Stolen Years

STOLEN YEARS recounts a gruesome era in modern history - the wave of terror that Soviet dictator Josef Stalin ordered against his own people from 1929 to 1953. Stalin's purges led to an estimated 20 million deaths. STOLEN YEARS features eleven survivors - men and women, poets and artists, soldiers and students - telling their stories after 50 years of silence. Historian Robert Conquest, an expert on Stalin's regime, introduces the program.

STOLEN YEARS combines archival materials never seen in the West with contemporary footage, interviews and the artworks of gulag survivor Nikolai Getman. The program traces the full arc of the horror, from arrest, interrogation and bulk shipment to the East through forced labor in the camps and, finally, to the day Stalin died in March 1953.

Among the victims who tell their stories are:

• Semyon Samuilovich Vilensky, who was arrested just after his 20th birthday and incarcerated in the Sukhanov prison. He wrote the following after hearing a distant church bell from his prison cell: "This was the first period in my life when I, a person raised entirely in an atheist way, first thought about God. This was difficult for a young man who had been brought up in Soviet schools, who had studied in a Soviet university. You know, I spoke with Him. I spoke with Him. I asked Him how He could accept all of this."
• Yelena Semyonovna Glinka, who was arrested in 1950 at age 23 and charged with Article 58/1A, "Treason to the Motherland." She was a teenager living in Novorossiysk on the Black Sea when the Germans invaded on August 31, 1942, but the Soviets charged her with voluntarily staying in German-occupied Ukraine to consort with the enemy.
  • George Zoltan Bien, the son of a well-known heart specialist, was born in Budapest in 1928. In STOLEN YEARS, he recalls Christmas Eve 1944, the day on which the siege of Budapest began. On February 6, 1945, two NKVD officers came to the Bien apartment and took father and son to headquarters. Both were interrogated and imprisoned, then shipped by train to the Ukraine, where the elder Bien died in prison of dysentery. George Bien spent 10 years in labor camps, returning to Budapest just in time for the 1956 uprising. He escaped to the United States, where he lives today.

STOLEN YEARS was filmed at some of the most historically resonant sites in the former Soviet Union, including the Lubyanka Prison in Moscow, mass grave sites at Oryel and elsewhere, and the Butugychag forced labor camp in Kolyma, the heart of the Siberian gulag.

The 20 million people who died during Stalin's regime perished in a series of purges, executions, artificial famines and deportations to desolate regions and forced labor camps. Almost without exception, the charges against these victims were false. Stalin targeted not only poets and artists, playwrights and historians, leading politicians and top generals, but also the general population. He crushed not only the opposition but also any trace of independent thought.