Curated category
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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- Tehran ConferenceThe USS Iowa dropped anchor in the Caspian Sea on the 27th of November 1943. President Franklin D. Roosevelt stepped off a plane at Baku and traveled by…
- Vyacheslav MolotovVyacheslav Molotov was the only person in the twentieth century to have shaken hands with Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, Franklin D.
- 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.
- Yalta ConferenceThe Yalta Conference opened on the 4th of February 1945, inside three palaces overlooking the Black Sea in Soviet Crimea.
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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.
- 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.