Curated playlist
Soviet military occupations
- Anglo-Soviet invasion of IranThe Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran began before dawn on the 25th of August, 1941, when Royal Air Force aircraft crossed into Iranian airspace and dropped bombs on Tehran and Qazvin. The attack had a name: Operation Countenance. It would be…
- Allied-occupied GermanyAllied-occupied Germany begins not with peace but with erasure. On the 5th of June 1945, the Berlin Declaration extinguished Germany as a sovereign state and placed every square kilometer of it under foreign control. The country that had…
- Molotov–Ribbentrop PactThe Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed in Moscow on the 24th of August 1939, and within a week Germany had invaded Poland. What made this treaty so astonishing was not merely its contents but the sheer improbability of its existence. Two…
- Soviet occupation of the Baltic states (1940)The Soviet occupation of the Baltic states in 1940 unfolded against the backdrop of a continent already consumed by war. On the 14th of June 1940, the same day Soviet forces issued an ultimatum to Lithuania, the world's attention was fixed…
- 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 gathered beside a statue in Budapest, and a crowd chanted a poem that the government had…
- Soviet–Afghan WarThe Soviet-Afghan War began on the 25th of December 1979, when the Soviet 40th Army crossed into Afghanistan under the pretext of extending 'international aid' to a puppet government it had helped install. What followed was nearly a decade…
- 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 the cover of darkness. Before dawn, 250,000 troops and 2,000 tanks had crossed…
- Soviet occupation zone in GermanyFour Allied powers claimed German territory in 1945, and the Soviet occupation zone in Germany was Moscow's share. The Potsdam Agreement of August 1945 fixed its borders. Within those borders, the Soviet Military Administration built a…
- Soviet invasion of PolandOn the morning of the 17th of September 1939, Polish schools were still open across the six easternmost voivodeships of Poland. Rail lines were running. Factories were operating. A French Navy ship loaded with Renault R35 tanks was sailing…
- 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…
- Soviet occupation of Bessarabia and Northern BukovinaAt 22:00 on the 26th of June 1940, Soviet People's Commissar Vyacheslav Molotov summoned the Romanian minister to Moscow and handed him an ultimatum. Romania had four days to withdraw its military and civil administration from Bessarabia…