Curated category
Communist states
- East GermanyEast Germany, officially the German Democratic Republic, was born on the 7th of October 1949 from the wreckage of a war and the hardening of a Cold War…
- North VietnamNorth Vietnam declared its existence on the 2nd of September 1945, when Hồ Chí Minh stood before the world and proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam…
- Socialist Federal Republic of YugoslaviaThe Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was a country that once occupied 255,804 square kilometers in the heart of the Balkans, stretching from the…
- North KoreaNorth Korea, officially the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, is a country that Amnesty International considers to hold the worst human rights record in…
- Socialist Republic of RomaniaOn the 25th of December 1989, Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife Elena were executed by firing squad moments after a drumhead court-martial delivered its verdict.
- Hungarian People's RepublicThe Hungarian People's Republic was born on the 20th of August 1949, when a newly elected parliament passed a constitution that was, by most accounts, a…
- LaosBetween 1964 and 1973, American aircraft dropped more than 2 million tons of bombs on Laos. That is more than all the bombs dropped by American planes during…
- Communist stateA communist state has never officially called itself a communist state. This is one of the first and most disorienting facts about a form of government that…
- Czechoslovak Socialist RepublicThe Czechoslovak Socialist Republic was born on the 25th of February 1948, when President Edvard Beneš, fearing civil war and Soviet intervention…
- Polish People's RepublicIn February 1945, the Red Army occupied the entire country of Poland. Joseph Stalin presented his Western allies with a fait accompli at the Yalta Conference.
- Russian Soviet Federative Socialist RepublicThe Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic was proclaimed on the 7th of November 1917, hours after Bolshevik forces overthrew the provisional…
- Mongolian People's RepublicIn July 1921, cavalry under Damdin Sükhbaatar captured the capital of Mongolia with Soviet troop support. This event marked the Mongolian People's Revolution…
- People's Republic of BulgariaThe People's Republic of Bulgaria was born on the night of the 9th of September 1944, when communist guerrillas launched a coup that ended a monarchy and…
- People's Socialist Republic of AlbaniaOn the 10th of January 1946, a small Balkan nation declared itself a people's republic, and began one of the most isolated and doctrinaire communist…
- ChinaChina sits in East Asia, home to more than 1.4 billion people, roughly 17 percent of everyone alive. Spread across about 9.6 million square kilometers, it is…
- Soviet UnionOn the 26th of December 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev officially recognized the dissolution of the Soviet Union, ending nearly seven decades of Soviet rule.
- VietnamVietnam is as little as 50 kilometres across at its narrowest point, in the central Quảng Bình province, yet it widens to around 600 kilometres in the north.
- CubaCuba sits at the convergence of three bodies of water: the Caribbean Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Atlantic Ocean. An archipelago of more than four…