HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: The official website for BBC History Magazine
date: 2025-05-23T09:54:56.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "Social taboos are violated: a parent must decide which child to feed"
items: How Queen Victoria's aunt broke free of an abusive marriage
items: My history hero: James Coomarasamy chooses Andrei Sakharov (1921–89)
items: Did Catherine the Great really have sex with a horse?
items: Why did the Soviet Union adopt the hammer and sickle, and how did it become a symbol of communist revolution?
items: Josef Stalin: the paranoid dictator who forged the Soviet Union into a superpower
items: Operation Bagration 1944: the perfect victory on the Eastern Front
items: From the USA's 'good war' to Britain's 'great hurrah': how is D-Day remembered around the world?
items: The incredible real history of A Gentleman in Moscow’s Hotel Metropol
items: The death of Lenin, a century on: the long afterlife of Russia’s pre-emiment revolutionary

Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "Social taboos are violated: a parent must decide which child to feed"
type: item
date: 2025-05-23T08:00:08.000Z
creator: Kavita Puri
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: Kavita Puri on the urgent need to commemorate historical famines
encoded: During the Second World War, Deaths related to hunger matched or outnumbered military losses. Famines afflicted regions including the Soviet Union, China, India, Vietnam and Greece. Yet those who perished are rarely remembered in the same way as fallen soldiers. Starvation is not relegated to the past. The latest UN Hunger Hotspots report identifies places of highest concern as Haiti, Mali, Sudan, South Sudan and Palestine. Sadly, the list of countries where hunger persists is much longer, with violence and conflict the key drivers. Professor Alex de Waal, research professor at Tufts University and a leading expert on famine, explains that part of the reason famines are not remembered and memorialised is that the experience is so painful to recount, and so full of shame, that people want to forget it. In extremis, social taboos are violated: a parent must decide which child to feed; a neighbour refuses to give food to a neighbour; forbidden foods are eaten; people sell their bodies to survive; some profit from scarcity. The authorities who engineered a famine, or who neglected the population, have no reason to remember it, either. Read more | Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "We mustn’t overlook the toll of surfacing traumatic histories" In Ireland, it wasn’t until some 150 years after the start of the Great Famine, which began with an outbreak of potato blight in 1845, that victims were widely memorialised. Around a million people died – from a population of fewer than 9 million – and close to 2 million emigrated in a bid to survive. An expression of remorse by the British government of its role in the famine came only as recently as 1997, though there is still debate about whether the statement issued on behalf of then prime minister Tony Blair constituted an apology. Monuments to the victims and those who fled the country are now dotted around Ireland, Northern Ireland and Britain – though none are in London. There are also significant memorials in places to which…

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How Queen Victoria's aunt broke free of an abusive marriage
type: item
date: 2025-03-27T09:00:01.000Z
creator: Danny Bird
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: Helen Rappaport speaks to Danny Bird about the tumultuous life of the German princess Juliane of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, who escaped her abusive marriage to the tsar’s brother.
encoded: Danny Bird: What drew you to explore the life of Princess Juliane of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld? Helen Rappaport: She was a difficult subject because she’s so lost to history. I discovered her story while researching the siblings of Queen Victoria’s mother Victoria (or Victoire), Duchess of Kent. Victoire was a younger sister of Juliane, known as Julie, who was born in 1781. I found it fascinating that the obscure and impoverished German duchy of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld produced so many children who made strategically significant marriages. Julie’s better-known siblings were Leopold, King of the Belgians, whose first marriage was to Princess Charlotte of Wales; and Victoire, who married the Duke of Kent. In 1796, Julie made an impressive marriage to Grand Duke Konstantin, the brother of the future Tsar Alexander I. If the couple had not divorced, Julie would have become empress on Alexander’s death in 1825 – yet she has been almost completely overlooked by history. Why did this family play such a major role in reshaping post-Napoleonic Europe? What distinguished the clan was their ambitious matriarch, Augusta. People often talk about Queen Victoria’s prowess as a matchmaker, but her grandmother Augusta was the precursor. Wedded to the impoverished Francis, heir to the Duchy of of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, she faced a dire situation: the family coffers were empty. To address this, she set about strategically marrying off her children to dukes, princes and princesses to secure their futures and the family’s standing. And her efforts began with Julie. In 1795, Catherine the Great of Russia sought a bride for her second grandson, Grand Duke Konstantin Pavlovich. German princesses were especially favoured, and Catherine’s emissary, Baron Budberg, came to Coburg. At the time, this was the capital of the Duchy of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld – one of the Thuringian states – though today it is a relatively modest town in northern Bavaria. There, Baron Budberg encountered Augusta’s three young d…

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My history hero: James Coomarasamy chooses Andrei Sakharov (1921–89)
type: item
date: 2025-03-26T08:30:02.000Z
creator: York Membery
subject: Cold War
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: History hero
description: BBC broadcaster James Coomarasamy chooses Andrei Sakharov as a history hero
encoded: In profile Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov was a Soviet physicist and, later, dissident awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 1975 for championing human rights around the world. After playing a major part in the development of a Soviet hydrogen bomb, he grew concerned about the moral and political implications of his work. In 1980, he was arrested and exiled by Soviet authorities, and later became prominent in political opposition in the USSR. When did you first hear about Sakharov? While I was studying Russian at university in the late 1980s. I spent half a year in Moscow during the Gorbachev era – in fact, I was in the USSR when Sakharov was elected to the Congress of People’s Deputies, the Soviet Union’s first serious experiment with parliamentary democracy. What kind of man was he? He was a brilliant scientist from an intellectual family. He tried to join the Red Army during the Second World War but failed his medical. He then became involved in the Soviet project to design an atomic bomb – he’s been dubbed ‘The father of the hydrogen bomb’. By the 1960s, though, he’d come to the view that the development of nuclear weapons had created the potential for worldwide destruction, and that the lack of individual freedoms in the Soviet Union also posed a danger to global peace. Read more | How have nuclear weapons shaped global politics? 10 key moments in the post-war atomic world What made him a hero? Sakharov used his position as a member of the Soviet elite to try to change the system from within, and used his platform to urge Khrushchev and Brezhnev to stop testing nuclear weapons, protect human rights and find ways to peacefully co-exist with the west. Speaking out came at great personal cost: by the 1970s, he was regarded as a dissident and traitor. He was prevented from collecting his Nobel Peace Prize, and was later arrested and exiled to the closed city of Gorky. Read more | The history of the Nobel Prizes Eventually, though, the courage he displayed paid off. Gorbachev…

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Did Catherine the Great really have sex with a horse?
type: item
date: 2025-02-14T09:00:29.000Z
creator: Jonny Wilkes
subject: Georgian
subject: Period
subject: Evergreen
description: It is well overdue that this particular rumour about Russian empress Catherine the Great is sent to the glue factory
encoded: More than 200 years after Catherine the Great’s death in 1796 – from a stroke, not bestiality – this ludicrous lie still tends to be the first thing people say about the long-serving Russian empress. In fact, Catherine simply received similar treatment to other powerful women throughout history who have dared to have a sex life. To this pernicious yet enduring myth, we must say an unequivocal: no. Or should that be neigh? Did Catherine the Great really have sex with a horse? No, Catherine the Great did not meet an outrageously lurid death during an attempt at bestiality. No, she had not rigged up a harness-and-pulley system to hold up a horse up so that she could lie down underneath and force the animal to have sex with her. And no, the harness did not break, resulting in her being crushed by the falling stallion. Why was Catherine the Great rumoured to have had sex with a horse? Today, the Empress of Russia (r1762–96) is widely celebrated for modernising the country and establishing the empire as a global player. She patronised the arts, sciences and literature; encouraged educational reform based on Enlightenment principles; and expanded Russian territory with the annexation of the Crimea and partition of the Poland-Lithuanian Commonwealth. But from the earliest days of her 34-year reign, Catherine fell victim to numerous rumours spread by her enemies, in the imperial court and beyond. Many of her nobles clung to their resentment over how she had come to the throne, and the fact that she was not Russian at all. Read more | Is Catherine the Great's reputation justified? She had been born a Prussian princess named Sophie (she adopted the name Catherine after converting to Russian Orthodox Christianity), who was married off as a teenager to the future tsar. To say the marriage was a failure would be an understatement: just six months into her husband Peter III’s reign, she overthrew him in a coup backed by the army. Then, when Peter died while in captivity eight days…

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Why did the Soviet Union adopt the hammer and sickle, and how did it become a symbol of communist revolution?
type: item
date: 2024-08-07T14:50:50.000Z
creator: Danny Bird
subject: 20th Century
subject: Period
subject: Communism
subject: Evergreen
description: The hammer and sickle is one of the modern world’s most recognisable symbols. It instantly evokes the former Soviet Union and communism. For some people around the globe, it remains a beacon of hope for a better tomorrow. But for others it is a painful reminder of totalitarian oppression and terror. What’s the history behind this revolutionary symbol?
encoded: What is the hammer and sickle? The symbol of the hammer and sickle is typically presented in a two-dimensional format, with the hammer crossed over the curved blade of the sickle (a tool traditionally used for harvesting crops, which has a curved metal blade often set on top of a wooden handle). A red star often – though not always – appears just above the tip of the sickle. The hammer represents the working class engaged in industrial production, who, according to Marxist theory, are destined to overthrow the bourgeoisie, the dominant social class under capitalism. The sickle denotes the peasantry, the toilers of the land. Though the symbol denotes solidarity between agricultural and industrial workers, the 19th-century philosopher Karl Marx, whose works were foundational to the beliefs of Vladimir Lenin and his fellow Bolsheviks, had dismissed the peasantry as a vestige, leftover by the epoch that had preceded capitalism: feudalism. Marx regarded peasants as an instinctively conservative class that would likely prove hostile to a workers’ revolution. The adoption of a visual expression of unity between worker and peasant shows the Bolsheviks’ adaption of Marxism to their homeland’s specific circumstances, referencing the socio-economic reality of Russia, which was still a predominantly agrarian society with little industrial development, at the time of the October Revolution in 1917. When did the hammer and sickle first appear? In early 1918, Lenin and Anatoly Lunacharsky – head of the regime’s Commissariat for Education (known as ‘Narkompros’) – launched a competition for artists and designers to create an official seal for the nascent Soviet state. The entries were a diverse assortment that spanned everything from striking avant-garde forms, classical imagery such as overflowing cornucopias, and even a double-headed eagle shorn of its feathers and regalia (the double-headed eagle had been adopted centuries before by the Russian tsars to symbolise their link to a…

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Josef Stalin: the paranoid dictator who forged the Soviet Union into a superpower
type: item
date: 2024-07-25T12:11:21.000Z
creator: Danny Bird
subject: 20th Century
subject: Period
subject: Communism
subject: Evergreen
description: Stalin is widely regarded as one of the most bloodthirsty tyrants in history. From his childhood in the Caucasus to his career as a Bolshevik revolutionary, Robert Service explores his life and explains why he was constantly underestimated by his contemporaries
encoded: Josef Stalin was the longest-serving leader of the world’s first socialist state, the Soviet Union, one of the principal architects of the postwar order and among the most ruthless tyrants to have ever lived. Undoubtedly, he was one of the 20th century’s most consequential figures. Speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, historian Robert Service explains how the young Stalin had been seduced by revolutionary ideals of the age and ultimately joined the network of Marxists operating both inside and outside the territories ruled over by the tsar. As a Bolshevik, he played a key role during the events of the Russian Revolution of 1917. After the death of Lenin in 1924, Stalin ultimately emerged as the Soviet Union’s de facto leader, confounding those around him who had misjudged his political acumen. During the 1930s, his Five-Year plans drastically altered the socioeconomic makeup of the USSR at a terrible human cost. His innate paranoia then instigated a bloody purge of his one-time comrades in the Communist Party as he sought to consolidate his grip on power. Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 marked the most vulnerable point in his dictatorship. Nevertheless, allied with Britain and America, the Soviet dictator would play a major role in reshaping the world following the defeat of Hitler’s regime in 1945. By the time of his death in 1953, Stalinism – the ideology synonymous with his approach to statecraft and culture – had transformed the Soviet Union into a superpower. But not without cost: estimated tens of millions had perished due to his decisions. This would ensure his criticism by successors. Where and when was Stalin born? Josef Stalin was born as Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili in Gori, Georgia on 18 December 1878. Located in the mountainous Caucasus region between the Black and Caspian seas, Georgia was part of the Russian empire at the time. However, some sources specify that he was born in 1879. Stalin preferred to “stay fairly quiet about…

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Operation Bagration 1944: the perfect victory on the Eastern Front
type: item
date: 2024-06-20T11:56:28.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
description: Iain MacGregor tells the story of the Operation Bagration, a large-scale Soviet offensive against Nazi Germany launched in support of the Normandy Landings...
encoded: The 80th anniversary of the Allied landings in Normandy – D-Day, on 6 June 1944 – was commemorated earlier this month. It was an epic operation in men, machines, and planning. But the beginning of the great assault on Hitler’s ‘Fortress Europe’ was not just a military success, it had been one supported with subterfuge on a grand scale. To confuse German military intelligence, fake armies, radio communications and orders of battle were created to convince Hitler that the allies were planning to cross the English Channel to attack the Pas-de-Calais. Operation ‘Fortitude’ would deceive and force him to divert precious German units guarding Normandy prior to D-Day. While all eyes were on the battle in France, another bigger assault on the Third Reich began, just over two weeks after D-Day. It was the offensive Joseph Stalin had promised to Winston Churchill and President Roosevelt at the Tehran Conference in 1943; a spectacular assault on the eastern front that would destroy all hopes Hitler had of keeping the Red Army at bay in 1944. The so-called Operation Bagration would see the Red Army race across eastern Europe. Within a matter of weeks, Soviet tanks were positioned outside the gates of Warsaw. Historically, it was a pivotal moment in the Second World War that all but guaranteed Nazi defeat in the ruins of Berlin ten months later. The build up Since Adolf Hitler’s gamble to launch the greatest land invasion in history on 22 June 1941 (Operation Barbarossa), the fighting on the eastern front had been brutal – almost a war of extermination. Hitler’s grand plans of conquest had been stopped by the Russian winter and the limitless supply of fresh Soviet troops that would replace each titanic defeat the Germans enjoyed in the first year of the war. Though several million Red Army troops had been killed or captured – and millions more civilians killed or imprisoned under German occupation – by the summer of 1944, the tide had turned in Joseph Stalin’s favour. Read more …

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From the USA's 'good war' to Britain's 'great hurrah': how is D-Day remembered around the world?
type: item
date: 2024-06-05T09:03:11.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Second World War battles
description: On 6 June 1944 a massive Allied invasion force descended on Normandy in France. In recent decades, ‘D-Day’, as this event is commonly known, has been the subject of persistent commemoration, with major anniversaries – like the 50th in 1994 and the 75th in 2019 – marked with televised international ceremonies. But does everyone commemorate D-Day the same way? Or does the memory of the Allied invasion look different depending on exactly who is doing the remembering?
encoded: This June, on the 80th anniversary of D-Day, there will be ceremonies in Normandy and heads of state will deliver speeches. And while these speeches will undoubtedly emphasise Western unity, they will also reveal that over the years D-Day has come to mean different things to different nations over the years... D-Day in the United States: a good war D-Day looms especially large in American memory of the Second World War. American forces played a key role on 6 June and when news of the landings broke back home President Roosevelt took to the radio to lead the nation in solemn prayer. In later years, Cold War tensions only further consolidated American commitment to D-Day. Here was an eminently ‘useable’ story of freedom versus tyranny. This was certainly the subtext to the popular Hollywood film The Longest Day (1962), which depicts an American-led armada descending on the French coastline in a heroic quest to bring liberation to the oppressed. American interest in the legacy of D-Day further intensified in the late 20th century. President Ronald Reagan gave a celebrated speech during the 40th D-Day anniversary in 1984. Speaking from Pointe du Hoc in Normandy, scene of a fierce D-Day battle involving American Army Rangers, Reagan recalled the landings as a heroic endeavour in which “the Allies stood and fought against tyranny in a giant undertaking unparalleled in human history”. In the 1990s, the D-Day histories of Stephen Ambrose – which often focused on the valour of ordinary American soldiers – sold in enormous numbers and Stephen Spielberg’s blockbuster Saving Private Ryan (1998) met with critical and commercial acclaim. In 2000 a National D-Day Museum was opened in New Orleans (since re-named the National World War II Museum), followed a year later by the dedication in Bedford, Virginia, of a National D-Day Memorial. Today, 6 June’s position in the American memory of the Second World War remains unrivalled. It is remembered as the battle which perfectly encapsul…

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The incredible real history of A Gentleman in Moscow’s Hotel Metropol
type: item
date: 2024-03-29T16:53:34.000Z
creator: Danny Bird
subject: 20th Century
subject: Period
subject: Trends-Entertainment
subject: TV interest
description: A Gentleman in Moscow, a new Paramount+ adaptation of the 2016 international bestselling novel by Amor Towles, follows the escapades of a disgraced aristocrat confined to the Hotel Metropol across the turbulent decades that followed the Russian Revolution. But Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov wasn’t the only illustrious guest to have checked in…
encoded: The setting for historical drama A Gentleman in Moscow is the Russian capital’s legendary Hotel Metropol. It is here where the protagonist, the noble-born Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov (played by Ewan McGregor in the Paramount+ adaptation), is detained by Russia’s new Bolshevik masters after being denounced as an enemy of the revolution on account of his aristocratic heritage. Is A Gentleman in Moscow a true story? Not quite. Though Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov and the decades of house arrest that he endures within the Metropol are a work of Amor Towles’s imagination, the setting in which the events unfold is a real hotel, with a history that rivals any work of fiction. View oEmbed on the source website When was the Hotel Metropol built? Located within sight of the world-famous Bolshoi Theatre and just a short walk from Red Square and the Kremlin, the Metropol has borne witness to some of the most dramatic events in Russia’s modern history. Built in the Art Nouveau style, construction began in 1899 and was initially funded by Russian industrialist Savva Mamontov, who conceived of building a ‘palace of the arts’ capable of holding 3,000 spectators. Scottish-Russian architect William Walcot was recruited to oversee the project, while artists including Mikhail Vrubel and Alexander Golovin created the building’s celebrated décor and façades. However, Mamontov’s sudden bankruptcy (he was accused of embezzling funds from a railroad venture, and though later acquitted, he faced financial and reputational failure) led to the Petersburg Insurance company stepping in to see the project through to completion. Consequently, the building evolved from Mamontov’s original concept into more of a plush hotel with an American cocktail bar and a restaurant, in the vein of the Ritz in Paris and the Savoy in London. When did the Hotel Metropol open? The Hotel Metropol finally opened its doors in 1905, just as revolutionary turmoil in Russia forced Tsar Nicholas II to cave in to constit…

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The death of Lenin, a century on: the long afterlife of Russia’s pre-emiment revolutionary
type: item
date: 2024-01-21T08:05:28.000Z
creator: Danny Bird
subject: 20th Century
subject: Period
subject: Trends-Anniversary
description: Lenin was a towering in figure in life, but in death he became larger still. Danny Bird explores the final months of Lenin’s life, the long debate over what to do with his body, and long tail of his legacy over Russia
encoded: Born on 22 April 1870 as Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, Lenin was raised within a comfortable, cultured family in the Russian provincial city of Simbirsk. Later, he would become the architect of the Soviet state and the leader of the Bolshevik party, who shot to global attention as the driving force behind the October Revolution of 1917. Most of Lenin’s adult life was spent living in Western Europe. There, he fostered ties with fellow revolutionaries and cultivated his interpretation of Marxism. Central to Lenin’s ideology was the need for a ‘vanguard’ of professional revolutionaries to guide the working class towards the destruction of capitalism and the dawn of socialism. His decisive role in the Russian Revolution came during the febrile months following the collapse of the Romanov monarchy in March 1917. A provisional government of liberal politicians replaced the ousted tsar, Nicholas II. Read more | The last days of the Romanovs Little more than a fortnight earlier, workers and soldiers in the capital, Petrograd (now St Petersburg) established a representative council to advance their demands – a council known as a ‘soviet’. Lenin’s moment came in April 1917, when he returned to Russia and exclaimed: “All power to the soviets!” to a jubilant crowd that greeted him in the city. Against the prevailing opinion of his comrades, Lenin persuaded the Bolsheviks to overthrow the Provisional Government and seize power that autumn. The result was the founding of the world’s first ‘socialist state’, Soviet Russia. A brutal civil war then engulfed the former Russian empire. The Bolshevik regime eventually emerged triumphant, and, in December 1922, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was born. At the same time, however, the health of the Soviet state’s founder was beginning to fail. Lenin’s death: how did he die? Lenin died of a stroke aged 53 on 21 January 1924 in the village of Gorki, to the south of Moscow. His comrade, Nikolai Bukharin, witnessed the death and later wrote…

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