Russia to his secretary.

[ Typewriter clacking ] ♪♪ Lenin's last testament threatens to undermine his former colleagues, particularly Stalin, who's now in charge.

This is what Lenin has to say.

"Comrade Stalin, having become secretary general, has unlimited authority concentrated in his hands.

And I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution."

He's no fool, is he, Lenin?

He goes on, "Stalin is too coarse, and this defect becomes intolerable in a secretary general.

That is why I suggest that the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post and appointing another man."

Well, this is going to have to be disappeared and kept secret.

And soon, Lenin's death will be spun into yet another powerful myth.

♪♪ Lenin's testament was hidden away in a top-secret vault.

To gain power, Stalin spread the word that he was Lenin's choice.

♪♪ And to secure it, he began turning Lenin into a Bolshevik secular saint.

[ Explosions ] ♪♪ With Stalin as chief pallbearer, the carefully stage-managed funeral went like clockwork.

After the funeral, one of the senior communists said, "Lenin is dead.

Leninism lives."

Lenin had achieved immortality.

He'd become an idea.

And Stalin's creation of this cult of Lenin worked really well for him.

It helped him see off his rivals like Trotsky, and it helped him gain total control of the Soviet Union.

[ Soviet Union National Anthem playing ] ♪♪ Stalin built on the Bolshevik falsification of the history of the revolution to bolster his own grip on power.

♪♪ Natalia Sidlina has studied how he did this.

What's going on in this picture of Lenin arriving at the Finland station in order to kick off the triumph of Bolshevism?

-So, this particular painting was created 20 years after the event.

He has his iconic cap in one hand.

-Yes.

-And behind him is Joseph Stalin.

-Now, that didn't happen.

It's like Stalin has retrospectively photobombed Lenin's arrival at the Finland station.

-Stalin is in every single historically significant moment And if that moment didn't exist, there's always a painting.

And whoever creates the picture is the person who makes history.

No image, no history.

-Paintings are easy enough to fake, but surely photographs were more of a challenge back then.

-Here we have probably one of the most famous photographs of Lenin.

He's addressing troops about to depart for the front during the civil war.

-You can see he's mid-flow, isn't he?

He's making a speech.

-Absolutely.

And waiting for their turn are two very important politicians of the post-revolutionary Russia, Lenin's number two, Leon Trotsky, and then behind him is Kamenev.

And then we look at the photograph which appeared in the press during the Stalin time.

And can you spot the difference there?

-It's pretty obvious.

Trotsky's disappeared!

-And Kamenev is not there, either.

Yes.

So that's brilliant work of the photographers who did the airbrushing of the images on an industrial scale.

♪♪ -Nowadays, we take image manipulation for granted, but we still often fall for it.

Even in the 1920s, though, Stalin could make anyone disappear or even pop up magically as a fellow comrade in Red Square.

-During Stalin time, the glorification of Lenin began in earnest.

And some of the historical photographs of important speeches by Lenin, as far as Stalin was concerned, were not impressive enough.

So in some of them, larger crowds would be added.

♪♪ -Stalin now wielded more power than even the tsars.

♪♪ In 1928, he announced the collectivization of farms.

♪♪ No more landowners.

Instead, farms and their produce would be shared by all.

It would be a disaster.

But many Western radicals believed Stalin's lies about his latest triumph, and they came to see it in action.

They came from all over!

There was H.G.

Wells, the writer, Arthur Koestler, philosopher, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, who set up the Fabian Society, and George Bernard Shaw.

He was a big fan of the revolution in general and of Stalin in particular.

-The Russian Revolution became a kind of touch point for all kinds of left-wing intellectuals, George Bernard Shaw and others in the 1930s.

They wanted to believe that it was a new, rational kind of society being built in accordance with kind of enlightenment principles of reason and organization rather than the madness of the market and capitalism and so on.

-And did Stalin welcome these visitors?

-They were always very pleased to kind of show off their achievements and to show how successful they claimed to be.

-When George Bernard Shaw visited Russia, he was quick to accept Stalin's proud boasts about his new policies.

"Hunger in Russia?"

asked Shaw?

"Nonsense.

I've never been fed as well anywhere as I was in Moscow."

But Shaw had been taken in.

He'd been sent on these excursions to see happy, well-fed farmers.

But while he was being wined and dined in Moscow, in fact, a devastating famine was killing peasants in Ukraine and other parts of the Soviet Union.

♪♪ The farms were producing lots of grain, but thanks to collectivization, most of it was funneled to the cities.

Little was left for the peasants in the countryside, and millions starved to death.

♪♪ Many of Stalin's crimes would remain hidden from the world for decades, his terrible excesses glossed over after his victory against Hitler.

In Russia, he was celebrated as a hero.

♪♪ Stalin's death in 1953 marks the end of the first revolutionary generation.

♪♪ But in the years that followed, the memory of the Romanovs continued to haunt Russia.

In 1979, two amateur detectives, Alexander Avdonin and Gueli Riabov, came to a forest near Yekaterinburg.

They had a tip-off about where the royal bodies might be buried.

♪♪ Avdonin said that his task was to restore one of the pages of our history, but he also knew that this was extremely dangerous.

"If this gets to the KGB," he said, "it will end very badly for me."

Even so, they started digging.

They found bones and pretty soon three skulls.

♪♪ One skull had a bullet hole in it.

Another had several gold teeth, just like the tsar.

The men contacted scientists in Moscow to confirm their find, but no one would dare touch it.

This was Soviet Russia in the 1970s.

People were terrified of the authorities.

Avdonin said, "We could have been sent to prison.

We could even have just been disappeared."

The Soviet regime had been covering up this business since the very first year of the revolution.

So they lost their nerve.

They went back to the forest, and they reburied the skulls.

History would have to wait a little bit longer for the truth to be revealed.

♪♪ But not as long as the two men feared.

♪♪ In the 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev attempted to reform the Soviet Union with a new spirit of openness.

But by challenging the lies of the past, Gorbachev unleashed an unstoppable force that swept Soviet power away altogether.

On Christmas Day 1991, the red flag above the Kremlin was lowered for the last time, to be replaced by the old Russian imperial colors.

Russia was now a democratic republic.

74 years of Bolshevik rule were over.

♪♪ The Russian Orthodox Church flourished once more.

A cathedral was built on the site of the Romanov executions in Yekaterinburg.

Over the years, Bolshevik lies about the fate of the tsar's family had allowed the story of Anastasia's survival to flourish.

Books and films were made about the heir to the Romanov throne who'd supposedly made it to the West.

Several women even claimed to be Anastasia.

In 1991, the bones in the woods were dug up again and later analyzed by scientists.

♪♪ The DNA tests confirmed that the bodies were the Russian royal family.

And from their number, it was clear that Anastasia was among them.

She hadn't escaped the murders after all.

The celebrated myth of Anastasia could finally be put to rest.

♪♪ In the year 2000, the Russian church declared the Russian royal family to be saints.

In Vladimir Putin's new Russia, tens of thousands go on marches and pilgrimages commemorating the Romanovs every year.

♪♪ Former BBC Moscow correspondent Martin Sixsmith has witnessed the extraordinary rewriting of the story of the revolution.

-The tsar and the tsarist dynasties, the Romanovs and those who preceded them, have made a fantastic and quite remarkable comeback in the last 30 years since 1991.

Under communism, they were the tyrants who were overthrown by the force of the people, the socialist uprising of 1917.

Suddenly, now they're saints.

They are literally sanctified.

And that's all to do with Putin co-opting the legacy of the Romanovs, which was a strong, centralized Russia.

But it's also to do with co-opting the power of the Russian Orthodox Church.

♪♪ -Putin has embraced this new veneration of the tsar, and he rejects the legacy of the October Revolution.

♪♪ Political commentator Arkady Ostrovsky has studied Putin's approach to Soviet history.

-The Bolshevik Revolution is -- if anything, is a negative event for him.

It's omitted from the official Russian account.

It's no longer marked because it's a divisive event.

The fact that the Lenin's mausoleum is draped off during the parades in the Red Square actually speaks volumes about his attitude to those events.

As an autocrat who built his legitimacy around the idea of Russian imperial history, expansion of territories, revolutions are not comfortable events.

And that's the big change from, of course, the Soviet period, which was all based on the idea of the Bolshevik revolution.

And that was the source of legitimacy of the Soviet rulers up till and including Gorbachev.

For Putin, it's the idea of the empire, which is much more important than the idea of the communist ideology.

So suddenly, a revolution is uncomfortable, because it's -- Part of the reason they're omitting it is that it raises some of the very, very similar questions about Russia's own future.

-Is it time for another one?

-Yes.

And in a sense that Russia is battling with the same dilemmas as it did in 1916, just before the revolution.

♪♪ -Vladimir Putin is marginalizing Lenin and the Russian Revolution.

He's happy to create his own narrative and brush aside unwelcome facts.

It's an art perfected by the Bolsheviks.

-There have been more fibs told about the history of Russia than about the history of any country in the world.

We look at fake news today.

We look at politicians who say one thing today and then the following day deny that they said it.

But they look like amateurs compared to the Bolsheviks.

The Bolsheviks rewrote whole swathes of history, decades of history, and they rewrote it in the way that suited them best.

So they became the heroes.

Everybody else became the villains.

♪♪ -Royal history is always being written and rewritten to suit those who are telling it.

For many decades, Russians were told it was the October Revolution that saved the nation, that Lenin was a national hero.

Now he's been sidelined.

As for the tsar and his family, well, today, in the new Russia, they are royal martyrs.

And tomorrow, who knows?

Only one thing's for sure -- The future is just as uncertain as the ever-changing story of the past.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪