A COLD WAR

Part One of our mini-biography of everyone's favorite wheelchair pilot, FDR. His family background (opium traders), his rise, his polio, his affairs, his reforms, his ballsy attitude, his assassination attempt, his concentration camps and how incredibly fucked America was when he was sworn in. In 1933, the US was in dire straits. Three years into the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and a third-rate military. When he died in 1945, it was the world's leading economic and military superpower.

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Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili aka STALIN. Unlike Churchill and Roosevelt, Joseph wasn't born into the elite classes of society. His father was a cobbler; his mother, a housemaid. As a young man, he trained to become a priest, but it didn't take. Soon afterwards he discovered the writings of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, alias Lenin, and joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, ending up the leader of the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s until his death in 1953.

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Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was a fascinating character. His reputation as a "great man", as the brave British wartime leader who defeated the Nazis, hides his reputation before and after WWII - a racist who enjoyed participating in "a lot of jolly little wars against barbarous peoples" and who even his peers thought had extremely racist views. We're not here to demonise Churchill, but, on the other hand, it's our job to peel away the layers of mythology to find the real man who popularised the term "the Iron Curtain".

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Where your intrepid hosts set off on the audio journey of a lifetime and introduce the series.

If you like our intro music, it's by the very great Jofre Horta Antoniou!

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