May 22, 2020 | Podcast, Premium |
The Jasenovac concentration camp, established in Slavonia, aka “the Auschwitz of the Balkans”, “specialized in one-on-one violence of a particularly brutal kind” and prisoners were primarily murdered manually with the use of blunt objects such as knives, hammers and...
May 15, 2020 | Podcast, Premium |
In 1941, after the creation of the NDH, Ante Pavelić, the leader of the Catholic fascist Ustasha, went to Rome to receive the blessing of Pope Pius XII – while his administration was publicly saying they were going to kill a third of the Croatian Orthodox....
May 9, 2020 | Podcast, Premium |
Today we start telling the story of the Independent State of Croatia, or NDH, lead by Ante Pavelić, and his Catholic fascist group, the Ustasha, after Hitler invaded and broke up the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1941. They built concentration camps to house and execute...
Apr 24, 2020 | Podcast, Premium |
As caretaker secretary of the Yugoslav Party from 1937 to 1940, Tito first moved the Central Committee from Paris to Zagreb, then built up a new, young leadership loyal to him. These guys would be his inner circle for decades to come. When, in February 1941, the...
Apr 18, 2020 | Podcast, Premium |
Back to Tito and Yugoslavia. In 1934, the Croat Catholics rose up against the Serb King Alexander, leading to his assassination by a Ustasha agent while visiting France. Meanwhile Stalin purged the leadership of the Yugoslav Communist Party, opening the door to a new...
Apr 9, 2020 | Podcast, Premium |
My guest today is Archie Brown, emeritus professor of politics at the University of Oxford and an emeritus fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford, where he served as a professor of politics and director of St Antony’s Russian and East European Centre. He...
Apr 3, 2020 | Podcast, Premium |
By the time Tito got back to his home country in 1920, the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, German and Ottoman empires had all been broken up. In their place were the independent states of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and...
Mar 24, 2020 | Podcast, Premium |
In order to understand the career of Josip Broz Tito, we need to understand the religious and political history of the Balkans. As historian Richard West says: anyone who approaches the Yugoslavs without some knowledge of their religious history is like a chicken...
Mar 21, 2020 | Podcast, Premium |
Josip Broz Tito grew up in poverty on a small farm in Croatia. He dropped out of school at 13, and apprenticed as a locksmith and mechanic. In 1913 he was conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian Army and ended up in WWI, where he was injured and captured by Russians....
Mar 6, 2020 | Podcast, Premium |
After the bombing of Hiroshima, the Soviets work their asses off to get their own nuclear weapons as quickly as possible, despite the enormous financial commitment it required and the other, more pressing social and economic problems the country was facing after WWII....
