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Initially, Mao proceeded with caution against the social enemies of the Communist Party, using the tools of state repression left behind by Chiang Kai Shek’s Kuomintang. Assigning a new legal social class status to all Chinese citizens saw many later condemned to forced labour, imprisonment Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past to the present. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and share.▸ Support t
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In four years between 1958-62 a catastrophic famine in China killed 40 million people and a quarter of those died in Szechuan, a food rich province. This podcast explores the wilful blindness of Mao and the corruption of the communist party that cost so many lives. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past to the present. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and share.▸ Support the Show & Get Exclusive Co
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In 1947 US President Harry Truman was forced to commit to the defence of Greece and Turkey against the possibility of communist victories in the Greek civil war and the threat of Soviet pressure on Turkey. The British had been forced to end their commitments to both countries, placing the eastern Mediterranean in danger and as a result the flow of Middle Eastern oil to Europe and America. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interview
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How did everyone from German citizens to concentration camp survivors, war ravaged citizens of Poland and partisans across eastern Europe encounter the Red Army in 1945? In some cases violent conquerors and in others as liberators. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past to the present. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and share.▸ Support the Show & Get Exclusive ContentBecome a Patron: patreon.com/
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By 1927 the situation of the Soviet peasantry had just about stabilised from the famine years of the Russian Civil War. However, both Lenin and Stalin looked upon the peasantry and especially the wealthier peasants with barely concealed disgust and suspicion. In Bolshevik thinking, the peasants represented an existential threat to the revolution and would be subsequently broken by Stalin after 1928. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and exper
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Following the end of a bloody civil war in China, the communist party began to rapidly seize the levers of power and create class categorisations for the population. Control of the police and a network of communist spies and informers began a wave of repression which was but a foretaste of catastrophes and horrors to come. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past to the present. If you enjoy the show, pleas
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By 1946 America’s political class, it’s intellectuals and opinion formers and the population as a whole was broadly anti Soviet but had not committed to any major confrontation with the USSR. It would take changes in world circumstances in 1947 to bring about this commitment in the guise of the Truman doctrine. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past to the present. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe
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Between 1928 and 1935, bread rationing in the USSR had been implemented due to the extraction of foodstuffs from the peasantry for export and Stalin’s disastrous collectivisation policy. In 1935 Stalin signalled a shift towards consumerism, but many Soviet citizens saw little improvement in their living conditions. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past to the present. If you enjoy the show, please subsc
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In a two month period Truman’s policy towards the Soviet Union became more entrenched in the face of Soviet advances in eastern Europe and Iran. Truman, with little foreign policy experience was swayed by wartime diplomats such as George Kennan and the former Prime Minister of Britain, Winston Churchill. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past to the present. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and sha
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During the Stalin era, the science of genetics came under a sustained attack and was denounced as a bourgeois ideology. This podcast explores the changing thinking of British communist scientist J.B.S. Haldane and the Stalinist fraud Trofim Lysenko Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past to the present. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and share.▸ Support the Show & Get Exclusive ContentBecome a Pat