HistoryExtra https://www.historyextra.com/period/cold-war Sun, 11 Oct 2026 03:24:42 GMT en hourly 1 The Soviets found proof of Hitler's death. So why did they hide it from the world? https://www.historyextra.com/period/second-world-war/soviet-proof-of-hitlers-death-hid-it-from-the-world/ Sun, 11 Oct 2026 13:00:04 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/second-world-war/soviet-proof-of-hitlers-death-hid-it-from-the-world/ Soviet investigators had obtained compelling evidence of Hitler’s death – but Moscow’s public statements told a different story In the ruins of Berlin in May 1945, Soviet investigators recovered dental remains and tracked down two people familiar with Adolf Hitler’s mouth: his dental assistant and the technician who had made his elaborate dental work.
Both quickly recognised what they were shown.
“They are able to not only describe all of the complex dental treatment that Hitler has had over the years, but then, when confronted with the physical remains in front of them, they're said, ‘Yes, straight away, these are Hitler's teeth,’” explains historian Caroline Sharples, author of The Long Death of Adolf Hitler.
But even as Soviet investigators assembled their findings, Moscow publicly encouraged uncertainty about whether Hitler was dead at all. Why would the power that had captured Berlin withhold evidence confirming the Nazi leader’s fate?
The death of Hitler
Hitler died on 30 April 1945 in the Führerbunker, the underground shelter beneath the Reich Chancellery complex in central Berlin, as Soviet troops were closing in. His staff carried his body and that of his wife, Eva Braun, into the garden, doused them with petrol and burned them.
When Soviet forces took the site, its investigation fell partly to SMERSH, the military counterintelligence organisation whose name abbreviated the Russian phrase “Death to spies”.
According to the Soviet account, investigators recovered the charred remains of a man and woman outside the bunker and performed autopsies. The dental identification became the strongest element of that investigation.
“They take them to their field headquarters, they perform an autopsy, they have dental remains extracted, and they immediately hunt down Hitler's former dental nurse and his dental technician,” says Sharples speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast.
The witnesses were Käthe Heusermann and Fritz Echtmann. Their knowledge of Hitler’s distinctive bridges and other dental work gave investigators crucial evidence that was much more tangible than a subjective resemblance between a burned corpse and a photograph.
But evidence gathered inside the intelligence organisation did not automatically become information available to allies, or even to other Soviet officials.
As Sharples explains, “the Soviets have this evidence, but the public line is always, ‘No. We haven't found anything.’”
In practice, Soviet statements fluctuated. Reports suggesting that a body had been identified were followed by denials. On 9 June, Marshal Georgy Zhukov publicly said there was no identified corpse and raised the possibility that Hitler had escaped. Soviet suggestions that he might be in Spain prompted an official Spanish denial.
Why ambiguity about Hitler’s death was useful
For the Soviets, this intentional uncertainty was politically useful. Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union had fought a common enemy, but following crucial developments at the Yalta conference, their alliance was already strained over the direction of Europe’s postwar future. Suggestions that Hitler remained at large could cast suspicion on other countries and sustain the argument that the Nazi threat required continued vigilance. Historians have therefore interpreted Stalin’s handling of the evidence partly as an attempt to strengthen his position in the postwar settlement.
For Western investigators, the immediate consequence was that they had to reconstruct Hitler’s death without access to the strongest physical evidence. In June 1945, witnesses in British and American custody began describing the burning of the bodies. They included Hitler’s chauffeur, Erich Kempka, who had supplied the petrol.
“They're interrogated separately, and then in late June they're both paraded before the press,” says Sharples of Kempka and a guard who had observed the burning.
- Read more | Did Hitler really shoot himself? Here's why the Führer's death is more complicated than you think
“They tell their stories, and this is the first real testimonial evidence that we have from people who are able to say, “yes, he's dead. Yes, we saw his body destroyed.””
But without the dental records for corroboration, these eyewitness statements weren’t enough to silence every objection. Had Hitler’s staff agreed on a cover story? Could witnesses distinguish what they had seen from what others had told them?
British Military Intelligence commissioned the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper to investigate. He sought witnesses, compared their accounts and reconstructed events inside the bunker. On 1 November 1945, he presented his conclusion in Berlin: Hitler had killed himself.
“This isn't necessarily the whole truth by any means,” Sharples observes. “This is what has been unfolding publicly.”
Behind the scenes, Soviet inquiries continued. In May 1946, investigators from the internal-security apparatus associated with the NKVD (the Soviet Union’s secret police organisation) returned to the bunker site, after further questioning witnesses in custody. They recovered skull fragments from the Chancellery garden where Hitler’s corpse was burned. One fragment appeared to contain a bullet hole. “Again, this evidence isn’t shared [with other countries],” Sharples says.
The truth emerges
During the 1950s, that secrecy became harder to maintain. Germans returning from Soviet captivity included members of Hitler’s household who had witnessed the aftermath of his death.
“They have been his valet or his close advisers,” says Sharples. “They have been the people who were instructed to carry out that cremation of his corpse. So they have handled his body, let alone just seen it.”
German legal proceedings gathered testimony, including from these people, to establish Hitler’s death formally. The Berchtesgaden court’s investigation culminated in a declaration of death in 1956. Accounts of the dental identification also started to emerge, revealing that Soviet investigators had possessed evidence unavailable to their Western counterparts.
Then, in 1968, Soviet journalist Lev Bezymenski published The Death of Adolf Hitler, including an autopsy report and previously withheld material.
“It is very much a propaganda text in its tone,” Sharples says. “Much of the book is a celebratory account of the Soviet war effort, and then Hitler's autopsy report is in this collection.”
The publication acknowledged the recovery and examination of remains. But its insistence on cyanide poisoning also challenged the Western account centred on a gunshot.
For Sharples, this interpretation carried an ideological purpose. Soviet narratives presented poison as a supposedly weak, feminine means of death, denying Hitler the image of a soldier dying by his pistol. Those were propagandists’ gendered assumptions, not forensic distinctions.
Western scepticism consequently concerned both the findings and their presentation. Evidence released selectively, inside an overtly political account, was difficult to assess separately from the motives of those releasing it.
Caroline Sharples was speaking to Charlotte Vosper on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
]]> The Soviet spy who couldn't love https://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-soviet-spy-who-couldnt-love/ Fri, 25 Sep 2026 14:36:53 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-soviet-spy-who-couldnt-love/ Ben Macintyre introduces an extraordinary agent with a sexual secret – a secret that changed the course of Iranian history and may, just may, have averted nuclear war In 1981, a Soviet spy walked into MI6 HQ in Tehran and offered to defect to Britain – if, in return, Britain could help him improve his performance in bed.
In this episode, Ben Macintyre introduces Spencer Mizen to an extraordinary agent with a sexual secret – a secret that changed the course of Iranian history and may, just may, have averted nuclear war.
]]> This Russian hero was a global superstar – but fame came at a heavy cost https://www.historyextra.com/period/cold-war/yuri-gagarin-return-international-tour/ Sat, 29 Aug 2026 10:30:18 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/cold-war/yuri-gagarin-return-international-tour/ After becoming the first human to orbit Earth, Yuri Gagarin was transformed into a global celebrity and sent around the world as the smiling face of Soviet power. But what did the cosmonaut make of the royalty, politicians and ordinary people he encountered? On 12 April 1961, Yuri Gagarin climbed into a tiny spacecraft at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Soviet Kazakhstan and was launched beyond the sky. His flight came less than four years after the Soviet Union had launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, in 1957. That earlier success had already shocked the United States and transformed the Cold War into a technological contest as much as a military and ideological one.
Gagarin returned to Earth having travelled into space, and orbited the planet. Upon setting his feet back onto soil, the 27 year old was now among the most famous people in the world.
For the Soviet Union, this was an extraordinary propaganda opportunity. Gagarin embodied one of the USSR's greatest Cold War victories: incontrovertible evidence that the communist superpower had overtaken the United States in the race into space. And it helped that Gagarin was so gregarious.
"He was extremely personable, affable, charming," says historian of spaceflight Asif Siddiqi, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast. "He was funny. He got along with everybody."
Those qualities soon carried Gagarin far beyond the Soviet Union. In the months after his flight, he was dispatched around the world as the smiling face of Soviet technological achievement, meeting workers, politicians, presidents – and, in Britain, Queen Elizabeth II. So how did a Soviet military pilot become the world’s first space-age superstar – and what did he make of the kings, queens and political dignitaries suddenly clamouring to meet him?
How did Yuri Gagarin become a cosmonaut?
Born in 1934, Gagarin grew up in the Soviet Union during an era in which pilots enjoyed an extraordinary cultural status.
"The larger context of Soviet Russia here is important to understand his interest and obsession with flying," he says. "A generation of Soviet kids, especially those who had been born in the 1930s, after the war saw flying as both literally and metaphorically a kind of escape from their particular context of life."
Siddiqi describes the fame enjoyed by these aviators as “analogous to Hollywood stars in the West. Gagarin grew up in this environment. He worshipped many of these aviators, and I think he wanted to emulate them."
Gagarin pursued aviation himself, training as a pilot and entering the Soviet Air Force. Then came an opportunity that would have gone beyond any expectations. At the end of the 1950s, the Soviet Union began selecting military pilots for a secret programme intended to put a human being into space. The project was highly classified. Soviet officials were competing directly with the American Project Mercury programme, but neither side knew precisely how close the other was to launching a person.
Why was Gagarin chosen to be the first man in space?
Gagarin wasn’t just plucked from obscurity because Soviet officials thought he would look good in photographs (though, his photogenic nature served in his favour). Siddiqi describes him as "one of the best pilots of that initial cohort", and he performed exceptionally well during the cosmonaut selection. "He was very intelligent. In all their engineering classes, he's coming out at the top."
But still, there were several highly capable candidates. "I would say probably there's about five or six of them that were absolutely top-notch, and he was one of those," Siddiqi explains. "Now, at that point, the criteria become much more subjective, and I think that's where his personality stepped in."
Gagarin was naturally good with people. He was smart, approachable and humorous rather than stiff or aloof. Those qualities would prove extremely useful in the quest to turn him into a lovable public figure, following any successful launch.
On 12 April 1961, the decision was vindicated spectacularly when Gagarin's Vostok 1 spacecraft carried him into orbit. Gagarin actually had relatively little direct control over the spacecraft; much of the flight was automated because Soviet engineers were uncertain how a human being might function in weightlessness.
- Read more | Did the Cold War ever really end?
But regardless of his role within the spacecraft, the Soviet Union had beaten the United States. The timing was especially painful for Moscow’s Cold War rival. American astronaut Alan Shepard would become the first American in space less than a month later, on 5 May 1961, but his flight was suborbital rather than a complete orbit of Earth. Gagarin's achievement therefore appeared considerably more advanced. It helped persuade President John F Kennedy that the United States needed an even more ambitious objective: landing a human on the Moon.
The Soviet Union’s next step was to turn Gagarin into an incontrovertible world hero.
How did Gagarin become the world's first space-age celebrity?
Capitalising on the immensity of its achievements, the Soviet state sent its new hero around the world. Countries would receive Gagarin for "two days to four days", Siddiqi says, before he moved on again. The result was a succession of receptions, speeches, dinners, ceremonies and encounters with political leaders.
These journeys formed part of Soviet "soft power": an attempt to win admiration and influence abroad not through military pressure but through culture, technology and personal diplomacy. This would be particularly influential in newly independent countries across Asia, Africa and Latin America, where both superpowers were competing for political influence.
But for Gagarin himself, it could be exhausting.
"There were so many functions, one after another," says Siddiqi. "So I think it was a combination of fatigue because there were so many places, so many things, a kind of blizzard of things, if you will."
Nevertheless, among the staged diplomatic engagements were also, Siddiqi argues, "moments of genuine connection".
What happened when Yuri Gagarin met Queen Elizabeth II?
Gagarin arrived in Britain in July 1961, three months after his space odyssey. Here was the Soviet Union's glorious hero, being welcomed into a western constitutional monarchy, at a time when Britain was firmly allied with the United States against the communist bloc. Crowds gathered to see Gagarin despite these political differences, and despite heavy rain.
Gagarin's itinerary also brought him into contact with Britain's establishment, including the royal family.
"It was a very charming trip," says Siddiqi. "He met with Queen Elizabeth II and other members of the royal family who wanted to meet him. Prince Charles, Princess Anne, Princess Margaret."
For all the ideological hostility dividing Britain and the USSR, the first human being to travel into space possessed a status that transcended political boundaries. Inevitably though, his British visit nevertheless retained a strongly political character. Gagarin made a point of visiting Highgate Cemetery in north London, where Karl Marx, the German philosopher whose writings had profoundly influenced communist ideology, had been buried in 1883.
In terms of symbolism, Siddiqi says that this was “the history of communism being brought together with the future of communism: Gagarin.” Marx represented the intellectual ancestry of the Soviet state; Gagarin represented its dazzling and boundless technological future in action.
Why did Gagarin want to visit Manchester?
But rather than simply moving between palaces and official receptions, Gagarin also wanted to meet British workers, and in particular, he wanted to go to Manchester.
The industrial city was intimately connected to the development of 19th-century capitalism and, consequently, to the history of communist thought. Friedrich Engels, Marx's co-author of The Communist Manifesto, had lived and worked in Manchester and studied the conditions experienced by its industrial working class.
"He wanted to go and visit the factories in Manchester because they had this sort of mythic view of the Industrial Revolution, where Marx and Engels had written about the factories in Manchester," says Siddiqi.
There was ideological symbolism here too. The Soviet Union claimed to be a workers' state, and photographs of the first cosmonaut meeting industrial workers in capitalist Britain carried an obvious political resonance.
But Siddiqi says Gagarin's enthusiasm was also personal. "One of the interesting things about Gagarin was that he was very bored with meeting the high dignitaries, the politicians," he says. "He just didn't find it very interesting meeting the prime minister of here, the president of that, and so forth. He really wanted to meet regular people."
- Read more | What if the Soviets had beaten the Americans to the moon? An alternate space race history
In Eastern Europe, Siddiqi says, there are descriptions of Gagarin breaking away from formal processions to approach spectators. "There are accounts where he would step out of a procession or something and walk over to some regular people on the side and chat with them," he says.
"There are many sweet accounts like that, where he would just say, 'How are you doing?' And he would try to have a conversation with regular people."
But Gagarin's celebrity drew ever large crowds, which rapidly became a barrier between him and the ordinary people he wanted to encounter.
The surviving records also reveal just how relentless the demands placed upon him became. General Nikolai Kamanin, a senior Soviet military figure closely involved with the cosmonaut programme, recorded the tours in his diaries, and Siddiqi says that in these diaries, “there are accounts of Gagarin being exhausted and being bored by elaborate ceremonies."
"Whenever he went to a country, everybody wanted to meet him," Siddiqi explains. "So it would be ten o'clock at night, and they would say, 'Well, the minister's wife wants to meet you. Can she just come by for ten minutes?'"
"He would willingly do all of that," says Siddiqi. "So I think it was kind of an exhausting tour, and it lasted several months."
Asif Siddiqi was speaking to Danny Bird on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
]]> Hedy Lamarr: life of the week https://www.historyextra.com/membership/hedy-lamarr-life-of-the-week/ Tue, 18 Aug 2026 08:30:56 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/hedy-lamarr-life-of-the-week/ Professor Ruth Barton charts the extraordinary life of Hedy Lamarr – teenage actor, refugee from Nazism, Hollywood megastar and pioneering inventor Hedy Lamarr starred in dozens of movies, but her life may have been more dramatic than any of them.
She was the teenage actor who portrayed the first character to have an on-screen orgasm. The Austrian Jew whose husband sold arms to the fascists. The refugee from Nazism who became a Hollywood megastar. And the pioneering inventor whose work anticipated Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
In today's episode Professor Ruth Barton, Fellow Emeritus in Film Studies at Trinity College shares Hedy's remarkable story with Rob Attar.
]]> Yuri Gagarin: life of the week https://www.historyextra.com/membership/yuri-gagarin-life-podcast/ Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:51:10 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/yuri-gagarin-life-podcast/ Asif Siddiqi tells the extraordinary story of the first human being to venture into space and orbit planet Earth Yuri Gagarin’s journey from a Nazi-occupied Soviet village into outer space make him one of the most famous people on Earth.
In this episode, historian Asif Siddiqi tells Danny Bird about the life behind the legend, revealing how Gagarin came to embody the USSR’s postwar ambitions and why his winning smile still evokes the optimism of humanity’s first steps into the cosmos.
]]> Sexual pleasure and smear campaigns: spreading fear and loathing during the Cold War https://www.historyextra.com/membership/sexual-pleasure-fake-students-and-smear-campaigns-spreading-fear-and-loathing-during-the-cold-war/ Sun, 02 Aug 2026 14:30:01 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/sexual-pleasure-fake-students-and-smear-campaigns-spreading-fear-and-loathing-during-the-cold-war/ Sometimes the best propaganda is something you claim was produced by your enemies. At the height of tensions between communist and western powers, one covert unit created a host of bogus organisations targeting opponents worldwide. Rory Cormac explores some of the most cunning examples How do you sway an audience who will never trust a word you say? And what if the message is underpinned by top-secret intelligence? How do you use it without blowing the source? One answer comes in the form of covert or black propaganda – material for which the source is faked, leaving readers ignorant of the real authors.
During the Cold War, plenty of states waged political warfare across the world. Now, archival declassifications reveal the UK’s programme in remarkable detail.
Between 1948 and 1977, a small team in the Foreign Office’s little-known and banally named Information Research Department worked in the shadows to expose and discredit adversaries wherever they were to be found. They used three channels for the darker side of things: covertly controlled news agencies; forgeries of material purportedly obtained from genuine Soviet front organisations; and a constellation of fake groups disseminating equally bogus material.
These 14 of the named – but completely fictional – groups were among the most cunning, crazy and controversial.
1. International Committee for the Investigation of Communist Front Organisations
Created in 1959, this fabricated research institute published some 30 bulletins exposing Soviet front organisations. From non-existent offices across Europe and north Africa, it traded off its reputation as an authoritative (if dry) source, posting its exposés to peace organisations, student groups and the media worldwide. Bulletin no. 25, for example, outed the International Organisation of Journalists as a “Russian international camouflage organisation” and exposed its role in organising a supposedly independent “world meeting of journalists” in the Mediterranean, including by listing the names and tactics of those involved. The propagandists were delighted when media sources from Tunisia to Ankara repeated the bulletin’s claims. Even BBC referred to the fake Committee’s representation of the meeting as a “floating hive of subversion.”
With targets including everyone from the World Federation of Scientific Workers to the World Federation of Democratic Youth, this ‘Committee’ caused quite a stir. The Soviets complained to the Austrian police, while West German intelligence cheekily claimed credit for the Committee – a professional hazard when the real author can’t own up. Eventually, cover was blown and the fake Committee outlived its usefulness.
2. Centre d’Études Micro-Analytiques
The replacement for that first ‘Committee’ was a supposedly French-speaking west European research organisation specialising in long-winded faux scholarship. Bulletin number 7, for example, comprised a dense 16-page assessment of recent organisational developments within the World Peace Council – the international anti-imperialist and anti-nuclear organisation discreetly sustained by the Soviets. It generated coverage in an Indian newspaper under the gratifying headline “World Peace Council Promotes War, not Peace”. British socialists were early readers, attacking it as “A mad-house anti-communist journal”. In doing so, they fell into a classic trap: repeating the Centre’s arguments to the very readers the propagandists most wanted to reach.
Other editions were too subtle. Foreign Office bosses in the know couldn’t tell the difference between the propaganda and a standard verbose research paper. Foreign Office colleagues not in the know took the Centre’s material at face value – and were unimpressed by the quality of the analysis.
- Read more | The ultimate Cold War sex scandal – and 11 other political outrages from British history
3. Freedom for Africa Movement (Loyal African Brothers)
Created around 1960 and supposedly heralding from an unspecified part of Francophone Africa, this fictitious pan African nationalist network issued scruffy leaflets to expose and smear politicians deemed too close to the communists. Each of the 50 or so operations began with the same rallying cry: “Loyal African Brothers!”, earning the group its affectionate moniker.
Each combined ad hominem attacks with salacious rumourmongering, delivered in what the propagandists called “semi-educated prose” and “hideous jargon” to supposedly appeal to “the half-baked intelligentsia”.
The Movement claimed (without evidence) multiple successes in derailing local politicians and even had their words read out – unwittingly – on BBC radio. Most bizarrely, the Soviets forged a Brothers leaflet of their own, exposing CIA bribery of African politicians; the opportunistic British ran with it – knowing that it bolstered their own deniability.
4. Council of the Arab Unity Brethren
Various fictional Arab groups popped up and then disappeared again in the mid-1960s, each taking a shot at Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, a longtime target of the British. One such group, the Council of the Arab Unity Brethren, was christened by the head of the Information Research Department himself, who insisted that its name “apparently makes more sense in Arabic than in English” after the team raised quizzical eyebrows.
Supposedly based in Libya, the Brethren attacked Egyptian expansionism, designs on Libyan oil, and Nasser personally on religious grounds. In a list reminiscent of a Monty Python sketch, other groups created by the British to do much the same included the Brothers of the Renaissance, the Socialist Brotherhood of Iraq, the True Islamic Socialists, and so on.
5. Committee for the Defence of Non-Totalitarian Socialism
Another of the fake anti-Nasser groups, this supposed Committee exposed and criticised Egyptian covert operations in Sudan and Yemen from a left-wing perspective. It warned of the dangers posed by communists inside the Syrian government. The British were delighted when Egypt wrongly assumed that disaffected Syrians were behind it and insisted that the operation had hurt Nasser – without providing any evidence of that.
6. People’s Front of East Africa
By implication a pro-Chinese movement, the People’s Front amplified Kenyan political tensions and discredited the vice president, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, by association. After criticising the Kenyan government as a cesspool of dishonesty and authoritarianism, the Front lavished praise on Odinga and his vision of closer ties with China. Its material insulted African socialism but then called to make Odinga president.
The mysterious People’s Front generated coverage in British and Kenyan newspapers, with one Swahili commentary blaming the CIA for what it called a crude forgery. The British propagandists were delighted, and hoped to use the Front again when the Rhodesian government unilaterally declared independence from London in 1965. The plan was for the People’s Front to encourage Africans to rise up and resolve the Rhodesian problem through violence. Diplomats vetoed it as being far too risky.
7. International Movement for Revolutionary Action
Those British propagandists did repeat the People’s Front trick elsewhere in Africa, using yet another fake group. The Movement, another supposedly pro-Chinese group, valorised another target of British ire: John Malecela, a diplomat spearheading much of the United Nations’ decolonisation work.
In an attempt to unsettle African leaders, the Movement praised Malecela as a “revolutionary hero” who had scored “many brilliant victories” at the United Nations “in the war against those who are taking the bourgeois-nationalist road and opening up the only correct road for the victory of the Chinese revolution”. In doing so, the hope was to discredit Malecela by associating him with revolutionary Chinese militants. The Movement’s rallying cry to wage guerrilla warfare across the continent would have unnerved African leaders further.
8. Front for the Liberation of the Spanish Maghreb
When Spanish dictator Francisco Franco criticised the UK’s position in Gibraltar, the British shot back to remind the world of Spain’s own colonialism in north Africa. This fake Front sought to embarrass Spain at the United Nations, and to stir regional tensions.
It sounded legitimate enough – not too dissimilar from genuine organisations such as the National Movement for the Liberation of Equatorial Guinea, or the even more verbose Movement for the Self-Determination and Independence of the Canary Archipelago.
British operatives posted a forged petition to the UN calling for the restitution to Morocco of various Spanish colonial territories. It left the Moroccan press confused and authorities keen to identify the perpetrators.
9. Organisation for the Expulsion of the Spanish Colonialists
In January 1967, the British followed up with another pseudo anti-Spanish group. This one incited violence against Madrid, noting that, whereas the French, Belgians and British had all withdrawn from Africa, Spain had not.
“We will fight with all our strength and with every weapon we can lay our hands on… Victory [will be won] by God’s will.” There were so many of these little groups flying around that British propagandists struggled to keep track of which were real and which were creations of their own. It was all a bit confusing.
10. The Matopos Club
Named after the distinctive granite hills in Rhodesia (now the Matobo Hills in Zimbabwe), the burial place of Cecil Rhodes, the Matopos Club was a fake white Rhodesian group created after Ian Smith’s government unilaterally declared independence from the UK in 1965. To maintain credibility, the Club railed against “those arrogant dictators in Whitehall” before attacking Smith for lying, creating chaos, crippling the economy and, ironically, spreading propaganda.
Its most controversial mooted operation – ultimately vetoed – targeted recipients inside the UK, linking support for Smith to support for Aryan supremacy. The Club did not make much of a mark; intelligence suggested that the wife of a wealthy young farmer in Rhodesia thought that the Club was playing a very important role. Apparently, her friends agreed and all thought it was the work of a mysterious resistance leader. This was a rather underwhelming outcome.
11. Committee for European Syndicalist Action
This fake student group sought to disrupt the 1968 World Festival of Youth and Students in Sofia by playing on the leftist, anti-war, counterculture student protests sweeping western Europe and the US. Senior diplomats worried that the Committee risked inciting violence, which might backfire against the west. The propagandists, though, insisted that the aim was merely to give the impression that there were people willing to make trouble, which would be enough to disrupt the festival.
It was a gamble, especially because the fake group did explicitly call for anarchist students to express their grievances at the festival. “We say that the time has come to answer violence with violence.” And violence did break out – although it is difficult to trace it back to the faux syndicalists.
12. The Black Power – Africa's Heritage Group
Struggling to stay relevant and justify budgets, the propagandists found a new target in the late 1960s: Black Power. A fake west African Group tried to exploit differences between US and sub-Saharan African manifestations of that movement.
It attacked Stokely Carmichael, the Trinidad-born Black Power leader who had travelled to Guinea in part to escape harassment by the FBI. The Group launched a personal attack, calling Carmichael: “That unbidden prophet from America… weaving a bloody trail of chaos in the name of Pan-Africanism”.
By coming to Africa, the material continued, Carmichael had “deserted the cause” in the US “which needs him more than we do”. And how dare he – who seemed to imagine Africans as ‘savages’ – preach Black Power to a continent “where it already truly belongs”? Strong words – but they did little damage.
13. Comitato Milanese per la Pace
This fake Italian peace committee published an overzealous eulogy – the Adult’s ABC of Peace – to send to the World Peace Council, a long-standing target of British propaganda. The aim, as ever, was to expose the Council as a decidedly unpeaceful instrument of Soviet policy.
The booklet produced was rather a clumsy publication. C was for China, obstructing the world-wide struggle for peace; N, rather desperately, was for Negative Views, or any criticism of the Soviets; X, more desperately still, was for Unknown Quantity; Z for Zealous Struggle.
Based on genuine World Peace Council writings, the British booklet cleverly tried to box the communists into a corner, making it difficult for them to denounce the fake. Some 770 copies were sent from Milan to addresses worldwide, some of which reached senior World Peace Council leaders. The British claimed success in causing trouble – but, again, struggled to provide evidence.
14. World Muslim Brotherhood
A particularly controversial fake group was created simply by inserting ‘World’ in front of the (real) Muslim Brotherhood as a means of reaching Muslim audiences in the mid-1960s. In fiery language, the World Muslim Brotherhood attacked President Sukarno of Indonesia: “That creature is always running after more authority and sexual pleasures which had made him throw away every consideration for his and his people’s dignity for the sake of his lust.”
The fake Brotherhood protested the treatment of Muslims in China, drawing attention to the discrepancy between China's supposed religious tolerance and the persecution of Muslims under the Cultural Revolution. And it exposed Egypt’s use of chemical weapons in the Yemen Civil War: “detestable and internationally-banned weapon of warfare… which even the madman Hitler did not use against his enemies in the Second World War”. Worryingly, the propagandists laced this missive with antisemitism, in order (they would have insisted) to make it credible.
Rory Cormac is a professor of international relations at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of Fakers: A Top-Secret Tale of Phantoms and Forgeries on the Disinformation Front Line (Oxford University Press), out now
]]> When football became a weapon of the Cold War https://www.historyextra.com/membership/when-football-became-a-weapon-of-the-cold-war/ Mon, 06 Jul 2026 16:02:31 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/when-football-became-a-weapon-of-the-cold-war/ Tony Shaw and Alan McDougall reveal how the great ideological battle between east and west was waged on the football pitch The Cold War cast a shadow over all aspects of life – including the world's favourite sport. All sides of the ideological divide used football to score political goals.
Tony Shaw and Alan McDougall talk Spencer Mizen through some of the most explosive Cold War footballing clashes in a story that takes in Pele, Eusebio, North Korean upsets and a galloping major.
]]> Angry bishops, grumpy dictators and the 'wizard of dribble': 8 moments when football and politics collided https://www.historyextra.com/membership/angry-bishops-grumpy-dictators-and-the-wizard-of-dribble-8-moments-when-soccer-and-politics-collided/ Fri, 03 Jul 2026 14:30:39 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/angry-bishops-grumpy-dictators-and-the-wizard-of-dribble-8-moments-when-soccer-and-politics-collided/ As the 2026 World Cup gets under way, Tony Shaw and Alan McDougall revisit eight football matches played during the Cold War that turned the beautiful game into a battleground of ideology, identity and state power 1. The fog of war at White Hart Lane
A chaotic 1945 friendly between Arsenal and Dynamo Moscow saw wartime alliance splintered by Cold War rivalry
It’s not often that football friendlies spark conflict – especially between allies. The match between Arsenal and Dynamo Moscow, part of a tour of Britain by the Soviet Union’s top team in November 1945, was intended to celebrate the Allies’ recent victory over Nazism. But things went badly wrong – on and off the pitch.
Playing at Tottenham Hotspur’s White Hart Lane stadium – Arsenal’s ground at Highbury was unavailable – the British team bent the rules by fielding ringers such as England’s ‘Wizard of Dribble’, Stanley Matthews. And the Soviet referee, perhaps with half a mind on the gulags, tested neutrality to the limits.
Thick London fog, a real pea-souper, added confusion – and controversy. Visibility was so limited that players could barely distinguish teammates from opponents. Arsenal claimed that Dynamo cheated by sometimes fielding more than 11 men, slipping on substitutes unnoticed. Dynamo accused Arsenal of trying to maim its players. Soviet officials later alleged that Arsenal’s “capitalist” manager, George Allison, had tried to get the game called off once his team had fallen behind because he’d gambled a fortune on a home victory.
The match in the mist revealed a striking contrast in styles. Dynamo played a fast, fluid collective game built on discipline, short passing and constant movement. Players interchanged positions, drifting across the pitch to create space. For British spectators accustomed to more direct football, the effect was startling. Perhaps it offered proof of the vitality of communism – and a glimpse of the future of football.
After Dynamo’s thrilling 4-3 victory, both sides accused each other of bringing the game into disrepute. Writing the next month, George Orwell decried the “orgies of hatred” in such encounters, famously observing that international sport was “war minus the shooting”. The encounter suggested that ideological rivalry between east and west had reached the football pitch.
2. The 'miracle' that remade a nation
With its shock 1954 World Cup win over Hungary, West Germany emerged from the shadow of Nazism
It’s hard to believe now, but Germans were once football underdogs. On Sunday 4 July 1954, in a rainswept Wankdorf Stadium in Bern, Switzerland, the biggest match of the early Cold War saw the world’s best team – the ‘golden squad’ of communist Hungary – pitted against capitalist West Germany in the World Cup final. The ‘Magical Magyars’, featuring the brilliant forward Ferenc Puskás, were hot favourites. The only question was how many goals they would put past the Germans.
At first, the match went to script, and Hungary raced into a 2-0 lead. But West Germany had drawn level by the 18th minute, and it was still 2-2 in the 84th. Then Helmut Rahn rifled a shot past Gyula Grosics. “Germany lead 3-2!” exclaimed commentator Herbert Zimmermann. “Call me mad! Call me crazy!”
Controversy erupted late on as linesman Mervyn Griffiths disallowed a Puskás equaliser for offside. Then the final whistle blew. West Germany were world champions for the first time.
They called it “the miracle of Bern”. That was an exaggeration: the West Germans had top players, a wily coach in Sepp Herberger, and screw-in studs on their Adidas boots – a huge advantage in muddy conditions.
Miracle or not, victory in 1954 helped Germany emerge from the shadow of Nazism. Budapest, though, rioted after their national team’s loss. Two years later, a popular uprising almost toppled communist rule. Grosics hid arms for the rebels. Puskás, like many of Hungary’s golden generation, went west to continue a glittering career at Real Madrid.
Hungary’s brief time as a football superpower was over. Germany’s was just beginning.
3. Church vs communism
A “bewitching” Yugoslav team got the better of Ireland’s footballers – and incensed its religious authorities
“Football is like a religion to me,” Pelé once confessed. “I worship the ball and treat it like a god.” In October 1955, at the height of the Cold War, football and faith clashed head-on as the Catholic Republic of Ireland played communist Yugoslavia in Dublin – and God lost.
For much of the Cold War, Yugoslavia dominated eastern European football. In the 1950s it boasted one of the world’s best goalkeepers, Vladimir Beara, along with prolific striker Miloš Milutinović. When the team’s visit to Dublin was announced in the summer of 1955, Irish sports fans licked their lips at the prospect of seeing these stars in the flesh.
Enter John Charles McQuaid, Catholic archbishop of Dublin and one of the most dominant figures in the history of the Irish Republic. He hated Yugoslavia’s atheistic dictator, Josip Broz Tito, who’d infamously imprisoned Catholic priests. McQuaid had successfully lobbied against a planned 1952 fixture between these teams, and now heaped immense pressure on Ireland’s football authorities to cancel the 1955 game.
The result was an almighty public row. Clergy accused football officials of betraying church and country by arranging the match. Officials argued that vetoing Tito’s team would irreparably damage Irish football. The Yugoslavs cheekily responded by reminding Catholics of Pope Pius XII’s view that politics should not interfere with sports.
This time, McQuaid suffered a rare defeat – and the match went ahead in front of 22,000 spectators at Dalymount Park. The Yugoslavs demonstrated another communist team’s technical brilliance, their slick passing and inventive attacking play repeatedly exposing the Irish defence. Milutinović bagged a hat-trick, and Tito’s team ran out 4-1 winners. Irish newspapers claimed that the visitors’ footballing “science” had “bewitched and bewildered” their opponents.
Ireland lost on the pitch. But many later claimed that football dented the authority of the Catholic church in 1955 – so perhaps the country won something more important.
4. Franco, Khrushchev and the ultimate grudge match
Francoism and communism clashed on the pitch in the final of the 1964 European Nations’ Cup – a game that neither team dared lose
Madrid’s Bernabéu Stadium is always a cauldron. When Spain played the Soviet Union there in the final of the European Nations’ Cup, it was Francoism versus communism in the ultimate Cold War grudge match. “Not just a battle – it was a war,” recalled Barcelona’s Chus Pereda.
Spanish dictator Francisco Franco was among the crowd on 21 June 1964. A Real Madrid fan, he liked football – but not as much as he hated communism. When Spain were drawn against the Soviet Union in the 1960 Euros, they forfeited the tie rather than send the team to Moscow.
Four years later, with Spain hosting the Euros, Franco’s advisors ensured that the 1960 boycott wasn’t repeated. The country was on the path to economic liberalisation, and the Cold War tensions of the early sixties had receded. Semi-final wins for Spain and the Soviets set up the final both sides dreaded.
Pre-match tensions were high. The president of the Spanish Football Federation even considered having the Soviet team poisoned. But all of this was forgotten when the game started. Pereda gave Spain an early lead but the Soviets quickly equalised, with Galimzyan Khusainov’s shot squirming under keeper José Ángel Iribar’s body.
Extra time looked inevitable – until, with 6 minutes remaining, Marcelino powered a remarkable header past Soviet stopper Lev Yashin to give Spain a 2–1 victory.
The Spanish press was cock-a-hoop. Celebrations were widespread, even in the outlawed Communist Party. But the feel-good factor didn’t last. It would be 44 years before Spain won another international trophy.
In Moscow, Nikita Khrushchev was furious – both with the result and with images of a smiling Franco on TV sets across the Soviet Union. Two days after the final, coach Konstantin Beskov was sacked. Khrushchev soon followed. Leonid Brezhnev, a bigger football fan, replaced him as party leader in October 1964.
5. The 'hermit nation' steals British hearts
North Korea’s players were the darlings of the 1966 World Cup finals, but they met their match in the men of an anti-communist dictatorship
The 1966 World Cup quarter-final between North Korea and Portugal produced one of the most dramatic matches in football history – one shaped by the wider tensions of the Cold War.
By that stage of the competition, the communist Asian team had already shocked Italy, but its performance at Goodison Park in Liverpool on 23 July 1966 was still more impressive: fast, direct and fearless. Within 25 minutes North Korea led 3-0, exploiting defensive gaps with sharp passing and clinical finishing. The crowd watched in astonishment as a team from Kim Il-Sung’s ‘hermit nation’ was overwhelming one of Europe’s elite sides.
The Koreans had become unlikely favourites with British fans, especially in Middlesbrough, where their earlier victory over Italy had forged a lasting connection still remembered today. New fans chanted the names of players from the east, and waved improvised North Korean flags.
Portugal, however, represented a different Cold War story. Under António de Oliveira Salazar, the Iberian country was a staunchly anti-communist dictatorship. Its team reflected imperial ambitions: several key players, including Eusébio, were born in African colonies, embodying the regime’s claim of a unified, multiracial state.
The quarter-final match turned on endurance and quality. Portugal regrouped, slowing the tempo and asserting control. Eusébio became the decisive figure, combining strength, pace and finishing to devastating effect, scoring four goals as Portugal mounted a relentless comeback. At the final whistle they had won 5-3.
The game was a classic of shifting momentum: early shock, mounting pressure and eventual domination. Yet it also carried symbolic weight. North Korea’s performance offered a rare humanising sight of a closed communist state, while Portugal’s victory allowed Salazar’s regime to celebrate both footballing excellence and imperial identity.
6. When a regime's dream turned sour
Zaire’s appearance at the 1974 World Cup was meant to rubber-stamp its status as a rising power. That bubble was burst in 90 humiliating minutes
When Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) qualified for the 1974 World Cup finals in Germany, President Mobutu Sese Seko saw an opportunity to advertise his regime to the world. His nation had become the first from sub-Saharan Africa to reach the finals, and he intended to turn that success into a political triumph.
Mobutu was a master of Cold War diplomacy. While presenting himself as a staunch anti-communist ally of the US he cultivated relations with China and other socialist states, skilfully playing rival powers off against one another to secure aid and influence. Footballing success, he believed, would reinforce Zaire’s image as a rising African power.
Ironically, as it transpired, the team reflected Yugoslavia’s growing influence across the developing world. Zaire was managed by Blagoje Vidinić, a former Yugoslav international goalkeeper who’d previously coached in Morocco. (Yugoslavia frequently sent sporting experts abroad as informal ambassadors, in an attempt to strengthen diplomatic links through football.)
When Zaire faced Yugoslavia in their Group 2 clash in Gelsenkirchen, it proved an embarrassing mismatch. The communist team’s experienced side dominated, exploiting defensive errors and scoring repeatedly. The final score of 9-0 remains one of the heaviest defeats in World Cup history.
The humiliation had frightening consequences. Before Zaire’s next match against Brazil, rumours spread among the players that Mobutu had threatened punishments if they suffered another embarrassment. Several later said they feared for their lives.
That fear produced one of football’s most famous moments. Before a Brazilian free kick, defender Mwepu Ilunga burst from the defensive wall and blasted the ball upfield. To spectators, he seemed confused about the rules. In reality, it was a desperate attempt to disrupt play and avoid further shame.
The episode revealed the darker side of Cold War sport, in which political pride could transform a football match into something far more dangerous.
7. The derby of a doomed dictatorship
A bitter cup final contested by Bucharest neighbours exposed cracks that augured revolution
Did football ever help overthrow communism? Well, maybe. Take Romania under the tyrannical rule of Nicolae Ceauşescu (1965–89). For much of his dictatorship, Romanian football wasn’t very good. But that changed in the 1980s.
Leading the way were Romania’s most powerful clubs, Steaua Bucharest and Dinamo Bucharest. This was army versus secret police: the team run by Ceauşescu’s son, Valentin, against the team of the hated Securitate. There was no love lost in the ‘eternal derby’.
Dinamo won three league titles between 1981 and 1984, then Steaua took control, taking five straight championships and, sensationally, the Eastern Bloc’s first European Cup – an upset win over Barcelona in 1986.
Tensions peaked at the 1988 Romanian cup final in Bucharest. It was 1-1 in the 90th minute when Steaua sub Gabi Balint’s winning goal was contentiously ruled offside. The furious Steaua team stormed off the pitch. Dinamo’s bemused players eventually lifted the cup in front of their delirious fans.
The bad blood continued. After Steaua’s 2-1 win in a vital league game in March 1989, Dinamo’s players turned their anger on the authorities. Legend has it that defender Ioan Andone walked towards the VIP box, dropped his shorts and flashed Valentin Ceauşescu. More likely, he raised his middle finger at the dictator’s son – a defiant gesture that earned Andone a three-month ban from playing.
Before 1989 ended, so did communism in Romania. Nicolae Ceauşescu was executed on Christmas Day. His regime’s downfall had more to do with political repression and economic misery than football, of course, but the combustible Steaua-Dinamo rivalry showed that the state wasn’t always in control. Or even on the same page. Football was a canary in the coal mine, signalling explosive change ahead.
8. A new world order
China’s victory in the opening match of the 1991 Women’s World Cup signalled the rise of a superpower
By late 1991, the Cold War was thawing and communism had collapsed in eastern Europe. Francis Fukuyama had predicted the universal victory of liberal democracy, and it seemed that a new world was coming, shaped by American power. But there was room, too, for smaller players – and a communist superpower. This was the backdrop to the 1991 Women’s World Cup.
Away from the Olympics, women’s sport had been largely ignored during the Cold War, and women’s football survived with little support from the game’s powers. The wind of change, though, eventually blew into Zurich where Fifa, hardly a feminist bastion, recognised the PR value of women’s football. As did Fifa’s biggest untapped market, the People’s Republic of China. Fifa awarded it the first Women’s World Cup, to be held in November 1991.
It was a controversial choice. In June 1989, Deng Xiaoping’s government had crushed pro-democracy protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, killing hundreds or possibly thousands. Hosting a major sports event was part of China’s international rehabilitation. Today we’d call it sportswashing.
On 16 November 1991, at the Tianhe Stadium in Guangzhou, China played Norway in the first Women’s World Cup game. Some 65,000 spectators watched the hosts win 4-0. Liu Ailing starred, scoring two goals, the second a 30-yard screamer.
Though China went out in the quarter-finals, Norway reached the final, losing 2-1 to the USA. These three countries led the women’s game in the 1990s, a crucial decade of growth. More than 90,000 people watched the USA beat China on penalties in the 1999 World Cup final in California. Bill Clinton received the winners at the White House, saying: “It’s going to have a bigger impact than people ever realise.”
A quarter of a century later, women’s football is no longer relegated to the margins of international sport. Nor is China, which has hosted two Olympics, plus another Women’s World Cup in 2007. The Cold War might be over – but sport remains a potent weapon in tussles for soft power.
Tony Shaw and Alan McDougall are the co-authors of Cold War Football: A History in Ten Matches (Cambridge University Press, 2026)
This article was first published in the July 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]> What if the Soviets had beaten the Americans to the moon? An alternate space race history https://www.historyextra.com/period/cold-war/star-city-for-all-mankind-space-race-history/ Fri, 12 Jun 2026 14:21:15 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/cold-war/star-city-for-all-mankind-space-race-history/ Two television shows – For All Mankind and Star City – imagine an alternative universe in which Soviet cosmonauts completed the first moon landing in 1969 ahead of US astronauts. But how might global history have unfolded if the space race had taken a different course, asks Matthew Trask – and could it have ensured the survival of the Soviet Union? The year is 1969, and Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov has just become the first human to land on the moon. This moment marks a decisive victory for the Soviet Union and sparks a protracted space race that sees both the Soviets and the US reach farther into the farther reaches of the solar system.
That’s the premise of the Apple TV series For All Mankind, running since 2019: what if the Soviets had won the race to the moon? It explores that alternate history by imagining how Nasa and the US government might respond to falling behind in the Cold War space race. What it doesn’t depict is the Soviet perspective.
That changed on 29 May, when spin-off show Star City dropped on Apple TV. It tells the story of the Soviet space agency’s efforts to beat the US to the moon, offering a different take on the events leading up to the first season of For All Mankind.
The alternate history explored in both shows echoes a period in our timeline that was fraught with tension and espionage but also illuminated by some of the greatest feats ever accomplished by humanity. They depict one possible set of outcomes to that ‘what if’ question – but can history provide pointers to what might actually have happened had Soviet cosmonauts reached the moon before the US in 1969?
How close did the Soviets really come to beating Nasa to the moon?
Whether you’re old enough to remember the space race as it unfolded, or you were born after the turn of the millennium, almost everyone around the world will be familiar with the images of Neil Armstrong and the crew of Apollo 11 taking their first steps on the moon.
“That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind,” Armstrong famously said – celebrating not the achievement of one nation but the collective advancement of the whole human race. These were revolutionary words, spoken at the height of the Cold War between his country and those behind the so-called Iron Curtain.
It is easy to forget just how close the Soviets came to stealing a march on the US. After all, the first artificial objects sent into space were the Soviet craft Sputnik 1 and 2, launched in 1957. And Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space in 1961.
Despite these early successes, the Soviets lacked the laser focus with which Nasa and the US targeted the moon through the Apollo programme, and suffered from the effects of a fractious administration managing multiple projects all competing for funding.
“It was a byzantine system beset by internal rivalry, nepotistic patronage and wasteful duplication,” Dr Thomas Ellis said of the Soviet space programme, speaking to HistoryExtra in 2021. In order to win the space race, the Soviet project would have needed to behave “like the American image of it”.
Star City presents a vision of history in which these issues were resolved, allowing the Soviets to win out. Interestingly, the show’s lead, played by Rhys Ifans and billed as chief designer, is the driving force behind the Soviet race to the moon. In season 2 of For All Mankind, it is implied that his character may have been inspired by Sergei Korolev, the real life ‘glavny konstruktor’ behind the rockets that put both Sputnik and Gagarin into orbit.
Korolev died in 1966, three years before the US reached the moon. “Had he lived longer, Korolev would have continued to be a crucial cog in the machine to achieve crewed space flight and in developing the N1 rocket (the Soviet version of the Saturn V),” Jonny Wilkes wrote in BBC History Revealed magazine in 2021.
Star City imagines a universe in which Korolev – or at least a Korolev analogue – lived long enough to see the Soviets beat the US to the moon.
How might the Cold War have unfolded after a Soviet moon landing?
Behind the scientific breakthroughs, speeches and rocket launches, an ideological war was being waged.
This conflict was about, amongst other things, the competing ideologies of capitalism and communism. And economic and social structures underpinned both US and Soviet approaches to the space race.
Had the Soviets beaten the US to the moon, might the Cold War have unfolded differently?
“There would have been huge celebrations in the Soviet Union,” said Ellis, “with parades and ceremonies symbolically linking the space heroes to the Communist Party’s role as the unquestioned guiding force.”
Such a victory would have provided the Soviets with a “huge, much-needed prestige boost… both at home and abroad,” Ellis noted – and a victory in the political and economic battle against capitalism epitomised by the US.
It might well have been Alexei Leonov, the first man to complete a spacewalk and the cosmonaut widely thought of as Neil Armstrong’s Soviet counterpart, written into the history books as the first man on the moon.
“Like the Apollo astronauts, these lunar cosmonauts would have followed a hero’s welcome in the homeland with a victory lap tour around the world,” Ellis continued.
Meanwhile, the Americans would have been left licking their wounds. Such a public defeat would have made the administration and its ideology look weak.
“Publicly, there would be gracious congratulations and invites to the White House,” Ellis added. “Privately, President Nixon would have been seething.” Such a defeat could have provided the requisite fuel for US politicians who sought a reduction in Nasa’s overall budget – people who, as Ellis noted, might have “disparaged space racing as the sort of propagandistic spectacle best left to the communists”.
For All Mankind suggests a different outcome. In that show, the space race never ends; instead, Americans and Soviets vie to reach various milestones in space exploration ahead of their rivals. “The Soviets would undoubtedly have continued exploring space [if they’d achieved the first moon landing],” said Ellis, “spending subsequent decades attempting to press their advantage.”
We see this idea borne out in For All Mankind, as the space race escalates in the decades after that landing, with attempts to establish permanent moon bases and even to reach Mars and beyond.
Ellis suggested that such goals would have created a very different political and economic landscape, fundamentally changing the latter half of the Cold War if Soviet funds were channelled into a spiralling pace race.
Might a Soviet moon landing have prevented the collapse of the USSR?
In the short term, that success would have provided a huge boost to the Soviet propaganda machine, allowing the moon landing to be hailed as a victory for communism on the world stage.
“A successful moonshot might well have provided a new potent diplomatic and propaganda tool,” commented Ellis, “and led to an uptick in membership for Third World communist parties.”
However, in the longer term it might have led to the downfall of the Soviet Union. “Prestige is powerful, but it wouldn’t have invalidated the economic and political weaknesses,” Ellis said. “Continued attempts by the Soviet Union to maintain their lead over the US may have served to highlight the structural problems deep-rooted within the Soviet economy. It is difficult to imagine a moonshot preventing the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union.”
Star City and For All Mankind offer glimpses of what might have been had the Soviets beaten the US to the moon in 1969 – and today’s world would be a very different place.
Star City premiered on 29 May on Apple TV. For All Mankind seasons 1–5 are all available to watch now on the service
Matthew Trask is a writer and journalist
]]> Masters of disinformation: how British spies played dirty in the Cold War https://www.historyextra.com/membership/masters-disinformation-how-british-spies-played-dirty-cold-war-podcast/ Fri, 12 Jun 2026 10:41:43 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/masters-disinformation-how-british-spies-played-dirty-cold-war-podcast/ Rory Cormac tells the story of the mavericks charged with running a black propaganda campaign to disrupt and discredit Britain's Cold War adversaries They 'haunted' an Indonesian general with a talking ghost and planted fake hippies in a Bulgarian youth festival. But did they change the course of the Cold War? Rory Cormac introduces Spencer Mizen to the comically absurd – and dangerously controversial – tactics deployed by a group of misfits and mavericks charged with raining down confusion on Britain's adversaries in the 1950s and 60s.
Hear more from Rory Cormac on the HistoryExtra podcast, listen to him discussing Queen Victoria's spy network here
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