Kgb

The moving story of a writer, the Russian Vasily Grossman, and his novel "Life and Fate", one of the most violent charges ever leveled against the Stalinist regime. This is the story of a manuscript that shook the Kremlin. A book "arrested" in October 1961, in the early morning, and locked up in the basement of Lubyanka, the KGB headquarters. "Why would we add your book to the bombs that our enemies are preparing against us?", wrote Mikhail Suslov, Stalin's grey eminence, to Vassili Grossman who pleaded the cause of his book. Saved from extinction thanks to the courage of a network of dissidents, including physicist Andrei Sakharov and writer Vladimir Voinovich, Life and Fate was published 1983 in France.

It’s a story that even the best spy novelists couldn’t have invented, complete with double agents and the CIA vs KGB. In the midst of the cold war, a KGB mole passed on thousands of highly confidential documents to the French secret services, who, in turn, passed them onto the CIA. Revelations that ultimately led to the fall of the Eastern bloc

Soviet spy Donald MacLean and Tory cabinet minister Iain Macleod were both sons of the Hebrides, born in 1913, went to Cambridge University and both tried to change the world. Macleod implemented independence for the British colonies – but was hated by the Tory right. MacLean betrayed his country – but believed he worked for world peace. Cathy MacDonald reveals the forces that shaped these very different lives.

With assassinations, Russian spies and rumours of the Kremlin's dark influence back in the news, this documentary tells - for the first time - the inside story of the murder of a British citizen on British soil using the world's deadliest poison, and of an international manhunt that led to the steps of the Kremlin. Alexander Litvinenko was killed in London with the radioactive poison polonium 210 in November 2006. The Scotland Yard detectives who led the murder investigation have never spoken publicly about it before.

The inside story of Alexander Litvinenko's murder in London and the subsequent international manhunt that led to the Kremlin, told in full for the first time, with exclusive access to key individuals.

Under the radar documentary about KGB operations in the US pre-1982 is a scary little film even in retrospect, since it would seem what the Soviets were doing at the end of the 70's and start of the 80's are now being done by terrorists. Have we learned anything? Clearly not.

At present the total nuclear arsenal of the world is no less than 27,000 nuclear warheads. Nine countries in the world (probably) have nuclear weapons and a dozen more have access to the resources and technology needed to produce such a weapon.

Nuclear Secrets is a series of spy thrillers exploring the key turning-points in the race for nuclear supremacy. From the development of the A-bomb, via the Cuban missile crisis, to the spread of nuclear weapons to the Middle East and beyond, each story is told through the eyes of the men who risked everything to proliferate their nuclear secrets and those who tried to stop them. Nuclear weapons and the actions of these men have transformed the face of war – and now the world could pay the price.

Ben Zand travels to some of the worlds's longest-running dictatorships, discovering the sinister and at times bizarre reality of life there.