Curated playlist
Joseph Stalin
- Joseph StalinJoseph Stalin signed his articles "K. Stalin", an alias drawn from the Russian word for steel, translated as "Man of Steel." The man who chose it was born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili, into poverty in the small Georgian city of Gori.…
- German–Soviet Axis talksIn November 1940, Vyacheslav Molotov stepped off a train in Berlin to what should have been an impossible scene: an orchestra inside Nazi Germany playing The Internationale, the anthem of world communism, for the first time since 1933. The…
- Soviet offensive plans controversyThe Soviet offensive plans controversy asks one of the most unsettling questions in modern history: was Stalin the one who nearly started the Second World War on the Eastern Front? The debate began in earnest in 1988, when a former Soviet…
- 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…
- Tehran ConferenceThe Tehran Conference, codenamed Eureka, gathered Joseph Stalin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill in the same room for the first time on the 28th of November 1943. They met at the Soviet embassy in Tehran, Iran, and remained…
- Vyacheslav MolotovVyacheslav Molotov was the only person in the twentieth century to have shaken hands with Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Adolf Hitler, Rudolf Hess, Hermann Göring, and Heinrich Himmler. That single…
- 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…
- Yalta ConferenceThe Yalta Conference opened on the 4th of February 1945, inside three palaces overlooking the Black Sea in Soviet Crimea. Outside, the war in Europe was not yet over, but it was close enough that three of the most powerful men alive had…
- Death and state funeral of Joseph StalinJoseph Stalin, the second leader of the Soviet Union, spent his final hours completely alone. By the time anyone realized something was wrong, it was already too late. Word of his death set off national mourning, but the funeral crowds…
- Battle of StalingradThe Battle of Stalingrad was a fight that consumed an entire city and changed the course of the Second World War. By the time it ended on the 2nd of February 1943, the German 6th Army had surrendered - the first of Hitler's field armies to…
- GulagAleksandr Solzhenitsyn likened the Gulag to a chain of islands. He had survived eight years inside it, and in 1973 he gave the system its international name with The Gulag Archipelago. The word itself was once narrow. GULAG stood for the…
- Population transfer in the Soviet UnionPopulation transfer in the Soviet Union was not a footnote in history. It was a machine. Between 1930 and 1952, the Soviet government under Joseph Stalin forcibly uprooted millions of people across the largest country on earth. The…
- 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…
- RDS-1At seven in the morning on the 29th of August 1949, a blinding flash lit the Kazakh steppe. RDS-1, the Soviet Union's first nuclear device, detonated at the Semipalatinsk Test Site, releasing a force equal to 22 kilotons of TNT. The world…
- Katyn massacreThe Katyn massacre names the place where Nazi German forces first uncovered mass graves in a Polish forest near Smolensk in 1943, but the killing had begun three years earlier, and the men who ordered it would spend the next five decades…
- Stalinist architectureStalinist architecture rose and fell within a single generation, yet it left an indelible mark on cities from Moscow to Warsaw, Minsk to Bucharest. At its heart was a paradox: a style built on the prestige of marble, granite, and bronze,…
- Soviet famine of 1946–1947The Soviet famine of 1946-1947 killed people who had already survived one of the deadliest wars in human history. Soldiers had come home. Cities were rebuilding. And yet, across the Ukrainian SSR, the Moldavian SSR, and wide stretches of…