Curated category
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…
- 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…
- 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…
- Prague SpringPrague Spring began on the 5th of January 1968, when Alexander Dubček was elected First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.
- 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…
- 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.
- 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.
- 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…
- ComeconComecon, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, was born at a Moscow conference that ran from the 5th to the 8th of January 1949.
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- CominformOn the 5th of October 1947, nine communist parties across Europe signed their names to a new organization in Szklarska Poręba, Poland.
- 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…
- Satellite stateA satellite state has been part of the English language since as early as 1780, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- Czechoslovak Socialist RepublicThe Czechoslovak Socialist Republic was born on the 25th of February 1948, when President Edvard Beneš, fearing civil war and Soviet intervention…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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.
- Ukrainian Soviet Socialist RepublicThe Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was, for most of its existence, the second-most powerful constituent republic in the Soviet Union.
- 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…
- 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…
- 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.
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…