In 1966, Mao Zedong launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, a decade-long campaign to purify the Communist Party that plunged China into total anarchy. This episode traces the descent into chaos, from the mobilization of the Red Guards and the violent destruction of the "Four Olds" to the factional street battles that brought the nation to the brink of civil war.

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In 1958, the People's Republic of China embarked on one of the most radical social experiments in human history: the Great Leap Forward. Aiming to surpass the industrial output of the West in just fifteen years, Mao Zedong mobilized the nation to replace capital with sheer willpower.

This episode details the unprecedented restructuring of Chinese society, from the collective life of the People's Communes and the mania of the backyard steel furnaces to the ecological disaster of the campaign to exterminate the sparrow.

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In the finale of the series, we enter the "House of Special Purpose" - the ominous code name for the villa where the Romanov dynasty met its end. As the White Army closed in on Ekaterinburg in the summer of 1918, the Bolsheviks made a cold calculation: the Tsar could not be allowed to live as a banner for the counter-revolution.

We follow the family’s descent from imperial boredom behind painted-over windows to the terror of the night of July 16th.

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The most consequential revolution of the 20th century did not happened with a change of the guard. In this episode, we dismantle the myth of the "storming" of the Winter Palace to reveal the reality of the Bolshevik seizure of power: a methodical, invisible coup d'état masterminded by Leon Trotsky. While the citizens of Petrograd rode the trams and attended the opera, the Military Revolutionary Committee quietly seized the city's bridges, telegraphs, and banks without firing a shot.

We follow the surreal timeline of October 25th, from Prime Minister Kerensky fleeing the capital in a borrowed American car, to the "siege" of the Winter Palace—defended only by teenage cadets and the Women’s Battalion of Death. The episode concludes in the smoke-filled halls of the Smolny Institute, where Trotsky consigns his political enemies to the "dustbin of history" and Lenin announces the birth of the Soviet state.

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By the summer of 1917, the optimism of the February Revolution had dissolved into violence. Alexander Kerensky, the "Persuader-in-Chief," attempted to save the crumbling nation with a suicidal military offensive that destroyed the last remnants of the army's morale. The resulting power vacuum triggered the "July Days," a premature uprising of armed sailors that forced Vladimir Lenin to shave his beard and flee into the swamps of Finland.

The chaos culminated in the Kornilov Affair, a bizarre standoff between the socialist Prime Minister and a general with "the heart of a lion but the brain of a sheep." Facing a military coup, the government made a fatal calculation: opening the armouries and handing 40,000 rifles to the Bolsheviks, effectively arming their own executioners.

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In the spring of 1917, the German General Staff decided to deploy a new kind of weapon against the Russian army: a revolutionary exile named Vladimir Lenin. In this episode, we follow the journey of the "plague bacillus", Vladimir Lenin, as he travels from a cramped apartment in Zurich to the steps of the Finland Station.

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In the bitter winter of 1917, the 300-year rule of the Romanov dynasty ended with a bread riot. What began as a march by female textile workers demanding food spiraled into a revolution when the Tsar’s ultimate enforcers, the Cossacks, refused to charge the crowd.

We follow the chaotic escalation from snowballs to machine-gun fire, leading to the decisive moment when Sergeant Kirpichnikov convinced the Volhynian Regiment to shoot their own officers rather than their people. Finally, we board the "Ghost Train" with Nicholas II, trapping him in a railway siding at Pskov where, isolated and abandoned by his generals, the Autocrat of All the Russias was forced to sign his empire away with a pencil.

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When World War I began, the Allies believed the "Russian Steamroller"—an army of millions—would crush Germany by Christmas. Instead, the Imperial Army marched into a catastrophe that would break the back of the regime. In this episode, we move from the palaces of Petrograd to the frozen trenches of the Eastern Front to witness the military collapse of the Russian Empire.

We tell the tragic story of the Battle of Tannenberg, where a personal feud between two generals led to the annihilation of an entire army and a suicide in the dark forests of East Prussia. We explore the horrors of the "Great Retreat" and the "Shell Famine," where soldiers were sent into battle without rifles. Finally, we witness the fatal decision of Tsar Nicholas II to dismiss his generals and take personal command of the war, tying the fate of the monarchy directly to the dying war effort.

Contact: whatcamebeforepodcast@gmail.com

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