Stalin

''Revolutionary,'' tells of the rise to a sort of atheistic deification of the man who, on his 70th birthday in 1949, was hailed as ''teacher, leader, favorite friend'' and given flowers by adoring children. A former prisoner recalls that at his death in 1953, ''Even in the prison camp they wept.'' Another man defends his actions as an informer for Stalin. The hour traces Stalin's ascent in Lenin's shadow and his accumulation of power at the expense of his Bolshevik comrades and rivals, whom he outmaneuvered and then consigned to their deaths. The account of how he managed to create a Lenin-Stalin cult despite the famous testament of Lenin that warned against him and recommended his removal as General Secretary of the Communist Party is fascinating for its display of hypocrisy, audacity and ruthlessness.

The record of Stalin's reign, especially as recounted in this episode, ''Despot,'' is one of murder on an immense scale. ''Stalin embarked on a war against the nation,'' the narrator says, as details are laid on of the mass terror that, by the estimate accepted here, brought 20 million deaths at the hands of the state. Historians tell of the destruction of the peasantry that resulted in a famine in the early 1930's that took the lives of more than 5 million people yet went unreported by most Western observers. You can see George Bernard Shaw visiting the Soviet Union during the worst of the famine but noticing nothing of it; he brought back compliments for the new society. Forced labor killed millions more.

The third episode of this strong series, ''Generalissimo,'' concludes with the last years of Stalin's life, from the 1939 non-aggression pact with Germany, through the victory of the Red Army in World War II, the takeover of Eastern Europe and the beginnings of a new purge before his death; he was mourned by millions of those whom he held in subjection. It is a grim history and a cautionary one.