Unbreakable Union

The Cultural Revolution signaled the "Great Break" that promised to generate a new Soviet society. The Communist Party set out to revolutionize Soviet culture. They attacked the old intelligentsia, smashed established hierarchies and sought to create a new socialist man. A few years later, the revolutionaries had built a bureaucracy, the workers and peasants had achieved social mobility, and Stalin was declaring that ‘life ha...

The 1930s transformed Soviet society. The state collectivized agriculture, built an enormous industrial economy, reshaped the cities, and established a political system that reached more deeply into everyday life than ever before.

But these transformations did not happen through economic policy and political decrees alone. They also changed by law.

In the 19...

From the launch of the First Five-Year Plan in 1928 to the eve of the German invasion in 1941, the Soviet Union underwent one of the most dramatic economic transformations in modern history. In little more than a decade, a predominantly agrarian country became one of the world's leading industrial powers, constructing vast steelworks, hydroelectric dams, railways, and entire new cities while mobilizing mill...

Beginning in 1928, the Soviet Union embarked on one of the most radical and thoroughgoing economic experiments in human history: to transform its agricultural base from a quasi-feudal to a comprehensively modern mode of production and management. This process, known as "collectivization" remains one of the defining moments of the soviet experience. 

In this episode, hosts Matthew and Jason explore collectivization, its succes...

The decade following the Russian Civil War was one of reconstruction, experimentation, and extraordinary uncertainty. The Soviet Union had survived foreign intervention, economic collapse, and armed counter-revolution, but many of the questions facing the Bolshevik Party remained unresolved. How quickly should the country industrialize? What role should market forces play under the New Economic Policy? How ...

The Soviet Union was not born as a nation-state, but as a multinational federation. Stretching from the forests of Eastern Europe to the deserts of Central Asia and the mountains of the Caucasus, it was home to hundreds of ethnic groups, dozens of languages, and an extraordinary diversity of cultures, religions, and historical experiences. The collapse of the Russian Empire and the upheavals of revolution a...

Few institutions of the early Soviet state have generated as much fascination, or controversy, as its military and security services. Born in the turmoil of revolution and civil war, the Red Army and the Soviet intelligence apparatus were charged with an immense responsibility: defending a fragile socialist state that faced foreign intervention, armed counter-revolution, political instability, and widesprea...

The Soviet Union emerged from revolution and civil war isolated, exhausted, and surrounded by a world that was, at best, deeply suspicious of its existence. Many of the major powers had intervened in the Russian Civil War, refused to recognize the new government, and hoped that the Bolshevik experiment would ultimately collapse under the weight of economic hardship and political instability. Yet by the end ...

Revolutions do more than change governments, they transform the way people imagine the world. In the years following the October Revolution, the Soviet Union became one of the most exciting laboratories of artistic and cultural experimentation in modern history. Writers, painters, filmmakers, architects, photographers, theatre directors, composers, and designers all grappled with the same extraordinary ques...

The Bolsheviks came to power in the name of the working class, but they inherited a country that was overwhelmingly peasant. In the early 1920s, roughly four out of every five Soviet citizens lived in the countryside, cultivating small plots of land and relying on agriculture for their livelihoods. The future of the Soviet state therefore depended not only on the factories of Moscow and Petrograd, but on the millions of villages th...

The Russian Revolution was carried out in the name of the working class. The Bolsheviks claimed to represent its interests, Soviet power was built upon its political leadership, and Marxist theory placed industrial workers at the heart of the transition to socialism. Yet in the years following the Revolution and the Civil War, the Soviet working class faced an extraordinary paradox. The class that had helpe...

Millions of people who lived through the founding years of the Soviet Union experienced the profound changes brought about by momentous events in history, but beyond the battlefields and debating halls of the Russian Revolution and Civil War, these changes were wrought in the classrooms, courtrooms, workplaces, homes, and places of worship of average Soviet citizens.

In this episode...

After years of revolution, civil war, foreign intervention, and economic collapse, the young Soviet state had survived, but at an enormous cost. Industry had ground to a halt, agricultural production had plummeted, cities were emptying as workers returned to the countryside, and famine threatened millions. The policies of War Communism, adopted in the desperate circumstances of civil war, had helped secure ...

Constitutions are often thought of as dry legal documents; mere collections of articles, clauses, and technical language that seem far removed from the drama of history; however, in revolutionary times, constitutions are declarations of political intent, blueprints for a new society, and statements about who holds power and why.

This is the case of the first two revolutionary consti...

Between 1917 and 1921, Russia experienced one of the most dramatic upheavals in modern history. In the space of just a few years, an empire that had stood for more than three centuries collapsed, two revolutions overturned the old political order, and a brutal civil war determined who would shape the future of the world's largest country. Out of this extraordinary period emerged the Soviet state, an experim...

From the failed uprising of the Decembrists in 1825 to the storming of the Winter Palace in 1917, the Russian revolutionary tradition evolved through nearly a century of struggle, sacrifice, debate, and transformation. Across those decades, generations of revolutionaries confronted one of Europe's most entrenched autocracies, experimenting with ideas that ranged from constitutional monarchy to peasant socia...