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In the immediate post war years, the arrival of Black British citizens from the Caribbean was met with widespread racism across most areas of British life. Black people encountering Britain for the first time discovered not a wealthy land of enterprise but one with a poor white working class whom assumed superiority by dint of their skin colour. Help the podcast to continue bringing you history each weekIf you enjoy the Explaining History podcast and its many years of content and would like to
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Lenin had no intention of national independence for Ukraine or any of the other non Russian nations of the former Tsarist empire. This podcast explores how the Bolsheviks responded to the national movement in Ukraine during the Russian Civil War.Help the podcast to continue bringing you history each weekIf you enjoy the Explaining History podcast and its many years of content and would like to help the show continue, please consider supporting it in the following ways:If you want to go ad-free,
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In 1935, Italy invaded Abyssinia, creating one of final crises of the League of Nations. The deal made between British Foreign Secretary Samuel Hoare and his counterpart Pierre Laval to allow League of Nations sanctions against Italy to be broken led to widespread outrage. What did ordinary British people think about tihs and how did it shape the actions of the political class?Help the podcast to continue bringing you history each weekIf you enjoy the Explaining History podcast and its many year
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How did Stalin’s terror spread to incorporate more and more victims? This podcast episode explores the effect of Stalin’s terror on ordinary people and how denunciations, confessions and the effect of ‘contagion’ caused the terror to metastasise.Help the podcast to continue bringing you history each weekIf you enjoy the Explaining History podcast and its many years of content and would like to help the show continue, please consider supporting it in the following ways:If you want to go ad-free,
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The development of the Holocaust, from the mass murder of Soviet soldiers who the SS exploited for labour before killing, to the industrialised mass murder of Europe’s Jews went through a series of contradictory and chaotic developments between the start of Operation Barbarossa and the Wannsee Conference in early 1942. This episode of the Explaining History podcast is based in Nikolaus Wachsmann’s excellent book KLHelp the podcast to continue bringing you history each weekIf you enjoy the Explai
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By the late 1950s ties between the USSR and China were weakening and there was mutual hostility and suspicion between the two powers. Deng Xiaoping in 1960 was involved in advancing China’s role as a key player in the shaping of world communist thought. This podcast examines his role and the crises that shape both regimes.Help the podcast to continue bringing you history each weekIf you enjoy the Explaining History podcast and its many years of content and would like to help the show continue, p
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In the aftermath of Germany’s stunning victories in 1940, the countries of western Europe were economically exploited by Germany. From the level of individual soldiers who stole and purchased at fire sale cost consumer goods that their families in Germany couldn’t possibly afford, all the way to the wholesale expropriation of French, Dutch, Belgian and Scandinavian economies by the Nazi state. Help the podcast to continue bringing you history each weekIf you enjoy the Explaining History podcast
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In 1941 the USSR was desperate for American war materiel from trucks to tanks to aircraft and grain but the intensity of German submarine and aircraft attacks on convoys sailing to the Soviet Arctic ports meant that in the summer of 1942 they had to temporarily be suspended and re-routed by the Pacific. In the meantime the complex web of diplomacy, suspicion and mistrust between western allies and the USSR had side effects including the further mistreatment of Stalin’s Polish prisoners.Help the
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In 1947 US Secretary of State George Marshall announced that the US government would offer unprecedented assistance to the European countries devastated by war in a bid to prevent the expansion of communism and other extremist politics into western Europe. The fear that countries like France might even fall to the communists after the wave of new communist states emerging across eastern Europe was extremely concerning to US policy makers. The grants offered to Europe, of course, was not born of
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The western world as we understand it, is over. China’s advances in key technologies has reached an inflection point that is historically without precedent, soon western countries will offer access to their markets in return for Chinese technology transfers. Listen to this special Friday analysis report on China and the west.This is part seven of the Explaining History study course based on the AQA A level history module Revolution and Dictatorship: Russia 1917-53.In this episode we explore the