Explaining History

In 1945, after the devastation of a long war across Asia, Britain's hold over her Indian empire was greatly weakened. The new Labour Government was notionally committed to Indian independence, but it was the inability of Britain to continue ruling and the development of India as a powerful new military force in the region that made independence an inevitability.

In the aftermath of the October Revolution in 1917, Constructivism, a radical avante garde modernist style of architecture became influential. The Constructivists enthusiasm for the revolution was not shared by Lenin and the Bolsheviks who viewed it with suspicion. In 1932 architecture and all other forms of art and culture were finally harnessed in the interests of Stalinism and the Constructivists were replaced by Stalinist architecture.

Following the death of US president Franklin Roosevelt, his successor, Harry Truman entered the Oval Office in the last days of World War Two. The inexperienced and untested president charted a new course in US diplomacy, ending his predecessor's accommodation of Soviet demands. One of the key moments in the development of the Cold War began in April 1945 with Truman's presidency.

By the end of the 1960s the Cold War was in deadlock and America was mired in war in Vietnam. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger attempted to address these crises but in a secretive and controlling fashion. The results were a major shift in Cold War relations but also terrible devastation and destruction in Asia.

During the Second World War, Subhas Chandra Bose courted Soviet, Nazi and Imperial Japanese leaders in order to build an army to force the British out of India. He died in a plane crash in Taiwan in 1945 but was seen by many in India as a freedom fighter and a hero.

In 1974 the government of Edward Heath was defeated in an election called to give Heath a mandate against the trade unions. His nemesis was the miners union organiser Arthur Scargill. In 1984 Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher inflicted a crushing defeat on the union movement, a victory long in the planning by the Conservative Government.

In August 1945 two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan ending the Second World War in Asia. However the bombs did not end conflict across the region, instead they ended Japan's involvement as an imperial power. Fighting continued in Asia throughout the next three decades as the new fault lines of the cold war emerged and European powers sought to regain control of their colonies.

At the end of the Second World War, the USA was the wealthiest society in history and experienced an economic boom that was to last for nearly three decades. This boom had a profound transformational effect on American society and was the dawning of the USA that dominated the world in the second half of the 20th Century.

During the chaos of the First World War a generation of British and American correspondents in Russia astutely predicted the failure of the Provisional Government and came to see the Bolsheviks as a viable alternative. Some, like Arthur Ransome and John Reed went further and became passionate advocates for the new regime led by Vladimir Lenin.

Throughout the 20th Century Romania has endured the twin catastrophes of fascism and communism. During the Second World War Romania was deeply involved in the holocaust and the development of an aggressive nationalism that remained undiminished throughout the communist era was chiefly to blame.

Margaret Thatcher was a politician convinced that a return to 'family values' after two decades of seeming moral decline in the 60s and 70s was part of the key to restoring British fortunes. Throughout the 1980s, however, this manifested itself in a prolonged attack on gay rights, during a time when the existence of the HIV virus and AIDS was associated in the press with the LGBT community. During the 1980s however, Conservative policies led to a politicisation of the gay community and the question of gay rights in a way that had not previously occurred in Britain.

In February 1943, after one of the longest coldest winters of the war, the news that the German 6th Army had been lost at Stalingrad shocked the nation. In response Joseph Goebbels, the public face of the regime made the most important speech of his career announcing a new time of struggle and total war.

During the First World War the racist terrorist organisation the Ku Klux Klan reformed and by 1924 boasted four million members. However five years later it was once more a political irrelevance.

In August 1941, the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and US President Franklin Roosevelt met along with their top military and diplomatic advisors at Placentia Bay off the coast of Newfoundland. Their discussions shaped the western allied war aims and laid the foundations of a post war order based on the United Nations

In August 1961 East German and Soviet forces created a wall around West Berlin, preventing East Germans from fleeing to the west. The failures of Soviet Communism and the attractions of a prosperous west had led a fifth of the population to migrate. This podcast explores the crisis and how the wall led to a gradual stabilisation in the Cold War in Europe.