Curated playlist
Eastern Bloc
- 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 divide. It lasted exactly forty-one years. In that time, a state that began with a…
- Tito–Stalin splitThe Tito-Stalin split began not with a dramatic confrontation in some smoke-filled Kremlin office, but with a letter. On the 27th of March 1948, Joseph Stalin wrote to Josip Broz Tito and his colleague Edvard Kardelj, calling several of…
- Eastern BlocThe Eastern Bloc was an unofficial coalition of communist states that stretched from Central and Eastern Europe across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, bound together by alignment with the Soviet Union and existing from 1947 until 1991. At…
- Prague SpringPrague Spring began on the 5th of January 1968, when Alexander Dubček was elected First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. For just over seven months, a small Central European nation tested an idea that terrified the…
- Warsaw PactThe Warsaw Pact was born on the 14th of May 1955, eight days after West Germany joined NATO. Its founding declaration accused a remilitarized Western Germany of increasing "the danger of another war" and posing a threat to "the national…
- 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. The trial lasted an hour and a half. Just days before, Ceaușescu had been…
- Territories of Poland annexed by the Soviet UnionSeventeen days after Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the Soviet Union sent its own forces across Poland's eastern border. The region they entered was known as the Kresy, a vast stretch of land totaling more than 200,000 square…
- Berlin WallThe Berlin Wall was a guarded concrete barrier that for 28 years encircled the western half of a divided city, turning West Berlin into an isolated exclave surrounded by hostile territory. When East German construction workers began…
- ComeconComecon, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, was born at a Moscow conference that ran from the 5th to the 8th of January 1949. Six founding nations gathered behind closed doors: the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary,…
- 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 near-carbon copy of the Soviet original. For the next forty years, Hungary existed as…
- Revolutions of 1989The Revolutions of 1989 began with a single trade union. On the 14th of August 1980, workers at a shipyard in Gdansk walked off the job, setting in motion a chain of events that would, within a decade, bring down the political order that…
- 1948 Czechoslovak coup d'étatThe 1948 Czechoslovak coup d'état unfolded in a single week in late February, turning the last liberal democracy in Eastern Europe into a Communist-controlled state. Twelve non-Communist ministers walked out of their own government on the…
- CominformOn the 5th of October 1947, nine communist parties across Europe signed their names to a new organization in Szklarska Poręba, Poland. They called it the Information Bureau of the Communist and Workers' Parties. The world would know it as…
- Emigration from the Eastern BlocEmigration from the Eastern Bloc was not merely restricted during the Cold War. It was redefined as treason. A Soviet decree from 1929 stated that any official who went over "to the camp of the enemies of the working class and the…
- Satellite stateA satellite state has been part of the English language since as early as 1780, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. That is decades before the Cold War made the phrase famous. The term was coined by analogy to astronomy, comparing…
- Hungarian Revolution of 1956The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 began with university students and a list of sixteen demands. On the 23rd of October 1956, roughly 20,000 protesters gathered beside a statue in Budapest, and a crowd chanted a poem that the government had…
- Iron CurtainFrom Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Winston Churchill spoke those words on the 5th of March 1946 at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, with President Harry Truman…
- Solidarity (Polish trade union)Solidarity, the Independent Self-Governing Trade Union founded in August 1980 at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, Poland, began not with a grand political declaration but with a dismissal notice. Anna Walentynowicz, a crane operator, was…
- Warsaw Pact invasion of CzechoslovakiaThe Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia began at approximately 11 pm on the 20th of August 1968, when columns of tanks rolled silently toward Prague under the cover of darkness. Before dawn, 250,000 troops and 2,000 tanks had crossed…
- Czechoslovak Socialist RepublicThe Czechoslovak Socialist Republic was born on the 25th of February 1948, when President Edvard Beneš, fearing civil war and Soviet intervention, surrendered power to a Communist-dominated government. What followed was four decades of…
- Eastern Bloc media and propagandaEastern Bloc media and propaganda was not simply a system of lies. It was an architecture, built brick by brick, to make certain thoughts unthinkable and certain questions unaskable. During the Stalinist period, even weather forecasts were…
- January EventsThe January Events left fourteen civilians dead on the streets of Vilnius over a single night in January 1991. Soviet tanks drove directly through crowds of unarmed Lithuanians gathered around the city's television tower. Loudspeakers…
- Polish People's RepublicThe Polish People's Republic was born out of the ruins of a country that had lost nearly a third of its population in six years of war. By the census of the 14th of February 1946, Poland counted only 23.9 million inhabitants, down from…
- Ukrainian Soviet Socialist RepublicThe Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was, for most of its existence, the second-most powerful constituent republic in the Soviet Union. With a population of over 51 million counted in the 1989 census, it was second only to Russia. Its…
- CzechoslovakiaCzechoslovakia appeared on the map of Europe in October 1918, carved from the wreckage of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and vanished just as deliberately on the 31st of December 1992, dissolved by its own parliament without a single shot…
- 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 government headed by Alexander Kerensky. For seventy-four years it existed as a political…
- Byelorussian Soviet Socialist RepublicThe Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic spent most of the twentieth century as a place other powers fought over, traded away, and occasionally forgot. At the end of World War II, its losses were staggering: over two million people…
- 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 began four decades of Communist rule. That night, a new government took power under…
- 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 experiments in twentieth-century history. The People's Socialist Republic of Albania held…
- 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 thousand islands, cays, and islets, it is the largest country in the Caribbean by area…
- Berlin BlockadeThe Berlin Blockade began at one minute past midnight on the 24th of June 1948, when Stalin ordered Soviet troops to cut every railway, road, and canal leading into the western sectors of Berlin. Two and a half million people in a city…