A COLD WAR

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 has written widely on Soviet and Russian politics, on communist politics more generally, on the Cold War, and on political leadership. His new book is The Human Factor, about the end of the Cold War.

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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 the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, commonly known as Yugoslavia.

It was then that Tito began his career as a revolutionary.

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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 trying to understand a ladder.

So on this episode, we do a quick review of the region from the fall of Rome through to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

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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. When the Russian Revolution broke out in 1917, he became a Bolshevik and fought with them against the White Army.

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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.

They saw it as a matter of self-defence against the USA.

In 1947, Andrei Zhdanov introduced the 'two-camps doctrine’.

And finally, on 29 August 1949 the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb: RDS-1, codenamed "First Lightning", but known to the West as "Joe-1".

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When Stalin and Molotov heard what Truman had said at Potsdam about the USA having a new bomb ready, they saw it as a direct threat to the Soviet Union and increased their support for Soviet scientists. They might have been further advanced if it hadn't been for the purge of Soviet military strategists like Mikhail Tukhachevskii, aka "The Red Napoleon".

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It’s commonly thought in the West that the Soviet Union stole all of the secrets for building a bomb from their spies in the West. Not exactly correct. When nuclear fission was discovered in Berlin in December 1938, the Soviets were as quick to react as the West. But their economy wasn't as strong, and they had many more problems to contend with, so it didn't get a high priority. And then 4 million Germans invaded. On this episode we being to tell the story of the Nobel Prize-winning Soviet scientists who lead the work.

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When WWII broke out, the Zionists declared their support for Britain. It's not like they were going to throw their lot in with the Nazis. For the Arabs, the choice was trickier. The British were seen by the Arabs as the protectors of Zionism while the Nazis were against the Jews - and the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And for the first few years, the Nazis looked like the favourites to win.

Then Churchill came to power in the UK and threw his lot in with the Zionists. In May 1942 an Extraordinary Zionist Conference in New York voted to support what became known as the Biltmore Program, for the hotel in which they met. It called for “Palestine to be established as a Jewish Commonwealth integrated in the structure of the new democratic world."

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After The Peel Commission recommending moving hundreds of thousands of Palestinians off their land by force, the Arab Revolt re-emerged with hundreds of terrorist attacks during 1937-38 against the British and Jews - and even against Arab collaborators. The British cracked down and deported many of their leaders. Irgun, the Jewish militant group, met this threat with their own terrorism. Hitler used the situation to score propaganda points against the Jews and the British.

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After the Great Arab Revolt of 1936, the British pretended not to understand the causes of Arab anger and held The Peel Commission to get to the bottom of it. Peel recommended partitioning the land, giving one-fifth to the Jews - forcing 225,000 Arabs to move off their land.

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