• See Origin Story LIVE at The Tabernacle, London on Thur Nov 13. ⁠Buy tickets here.

Welcome back to Origin Story: The Story of Socialism as we resume the story of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin in part two: Power.

It’s 1917. The Bolsheviks have seized control of Russia, the world’s first socialist state, but they’re a small party in a very big country, besieged by enemies at home and abroad. No sooner has it extricated itself from the First World War than Russia is plunged into an existentially perilous civil war between the Reds and the Tsarist Whites and, well, everybody else. 

The war accelerates Russia's transformation into a dictatorship, with one-party rule, a secret police force and a ruthless disregard for human life. The suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion in 1921 confirms that the dictatorship of the proletariat will brook no dissent.

Meanwhile in Germany, revolutionary hopes are crushed with the murder of German communist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. As other communist uprisings also fail, Trotsky’s dream of world revolution fades and Stalin’s vision of “socialism in one country” prevails.

As Lenin’s health collapses, a succession battle between Stalin, Trotsky and other leading Bolsheviks begins that will last for most of the decade. It ends in 1929 with Stalin triumphant, Trotsky in exile, the dead Lenin a kind of deity, and the USSR’s age of terror ready to begin.

Could the progress of the revolution have been different without the brutal chaos of the Civil War or was tyranny always part of the plan? How did Stalin outwit his rivals to take over from Lenin, and how did Trotsky blow it? Why didn’t communist revolutions succeed anywhere else but Russia? How was the new regime perceived by socialists around the world? And did Rosa Luxemburg, more than anyone, represent the humane, democratic socialism that might have been?

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Reading list

• Franz Borkenau, The Communist International (1938)

• Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879-1921 (1954)

• Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky, 1921-1929 (1959)

• Ian Dunt, How to Be a Liberal: The Story of Freedom and the Fight for Its Survival (2020)

• Max Eastman, Reflections on the Failure of Socialism (1955)

• Elzbieta Ettinger, Rosa Luxemburg: A Life (1988)

• Emma Goldman, My Disillusionment in Russia (1923)

• Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator (2017)

• Dorian Lynskey, The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (2019)

• Reds, co-written and directed by Warren Beatty (1981)

• Bertrand Russell, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism (1920)

• Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography (2000)

• Robert Service, Stalin: A Biography (2004)

• Robert Service, Trotsky: A Biography (2009)

• Boris Souvarine, Stalin: A Critical Study of Bolshevism (1939)

• Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism: Against Kautsky (1920)

• Dimitri Volkogonov, Lenin: A New Biography (1994)

• H. G. Wells, Russia in the Shadows (1920)

• Yevgeny Zamyatin, We (1921)

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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• See Origin Story LIVE at The Tabernacle, London on Thur 13 Nov. ⁠Buy tickets here.

Welcome to Origin Story. The Story of Socialism is our first ever themed season and now we begin our first ever three-part story because there’s just so much to tell: Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin.

Vladimir Lenin’s political journey begins in 1887 when he’s 17 and his older brother is executed for plotting to assassinate the Tsar. As Russian socialism pivots from rural agitation to Marxism, Lenin develops his own version of Marxism: violent revolution led by an elite vanguard rather than the masses, leading to a temporary dictatorship of the proletariat (details TBC).

Forced to leave Russia, Lenin wages a power struggle for command of its socialist exiles in Europe, splitting the party into his own aggressive Bolsheviks and the more moderate Mensheviks. In the process, he first meets the flamboyant writer and orator Leon Trotsky and the sullen Georgian activist who will become Stalin.

After the failure of Russia’s 1905 revolution, Lenin tightens his grip on the movement. In 1907, the socialists of the Second International pledge not to fight each other in a European war but the Polish-German Marxist Rosa Luxemburg predicts that nationalism will trump class solidarity when it comes to the crunch. She’s right. When the First World War begins in 1914, socialists take up arms and the Second International implodes. 

The war also finishes off the teetering Tsarist regime in February 1917 and a Provisional Government of liberals and socialists takes over, but it’s doomed from the start. Lenin races to Petrograd, where he reconnects with Trotsky and Stalin and convinces the Bolsheviks to stage a second revolution. In October, Petrograd revolts, the government caves in and Lenin takes charge of a vast empire of 125 million people — the world’s first socialist regime. Leninism has triumphed. The dictatorship of the proletariat can begin.

What was Leninism? How did one man redefine Russian Marxism and squash his rivals? How did he see the distinction between socialism and communism? What role did the very different personalities of Trotsky and Stalin play on the road to revolution? Was it only the war that made revolution possible, let alone inevitable? Who predicted years in advance that Bolshevism would mean tyranny? And is this really want Marx wanted? Join us as we begin one of the most earth-shaking stories of the 20 th century

• Use code ORIGINSTORY at the link below to get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan: ⁠https://incogni.com/originstory

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

• Buy the Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory 

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Reading list

• Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky: 1879-1921 (1954)

• Ian Dunt, How to be a Liberal: The Story of Freedom and the Fight for Its Survival (2020)

• Elzbieta Ettinger, Rosa Luxemburg: A Life (1988)

• Oleg V Khlevniuk, Stalin: New biography of a dictator (2015)

• V. I. Lenin, What Is to Be Done? (1902)

• V. I. Lenin, ‘The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution’ (aka the April Theses) (1917)

• V. I. Lenin, The State and Revolution (1917)

• Reds, co-written and directed by Warren Beatty (1981)

• Kevin Morgan, ‘Rummaging in Trotsky’s dustbin or what does the left need with history?’ (2003)

• John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World (1919)

• Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography (2000)

• Robert Service, Stalin: A Biography (2004)

• Robert Service, Trotsky: A Biography (2009)

• Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution (1932)

• Dmitri Volkogonov, Lenin: A New Biography (1994)

• Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (1940)
Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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Welcome back to Season Eight: The Story of Socialism as we conclude the story of Karl Marx and the birth of Marxism.

It’s 1849. In the wake of the failed revolutions in Europe, Marx and his wife Jenny arrive in London for a fresh start. But his magnum opus, Capital, is a long time coming due to chronic illness, the loss of three children and recurring money worries. The great critic of capitalism is such a disaster with finances that his friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels has to take a job at his father’s textile company in Manchester to keep the project of communism afloat. Then there are the feuds. So many feuds!

Eventually, in the 1860s, a flurry of productivity bears fruit. Capital is finally finished (or volume one at least) and Marx becomes head of the International Working Men’s Association, where he wages war against rival socialists and the fearsome anarchist Mikhail Bakunin.

In 1871, Marx’s response to the doomed experiment of the Paris Commune makes him famous at last — and infamous. He’s the “Red Doctor” accused of orchestrating a vast communist conspiracy that doesn’t actually exist. But then he falls quiet, retreating from political activism and writing relatively little. When he dies in 1883, there are only 11 mourners at his funeral. It is left to Engels to simplify and spread the tenets of Marxism, revolutionising European socialism.

Where did Capital succeed and fail? What did he get right and wrong about capitalism and why was he so vague about the future of communism? What does Marx’s clash with Bakunin tell us about the dangerous flaws in his theory? Did Engels rewrite Marxism in the process

of popularising it? And has any great writer ever been as bad with deadlines as Marx?

• Use code ORIGINSTORY at the link below to get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan: ⁠https://incogni.com/originstory

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

• Buy the Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory 

• Subscribe to Origin Story on YouTube

Reading list

• Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment: Fourth Edition (1978)

• John Cassidy, ‘The Return of Karl Marx’, The New Yorker (1997)

• Christopher Clark, Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848-1849 (2023)• GDH Cole: History of Socialist Thought, Volume one, The Forerunners (1953)

• GDH Cole: Socialism in evolution (1938)

• Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880)

• E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848 (1962)

• E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital: 1848-1875 (1975)

• Tristram Hunt, Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels (2009)

• In Our Time: Marx, Radio 4 (2005)

• In Our Time: Hegel’s Philosophy of History, Radio 4 (2022)

• Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach (1845, published 1888)

• Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)

• Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852)

• Karl Marx, Preface to Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy (1859)

• Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867, 1885, 1894)

• Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (1871)

• Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875, first published 1891)

• Louis Menand, ‘Karl Marx, Yesterday and Today’, The New Yorker (2016)• Bertrand Russell, Roads to freedom: Socialism, Anarchism and Syndicalism (1918)

• Peter Singer, Hegel: A Very Short Introduction (2001)

• Peter Singer, Marx: A Very Short Introduction: Second Edition (2018)

• Jonthan Sperber, Karl Marx: A 19th Century Life (2013)

• Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (2016)

• Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader: Second Edition (1978)

• Francis Wheen, Karl Marx (1999)

• Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (1940)

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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A spectre is haunting Origin Story — the spectre of Karl Marx. Welcome back to season eight: The Story of Socialism. Last week, we explored the various socialisms that were exciting Europe when Marx was a young man. Now we turn to the man himself, and his close friend and ally Friedrich Engels. The landslide winner of an In Our Time poll to choose the most important philosopher of all time, Marx introduced gigantic new ideas that still inform our thinking whether you’re a Marxist or not.

Born in Prussia in 1818, Marx was on course to become one of many young German philosophers wrestling with the legacy of Hegel. But when he was frozen out of academia, journalism set him on a more confrontational, activist path. His extraordinary intellect was wrapped up in a spectacularly belligerent personality, addicted to vicious feuds and denunciations. He could start a fight in an empty room.

As he moved from Prussia to Paris to Brussels during the 1840s, Marx went on a political journey, too: from liberal to socialist to head of the Communist League. Along the way, he built the basic framework of Marxism: the class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat, the value of labour, the volatile, insatiable energy of capitalism, and the dialectical progress of history. It was nothing less than a new way of understanding the world.

Marx’s first phase culminated in The Communist Manifesto in 1848, the same year that revolution swept the great cities of Europe. Explaining its failure was the first task of Marx’s next phase as he left the continent for good, settled in London and embarked on the torturous process of writing his masterwork, Capital.

How did Marx become a communist? What did he owe to Hegel? Why was his friendship with Engels so essential? Why was he more dedicated to waging war on his former friends than his obvious enemies? Which rival socialist called him “the tapeworm of socialism”? And what exactly is dialectical materialism anyway?

“Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways,” Marx wrote. “The point is to change it.” This is how he began to change it.

• Use code ORIGINSTORY at the link below to get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan: ⁠https://incogni.com/originstory

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

• Buy the Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory 

• Subscribe to Origin Story on YouTube

Reading list

• Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment: Fourth Edition (1978)

• John Cassidy, ‘The Return of Karl Marx’, The New Yorker (1997)

• Christopher Clark, Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848-1849 (2023)• GDH Cole: History of Socialist Thought, Volume one, The Forerunners (1953)

• GDH Cole: Socialism in evolution (1938)

• Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880)

• E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848 (1962)

• E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital: 1848-1875 (1975)

• Tristram Hunt, Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels (2009)

• In Our Time: Marx, Radio 4 (2005)

• In Our Time: Hegel’s Philosophy of History, Radio 4 (2022)

• Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach (1845, published 1888)

• Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)

• Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852)

• Karl Marx, Preface to Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy (1859)

• Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867, 1885, 1894)

• Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (1871)

• Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875, first published 1891)

• Louis Menand, ‘Karl Marx, Yesterday and Today’, The New Yorker (2016)• Bertrand Russell, Roads to freedom: Socialism, Anarchism and Syndicalism (1918)

... Reading list continues on Patreon

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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Welcome to season eight of Origin Story. This season we’re trying something different: one big narrative across multiple topics. It’s the story of socialism, from the earliest blueprints to the present day, Lenin to Labour, Marx to Mao, Gramsci to Gorbachev and Proudhon to Piketty. We’re talking about the evolution of a powerful idea in all its manifestations and exploring how it came to encompass both Soviet communism and European social democracy. It’s arguably the most earth-shaking political concept of the last 200 years.

H.G. Wells summed up early versions of socialism as “a vast system of questionings and repudiations, political doubts, social doubts, hesitating inquiries, and experiments”. We begin in the wake of the French Revolution with the radical republican Gracchus Babeuf and his “enraged ones” calling for absolute equality. In France, the rebel aristocrat Henri de Saint-Simon imagined a progressive secular technocracy while Charles Fourier dreamt of communes in which the human spirit was liberated from drudgery and oppression. In the UK, the businessman Robert Owen modelled a new society based on cooperation and the fair exchange of labour. These so-called “utopian socialists” inspired numerous attempts to build a better world in miniature.

The 1830s and 1840s produced an explosion of new words to make sense of immense social change: socialism, communism, anarchism, capitalism. Thinkers like the utopian Étienne Cabet, the anarchist Joseph Proudhon and the politician Louis Blanc introduced concepts that are with us to this day, while the scholar Lorenz von Stein was the first to ask: what is the difference between socialism and communism anyway? (We’ll come back to this.) Out on the streets, Louis Blanqui championed revolutionary violence. And in 1848, actual revolution broke out in the great cities of Europe.

Soaking up all these ideas and developing their own version of communism were Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels — the subjects of our next two episodes. But even as Marxism swept Europe at the end of the century, the American journalist Edward Bellamy revived utopian socialism and made it more popular than ever. That dream refused to die. 

What unites all these disparate visions that called themselves socialism? How did they feed into both Marxism and the Labour Party? How did America become the world’s biggest laboratory for socialist experiments? Why did they fail? And can a change in the economic system really transform human nature? Join us as we begin the epic story of socialism.

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Reading list

• Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888, OUP edition 2007)

• James Boyle, What Is Socialism? (1912)

• Étienne Cabet, The Voyage to Icaria (1839)

• G.D.H. Cole, Socialist Thought: The Forerunners 1789-1850 (1959)

• G.D.H Cole: Socialism in Evolution (1938)

• Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880)

• Leslie Holmes, Communism: A Very Short Introduction (2009)

• William Morris, News from Nowhere (1890)

• Michael Newman, Socialism: A Very Short Introduction (2020)

• John Humphrey Noyes, History of American Socialisms (1870)

• Betrand Russell: Proposed Roads to Freedom (1918)

• Robert Service, Comrades: Communism: A World History (2007)

• George Bernard Shaw et al, Fabian Essays in Socialism (1889)

• Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (2016)

• H.G. Wells, New Worlds for Old (1908)

• Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891)

• Lectures on Modern European Intellectual History, The Utopian Socialists: Charles Fourier

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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British Chinese compose nearly one per cent of the British population, but they are culturally and politically ignored with precious little representation in politics or television.

In this Origin Story special edition, we trace the history of the British Chinese community, from the days of Roman Britain to the present day. Along the way, we see the construction of the first Chinatown in London's Limehouse, at the height of Empire, when ports function as joining-places for the world. We witness the racism that hit Chinese communities during the wars, when fear of 'Yellow Peril' and miscegenation resulted in deportation programmes against the very people who had helped Britain in the fight against Germany. And we follow the second triumphant wave of immigration in the 20th Century, in the restaurant business, as Chinese food helps democratise the practice of eating out in Britain.

We then look at the extraordinary accomplishments of the British Chinese in the modern era, particularly in education, culture and the economy. And we start to tease apart a richer, deeper story about multicultural Britain, one which is much more varied and surprising than people allow for in the barren conversation about immigration we read in the newspapers every day.

Support Origin Story on Patreon:

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Reading list

• William Poole, The Letters of Shen Fuzong to Thomas Hyde, 1687-88, British Library Journal, volume 2015, article 9

• Earle Gale, Chinese pathfinders paved the way in UK hundreds of years ago, China Daily

• Marc Horne, Extraordinary tale of first Chinese Scotsman, The Times

• Anonymous, William Macao

• Sylvia Hahn, Stanley Nadel (eds) Asian Migrants in Europe: Transcultural Connections

• Gregor Benton and Edmund Terence Gomez, The Chinese in Britain, 1800–Present 

• Anonymous, Liverpool Chinatown History

• Jody-Lan Castle, Looking for my Shanghai father, BBC.co.uk

• Anonymous, London by ethnicity: Analysis, The Guardian

• Emily Thomas, British Chinese people say racism against them is 'ignored', BBC.co.uk

• John Hills et al, An Anatomy of Economic Inequality in the UK: Report of the National Equality Panel, Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, LSE. 

• Tze Ming Mok and Lucinda Platt, All look the same? Diversity of labour market outcomes of Chinese ethnic group populations in the UK, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies

• Zain Mohyuddin and Sophie Stowers, Minorities Report: The Attitudes of Britain's Ethnic Minority Population, UK in a Changing Europe

• Anon, Chinese ethnic group: facts and figures, Gov.uk

• Anonymous, Ethnicity pay gaps, UK: 2012 to 2022, ONS• Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume One

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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Welcome back to Origin Story. In this bonus episode Dorian tells the unnervingly relevant story of Enoch Powell’s so-called “Rivers of Blood” speech. On 20 April 1968, the Conservative MP for Wolverhampton South West delivered probably the most explosive political speech in British peacetime history, bringing into the mainstream opinions previously confined to the far right. As Keir Starmer discovered, even the faintest echo of the speech is toxic on the left, yet on the right newspaper columnists and politicians like Robert Jenrick are reviving Powell’s rhetoric with impunity.

We start by examining Powell’s youth as a brilliant scholar, war hero and ardent imperialist who developed an idiosyncratic version of nationalism. As a junior minister and pioneering neoliberal  in the 1950s, he barely mentioned race or immigration but he became increasingly obsessed during the 1960s, and increasingly vocal. Powell contrived his speech to have the biggest possible impact and he succeeded. While he was sacked by Tory leader Ted Heath and denounced as an evil race-baiter by the establishment (even The Beatles took a shot), he became the most popular politician in Britain almost overnight. It was the first eruption of what we now know as right-wing populism and its aftershocks extended from Rock Against Racism and no-platforming to the Great Replacement Theory and Brexit.

How did one speech poison British politics? What led Powell to deliver it? What can it teach us about the timeless tricks of anti-immigrant oratory? Did he merely activate the British public’s latent racism or actively feed it? What lessons have politicians failed to learn about how to deal with anti-immigrant sentiment? And why are Britain’s elites more tolerant of overt racism in 2025 than they were in 1968?

Support Origin Story on Patreon:

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Reading list

• Anonymous, ‘An Evil Speech’, The Times (22 April 1968)

• Anonymous, ‘Coloured Family Attacked’, The Times (1 May 1968)

• Paul Foot, The Rise of Enoch Powell (1969)

• Simon Heffer, Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell (1998)

• Tom McTague, Between the Waves: The Hidden History of a Very British Revolution 1945-2016 (2025)

• Sarfraz Manzoor, ‘Black Britain’s Darkest Hour’, The Guardian (2008)

• Caroline Moorhead, ‘A Would-Be Leader Deserted by Destiny’, The Times (12 May 1975)

• Enoch Powell, the ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, 20 April 1968

• J. Enoch Powell, Freedom and Reality, edited by John Wood (1969)

• Andrew Roth, Enoch Powell: Tory Tribune (1970)

• Michael Savage, ‘Fifty years on, what is the legacy of Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech?’, The Observer (2018)

• Douglas E. Schoen, Enoch Powell and the Powellites (1977)

• Robert Shepherd, Enoch Powell (1996)

• Evan Smith, No Platform: A History of Anti-Fascism, Universities and the Limits of Free Speech (2020)

• Bill Smithies and Peter Fiddick, Enoch Powell on Immigration (1969)
Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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Welcome back to Origin Story. This bonus episode is something a bit different: a story about the power of music and the music of power. 

Tortured genius? Stalinist stooge? Undercover dissident? Perhaps no musician better represents the competing demands of art and politics than Dmitri Shostakovich, who died 50 years ago this week. He has been called the most brilliant symphonist of his age and the most controversial composer since Wagner.

Shostakovich’s career began with Lenin and ended with Brezhnev but his great antagonist was Stalin, a self-styled music buff and maestro in the art of fear. From symphony to symphony, Shostakovich danced on the edge of a knife. Sometimes he was the Soviet Union’s favourite composer, bathing in privilege and acclaim. At other times he was an “enemy of the people”, bullied into silence and terrified for his life.

Nobody knew what Shostakovich’s music was really saying until the posthumous publication of his memoir Testimony made an extraordinary claim that turned all assumptions on their head. But was this just a dying man’s attempt to save his reputation and was Testimony even his words or a brilliant forgery? His admirers and detractors have been fighting the

“Shostakovich wars” ever since.

How did Shostakovich and contemporaries like Prokofiev manage to produce great art in a dictatorship, and what did it cost them? Why did his Leningrad Symphony transfix the world? How did he inspire the most consequential review in the history of music criticism? And can we ever truly know what his music meant or is it all in the ear of the beholder? Listen closely.

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Reading list

• Anonymous, ‘Muddle Instead of Music’, Pravda (28 January 1936)

• Anonymous, ‘Shostakovich and the Guns’, Time (20 July 1942)

• Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time (2016)

• James Devlin, Shostakovich (1983)

• Jeremy Eichler, ‘The Composer and the Dictator’, New York Times (2004)

• Laurel E. Fay, Shostakovich: A Life (2000)

• Michel Krielaars, The Sound of Utopia: Musicians in the Time of Stalin (2025)

• Dorian Lynskey, ‘Settling a Soviet Score’, Jewish Renaissance (Spring 2025)

• Brian Morton, Shostakovich: His Life and Music (2006)

• Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (2007)

• Nikil Saval, ‘Julian Barnes and the Shostakovich Wars’, The New Yorker (2016)

• Dmitri Shostakovich, Testimony: The Memoirs of Shostakovich, as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov (1979)

• Elizabeth Wilson, Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (1994)

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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What is ICE? Who are these men we see gathered around students and politicians in the US, with their faces covered, wearing unmarked clothing, often throwing people into unmarked cars? Where did this organisation originate? How did it turn into what looks like a militia? And where will its loyalties lie in future if there is a threat to Trump's hold on power?

This special edition of Origin Story looks into US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a body which was once responsible for tracking undocumented immigrants who were a threat to national security, but has now metastasised into a group which seems to target all immigrants and many US citizens.

We track its birth under George Bush Jr, its actions under Barack Obama and then its radicalisation and expansion under Donald Trump. Then we peer into the alarming evidence about its behaviour and its part in Trump's broader agenda, before listing the comparisons with Nazi Germany. Everything you need to know about one of modern America's most disturbing developments.

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Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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Welcome to the grand finale of Origin Story season seven, as we conclude the remarkable story of Martin Luther King Jr. With the march from Selma to Montgomery and the passing of the Voting Rights Act, 1965 marked the zenith of the civil rights movement as a unified, effective force under King’s leadership. The decade-long fight to desegregate the South had given it strategic clarity and mainstream support. After that, things got much trickier as King switched his attention to economic injustice in cities like Chicago and came out against the war in Vietnam.

Estranged from President Johnson, challenged by the young firebrands of Black Power, hounded by the FBI and horrified by the despair that fuelled urban riots, King spent the rest of his life on the back foot. In 1968, he staked everything on an ambitious Poor People’s Campaign but his movement had fragmented and public opinion had turned against him. On 4 April, he was shot dead in Memphis.

The assassination simplified King into a martyr. We track the explosive unrest in the days after his death, the long struggle to make Martin Luther King Day a national holiday, and the way his philosophy has been caricatured and neutered by those who believe that civil rights have gone far enough. Finally, we unpack some of King’s most famous quotes to separate the myth from the reality.

Why did the movement unravel after Selma? Did King pick the wrong battles or were the forces ranged against him too powerful to vanquish? What happens when a human being becomes a symbol? How has his message been whitewashed by the right? Does President Trump’s backlash politics prove that King was right to lose faith in white America’s willingness to reject racism? And what can today’s activists learn from King’s victories and defeats?

Thanks for listening to season seven of Origin Story, and for supporting our work. We’ll be back soon with bonus episodes and Q&As.

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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