Apocalypse: Stalin
television film
Apocalypse: Stalin (in French: Apocalypse, Staline) is a French three-part television series retracing the meteoric rise of Joseph Stalin and the birth of Stalinist ideology, broadcast on France 2 on November 3, 2015. It brings together known and unpublished period documents relating the major events which led Stalin to become Secretary General of the Soviet Communist Party and to lead the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Archival images used in the series were restored and colorized. The series was directed by Isabelle Clarke and Daniel Costelle.
Episodes
Demon: Recounts the beginnings of Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili who became Stalin. Born in Gori, Georgia officially on December 6, 1878, he was son of a fervent Russian Orthodox mother who worked as a seamstress, and a father who made a good living as a shoemaker, but who quickly became an alcoholic. His mother pushed her son suffering from atherosclerosis to the priesthood and had difficulty financing his studies. A brilliant student, he was expelled at the age of twenty for Marxist propaganda and became a bandit in the name of the "Revolution". He was arrested and escaped on numerous occasions. During his escape in 1904, he encountered Lenin for the first time and then joined the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q21511519. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2015, 1878 and 1904.
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This entry incorporates text from “Apocalypse: Stalin” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.