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In the decade after the October Revolution the relations between the Soviet government and the peasantry declined as Stalin, Lenin and Trotsky all percieved that a new ‘capitalist’ peasantry was emerging in the guise of the Kulak class.miCCNvDJ1GzPhPzbYgfSExplaining 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 ContentBecom
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Even before the war had officially ended, German cities began the process of clearing debris and rubble and rebuilding. Often, municipal authorities didn’t wait for allied authorisation, they simply organised the clearances and began to move the millions of tonnes of brick and stone that had been left in the wake of allied bombing and Soviet shelling. In some instances, vigilante groups ordered former Nazi officials to carry out the clearance work, but before the allied occupation it had been sl
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After the detection of the Soviet Union’s first atomic bomb test in 1949, the race to create bigger and more destructive weapons led to testing in the wide expanses of Utah and at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific. The horrific costs of on civilians of these tests was mirrored by the USSR, which air-detonated bombs in the Urals to see if soldiers on the ground could continue fighting. The effect on the American defence industry of atomic testing was entirely positive however, with a massive arms boom
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China was the first country to be invaded by an Axis power and historian Rana Mitter has argued that its wartime experience is one of the most obscured and misunderstood in the west, though Chinese losses dwarfed those experienced by European and American combatants. Only the USSR suffered more during the war than China, but the immediate civil war that engulfed China and the victory of the communist party in 1949 meant that the Chinese wartime experience was lost under the complexities of Cold
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Eisenhower found McCarthy distasteful but had not desire to enter into a political fight with him. He thought that this would diminish the presidency and give lie to the idea that America was a harmonious post war society. He hoped that the public mood would change and when McCarthy was finally defeated the evidence suggests that attitudes were transitioning away from hysteria anyway. It was his decision to conduct televised hearings into suspected communist subversion in the army that eventuall
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When the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies drove their tanks into Prague in 1968, crushing the nascent pro democracy movement led by Alexander Dubcek, the last pretense of there being anything emancipatory about Soviet Communism disappeared. Instead, the USSR and its sattelite regimes were shorn of any ideological credibility and now faced sullen and uncooperative populations across the eastern bloc whose only interest in communism was whether it could economically deliver. The next two de
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When Mao Zedong, China’s ‘great helmsman’ died in 1976, the China that emerged after destructive reign began to be de-Maoified economically but also culturally. By the early 1980s a cutlure of Mao criticism was prevalent in the arts, television and cinema, along with critiques of the Mao era communist party. This podcast examines the processes of De-Maoification and how China changed throughout the 1980s, and the significance of this in the 21st Century. Explaining History helps you understand t
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The Republican Party and the right of the American liberal establishment colluded in the immediate post war years to wage war against the American left. The Republicans saw it an opportunity to undermine the New Deal years and their liberal collaborators view of the illiberalism of the Soviet Union justiified any and all political crack downs on those they viewed as Soviet agitators in the USA. The chief target for accusations of subversion was the Communist Party of the USA, but actual Soviet i
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By 1937 the Soviet newspaper Pravda (its editorial board pictured above), was a key part of the mechanisms of denunciation and terror. It presented lurid tales of corruption and embezzlement that most Soviet citizens knew happened in the party constantly, weaponising their anger against those accused in the show trials. The purpose was to build a mass popular base for Stalin’s attacks against the party itself. This podcast explores how the paper operated as part of the wider culture of denunciat
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Throughout the 1930s the forces that led to a year of terror in 1937 had been gradually developing, from the trials of bourgeois specialists in the1920s to the murder of Sergei Kirov. The regime initially looked to the population at large to show their anger and rage at figures such as Iuri Piatikov, who as a former ally of Trotsky, was cast as a saboteur and wrecker. Others were characterised as corrupt embezzlers as well as foreign agents. In a time of constant setbacks in industry and society