Over 300 years ago, with newly seized Swedish territory near the Baltic, Peter the Great sets out to create a city in the marshes of the River Neva. He sends Danish-born Vitus Bering on the expedition that discovers what is now known as the Bering Strait. Peter’s city grows to become a Venice of the North. A flamboyant high society entertains itself with lavish balls in the city’s fabled palaces during Russia’s Belle Epoque. When an assault on the Winter Palace launches the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, the city’s elite, along with two million inhabitants, flee to the West.

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Established as Tsaritsyn to defend the unstable southern regions of Russia, the city was shaped by the River Volga, by immigrants, commerce – and by war. In the 17th and 18th century, Cossack rebels conquer it twice. Sparsely populated, the area is easy prey. Empress Catherine the Great launches a campaign to solve this problem once and for all. She issues a decree that promises privileges and land to foreign settles – and chiefly promotes it in her native Germany. Immigrant farmers and craftspeople form over 100 settlements in the region. Tsaritsyn flourishes and now becomes one of the major Russian commercial cities – which also attracts the Nobel family from Sweden. Having set out to find wood for their rifle production – they find a new and even more profitable commodity: oil. In Russia’s Civil war 1917-1920, bitter fights are waged over its control. Hitler, too, has an appetite for the oil that can be accessed from here. The Battle of Stalingrad becomes the ultimate turning point of the war – at the cost of nearly one million lives. The city that has born the name of Stalin since the 1920s is completely destroyed, and rebuilt in Stalinist style. When the Communist leadership acknowledges Stalin’s atrocities - albeit secretly -, it is given a new name: Volgograd.

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While St Petersburg’s cityscape has remained largely unchanged, Moscow is forever reinventing itself. This episode opens when Napoleonic troops reach Moscow in 1812. Legend has it that Muscovites themselves burn down their city, but how the fire spread is unclear to this day. After Napoleon’s downfall, Moscow is rebuilt on a bigger scale. In the 1870s, the reform-minded Tsar Alexander II instigates large-scale modernisation – and Moscow becomes the starting point of the Transsiberian railway. Two years after its completion in 1916, the Bolsheviks reinstate Moscow as the capital of Russia. It is a time of both great expectation and great suffering. To this day, Russians take pride in the massive building projects of that era – in spite of the fact that they were built at the cost of millions of forced labourers’ lives. At the height of Stalin’s Great Terror, fear rules the Moscow, and entire perfectly innocent families are deported and enslaved, or killed. After the 2nd World War, Moscow becomes the epicentre of a global Communist Empire – and fiercely competes with the US for world domination. The construction of nuclear bombs becomes a major battleground. The brilliant nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov fights on the side of the Soviets – until a terrible accident leads him to the conclusion that neither party can win this deadly fight. Over time, Sakharov becomes the Soviet Union’s Public Enemy No. 1. Awarded with the Nobel Peace prize in 1975, his critique of the Soviet state culminates in his protest against the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, for which he is exiled to Siberia – until the advent of Glasnost and Perestroika.

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