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Other notable documentaries in the series include Steve Nash and Ezra Holland's inspirational story about Terry Fox, a Canadian amputee who ran the length of Canada to raise funds for cancer research."The Unknown War: WWII and the Epic Battles of the dvd box sets wholesale Russian Front" (five discs, Shout! Factory, $39.97, not rated, available May 24): It's certainly one of the ironies of history that the victory in World War II by the democratic nations of the United States and Great Britain over the autocracies of Germany, Japan and Italy was due in considerable part to our alliance with another autocratic state, Stalin's Soviet Union. Yet the story of the war on its Eastern Front is still a mystery to many, which is why this 20-part documentary series from 1978 remains important.
The major value of "The Unknown War," narrated by Burt Lancaster, is its use of never-before-widely-seen footage taken by Soviet filmmakers as well as film captured from the German army. It shows how the Red Army repelled the first large-scale cheap box sets invasion of Russia since Napoleon, at a cost of at least 20 million lives. The onset of the Cold War shortly after the end of combat no doubt contributed to a lack of recognition, at least in the West, of the importance of the Soviets' defeat of Hitler's army."The Unknown War" is itself a controversial project. With a screenplay by writer-composer Rod McKuen and co-directed by American military documentarian Isaac Kleinerman and Russian filmmaker Roman Karmen, the series takes a largely sympathetic view dvd boxsets toward the Soviet war effort. This proved unpalatable in the United States following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1978, and the series was withdrawn from circulation.
But there are other serious criticisms of the series' content as well. Just for starters, consider: It neglects Stalin's pre-war purge of many of the Soviet army's top commanders, thus weakening the Red Army at a very precarious time. It glosses over the Hitler-Stalin Pact (aka the Molotov-von Ribbentrop Non-Aggression pact of Aug. 23, 1939) as "a way to buy time." It ignores Stalin's failure to heed the warnings of his dvd box set military and diplomatic corps that Hitler was planning to violate the pact and invade the Soviet Union, which occurred on June 22, 1941. And, as historian Joshua Rubenstein has shown, the series fails to comment on the Red Army's horrendous treatment of POWS, which was as bad as Germany's in many cases, or the execution or imprisonment of many former Soviet POWs upon their return home after the war.Such omissions and mistakes don't negate the Red Army's heroism on the Eastern Front nor the value of the war footage, but they suggest that viewers watch "The Unknown War" with considerable skepticism concerning its analysis and interpretation of events.
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