The Unknown War of the Eastern Front: the first American-Soviet television production and Détente’s World War II

Abstract

This article details the production of the first American-Soviet television collaboration The Unknown War. The 1978 documentary series chronicled the Eastern Front of World War II, an area of the war few Americans were familiar with. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s American film and television portrayals of the war excised or minimized the Soviet Union’s role due to the Cold War rivalry leading to a knowledge gap. The success of the documentary series The World at War spurred the interest of American independent producer Air Time International for a similar series on the Soviet side of the war. For Americans it was capitalizing on a revival of interest in the war while remedying the public’s lack of knowledge on the Eastern. For the Soviet authorities it was a means of furthering relations eased by Détente and bolstering their ‘Cult of the Great Patriotic War’. The series’ creation showcases the difficulties and compromises made to craft a product that suited both sides’ needs. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan led to the series never being rebroadcast in the United States and largely forgotten. It serves as an example of the difficulties of such ‘cross-curtain’ collaborations and the Cold War’s influence on the interpretation of World War II.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Sabina Mihelj and Simon Huxtable have found that the number of inhabitants per TV set dropped into single figures across Eastern Europe. Assuming that an average family owning a set had four members, they conclude that roughly half of the population living in state-socialist European nations had regular access to a television.

2 Marie Cronqvist, ‘From Socialist Hero to Capitalist Icon: The Cultural Transfer of the East German Children’s Television Programme Unser Sandmännchen to Sweden in the Early 1970s’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 41, no. 2 (2020): 387–8.

3 Andrea Fickers, ‘Looking East-Watching West? On the Asymmetrical Interdependence of Cold War European Communication Spaces’, in Television Beyond and Across the Iron Curtain, ed. Bönker Kristen, Julia Obertreis, and Sven Grampp (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2016), 1–24, 13.

4 Ibid, 14.

5 Kristen Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time: How the Soviet Union Built the Media Empire That Lost the Cultural Cold War, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), 217–18.

6 Ibid., 279.

7 Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 231.

8 Some Western programs were purchased by the Soviet Union in the 1970s, most notably the BBC miniseries The Forsyte Saga (1969).

9 Sabina Mihelj and Simon Huxtable, From Media Systems to Media Cultures: Understanding Socialist Television (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 84.

10 Hal Erickson, Syndicated Television: The First Forty Years, (New York: McFarland & Company, 1989), 183.

11 Erickson, Syndicated Television, 184–5.

12 Bruce Fogel, ‘Now Media is ‘Full Service,’’ Media Services, April 1978, 67.

13 Philip H. Dougherty, ‘Media Buying Services Come of Age,’ New York Times, 17 November 1977.

14 Author telephone interview with Fred Wiener, 6 April 2018.

15 Eric Pace, ‘Harrison E. Salisbury, 84, Author and Reporter, Dies,’ New York Times, 5 July 1993.

16 Ronald Smelser and Edward J. Davies, The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 2.

17 Tom Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 75.

18 ‘Partisan: The Nazi-Soviet War,’ The Twentieth Century (New York: CBS, 11 February 1962).

19 James Chapman, ‘Television and History: The World at War’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 31, no. 2 (2011): 247–75, https://doi.org/10.1080/01439685.2011.572608, 252.

20 The World at War was to have an episode on ‘The Big Three’ of Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Josef Stalin but abandoned the plan as they were unable to locate enough footage of Stalin to fill his segment.

21 Nina Tumarkin, The Living & the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia (New York: BasicBooks, a Subsidiary of Perseus Books, 1994), 134.

22 Tumarkin, The Living & the Dead, 133.

23 Mihelj and Huxtable, From Media Systems to Media Cultures, 236.

24 James O. Jackson, ‘World War II: Key Soviet TV Theme,’ The Daily Report (Ontario, CA), 12 September 1970.

25 Author telephone interview with Fred Wiener, 6 April 2018.

26 Lenoid Brezhnev’s Speech in Tula,’ 18 January 1977.

27 Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 231.

28 Les Brown, ‘TV: Russian Agency Teaming With U.S. Group on World War II Film,’ New York Times, 26 December 1977.

29 Simon Welfare, ‘Obituary: John Lord,’ The Independent (London), 17 June 1994.

30 Wolfgang Saxon, ‘Isaac Kleinerman, Producer Of 'Victory at Sea,' Dies at 87,’ New York Times, 28 March 2004.

31 Rod McKuen, ‘The Unknown War: A Glimpse Behind the Scenes,’ interview by Marilyn Bechtel, New World Review, March/April 1979, 8.

32 ‘Interview with Rod McKuen,’ interview by Shout Factory for the DVD release of The Unknown War.

33 Naum Marr, ‘The Unknown War…Eastern Front!’ Soviet Literature, no. 6 (1978): 168.

34 Roberts, Graham. Forward Soviet!: History and Non-fiction Film in the USSR. London: I.B. Tauris, 1999.

35 Ian Aitken, The Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film (London: Routledge, 2013), 478.

36 Naum Marr, ‘The Unknown War…Eastern Front!’ Soviet Literature, no. 6 (1978): 164.

37 Ibid., 165.

38 Rod McKuen, ‘The Unknown War: A Glimpse Behind the Scenes,’ interview by Marilyn Bechtel, New World Review, March/April 1979, 10.

39 Isaac Kleinerman, ‘Reminiscences of Isaac Kleinerman’, interview by Barbara Hogenson on 11 August 1980, in New York, NY (New York: Columbia University Oral History Collection, 1981), 449.

40 Kleinerman and Weiner recall spending between 7-8 months collectively in the Soviet Union.

41 ‘Interview with Rod McKuen,’ interview by Shout Factory for the DVD release of The Unknown War.

42 Howard Rosenberg, ‘World War II in Russia,’ Los Angeles Times, 5 October 1978.

43 Rod McKuen, ‘The Unknown War: A Glimpse Behind the Scenes,’ interview by Marilyn Bechtel, New World Review, March/April 1979, 9.

44 Author telephone interview with Fred Wiener, 6 April 2018.

45 An investigation conducted by the office of the Prosecutors General of the Soviet Union (1990–1991) and the Russian Federation (1991–2004) confirmed Soviet responsibility for the massacres but refused to classify it as a war crime or act of mass murder. 

46 Author telephone interview with Fred Wiener, 6 April 2018.

47 Betty Utterback, ‘World War II: Another view,’ Democrat and Chronicle, Rochester, NY, 8 October 1978.

48 Naum Marr, ‘The Unknown War…Eastern Front!’ Soviet Literature, no. 6 (1978): 167, 163.

49 Ibid, 167, 169.

50 Rod McKuen, ‘The Unknown War: A Glimpse Behind the Scenes,’ interview by Marilyn Bechtel, New World Review, March/April 1979, 10.

51 Isaac Kleinerman, ‘Reminiscences of Isaac Kleinerman’, interview by Barbara Hogenson on 11 August 1980, in New York, NY (New York: Columbia University Oral History Collection), 446–7.

52 Kevin Klose, ‘Fresh Footage From ‘The Unknown War’,’ Washington Post, 22 December 1977.

53 Naum Marr, ‘The Unknown War…Eastern Front!’ Soviet Literature, no. 6 (1978): 165

54 Rod McKuen, "The Unknown War: A Glimpse behind the Scenes," interview by Marilyn Bechtel, New World Review, March/April 1979, 10.

55 G. Vasilyev, ‘America Learns History,’ Pravda, 10 September 1978, 5.

56 Author telephone interview with Fred Wiener, 6 April 2018. Wiener claims WTBS bought the series for syndication.

57 Since it was sold to different stations the series was aired at different days and times throughout the country. Each station, however, broadcast it on a weekly basis.

58 ‘’Unknown War’ Looks at Russian War Years,’ Ashbury Park Press, 24 September 1978.

59 Howard Rosenberg, ‘World War II in Russia,’ The Los Angeles Times, 5 October 1978.

60 Tom Buckley, ‘Soviet Union’s Unknown War with Germany,’ New York Times, 25 November 1978.

61 Paul Greenberg, ‘Will this TV series make SALT palatable?,’ Democrat and Chronicle, 17 January 1979.

62 Edward Shapiro, Clio from the Right: Essays of a Conservative Historian (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1983), 263.

63 Melvyn P. Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2008), 334, 335.

64 Erickson, Syndicated Television, 277.

65 Boris Alexeyev, ‘Truly a Great Patriotic War,’ Soviet Life, Spring 1983, 18.

66 Author telephone interview with Fred Wiener, 19 April 2018.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael A. LoSasso

Michael LoSasso is a PhD candidate at the University of South Florida.