Filmmaker Curtis chronicles demise of Russian communism for iPlayer

Documentary series Russia 1985-1999 TraumaZone: What It Felt Like to Live Through the Collapse of Communism & Democracy

BBC iPlayer is lining up a series of seven documentaries from award-winning filmmaker Adam Curtis about the collapse of communism in Russia towards the end of the 20th century.

Curtis, whose credits include Bafta-winning BBC Two series Pandora’s Box, The Mayfair Set and The Power of Nightmares, has produced Russia 1985-1999 TraumaZone: What It Felt Like to Live Through the Collapse of Communism & Democracy.

The 7×60’ series draws on thousands of hours of BBC newsreel from the late 1980s to the end of the century, much of which was never used for news reports, which captures the experiences of Russians at every level of society, to create what the BBC describes as “a vivid record of everyday life in a collapsing empire.”

The BBC Film production – which promises an “immersive history” following Curtis’s trademark documentary style – will premiere exclusively on BBC iPlayer on October 13, 2022.

“What the Russians lived through in the 1990s was not just the end of communism, but the failure of democracy too. They experienced the collapse of the two great ideologies of our time in a period of less than 10 years,” said Curtis.

“By 1999, the word democracy was used as a curse. To understand Russia now – and what might happen in the future – you have to understand what happened back then. For it is out of that rage, the violence, the desperation and the overwhelming corruption that Vladimir Putin emerged.”