Curated playlist
Totalitarian states
- Vichy FranceIn July 1940, French lawmakers voted 569 to 80 to give Marshal Pétain absolute power. Vichy France began that day.
- North KoreaNorth Korea once had nearly 45,000 family practitioners. Life expectancy reached 72 before the famine.
- Slovak Republic (1939–1945)Slovakia's parliament voted unanimously to break from Czechoslovakia on the 14th of March 1939.
- Socialist Republic of RomaniaRomania's Nicolae Ceaușescu was executed after a trial that lasted an hour and a half. Days before, a crowd booed him.
- Fascist ItalyMussolini once called antisemitism a "German vice." Fascist Italy passed racial laws in 1938 under German pressure.
- Hungarian People's RepublicHungary's communists won just 17% of the vote in 1945. Four years later, the country was under one-party rule.
- Protectorate of Bohemia and MoraviaHitler modeled the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia on India's princely states.
- TurkmenistanTurkmenistan banned satellite dishes the same month it launched its first satellite. That was April 2015.
- EritreaEritrea takes its name from a Greek word for red. Ancient Greek speakers called the Red Sea the Erythraean Sea, and the country at its southern end borrowed that old label. Italian colonial officials made the name official in 1890, when…
- Empire of JapanThe Empire of Japan abolished its own samurai class. That later brought conflict with the samurai.
- Ba'athist IraqIraq's Ba'athists seized power in 1968 without a single death. The ousted president was flown to London.
- AfghanistanPersians, Mongols, British, Soviets and Americans all marched into Afghanistan, and each marched out.
- Nazi GermanyNazi Germany's leaders promised it would last a thousand years, but it lasted twelve. It ended in May 1945.
- ManchukuoChina's last emperor once ruled Manchukuo, a state where he held no real power. Japan ran it from 1932 to 1945.
- Italian Social RepublicHitler threatened to destroy Milan, Genoa and Turin unless Mussolini led a new Fascist state.
- Polish People's RepublicIn June 1989, Poland's first competitive elections in decades ended in a Solidarity sweep.
- Mongolian People's RepublicIn December 1989, young people flooded Ulaanbaatar's streets to demand political freedom.
- People's Republic of BulgariaCommunist guerrillas launched a coup in Bulgaria on the night of the 9th of September 1944.
- People's Socialist Republic of AlbaniaAlbania gave Yugoslav advisers just 48 hours to leave in 1948. It then blamed Yugoslavia for its own purge.
- ZaireZaire held a presidential election on the 1st of November 1970, and the count was striking. Mobutu Sese Seko won by more than 10,131,000 votes, against only 157 voters who said no. Zaire was a country in Central Africa, run by this one man…
- Soviet UnionOn December 26, 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev officially recognized the Soviet Union's dissolution.