Curated playlist
Russian communists
- Nikita KhrushchevNikita Khrushchev stood before a closed session of the 20th Party Congress on the 25th of February 1956, and in four hours dismantled the reputation of a man who had ruled the Soviet Union for decades. The silence in the hall was absolute.…
- Anton ChekhovAnton Chekhov was born on the feast day of St. Anthony the Great in Taganrog, a commercial port city on the Sea of Azov, and he died on the 15th of July 1904 at the age of forty-four -- the same disease that had killed his brother claiming…
- Mikhail SuslovMikhail Andreyevich Suslov held the Soviet Union's ideological line for nearly four decades, yet he remains one of the most obscure figures of the Cold War era. Born in 1902 in the village of Shakhovskoye in Saratov Governorate, he rose…
- Leonid BrezhnevLeonid Ilyich Brezhnev died on the 10th of November 1982, and within days, leaders from Cuba, Nicaragua, Mozambique, Afghanistan, and India had declared national mourning. He was buried in his Marshal's uniform, medals pinned to his chest,…
- 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…
- Yuri AndropovYuri Andropov died on the 9th of February 1984 at 16:50, aged 69, after spending barely 15 months as the leader of the Soviet Union. He entered the Kremlin as the first former head of the KGB ever to become General Secretary, and he left…
- Vladimir LeninVladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, the man the world would come to know as Vladimir Lenin, took the name from no person at all. He first used it in December 1901, and one theory ties it to the Siberian Lena River. He often wrote it as N. Lenin,…
- Leon TrotskyLeon Trotsky was murdered in Mexico City in 1940 by Ramon Mercader, a Stalinist agent. He had been sentenced to death in absentia four years earlier at the Moscow show trials. Of all the men Stalin defeated, Trotsky was one of the few…
- Peter KropotkinPeter Kropotkin was born in Moscow on the 9th of December 1842, in the Konyushennaya district, which translates as the Equerries district. His father owned serfs in three provinces. His family descended from the princes of Smolensk. By the…
- Yevgeny ZamyatinYevgeny Zamyatin spent his final years in Paris dying in poverty, his name unmentioned in any Soviet newspaper, his most famous novel banned in his own country for decades. He had been an Old Bolshevik, a trained naval engineer, a man who…