History Sphere Podcast

After 1956, the Communist leaders of Hungary elected to rule with a softer touch than was employed elsewhere in the Eastern Bloc. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, Hungary became just the second...

3 Feb 202538min

In the summer of 1980, the workers at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, Poland went on strike to demand the reinstatement of a fired coworker and the recognition of their independent trade union. They wer...

12 Jan 202545min

In addition to the widespread loss of faith in the Soviet system by ordinary citizens as a result of the Chernobyl disaster, by 1987, the Soviet Union also faced a deepening economic crisis. The refor...

30 Dec 202434min

The initial response of the Soviet government to the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl was the perfect storm of incompetence, callousness, and shameless lies. This bungled exposed the flaws in the Soviet ...

16 Dec 202434min

In the early morning hours of April 26, 1986, reactor number 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station suffered a catastrophic failure when the poor decisions of the plant's electrical engineers combin...

18 Nov 202431min

In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev did not yet have the political capital or the right people in place to enact his bold domestic reforms. However, in the realm of foreign policy, he was able to make a splash...

3 Nov 202431min

Mikhail Gorbachev was a natural leader and a skilled administrator, but little about his early life led people to believe that he would usher in an era of revolutionary change when he became General S...

15 Okt 202447min

The period between the death of Leonid Brezhnev in 1982 and the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 is often glossed over in histories of the Soviet Union. Yet, much of what happened in this time period...

30 Sep 202438min