Frank Capra knocks it out of the park in this 1945 propaganda film that conveys our self-image as Americans and our role on the planet as World War II winds down and the Cold War begins. The main takeaways from the film is the idea that the US is an exceptional nation and worth …

Well, this is awkward!   At this point in the timeline we’ve spent decades lambasting communism and now we have to make the case that they’re really not so bad after all to justify the alliance with the USSR during the war.    Director Frank Capra proves he’s up to the (difficult) task of …

The best way to describe this film is the 300 of the Soviet Union…and one of the most influential films of all time.   Although the film was made in 1938, the USSR knocked a thin coat of dust off of it and rereleased it in 1941 immediately following the Nazi invasion – it …

When the Japanese attacked the American Navy at Pearl Harbor, that was only half of the story.   The other half is that they went after colonial possessions of Great Britain, the Netherlands and the United States in the Pacific (they had snatched French Indochina from the French a year earlier) in order to …

The sleeping giant is given a very rude awakening on a sleepy Sunday morning when Imperial Japan strikes at Pearl Harbor.  A rock was thrown at a hornets’ nest that day and in many ways, the hornets never came back to the nest. The attack on Pearl Harbor and the declaration of war …

America dips her toe back in the pool of world turmoil again after a couple decade hiatus.  Although non-interventionalism ruled public discourse, eventually there was enough support for at least assisting our old friends Great Britain and France and our ‘comrades’ in the USSR. The USA responded by assisting allied nations with the materials and …

Operation Barbarossa began on June 22, 1941 but it took Stalin almost two weeks to finally address the Soviet people.   Apparently (and maybe understandably) the stress of having the largest military operation in history thrown at you caused him to have a mental breakdown.   After a few days of solitude, Stalin was eventually …

In the last episode I used the term “realpolitik” and decided it needed a little further unpacking because of how important the concept is to the Cold War and specifically this upcoming block of history where we’ll see the US and the USSR as allies. Long story short, realpolitik is politics or diplomacy without regard …

We’ve covered a lot of ground so far, from the Communist Manifesto all the way up to Stalin going apeshit killing people and building stuff.  We’re ready to move on to the next segment of the podcast, the Second World War.   This is where the Cold War belligerents really assert themselves inthe world and …

Today we’re talking about the Soviet Union’s first and second five year plans, launched by Stalin in order to bring the USSR up to snuff with the rest of the world in short order.   The first five year plan focused on building up an industrial base and collectivizing agriculture, the second five year plan …