On this episode we talk about the Independent State of Croatia, or NDH, lead by Ante Pavelić, and his Catholic fascist group, the Ustasha.

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 Yugoslav regent Prince Paul did a deal with Hitler to avoid an invasion of Yugoslavia, the Serbian Orthodox went nuts and overthrew Paul's government, installed 18 year old King Peter, tore up the pact with Germany, and destroyed the Gestapo HQ in Belgrade. Hitler, unsurprisingly, did not take this well.

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 generation of younger, more radical leadership, with Tito becoming the General Secretary. While living in Paris, he loved to visit to graves of the original “dictatorship of the proletariat” – the Paris Communards, who took power briefly in 1871, before being executed en masse by the French government.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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".

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.