Curated playlist
Germany–Soviet Union relations
- Molotov PlanVyacheslav Molotov rejected the Marshall Plan in 1947, but his economic system had been operating since 1945. The Soviet Union began bilateral trade agreements with Central and Eastern European nations two years before the American…
- Soviet–Japanese Neutrality PactAfter Stalin signed the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact, he did something almost no one had seen him do. He personally saw off Japan's Foreign Minister, Yosuke Matsuoka, at a train station. Stalin rarely appeared before foreign diplomats…
- Flight and expulsion of Germans (1944–1950)The flight and expulsion of Germans between 1944 and 1950 stands as the largest forced migration in modern European history. By 1950, roughly 12 million Germans had left or been removed from east-central Europe, resettling in…
- Potsdam AgreementThe Potsdam Agreement was signed on the 1st of August 1945, at Cecilienhof Palace in Potsdam, as the guns fell silent across Europe but war still raged in the Pacific. Three men put their names to it: General Secretary Joseph Stalin,…
- Vega programThe Vega program launched two spacecraft toward Venus in December 1984, carrying a secret tucked inside each one: a balloon. Not a scientific metaphor, but an actual helium-filled sphere, 3.54 meters across, designed to float through the…
- Stalin NoteThe Stalin Note reached representatives of the United States, Britain, and France on the 10th of March 1952. Andrei Gromyko delivered it on behalf of the Soviet Union, then occupying half of a divided Germany. In plain terms, the document…
- Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to GermanyOn the 1st of August 1945, the Potsdam Agreement established provisional terms for governing Germany after World War II. This accord created an Oder, Neisse line that awarded most of Germany's former eastern provinces to Poland and the…
- Potsdam ConferenceThe Potsdam Conference opened on the 17th of July 1945, just sixteen days after the most destructive war in human history had ended in Europe. Three men gathered at Cecilienhof, a palace in Potsdam within the Soviet occupation zone near…
- German prisoners of war in the Soviet UnionGerman prisoners of war in the Soviet Union represent one of the most contested and tragic chapters of the Second World War. By April 1945, some two million German soldiers were already held in Soviet captivity. The number would climb…
- Tear down this wall!At 2:00 p.m. on the 12th of June 1987, Ronald Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin, shielded from East Berlin by two panes of bulletproof glass, and issued a direct challenge to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev: "Mr.…
- Berlin Crisis of 1961The Berlin Crisis of 1961 brought the Cold War closer to open conflict than any event since the Second World War ended. At its peak, American and Soviet tanks faced each other loaded with live munitions, just 50 to 100 metres apart, at a…
- OstpolitikOstpolitik produced its most visible symbol in 1987. That year, East German leader Erich Honecker made an official visit to West Germany. It was the first time any East German head of state had crossed into the West. Two German states that…
- Occupation of the Baltic statesThe occupation of the Baltic states is one of modern Europe's longest and most contested erasures of national sovereignty. In August 1939, in the early hours before dawn, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed a ten-year non-aggression…
- Kaliningrad OblastKaliningrad Oblast holds roughly 90 percent of the world's amber deposits, which is why many Russians call it the Amber Land. It is the westernmost federal subject of Russia, yet no Russian land touches it. To the south lies Poland, to the…