Joseph Stalin’s grip on the Soviet Union produced some of the most extreme episodes of state terror in modern history — forced collectivisation, the Great Purge, the Gulag system, and the catastrophic early years of the Second World War. If you want to understand how a totalitarian state consumes its own people, few subjects reveal it more starkly than Stalinist Russia.
The Explaining History podcast has built one of the most thorough collections of episodes on Stalin and Soviet society available in podcast form. From the peasant wars of the 1920s to the Gulag revolts that followed Stalin’s death in 1953, these episodes combine deep scholarship with clear, engaging storytelling. Below you’ll find our curated selection of the essential episodes — embedded directly so you can listen right here.
Essential Episodes: Stalin and Soviet Terror
1. The Soviet State and the Peasants
The forced collectivisation campaign of the late 1920s and early 1930s was Stalin’s declaration of war on the Soviet peasantry. As the Communist Party perceived a new capitalist class — the Kulaks — emerging from the countryside, Stalin moved to eliminate them as a social force. This episode explores how the relationship between the Soviet state and rural workers deteriorated into mass violence, famine, and deportation.
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2. American Workers in Stalin’s Russia
One of the most remarkable and largely forgotten stories of the 1930s: over 100,000 American workers crossed the Atlantic to work in Stalin’s industrial enterprises, convinced by the Great Depression that Soviet communism represented the future. This episode explores what happened to Stalin’s American guest workers — many of whom took Soviet citizenship and then fell victim to the very terror they had crossed an ocean to escape.
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3. Soviet Society and the Great Terror: 1937
The Great Terror of 1936–1938 was the deadliest phase of Stalinist repression, consuming party officials, military commanders, intellectuals, and ordinary workers alike. This episode examines how the terror became embedded in everyday Soviet life — how denunciations became a survival strategy, and how an entire society learned to navigate a state at war with itself.
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4. Spreading Stalin’s Terror: 1937–1938
How did Stalin’s terror spread to incorporate ever more victims — from party elites down to factory workers, collective farm labourers, and ethnic minorities? This episode explores the mechanisms of contagion: how denunciations, forced confessions, and the logic of self-preservation drove ordinary people to become participants in the purges. Essential listening for anyone trying to understand the social dynamics of totalitarian violence.
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5. Stalin and Poland: 1939
In the months before the Second World War, Stalin conducted secret diplomacy with both the western Allies and Nazi Germany, with Poland as his primary prize. This episode traces Stalin’s strategic thinking as he concluded the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and moved to destroy the Polish state — a decision that set the stage for the Katyn massacres and the partition of Eastern Europe that followed.
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6. Stalin’s War (Part One)
Drawing on historian Sean McMeekin’s revisionist account, this episode challenges the conventional picture of Stalin as caught off guard by Operation Barbarossa in 1941. Instead, it argues that Stalin had been planning an offensive war against Germany, and that his failure to respond to the German invasion reflected not incompetence but a catastrophic misreading of Hitler’s timetable. A provocative and important episode for students of the Eastern Front.
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7. The Battle of Stalingrad: Part Three
The encirclement and destruction of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad in the winter of 1942–43 was the turning point of the Second World War. This episode — the third in a Christmas series on the siege — explores the bloody aftermath: the surrender of Field Marshal Paulus, the collapse of German morale, and what Stalin’s greatest military victory meant for the future of the Soviet Union and occupied Europe.
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8. The Gulag Revolts: 1953
After Stalin’s death in March 1953, the carefully enforced silence of the Gulag system cracked open. Prisoners who had organised clandestine political networks — and who had learned to deal ruthlessly with informants — rose up in a series of revolts that the camp authorities could barely contain. Drawing on Anne Applebaum’s landmark history, this episode explores the remarkable moment when the Soviet Union’s slave labour system fought back.
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Other recommended history podcasts on Stalin and the Soviet Union
Explaining History is far from the only show covering this period. If you want to go deeper, here are the strongest alternatives:
- Revolutions (Mike Duncan) — Season 9 covers the Russian Revolution in exhaustive, authoritative detail. Essential background for understanding the system Stalin inherited and radicalised.
- Hardcore History (Dan Carlin) — “Ghosts of the Ostfront” is a harrowing account of the Eastern Front that puts Stalin’s wartime decisions in their full terrifying context.
- The History of the Twentieth Century (Mark Painter) — Systematic chronological coverage of Soviet history that complements Explaining History’s thematic approach.
- The Stalin Podcast (Albert Knapp) — A dedicated series working through Stalin’s life and the mechanisms of Soviet power in granular detail.
Related Collections
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Further Reading
These articles from the Explaining History archive go deeper on the history behind these episodes:
- Pravda and Stalin’s Terror 1937 — The role of the Soviet press in normalising the Great Terror.
- Stalin’s Five Year Plans — A deep analysis of Soviet industrialisation and its human cost.
- The February Revolution — The 1917 revolution that toppled the Tsar and opened the door to Bolshevik power.
- The Russian Revolution and Stalinism — A deep-dive article tracing the arc from revolutionary promise to Stalinist terror.
