On June 17, 1953, the first in a series of rebellions against Soviet-backed regimes in Eastern Europe took place.

It began in East Berlin and spread out across the German Democratic Republic. Over half a million workers went on strike, and around a million East Germans — close to 10 percent of the population — joined the protests.

These figures would have climbed even higher if the Red Army and domestic security forces had not, with lethal force, quickly intervened. The scale of the response prompted Bertolt Brecht’s famous barb: the Politburo would have to “dissolve the people and elect another.”