Nuclear War breaks out between NATO and Russia. World War III becomes reality as thousands of hydrogen bombs destroy the West's greatest cities. And the smoke of a sudden Nuclear Winter plunges the planet into an extended Ice Age. This History Channel documentary examines the effects of a global nuclear war and the aftermath as part of the Doomsday television series.

Doomsday | Nuclear War Documentary History Channel

Vladimir Putin worked for the Soviet secret police as a KGB agent in the backwater East German city of Dresden. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Putin returned home to Leningrad in 1990 and began a new assignment as an active reservist embedded within Leningrad City Council. He was the KGB handler of Anatoly Sobchak, one of Russia’s most prominent pro-democracy politicians. (Despite Gorbachev’s reforms in the late 1980s, the KGB continued to monitor, subvert and control leading public figures and Russia’s new democrats were under tight, round-the-clock surveillance.) In August 1991, with the Soviet economy in meltdown, the Politburo and a group of “hard-line” Russian generals staged a coup. Badly planned and poorly executed, the Communist coup quickly unravelled and the First Cold War ended with a Soviet collapse.

Jewish entrepreneur Boris Berezovsky was one of a half-dozen Russian oligarchs who became super-rich during President Yeltsin’s post-Communist privatization drive. While looking to expand business operations to Leningrad in the early 1990s, Berezovsky established friendly relations with the city’s deputy mayor, Vladimir Putin, who oversaw a number of shady business deals that ran through mayor Sobchak’s deeply corrupt, one-term city council. As sole manager of Russia’s Channel One Public Television Network, Berezovsky went on to join the “Family”: a cloistered group of loyal supporters that rallied round Yeltsin during his deeply unpopular, corruption-plagued second term.

During the chaotic government reshuffling of the late 1990s, Putin, a friend of Berezovsky, was appointed the new head of the Federal Security Service or FSB (successor to the KGB) in Moscow and replaced the top brass with associates from Leningrad. Faced with near-certain defeat in the upcoming election and likely criminal prosecution by an unfriendly successor, an ailing President Yeltsin named Putin prime minister of Russia on 9 August 1999. Perceiving Putin as a strong autocratic figure and “a sort of ally” Berezovsky had convinced Yeltsin and the rest of the Family that Putin could turn the situation around and lead the party to election victory. Putin’s appointment was confirmed by the Duma the following week and Nikolai Patrushev, a loyal Leningrad hand, replaced Putin as head of the FSB. Two weeks later, a wave of major terrorist bombings started to rock Moscow and other Russian cities. Chechen separatists were blamed and calls grew for Yeltsin to step down in favour of the tough-talking, increasingly popular Putin. In Ryazan, a city about 100 miles from Moscow, three people were seen placing sacks in the basement of an apartment block on 22 September and thousands of residents were evacuated. Twelve hundred local police were mobilized to hunt down the terrorists while the bomb squad disabled the timer and found the sacks filled with RDX explosive.

'The terrorists’ plan was apparently exactly the same as in the Moscow explosions: the amount of explosive would have destroyed the building entirely … killing all residents in their sleep.' Masha Gessen, The Man Without A Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, 36-41

On 24 September (with the terrorist suspects in custody), Patrushev, Putin’s replacement as head of the FSB, surprisingly announced that the attempted Ryazan bombing had actually been a security service training exercise. The sacks, he claimed, contained nothing but sugar and the “Chechen Islamists” were Moscow FSB agents conducting a simulated terrorist attack meant to test the vigilance of the public....

Doomsday: https://amzn.to/3DLfVvT
This channel is not monetized. All ads are run by the copyright owner.
Last Messages | US: https://amzn.to/42kbEdV | UK: https://amzn.to/3QfMfvZ