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Curated playlist

Communist states

  • East GermanyA picnic near the Hungarian town of Sopron helped bring down East Germany. The border opened there in August 1989.
  • North VietnamNorth Vietnam was proclaimed by Hồ Chí Minh on the 2nd of September 1945. It ended by absorbing its rival.
  • Socialist Federal Republic of YugoslaviaYugoslavia was a Communist state where people could buy Italian clothes and watch American films.
  • North KoreaNorth Korea once had nearly 45,000 family practitioners. Life expectancy reached 72 before the famine.
  • Socialist Republic of RomaniaRomania's Nicolae Ceaușescu was executed after a trial that lasted an hour and a half. Days before, a crowd booed him.
  • Hungarian People's RepublicHungary's communists won just 17% of the vote in 1945. Four years later, the country was under one-party rule.
  • LaosBetween 1964 and 1973, American planes dropped more than 2 million tons of bombs on Laos.
  • Communist stateNo communist state has ever officially called itself communist. They said they were socialist, still on the way.
  • Czechoslovak Socialist RepublicIn February 1948, a president handed his country to the Communists. Edvard Beneš feared civil war.
  • Polish People's RepublicIn June 1989, Poland's first competitive elections in decades ended in a Solidarity sweep.
  • Russian Soviet Federative Socialist RepublicThe Russian SFSR, largest Soviet republic, had no presidency until 1990. It had no anthem of its own until then.
  • Mongolian People's RepublicIn December 1989, young people flooded Ulaanbaatar's streets to demand political freedom.
  • People's Republic of BulgariaCommunist guerrillas launched a coup in Bulgaria on the night of the 9th of September 1944.
  • People's Socialist Republic of AlbaniaAlbania gave Yugoslav advisers just 48 hours to leave in 1948. It then blamed Yugoslavia for its own purge.
  • ChinaChina gave the world papermaking, printing, the compass and gunpowder.
  • Soviet UnionOn December 26, 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev officially recognized the Soviet Union's dissolution.
  • VietnamVietnam has a cave with a rainforest inside it. Hang Sơn Đoòng has caverns big enough to hold a 40-story skyscraper.
  • CubaIn 1956, Fidel Castro and about eighty supporters landed in Cuba from the yacht Granma to start a rebellion.

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