Timeline Russia 1911-1944
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1911 Mar 20, Russian Premier Stolypin resigned in St. Petersburg.
(HN, 3/20/98)
1911 Sep 14, Russian Premier Piotr Stolypin was mortally wounded in an assassination attempt at the Kiev opera house.
(HN, 9/14/98)
1911 Sep 18, Russian Premier Piotr Stolypin (b.1862) died four days after being shot at the Kiev opera house by socialist lawyer Dimitri Bogroff. As governor of the Saratov province, Stolypin ruthlessly suppressed local peasant uprisings, and helped to squelch the revolutionary upheavals of 1905. As Prime Minister, Stolypin initiated major agrarian reforms that granted the right of private land ownership to the peasantry.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyotr_Stolypin)
1911 Sep 24, Konstantin Chernenko, president of the Soviet Union 1984-1985, was born.
(HN, 9/24/98)
1911 Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova developed rayonism (rayonnism), a style of abstract art, after hearing a series of lectures about Futurism by Marinetti in Moscow. The Rayonists sought an art that floated beyond abstraction, outside of time and space, and to break the barriers between the artist and the public.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayonism)
1911 Mendel Beilis was tried on charges of killing a Russian child to extract its blood for baking Passover matzos. He spent over 2 years in prison before a jury found him not guilty. Franz Kafka followed the story and may have transformed it into a universal symbol of arbitrary victimization in his "The Trial."
(WSJ, 10/17/00, p.A20)
1911 Russia exported 13.7 million tons of grain while some 30 million of its peasants suffered from famine.
(SFC, 7/11/98, p.B3)
1912 May 5, The Soviet Communist Party newspaper Pravda began publishing. Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili took the name Stalin, meaning "man of steel," about the time he helped found the Russian Communist newspaper Pravda. Stalin specialized in writing about national minorities in Russia and went on to become editor of Pravda.
(HN, 5/5/98)(HN, 12/21/98)(HNQ, 4/6/00)
1912 Nov 24, Austria denounced Serbian gains in the Balkans; Russia and France backed Serbia while Italy and Germany backed Austria.
(HN, 11/24/98)
1912 The novella “Hadji Murad" by Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) was published. Murad (d.1852) was an important Chechen leader during the resistance of the Caucasian peoples in 1711-1864 against the Russian Empire's seizure of the region.
(http://tinyurl.com/js9od)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadji_Murad)
1912 The Pushkin Museum opened in Moscow. It was scheduled to close in 2009 for a $380 million upgrade to be completed in 2012.
(WSJ, 5/21/08, p.D9)
1912 The Saint Nicholas Cathedral in Nice, with its two pointed spires and five crucifix-topped onion-shaped domes, was built under Nicholas II, nearly 50 years after his grandfather, Alexander II, bought the land it sits on.
(AP, 1/20/10)
1913 May 13, 1st 4 engine aircraft was built & flown by Igor Sikorsky of Russia.
(SS, Internet, 5/13/97)
1913 Nov 26, Russian kingdom forbade Polish congregation of speakers.
(MC, 11/26/01)
1913 Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935), Ukraine born artist, designed the costumes for the opera “Victory Over the Sun."
(Econ, 10/26/13, p.96)(Econ, 12/21/13, SR p.5)
1913 Phillip Malyavin, Russian artist, painted the portrait "Dancing woman."
(WSJ, 5/2/03, p.W6)
1913 The Faberge Imperial rock crystal egg with rose cut diamonds set in platinum was created for the Czar. An American in 1994 paid $5.5 mil for the egg. Only 56 eggs were commissioned by the czars and czarinas.
(SFEM, 6/9/96, p.19)
1913 Vladimir Mayakovsky, futurist poet, authored "Mayakovsky: A Tragedy."
(SFC, 8/12/00, p.B1)
1913 Three Russian ships sailed to the Greek island of Athos and bundled hundreds of Orthodox monks off to Odessa. The Russians feared that a dispute over reciting the name of Jesus Christ would lead to the expulsion of all Russians from Athos. The name dispute began in 1907 when the book “In the Mountains of the Caucasus" was written by a monk named Ilarion.
(Econ, 12/22/12, p.89)
1913 The US firm Harley-Davidson opened its 1st motorcycle dealership in St. Petersburg, Russia. It closed in 1917. In 2005 it opened a new dealership opened in Moscow.
(SFC, 5/13/05, p.C2)
1914 Jan 16, Maxim Gorky was authorized to return to Russia after an eight year exile for political dissidence.
(HN, 1/16/99)
1914 Feb 26, Russian aviator Igor Sikorsky carried 17 passengers in a twin engine plane in St. Petersburg. Igor Sikorsky, founder of Sikorsky Aircraft, produced a film in 1942 that promoted the capabilities of his VS-300 helicopter, highlighting its possible rescue and military applications.
(HN, 2/26/98)
1914 Mar 6, Kirill P. Kondrashin, conductor (Hollywood Bowl 1981), was born in Moscow, Russia.
(MC, 3/6/02)
1914 Mar 17, Russia increased the number of active duty military from 460,000 to 1,700,000.
(HN, 3/17/98)
1914 Jun 15, Yuri Andropov, Russian KGB chief, 1st secretary, was born.
(MC, 6/15/02)
1914 Jul 25, Russia declared that it would act to protect Serbian sovereignty.
(HN, 7/25/98)
1914 Jul 31, German Kaiser Wilhelm II threatened war and ordered Russia to demobilize.
(MC, 7/31/02)
1914 Aug 1, Germany declared war on Russia at the onset of World War I.
(AP, 8/1/07)
1914 Aug 2, Russian troops invade Eastern Prussia.
(MC, 8/2/02)
1914 Aug 3, German Admiral Souchon, commander of the battle cruisers Goeben and Breslau, received an unexpected change in his orders. After attacking the Algerian coast he was no longer to sail west to the Atlantic Ocean. Instead, he was now ordered to turn around and sail east to Turkey. His new mission was to persuade the neutral Turkish government to enter the war on the side of Germany. The 2 ships were sold to Turkey and Souchon was made commander of the Turkish navy. He took the ships into the Black Sea, where he bombarded the Russian cities of Odessa, Sebastopol and Novorossiysk without the knowledge or consent of the Turkish government.
(http://www.worldwar1.com/sfgb.htm)(ON, Dec, 1995)
1914 Aug 6, Austria-Hungary declared war against Russia and Serbia declared war against Germany.
(AP, 8/6/00)
1914 Aug 15, Anatol K. Liadov (59), Russian composer (Baba Yaga), died.
(MC, 8/15/02)
1914 Aug 20, German forces occupied Brussels, Belgium, during World War I.
(AP, 8/20/97)
1914 Aug 20, Russia won an early victory over Germany at Gumbinnen.
(HN, 8/20/98)
1914 Aug 27, 2nd day of battle at Tannenberg: Germany bombed Usdau.
(MC, 8/28/01)
1914 Aug 29, 4th day of Tannenberg: Russian Narev-army panics, Gen Martos caught.
(MC, 8/29/01)
1914 Aug 31, Germany defeated Russia at the battle at Tannenberg. Some 30,000 Russians died.
(MC, 8/31/01)
1914 Sep 1, Russia renamed St. Petersburg to Petrograd.
(MC, 9/1/02)
1914 Sep 5, The First Battle of the Marne began during World War I. The German First Army was led by Gen. Alexander von Kluck.
(AP, 9/5/97)(WSJ, 12/31/99, p.A10)
1914 Oct 28, The German cruiser Emden, disguised as a British ship, steamed into Penang Harbor near Malaya and sank the Russian light cruiser Zhemchug.
(HN, 10/28/99)
1914 Oct 29, A Turkish fleet including 2 German cruisers stormed the Black Sea and bombarded Odessa, Sevastopol and Theodosia. [see Aug 3]
(PC, 1992, p.706)(ON, Dec, 1995)
1914 Nov 2, Russia declared war with Turkey. [see Oct 29]
(HN, 11/2/98)
1914 Nov 25, Hindenburg called off Lodz offensive 40 miles from Warsaw, Poland. The Russians lost 90,000 to the Germans’ 35,000 in two weeks of fighting.
(HN, 11/25/98)
1915 Feb 10, President Wilson blasted the British for using the U.S. flag on merchant ships to deceive the Germans. He also warned the Kaiser that he would hold Germany "to a strict accountability" for U.S. lives and property endangered. In Europe [Lithuania], the Germans encircled and captured 100,000 Russians near Nieman River. When the United States entered World War I, propagandist George Creel set out to stifle anti-war sentiment.
(HN, 2/10/97)
1915 Jun 22, Austro-German forces occupied Lemberg on the Eastern Front as the Russians retreated.
(HN, 6/22/98)
1916 Jan 11, Russian General Yudenich launched a WWI winter offensive and advances west.
(HN, 1/11/99)
1915 Jan 31, Germans used poison gas on the Russians at Bolimov.
(HN, 1/31/99)
1915 Feb 7, Field marshal Paul von Hindenburg moved on Russians at Masurian Lakes.
(HN, 2/7/99)
1915 Feb 21, The 20th Russian Army corps surrendered.
(MC, 2/21/02)
1915 Apr 24-May 14, Turkey said Armenians had sided with Russia and issued a deportation order for the mass deportation of Armenians. Armenian organizations in Istanbul were closed and 235 members were arrested for treason. Turkish police arrested hundreds of the most prominent Armenians in Constantinople, took them into the hinterlands and shot them. With that the terror spread through "Turkish Armenia" spearheaded by the "Special Organization" of soldiers of the Turkish leader Enver. In 2006 Taner Akcam authored “A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility."
(AP, 4/24/97)(HN, 4/24/98)(SFC, 4/27/99, p.A10)(HNQ, 5/30/99)(Econ, 10/21/06, p.95)
1915 Aug 23, Czar Nicolaas II took control of the Russian Army.
(MC, 8/23/02)
1915 Apr 27, Alexander N. Scriabin (43), Russian pianist, composer (Prometheus), died.
(SFC, 2/16/99, p.B1)(MC, 4/27/02)
1915 Oct 19, Russia and Italy declared war on Bulgaria.
(MC, 10/19/01)
1915 Kasimir Malevich (1878-1935), Ukraine born pioneer of abstract art, painted "Suprematist Cross in Black Square." It featured a dark black square against a white background and was "emblematic of the avant-garde belief that abstraction penetrated to the essence of things, on which basis the world could be reinvented."
(SFC, 5/28/98, p.E5)(WSJ, 10/5/05, p.D14)(Econ, 10/26/13, p.96)
1915 Ingush and Chechen regiments led "the Brusilov breakthrough" on the Russian-German front. Their horse cavalry attacked an enemy force armed with heavy artillery.
(www.chechnyafree.ru)
1916 Jan 18, The Russians forced the Turkish 3rd Army back to Erzurum.
(HN, 1/18/99)
1916 Jan 29, Grigori Rasputin, Russian mystic, shaman, grubby peasant, and influential favorite of the Romanov court, survived a failed attempt to poison him. Prince Felix Yussoupov, an effete, wealthy young aristocrat, shot and killed Rasputin and in effect, brought down the Russian Empire. The prince dined out on his story for many decades, becoming a jet-set celebrity. He restored his old wealth, lost in the Soviet Revolution, by suing anyone who wrote about Rasputin without his permission. [see Dec 16, Dec 30, 1916]
(MC, 1/29/02)
1916 Feb 16, Russian troops conquered Erzurum, Armenia.
(MC, 2/16/02)
1916 Feb 26, Russian troops conquered Kermansjah, Persia.
(SC, 2/26/02)
1916 Mar 18, On the Eastern Front, the Russians countered the Verdun assault with an attack at Lake Naroch. The Russians lost 100,000 men and the Germans lost 20,000.
(HN, 3/18/98)
1916 Jun 26, Russian General Aleksei Brusilov renewed his offensive against the Germans.
(HN, 6/26/98)
1916 Aug 7, Persia formed an alliance with Britain and Russia.
(HN, 8/7/98)
1916 Aug 11, The Russia army took Stanislau, Poland, from the Germans.
(HN, 8/10/98)
1916 Nov 7, Grand duke Nikolai Nikolayevich warned the czar of an uprising.
(MC, 11/7/01)
1916 Dec 17, Gregory Rasputin (45), the Russian monk and confidant to Czarina Alexandra, died after he was shot by Prince Yussoupov (Youssoupoff). The monk, who had wielded powerful influence over the Russian court, was murdered by a group of noblemen. He was fed cakes and wine laced with cyanide, then shot a number of times and finally drowned. In 1957 Youssoupoff (d.1967) authored a memoir in France that in 2003 was translated into English: Lost Splendor: The Amazing Memoirs of the Man Who Killed Rasputin." A TV version of Rasputin was made for HBO in 1996 [see Dec. 30].
(WSJ, 3/25/96, p.A-15)(AP, 12/16/97)(SSFC, 11/30/03, p.M4)
1916 Dec 30, According to the New Style calendar (Dec. 17th by the Old Style), Grigory Rasputin, the so-called "Mad Monk" who had wielded great influence with Czar Nicholas II, was murdered in St. Petersburg. Rasputin drowned when he was thrown through a hole in the ice of the Neva River. When Rasputin was introduced to the Russian royal family in 1905, he demonstrated an ability to heal the royal son Alexis and was then welcomed into the family circle. Rasputin was considered a holy peasant, but his belief that sinning was necessary for salvation led him to seduce women and other scandalous behavior. A conspiracy, believing Rasputin had too much influence on the empress, formed to assassinate him, and on the night of December 29-30, they poisoned his wine--but he did not die. They shot him twice, but when he still refused to die, they drowned him [see Dec 17].
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigori_Rasputin)(AP, 12/29/06)
1916 A Russian submarine sank off Sweden’s eastern coast after it collided with a Swedish ship in poor visibility, killing all 18 crew members. Wreckage of the submarine was found in 2015.
(Reuters, 7/28/15)
1917 Feb 20, Ammunitions ship exploded in Archangel harbor, Russia, and about 1,500 died.
(MC, 2/20/02)
1917 Feb 23, The February revolution began in Russia (OS calendar). [see Mar 8]
(MC, 2/23/02)
1917 Feb 28, Russian Duma set up a Provisional Committee; workers set up Soviets.
(MC, 2/28/02)
1917 Mar 8, Russian women commenced a strike for "bread and peace" in response to the death over 2 million Russian soldiers in war. This was 23 February on the Julian calendar then in use in Russia. This day on the Gregorian calendar in use elsewhere was 8 March.
(www.internationalwomensday.com/about.asp#.VP5OouEYOok)
1917 Mar 8-1917 Mar 12, Russia’s democratic February revolution took place. The "February Revolution" (according to the Old Style calendar that Russians used it was Feb 23-27) began with rioting and strikes in the Russian army garrison at Petrograd.
(AP, 3/8/98)(LHC, 3/8/03)
1917 Mar 9, A Lithuanian committee in St. Petersburg accepted a declaration for Lithuanian autonomy.
(LHC, 3/9/03)
1917 Mar 12, Russian troops mutinied in the "February Revolution." [see Mar 8]
(HN, 3/12/99)
1917 Mar 15, Nicholas II, last Russian tsar, said he will abdicate.
(MC, 3/15/02)
1917 Mar 16, Nicholas II, Czar of Russia, abdicated in favor of his brother Michael. He was forced to sign a document of abdication after being brought down by political unrest and widespread starvation stemming from Russia’s staggering losses in WWI. The czar, his wife Alexandra, their four daughters and son Alexis, heir to the throne, were held prisoner by the Bolsheviks for several months at Tsarskoye Selo palace near Petrograd. In August 1917, the family was transported to distant Siberia to prevent any attempt to restore them to the throne. In July 1918, the entire royal family was executed by local Bolsheviks.
(HNPD, 3/16/99)
1917 Mar 17, Czar Michael abdicated after one day in favor of a provisional government under Prince George Evgenievich Lvov (55).
(PCh, 1992, p.722)
1917 Mar 22, The U.S. became the first to recognize the Kerensky Government in Russia.
(HN, 3/22/97)
1917 Mar, Revolutionary soldiers dug up the Rasputin’s grave and soaked his body in gasoline and set it ablaze in insure his death.
(WSJ, 3/25/96, p.A-15)
1917 Apr 3, Lenin left Switzerland for Petrograd.
(MC, 4/3/02)
1917 Apr 16, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin returned to Russia after years of exile to start the Bolshevik Revolution.
(AP, 4/16/97)(HN, 4/16/98)
1917 Apr 20, In the Pravda newspaper Lenin named Russia "Free land of world."
(MC, 4/20/02)
1917 May 1, Caucasian unity was proclaimed at the first Mountain People's Congress in Vladikavkaz. The idea of a Caucasus Confederation had its origins in the spring of 1917 and was developed further in 1918. At the Congress the "Alliance of United Mountain People of the North Caucasus and Dagestan", headed by T. Chermoev, a Chechen, R. Kaplanov, a Kumyk, P. Kotsev, a Kabardian, V. Dzhabagiev, an Ingush, and others, was officially established. The Abkhazian people also became full members of this alliance. A Mountain Peoples' Government was formed in November 1917.
(www.ciaonet.org/olj/crs/crs_1998sp/crs98sp_las01.html)
1917 Jun 10, 60,000 people of Petrograd welcomed Prince Kropotkin, who was banned 41 years earlier.
(MC, 6/10/02)
1917 Jun 16, The 1st Congress of Soviets convened in Russia.
(MC, 6/16/02)
1917 Jun 17, The Russian Duma met in secret session in Petrograd and voted for an immediate Russian offensive against the German Army.
(HN, 6/17/98)
1917 Jun 24, Russian Black Sea fleet mutinied at Sebastopol.
(MC, 6/24/02)
1917 Jul 20, Alexander Kerensky became the premier of Russia.
(HN, 7/20/98)
1917 Jun 29, The Ukraine proclaimed independence from Russia.
(HN, 6/29/98)
1917 Aug 4, Pravda called for the killing of all capitalists, priests and officers.
(MC, 8/4/02)
1917 Sep 3, Fanya Kaplan, the Russian who shot at Lenin on Aug 30th, was executed.
(MC, 9/3/01)
1917 Sep 15, Russia was proclaimed a republic by Alexander Kerensky, the head of a provisional government.
(AP, 9/15/97)
1917 Sep 17, The German Army recaptured the Russian [Latvian] Port of Riga from Russian forces.
(HN, 9/17/98)
1917 Oct 8, Leon Trotsky was named chairman of Petrograd Soviet.
(MC, 10/8/01)
1917 Oct 21, Petrograd's garrison accepted a Revolutionary Military Committee.
(MC, 10/21/01)
1917 Oct 23, Lenin spoke against Kamenev, Kollontai, Stalin and Trotsky.
(MC, 10/23/01)
1917 Oct 25(OS), In Russia Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Lenin seized power. Lenin (1870-1924) and Leon Trotsky (1879-1940), seized power from Russian socialist Alexander F. Kerensky (1881-1970) who had taken over the government in July of 1917. Kerensky sent troop on this day to shut down the Bolshevik press in Petrograd (Leningrad, St. Petersburg). Kerensky’s ministers at the Winter Palace surrendered in the face of Bolshevik armed might. [see Nov 7]
(www.marxists.org/history/ussr/revolution/)
1917 Nov 6, Bolshevik "October Revolution" (October 25 on the old Russian calendar), led by Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, seized power in Petrograd. [see Nov 7]
(HN, 11/6/98)
1917 Nov 7, (October 25 old style Julian calendar then used by Russia) The provisional government of Premier Aleksandr Kerensky fell to the Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. He called his followers the Bolsheviks, meaning the majority, when they formed for a short period the majority of a revolutionary committee. The Bolsheviks became a majority of the ruling group, but they were only a small part of the total Russian population. Decades of czarist incompetence and the devastation of World War I had wrecked the Russian economy and in March 1917, Czar Nicholas II abdicated. Kerensky's provisional government struggled to maintain power until Lenin's Bolshevik followers stormed Petrograd and seized all government operations. Lenin and his lieutenant, Leon Trotsky, quickly confiscated land and nationalized industry and in March 1918, Russia withdrew from World War I by signing the humiliating Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany. Bloody civil war raged in Russia for the next two years as the anti-Bolshevik White Army battled the Communists for control. [see Nov 6] This day became a national holiday and continued until it was abolished in late 2004.
(CFA, '96, p.58)(V.D.-H.K.p.260-261)(AP, 11/7/97)(HNPD, 11/7/98)(AP, 11/4/05)
1917 Nov 8, The People's Commissars "gave" authority to Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin.
(MC, 11/8/01)
1917 Nov 10, New Soviet government suspended freedom of the press.
(MC, 11/10/01)
1917 Nov 15, Kerensky fled and the Bolsheviks took command in Moscow.
(HN, 11/15/98)
1917 Nov 17, Lenin defended the "temporary" removal of freedom of the press.
(MC, 11/17/01)
1917 Nov 21, Maxim Gorki called Lenin a blind fanatic and unthinking adventurer.
(MC, 11/21/01)
1917 Nov 26, Bolsheviks offered armistice between Russian and the Central Powers.
(HN, 11/26/98)
1917 Dec 6, Finland declared independence from Russia (National Day).
(MC, 12/6/01)
1917 Dec 6, Former Czar Nicholas II and family were made prisoners by the Bolsheviks in Tobolsk.
(HN, 12/6/98)
1917 Dec 9, New Finnish Republic demanded the withdrawal of Russian troops.
(HN, 12/9/98)
1917 Dec 18, The Soviet regiment under Stalin and Lenin declared Finland Independent.
(MC, 12/18/01)
1917 Dec 20, Russian secret police in Czechoslovakia was formed under Felix Dzerzhinsky. He helped lead the Bolshevik revolution and set up the communist secret police, the Cheka, which later became the KGB.
(MC, 12/20/01)(WSJ, 10/15/02, p.D6)
1917 Dec 24, The Kaiser warned Russia that he would use "iron fist" and "shining sword" if peace was spurned.
(HN, 12/24/98)
1917 The Bolsheviks tried banning money in favor of barter after the revolution, but chaos resulted and they accepted money as a necessary evil.
(SFC, 2/11/98, p.B3)
1917 After the Bolshevik revolution Lenin named Stalin commissar of nationalities.
(HNQ, 4/6/00)
1917 Feliks Dzherzhinsky established the Cheka. It was transformed to the KGB in 1954.
(SFEC, 1/2/00, BR p.5)
1917 Chechens formed their 1st independent state, the Confederation of North Caucasian Peoples, following the Bolshevik Revolution. [see May 1]
(SSFC, 11/10/02, p.A11)
1917 The Don Cossacks declared their own independent republic during the unrest that led to the Bolshevik Revolution.
(SFC,10/28/97, p.A8)
1917-1991 This period was later covered by Martin Malia in "The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991."
(WSJ, 3/26/98, p.A20)
1918 Jan 2, Bolsheviks talked about resuming war unless the Germans quit Russian soil.
(HN, 1/2/99)
1918 Jan 19, The Latvian rifleman 6th Tukums regiment, sent to defend the Bolshevik headquarters in Smolny institute in St. Petersburg, took part in disbanding Russia’s Constituent Assembly.
(http://tinyurl.com/krxwaky)
1918 Jan 28, Leon Trotsky became leader of the Russian Communists.
(MC, 1/28/02)
1918 Jan 31, Russia joined the rest of the world and adopted the Gregorian calendar. The next day became February 14, 1918.
(www.ortelius.de/kalender/greg_en.php)
1918 Feb 5, The Soviets proclaimed the separation of church and state.
(HN, 2/5/99)
1918 Feb 16, The Council of Lithuania declared the independence of the State of Lithuania. The council also declared that the foundations of the state would be determined by a Constituent Assembly to be elected by the inhabitants on the basis of universal, equal and secret suffrage.
(DrEE, 10/5/96, p.5)(LHC, 2/16/03)
1918 Feb 22, Germany claimed the Baltic states, Finland and Ukraine from Russia.
(MC, 2/22/02)
1918 Feb 24, Estonia's Independence Day. Estonia proclaimed independence from Russia.
(LHC, 2/23/03)
1918 Mar 1, The state of Idel-Ural, a Tatar republic in Kazan under Sadri Maqsudi Arsal, united the region's Finno-Ugric and Turkic peoples. On March 28 it was defeated by the Red Army. Arsal escaped to Finland.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idel-Ural_State)(Econ., 1/30/21, p.69)
1918 Mar 3, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, the Ottoman Empire and Russia signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which ended Russian participation in World War I. Germany and Austria forced Soviet Russia to sign the Peace of Brest, which called for the establishment of 5 independent countries: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which ended Russian participation in World War I, was annulled by the November 1918 armistice. The treaty deprived the Soviets of White Russia.
(HN, 3/3/99)(LHC, 3/1/03)(AP, 3/3/08)
1918 Mar 4, Terek Autonomous Republic was established in RSFSR (until 1921).
(SC, 3/4/02)
1918 Mar 5, The Soviets moved the capital of Russia from Petrograd to Moscow. St. Petersburg shrunk to 35% of its previous size.
(HN, 3/5/98)(SFEC, 6/27/99, p.T11)
1918 Mar 9, Russian Bolshevik Party became the Communist Party.
(MC, 3/9/02)
1918 Mar 12, Vladimir I. Lenin published his reasons for moving the capital from St. Petersburg to Moscow.
(WSJ, 9/20/04, p.A20)
1918 Mar 14, An all-Russian Congress of Soviets ratified a peace treaty with the Central Powers.
(HN, 3/14/98)
1918 Mar 20, The Bolsheviks asked for American aid to rebuild their army.
(HN, 3/20/98)
1918 Mar 25, Belarus proclaimed independence from Russia. The Belarusian People's Republic lasted until 1919.
(LHC, 3/25/03)(AP, 3/25/18)
1918 Apr 6, Savva Mamontov, Russian industrialist, merchant, entrepreneur, and patron of the arts, died. He had supervised the construction of the Severnaya Railway linking Moscow with the Russian North. He was also involved into the building of Donetsk railway from 1876 to 1882.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savva_Mamontov)
1918 Apr 13, The Soviet Wartime and people’s commissariat issued an order to form Latvian Soviet rifleman division. The commander in charge was Jukums Vacietis. It was one of the first divisions in the Red Army.
(http://tinyurl.com/krxwaky)
1918 May 28, Tatars declared Azerbaijan, in Russian Caucasus, independent.
(HN, 5/28/98)
1918 May, Leon Trotsky ordered a Czech legion to surrender while it was scattered across the sixth-thousand-mile-long Trans-Siberian Railway. Rather than turn themselves in, the legion’s men mutinied.
(The National Interest, 9/3/19)
1918 Jul 17, Russian Tsar, Nicholas II, was executed at Ekaterinburg by the Bolsheviks under orders from Lenin. His wife, son, 4 daughters, and 4 servants were also executed. The family mass grave was discovered by a former KGB agent in 1979 in the Urals and only 9 bodies were found. The bodies were dug up in 1991. A 1997 documentary film by Victoria Lewis, "Mystery of the Last Tsar," told the story. The Czar, his wife, three children and four servants were executed by a 12-man firing squad in the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg. A reburial of the family was scheduled in St. Petersburg for Jul 17, 1998.
(SFC, 4/5/97, p.E3)(SFC, 2/28/98, p.A8)(SFC, 7/15/98, p.A9)(AP, 7/17/07)
1918 Jul 17, Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna (b.1864) was murdered at a mine the village of Siniachikha. The Cheka beat Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich Romanov, Princes Ioann Konstantinovich, Konstantin Konstantinovich, Igor Konstantinovich, Vladimir Pavlovich Paley, Feodor Remez (Grand Duke Sergei's secretary), and Varvara Yakovleva, a sister from the Grand Duchess's convent, before throwing their victims into a pit, Elizabeth being the first. Hand grenades were then hurled down the shaft, but only one victim, Feodor Remez, died as a result of the grenades. Finally a large quantity of brushwood was shoved into the opening and set alight.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princess_Elisabeth_of_Hesse_and_by_Rhine_%281864%E2%80%931918%29)
1918 Jul, The US War Dept. assigned some 9,000 soldiers from California and the Philippines for duty in Siberia.
(Ind, 5/4/02, 5A)
1918 Aug 2, A British force landed in Archangel, Russia, to support White Russian opposition to the Bolsheviks.
(HN, 8/2/98)
1918 Aug 15, Russia severed diplomatic ties with US.
(MC, 8/15/02)
1918 Aug 16, US troops overthrew Archangel (Russia).
(MC, 8/16/02)
1918 Aug 30, Lenin, the new leader of Soviet Russia, was shot & wounded after a speech.
(MC, 8/30/01)
1918 Aug, Lenin gave a command to suppress a peasant revolt in Penza with orders to hang no fewer than one hundred known kulaks.
(WSJ, 10/23/96, p.A19)
1918 Sep 2, Some 9,000 soldiers from California and the Philippines began arriving at Vladivostok under Gen. William S. Graves. His orders said to stay out of trouble. US President Woodrow Wilson sent the Polar Bear Expedition to Russia in response to requests from the governments of Great Britain and France to join the Allied Intervention in North Russia (also known as the North Russia Campaign). The Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War fought the Red Army in the surrounding region from September 1918 through to July 1919.
(Ind, 5/4/02, 5A)(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_Bear_Expedition)
1918 Sep 19, American troops of the Allied North Russia Expeditionary Force received their baptism of fire near the town of Seltso against Soviet forces.
(HN, 9/19/99)
1918 Sep, Some 13 thousand US troops were placed under British command, and launched on a six-week offensive that pushed back Red Army troops towards the River Dvina and the Vologda railhead. The US troops were soon defending a series of strongpoints strung along the railway lines running to Murmansk and connecting Arkhangelsk to Vologda. The American Expeditionary Force to Siberia had an even more peculiar objective: helping extract friendly Czech soldiers.
(The National Interest, 9/3/19)
1918 Oct 18, Russian 10th Army drove out White armies of Tsaritsyn (Stalingrad).
(MC, 10/18/01)
1918 Nov 11, Some 2,500 Bolsheviks, backed by gunboats and led by a “giant of a man" named Melochofski, assaulted a company of three hundred US infantry in the village of Tulgas, two hundred miles south of Arkhangelsk, overrunning their hospital.
(The National Interest, 9/3/19)
1918 Nov 13, Soviet Russia annulled the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty.
(http://tinyurl.com/krxwaky)
1918 Dec 11, Alexander Solzhenitsyn (d.2008), Russian writer, was born. He won the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize and is famous for “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" (1962) and "The Gulag Archipelago" (1973). Daniel J. Mahoney later authored "Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Ascent From Ideology."
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn)(WSJ, 10/11/01, p.A20)
1918 Arthur Ransome (1884-1967), British agent and writer, wrote a propaganda pamphlet titled: “On Behalf of Russia: An Open Letter to America." In 2009 Roland Chambers authored “The Last Englishman: The Double Life of Arthur Ransome."
(Econ, 8/29/09, p.73)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Ransome)
1918 Lenin established the Collegium on Affairs of Museums and Protection of Monuments of Art and Antiquity.
(AM, Jul/Aug ‘97 p.33)
1918 Konstantin Stanislavsky founded an opera theater.
(WSJ, 1/13/98, p.A20)
1918 Gustaf Mannerheim led a Finnish victory over much larger Bolshevik and Finnish Red Guard forces.
(DrEE, 10/26/96, p.4)
1918 Idel-Ural (Volga-Ural), a 1917 union of Finno-Ugric people in the middle of Russia, was crushed by the Bolsheviks. Its foreign minister Sadri Maqsudi Arsal was welcomed in Finland and then Estonia.
(Econ, 12/24/05, p.73)
1918 "Special departments," later known as the FSB, were established to spy on the military as the Communist Party absorbed officers who had served under the just-deposed czar.
(SFC, 2/17/00, p.D3)
1918 In Russia Jacob Ivanovich Moiseeff of Minsk headed the Trans-Siberian Railway. His daughter Nadya Jacobova Moiseeva was born in 1918 and escaped to Shanghai after the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931.
(SFC, 12/2/97, p.A22)
1918 Nikolay Bukharin, member of the central committee of the Bolshevik Party and editor of Pravda, led the "Left Communists" in opposition to V.I. Lenin’s signing the Brest-Litovsk treaty with Germany and withdrawing Russia from World War I. Bukharin-a major Marxist theoretician and economist-and the Left Communists proposed to transform the war into a general European revolution.
(HNQ, 8/31/99)
1918 South Ossetians made a bid to break away from Georgia and thousands fled in the ensuing violence.
(WSJ, 8/27/08, p.A12)
1919 Jan 15, Peasants in Central Russia rose against the Bolsheviks.
(HN, 1/15/99)
1919 Jan 24, Grand Prince Pavel Alexandrovich, a son of Czar Alexander II, and grand princes Nikolai Mikhailovich, Georgy Mikhailovitch and Dmitry Konstantinovich, nephews of the czar, were executed at the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg. They were posthumously rehabilitated in 1999 by the Russian office of the prosecutor general.
(SFC, 6/10/99, p.C3)
1919 Feb 8, Lithuanian and German military forces forced the Bolsheviks from Kedainiai.
(LHC, 2/8/03)
1919 Feb 27, The Bolsheviks took Lithuania and joined it with White Russia as a single Soviet republic. Litbel lasted until June 25.
(LHC, 2/27/03)
1919 Feb, The Polish–Soviet War began and continued to March 1921. It was an armed conflict between Soviet Russia and Soviet Ukraine against the Second Polish Republic and the Ukrainian People's Republic, four states in post-World War I Europe.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish-Soviet_War)
1919 Mar 2, The 1st congress of Communist Int’l. opened at the Kremlin.
(SC, 3/2/02)
1919 Mar 19, A typhoid epidemic raged in Petrograd, Russia, killing 200 daily.
(HN, 3/19/98)
1919 Mar 23, Bashkir ASSR (Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic) in the RSFSR (Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic) was constituted.
(SS, 3/23/02)
1919 Mar 23, Moscow's Politburo-Central Committee formed.
(SS, 3/23/02)
1919 Apr 20, Polish Army captured Vilno (Vilnius), Lithuania from Soviet Army.
(HN, 4/20/97)
1919 Jun 6, Finland declared war on Bolsheviks.
(MC, 6/6/02)
1919 Jun, In Siberia four hundred guerillas caught a sleeping American encampment at Romanovka by surprise, killing twenty-four American soldiers out of a force of seventy-two.
(The National Interest, 9/3/19)
1919 Nov 7, US police raided offices of Union of Russian Workers.
(MC, 11/7/01)
1919 Nov 14, Red Army captured Omsk, Siberia.
(MC, 11/14/01)
1919 Dec 21, J. Edgar Hoover gallantly deported anarchist, feminist Emma Goldman to Russia for agitating against forced conscription in the US.
(WSJ, 12/11/95, p.A-1)(MC, 12/21/01)
1919 Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko founded a music theater.
(WSJ, 1/13/98, p.A20)
1919 Lenin created the Comintern to supervise the int'l. revolutionary movement.
(WSJ, 6/6/03, p.W9)
1919 The Bolsheviks began repressions and millions of Cossacks died. Their institutions were destroyed and many fled the country.
(SFC,10/28/97, p.A8)
1920 Jan 16, Allies lifted the blockade on trade with Russia.
(HN, 1/16/99)
1920 Feb 7, Adm. Alexander Kolchak (b.1874), commander of the White Army in Siberia during the civil war that followed the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, was executed by a firing squad in Irkutsk about a month after relinquishing command of anti-Bolshevik forces. He was condemned in Soviet law as a counterrevolutionary. In 2004 efforts began to exonerate him.
(AP, 12/7/04)(www.firstworldwar.com/bio/kolchak.htm)
1920 Feb 9, The Svalbard Treaty gave Norway sovereignty over the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, but allowed other countries to establish settlements there and to exploit its natural resources. The treaty allowed Russia to pursue mining at Spitsbergen. By 2017 there were more than 40 countries party to the treaty.
{Norway, Russia}
(WSJ, 9/19/97, p.A1)(Econ, 10/11/08, p.70)(Econ, 10/2/04, p.52)(Reuters, 10/26/17)(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard)
1920 Feb 27, The U.S. rejected a Soviet peace offer as propaganda.
(HN, 2/27/98)
1920 Mar 7, The Bolsheviks opened major offensive on the Polish front.
(HN, 3/7/98)
1920 Apr 1, The last members of the US Siberian expedition withdrew from Russia with a loss of over 400 lives.
(http://tinyurl.com/y4erkevn)(The National Interest, 9/3/19)
1920 Apr 5, Japanese forces landed in Vladivostok.
(HN, 5/5/97)
1920 Apr 28, Azerbaijan joined the USSR. The Red Army invaded Azerbaijan and turned the country into a Soviet Republic.
(HN, 4/28/98)(CO, Grolier’s Amer. Acad. Enc./ Azerbaijan)
1920 Jul 8, The Galician Soviet Socialist Republic (Galician SSR) was formed and lasted to September 21, 1920, during the Polish-Soviet War within the area of the South-Western front of the Red Army.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galician_Soviet_Socialist_Republic)
1920 Jul 12, Lithuania and Russia signed a peace treaty in Moscow.
(LC, 1998, p.20)
1920 Oct 14, In the Dorpart Treaty the Soviet Bolsheviks reaffirmed Finnish independence, gave Finland the ice-free port of Pechenga towards the Arctic Ocean and put the Finnish border 18 miles west of Leningrad. The treaty, signed by Stalin, was precipitated by Gustaf Mannerheim’s victory over much larger Bolshevik and Finnish Red Guard forces in 1918.
(DrEE, 10/26/96, p.4)
1920 Nov, White Russian Major Gen’. Paul Petroff entrusted 20 boxes of gold coins and 2 boxes of gold bullion to Colonel R. Isome of the Japanese forces that occupied part of Siberia in order to cross Manchuria and not loose the money to bandits. He was fleeing to the anti-Bolshevik stronghold at Vladivostok. The money was never returned. The events were later documented by his son Serge Petroff in the 1997 book "Let the War Rage."
(SFC,10/17/97, p.D2)
1920 Nov, Chechens joined with other Caucasian peoples to form the Republic of the Mountain Peoples. Chechens had rebelled during the civil war that followed the Russian Revolution of 1917, clashing with local Cossacks and the anti-Communist White forces as well as with the Communists' Red Army. With the establishment of Soviet authority in the region.
(www.chechnyawar.com/history)
1920 Isaac Babel (d.1940) wrote a wartime diary as he rode horseback with Budyonny’s First Cavalry Army as the Cossacks participated in the Bolshevik invasion of Poland. An essay on the diary was written by Cynthia Ozick in her 1996 book: "Fame & Folly."
(WSJ, 5/22/96, p.A-18)
1920 Leon Theremin (d.1993) invented the theremin musical instrument. He was a Russian physicist who invented the instrument made of vacuum tubes and oscillators. In 1927 he was allowed to go to the US to promote his instrument and to spy for the Soviets. He returned to Russia in late 1938. [He was later abducted by operators of Stalin and taken back to Moscow where he is forced to work on devices for the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs.] He was sent to Siberia for a year and then back to Moscow to work on aircraft design. He later designed some listening devices. [see 1945] The theremin was an early electronic instrument with an eerie, sliding tone. The 1994 film "Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey," featured the instrument. Clara Rockmore (d.1998 at 88), born Clara Reisenberg in Vilnius, became a theremin virtuoso, and was the focus of the 1998 video documentary: "Clara Rockmore, The Greatest Theremin Virtuoso."
(WSJ, 9/19/95, p.A20)(SFC, 5/12/98, p.A21)(ON, 11/01, p.8)
1920 Russia became the first country to allow abortion.
(Econ, 5/19/07, p.66)
1920 During the Russian Civil War, Mongolia was invaded by a White Russian force of 5,000 men. Freiherr Roman Nikolai Maximilian von Ungern-Sternberg hoped to use Mongolia as a base to restore the Romanov regime. During his 130-day rule he ordered that Commissars, Communists, and Jews, together with their families, be exterminated. In 2009 James Palmer authored “The Bloody White Baron: The Extraordinary Story of the Russian Nobleman Who Became the Last Khan of Mongolia."
(www.gobiexpeditions.com)(Econ, 2/14/09, p.96)
1920 During Polish-Soviet war thousands of captured Red Army men were placed in the camp of Тuchola, Poland. These POWs lived in trenches, while famine, cold, and infectious diseases killed tens of prisoners daily. In the winter 1920/1921 POWs had a death rate of about 25%, which was attributed to malnutrition, poor sanitary conditions, lack of fuel and medicines, and physical maltreatment by the Polish supervisors.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuchola)
1920s Dziga Vertov created a cinematic mosaic of Moscow in his film "The Man With a Movie Camera."
(SFEC, 2/2/97, DB. p.8)
1920s The New Economic Policy (NEP) of Lenin was elaborated by Nikolai Bukharin.
(WSJ, 3/26/98, p.A20)
1921 Feb 8, Pjotr A. Kropotkin (78), Russian anarchist and son of Prince Alexei Petrovich Kropotkin, died. Books by Peter Kropotkin included “Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution" (1902)
(www.en.wikipedia.org)
1921 Feb 26, The Russo-Persian Treaty of Friendship was signed in Moscow between representatives of Iran and the Soviet Russia. Both the Soviet Russia and Iran were given full and equal shipping rights in the Caspian Sea along with the right to fly their respective national flags on their commercial vessels.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Persian_Treaty_of_Friendship_(1921))
1921 Feb 12, Soviet troops invaded neighboring Georgia.
(MC, 2/12/02)
1921 Feb 28, A treaty between the Bolshevik government of Russia and the amir of Afghanistan is signed. British Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon states on one occasion that the Soviet government has offered the Afghans a subsidy of £100,000 a year.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1921_in_Afghanistan)
1921 Mar 1, Sailors revolted in Kronstadt, Russia.
(SC, 3/1/02)
1921 Mar 7, Red Army under Trotsky attacked the sailors of Kronstadt.
(MC, 3/7/02)
1921 Mar 16, Britain signed a bilateral trade agreement with Russia.
(HN, 3/16/98)
1921 Mar 21, Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP) was promulgated by decree.
(www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/RUSnep.htm)
1921 Apr 9, Russo-Polish conflict ended with the signing of the Riga Treaty.
(HN, 4/9/98)
1921 Apr 15, Georgi Timofeyevich Beregovoi, USSR cosmonaut (Soyuz 3), was born.
(MC, 4/15/02)
1921 May 21, Andrei Sakharov, Russian physicist, was born. He is known as "the father of the Soviet H-bomb" and was the first recipient of the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize.
(HN, 5/21/99)
1921 Sep 21, Pope Benedictus XV donated 1 million lire to feed Russians.
(MC, 9/21/01)
1921 Oct 4, League of Nations refused to assist starving Russians.
(MC, 10/4/01)
1921 Oct 18, Russian Soviets granted Crimean independence.
(HN, 10/18/98)
1921 Aleksandr Rodchenko, artist, created his whimsical "Project for a Perpetual Motion Machine." He also painted his “Triptych" in this year.
(WSJ, 7/8/98, p.A13)(WSJ, 10/5/05, p.D14)
1921 Yevgeny Zamyatin (d.1937), Russian author, completed his novel “We." It offended communist censors and did not appear in print in Russia until 1988. Editions outside Russia became available in 1924. In 2006 Natasha Randall made a new English translation.
(WSJ, 7/26/06, p.D11)
1921 Afghanistan signed a Treaty of Friendship with the Soviet Union.
(WSJ, 9/20/01, p.A12)
1921 The borders of Armenia were gerrymandered when the Caucasus territories were made part of the Soviet Union. This made the area of Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous enclave of mostly Armenians surrounded by Azerbaijan dependent on Moscow. The site of Ani, former capital of Armenia, was ceded to Turkey.
(SFC, 2/4/98, p.C2)(WSJ, 3/18/98, p.A18)(Econ, 6/17/06, p.59)
1921 The Red Army forced the Chechen government into exile and took nominal control. Armed resistance continued. The "Mountain Peoples' Government" was forced to emigrate as Soviet power became established in the Caucasus.
(SSFC, 11/10/02, p.A11)(www.ciaonet.org/olj/crs/crs_1998sp/crs98sp_las01.html)
1921 The League of Nations granted the Aland Island group to the new Finnish Republic.
(WSJ, 12/5/97, p.A1)
1921 In Mongolia Damdiny Sukhbaatar, supported by the Bolshevik administration in Moscow, organized a force that, with the help of Red Army troops, defeated the White Russians and drove off the Chinese.
(www.gobiexpeditions.com)
1921 In Russia a mineral exploration mission discovered coal deposits Vorkuta, 1,200 miles northeast of Moscow. The 1st coal mine there opened in 1931 using prisoner labor. Use of prisoners for mining ended in 1962.
(ST, 7/29/04, p.A3)
1921 A Soviet famine began with a drought that caused massive crop failures, including total crop failure on about 20% of Soviet farmland. a Soviet estimate put the death toll at 5.1 million.
(www.overpopulation.com/faq/Health/hunger/famine/soviet_famine.html)
1921-1944 The Soviets allowed Tuva to call itself independent as the Tuvan People’s Republic. Tannu Tuva stamps were issued by Moscow in odds shapes and they became collector's items.
(WSJ, 4/1/06, p.A5)(Econ, 11/7/15, p.46)
1922 Feb 1, Lieutenant Colonel I. Matuszewski, the head of the II department of the Polish Joint Staff, informed the military minister of Poland in the letter, that 22,000 prisoners of war were lost in the camp of Tuchola during its existence.
(www.search.com/reference/Prisoner-of-war_camp)
1922 Apr 3, Stalin was appointed General Secretary of Communist Party.
(MC, 4/3/02)
1922 Apr 16, A German-Russia treaty was signed in Italy. It recognized the Soviet Union.
(MC, 4/16/02)
1922 May 26, Lenin suffered a stroke.
(MC, 5/26/02)
1922 May 29, Jevgeni B. Vachtangov (39), Armenian-Russian actor, director, died.
(SC, 5/29/02)
1922 Nov 27, Allied delegates barred Soviets from Near East peace conference.
(HN, 11/27/98)
1922 Dec 30, Vladimir I. Lenin proclaimed the establishment of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Soviet Russia was renamed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The Soviet Union was organized as a federation of RSFSR, Ukrainian SSR, Belorussian SSR and Transcaucasian SSR.
(AP, 12/30/97)(HN, 12/30/98)(MC, 12/30/01)
1922 The Constructivist group of artists in Russia issued a manifesto calling for the defeat of art, which they regarded as the enemy of technology. Alexander Rodchenko (1891-1956), a painter turned photographer, was founding member of the group.
(Econ, 2/9/08, p.91)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandr_Rodchenko)
1922 The Red October Heat and Power Plant opened in St. Petersburg, Russia.
(SSFC, 12/22/02, p.F8)
1922 In the Rapallo Treaty Germany recognized Lenin's regime.
(WSJ, 8/5/99, p.A16)
1922 The Soviet government divided the North Caucasus along ethnic lines, separating the Chechen Autonomous Oblast from the Republic of the Mountain Peoples and abolishing the republic itself in 1924.
(www.chechnyawar.com/history)(USAT, 9/2/04, p.13A)
1922 Lenin deported 70 of the best minds in Russia along with their families. In 2006 Lesley Chamberlain authored “The Philosophy Steamer: Lenin and the Exile of the Intelligentsia."
(Econ, 3/18/06, p.80)
1922 South Ossetia became an autonomous region within the Soviet Republic of Georgia.
(WSJ, 8/27/08, p.A12)
1923 Feb 9, Soviet Aeroflot airlines formed.
(MC, 2/9/02)
1923 Feb 15, Yelena Bonner, soviet dissident, wife of Andre Sakharov, was born in Moscow.
(MC, 2/15/02)
1923 Mar 4, Lenin's last article in Pravda (about Red bureaucracy) was published.
(SC, 3/4/02)
1923 Mar 15, Lenin was felled by his 3rd stroke.
(MC, 3/15/02)
1923 Tamara Geva (d.1991), Russian ballet dancer, married George Balanchine, ballet choreographer. The couple traveled to East Prussia in 1924 with the Soviet State Dancers and then defected to Paris where they joined Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballet Russes.
(SFC,12/13/97, p.A23)(Econ, 4/12/08, p.94)
1924 Jan 21, Russian revolutionary Vladimir Ilyich Lenin died at age 53 and a major struggle for power in the Soviet Union began. A triumvirate led by Joseph Stalin succeeded Lenin. By 1928, Stalin had assumed absolute power, ruling as an often brutal dictator until his death in 1953 of a brain hemorrhage. In 1998 Vladimir Brovkin published "Russia After Lenin." After the death of Lenin, Bukharin became a full member of the Politburo and opposed the policy of initiating rapid industrialization and collectivization in agriculture-a position shared by Stalin at the time. In 2000 Robert Service authored "Lenin."
(TMC, 1994, p.1924)(AP, 1/21/98)(WSJ, 8/3/98, p.A12)(HNQ, 8/31/99)
1924 Jan 24, The Russian city of Petrograd (formerly St. Petersburg) was renamed Leningrad in honor of the late revolutionary leader. It has since been re-named St. Petersburg.
(AP, 1/24/99)
1924 Jan 27, Lenin's body was laid in a marble tomb on Red Square near the Kremlin.
(HN, 1/27/99)
1924 Feb 1, Soviet Union was formally recognized by Britain.
(MC, 2/1/02)
1924 Feb 7, Mussolini government exchanged diplomats with USSR.
(MC, 2/7/02)
1924 Mar 15, Sweden recognized the U.S.S.R.
(HN, 3/15/98)
1924 May 12, Russian-American poet Alexander Esenin-Volpin was born in Leningrad. A notable dissident, political prisoner and a leader of the Soviet human rights movement, he spent total of fourteen years incarcerated and repressed by the Soviet authorities in prisons, psikhushkas and exile.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Esenin-Volpin)
1924 Nov 14, Leonid B. Kogan, violinist (Lenin Prize-1952), was born in Dnepropetrovsk, Russia.
(MC, 11/14/01)
1924 Dec 15, Soviets warned the U.S. against repeated entry of ships into the territorial waters of the USSR.
(HN, 12/15/98)
1924 Isaac Brodsky, Soviet Realist, completed the monumental depiction: "The Second Congress of the Comintern," which took place in the Uritsky Palace.
(Econ, 10/11/03, p.85)
1924 The film "Kino-Eye" was the first genuine Soviet documentary and showed people from all walks of life who didn't know they were being filmed.
(SFC, 6/4/99, p.C12)
1924 The film "Strike" was Sergei Eisenstein's first feature.
(SFC, 6/4/99, p.C12)
1924 Lenin established the State Restoration Workshop to nationalize and protect Russian cultural heritage.
(AM, Jul/Aug ‘97 p.33)
1924 The Bolsheviks formed the Moldovan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR), aka Transdniestria, as a basis for later taking over a chunk of Romania.
(WSJ, 7/8/97, p.A1,8)(http://tinyurl.com/b7m4b)
1924 Stalin divided remnants of Turkistan into the current Central Asian republics.
(SFC, 1/2/97, p.A10)
1924 After the death of Lenin Bukharin became a full member of the Politburo and opposed the policy of initiating rapid industrialization and collectivization in agriculture-a position shared by Stalin at the time. When, in 1928, Stalin reversed his view, Bukharin's power diminished. Although he participated in writing the 1936 Soviet constitution, he was ultimately expelled from the Communist Party in 1937 for being a Trotskyite, was falsely accused and found guilty of counterrevolutionary activities and espionage. Bukharin was executed in 1938.
(HNQ, 8/31/99)
1925 Jan 16, Leon Trotsky was dismissed as CEO of Russian Revolution Military Council. Stalin took power over Trotsky.
(TMC, 1994, p.1925)(MC, 1/16/02)
1925 Mar 7, The Soviet Red Army occupied Outer Mongolia.
(HN, 3/7/98)
1925 Mar 23, Aleksei Kuropatkin (76), Russian General, minister of War, died.
(SS, 3/23/02)
1925 Mar 30, Stalin supported rights of non-Serbian Yugoslavians.
(MC, 3/30/02)
1925 Jul 10, The official news agency of the Soviet Union, TASS, was established.
(AP, 7/10/97)
1925 Dec 18, Soviet leaders Lev Kamenev and Grigori Zinoviev broke with Stalin.
(HN, 12/18/98)
1925 Sergei Prokofiev composed his opera "The Gambler."
(WSJ, 4/16/01, p.A14)
1925 “The White Guard," a novel by Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940) of Kiev during the Russian civil war, first appeared in part in serial form. A stage version titled “The Days of the Turbins" ran from 1926-1941. The novel was not reprinted in Russia until 1966.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Guard)(Econ, 8/9/14, p.67)
1925 Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940), Russian writer, medical doctor and playwright, published his novel "The Fatal Eggs." Here a pestilence spawned by a professor's research threatens not only his marriage, but civilization itself.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Bulgakov)(Econ, 3/28/20, p.74)
1925 Fragments of Ivan Bunin’s “Cursed Days," compiled of diaries and notes he made while in Moscow and Odessa in 1918-1920, were first published by the Paris-based Vozrozhdenye newspaper. A full version appeared in 1936. It was banned in the USSR until the 1980s. Bunin (1870-1953) was the first Russian writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1933).
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursed_Days)
1925 Eisenstein made his classic silent film "Potemkin."
(SFC, 1/4/97, p.E1)
1926 Feb 28, Svetlana Alliluyeva, daughter of Josef Stalin, author (My Life), was born.
(HN, 2/28/98)(MC, 2/28/02)
1926 Mar 26, U.S. oil companies bought 190,000 tons of kerosene from Russia for $3.2 million.
(HN, 3/25/98)
1926 Mar 30, Feliks E. Dzerzjinski (48), Lithuanian organizer (KGB), died. Felix Dzerzhinsky was the founder of the communist secret police, the Cheka.
(MC, 3/30/02)(WSJ, 10/15/02, p.D6)
1926 May 12, Dmitri Shostakovitch's 1st Symphony premiered in Leningrad.
(MC, 5/12/02)
1926 Sep 27, Lithuania and the Soviet Union agreed to a 5-year treaty.
(LC, 1998, p.16)
1926 Oct 19, Russian Politburo threw out Leon Trotsky and his followers.
(MC, 10/19/01)
1926 Oct 25, Galina Vishnevskaya, soprano (Madame Butterfly), was born in Leningrad.
(MC, 10/25/01)
1926 Nov 19, Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from Politburo in the USSR.
(HN, 11/19/98)
1926 Dec 5, Sergei Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin," debuted.
(MC, 12/5/01)
1926 The Russian film "Po Zakonu" (By the Law) was directed by Lev Kuleshov. It was based on the Jack London story "The Unexpected."
(SFC, 7/8/99, p.E4)
1927 Mar 27, Mstislav Leopold Rostropovich, cellist, conductor, was born in Baku, Azerbaijan, USSR.
(MC, 3/27/02)(Internet)
1927 May 5, Dmitri Shostakovitch' 1st Symphony, premiered in Berlin.
(MC, 5/5/02)
1927 Jul 18, Vasily Polenov (b.1844), Russian painter, died.
(http://tinyurl.com/737kp)
1927 Oct 29, Russian archaeologist Peter Kozloff uncovered the tomb of Genghis Khan in the Gobi Desert.
(HN, 10/29/98)
1927 Nov 12, Josef Stalin became the undisputed ruler of the Soviet Union as Leon Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party.
(AP, 11/12/97)
1927 Dec 14, China and Soviet Union broke relations.
(AP, 12/14/02)
1927 Dec 27, Stalin's faction won All-Union Congress in USSR. Trotsky was expelled.
(MC, 12/27/01)
1927 Dec, Leonid Kulik (d.1942), Russian expert on meteorites, delivered his report to the Russian Academy of Sciences on his 2nd trip to the Tunguska site in Siberia regarding the 1908 meteorite explosion. He estimated that the meteorite had weighed several thousand metric tons and convinced the academy to sponsor another expedition in 1928.
(ON, 6/08, p.8)
1927 Josef Stalin purged much of the Tatar intelligentsia in the Crimea.
(SFC, 1/4/99, p.A8)
1927 Sergius, a Greek Orthodox bishop, signed an agreement accepting the Soviet Union as a “civil motherland."
(Econ, 10/18/08, p.69)
1927 The monastery of Saint Serafim Sarofsky in the village of Deveyevo, Russia, was liquidated. The 266 year old complex was used to store lumber and vegetables until 1991 when it was returned to the church.
(SFC, 5/18/96, p.A-11)
1927 Prince John Kropotkin, son of Russian Prince Alexei Kropotkin, was beaten to death on a Paris street. Soviet agents were suspected.
(SFC, 7/5/04, p.B4)
1928 Jan 10, The Soviet Union ordered the exile of Leon Trotsky. Stalin triumphed over Bolshevik Party opposition led by Trotsky, Leo Kamenev, and Gregory Zinoviev.
(AP, 1/10/98)(SFEC, 5/31/98, p.7)
1928 Jan 11, Leon Trotsky, a leader of the Bolshevik revolution and early architect of the Soviet state, was shipped out by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to Alma-Ata in remote Soviet Central Asia. Later he was banished from the USSR.
(MC, 1/11/02)
1928 Jan 25, Eduard Shevardnadze, foreign minister of USSR, was born in Soviet Georgia.
(MC, 1/25/02)
1928 Mar 22, Peasants in the Soviet Union protested food shortages there.
(HN, 3/22/97)
1928 May 24, The dirigible Italia crashed while attempting to reach Spitzbergen. Nine men survived the initial crash. In 2000 Wilbur Cross authored "Disaster at the Pole," a revised edition of the 1960 version of the disaster led by Italian aviator Umberto Nobile. The Russian film "Krasnaya palatka" (1969), starring Sean Connery, detailed the Nobile expedition and attempted rescue. This movie was released in North America under the title "The Red Tent."
(ON, 10/00, p.6)(SSFC, 1/7/01, Par p.14)(www.imdb.com/title/tt0067315/)
1928 Jun 3, An amateur radio operator in Archangel, Russian, picked up a distress signal from the crew of the Italia and reported the crew’s location. A 2nd report from an American amateur changed the location and proved to be a hoax.
(ON, 10/00, p.6)
1928 Galina Ulanova (1910-1988), ballerina, made her debut in Leningrad’s Maryinsky Ballet.
(SFEC, 3/22/98, p.C5)
1928 Stalin introduced the 1st Soviet Five-Year Plan. Stalin pushed his farm collectivization program killing and displacing millions of peasants.
(TMC, 1994, p.1928)(WSJ, 2/24/04, p.D8)
1928 Stalin began his plans for the resettlement of Jews to Birobidzhan, an area of land the size of Belgium on the Russian-Chinese border. It was officially declared the Jewish Autonomous Region and by 1930 some 230,000 people lived in colonies there. Yiddish language and culture was fostered but worship was forbidden.
(SFEM, 5/24/98, p.4)
1928 Stalin reversed his view on rapid industrialization and Bukharin's power diminished. Although Bukharin participated in writing the 1936 Soviet constitution, he was ultimately expelled from the Communist Party in 1937 for being a Trotskyite, was falsely accused and found guilty of counterrevolutionary activities and espionage. Bukharin was executed in 1938.
(HNQ, 8/31/99)
1928 In the USSR a show trial of the North Caucasus Shakhty engineers paved the way for Stalin’s consolidation of power in 1929. They were accused of sabotaging coal production in Shakhty on orders from the Germans. The trial initiated a period of terror against technicians and engineers. The trial resulted in five of the 53 accused engineers being sentenced to death and another 44 sent to prison.
(Econ, 4/4/09, p.53)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakhty_Trial)
1928 Bertram and Ella Goldberg Wolfe, activists in the Comintern, went to Moscow as guests of the Communist Party. The Comintern was Communism's international governing body. Bertram clashed with Stalin over the idea of "American Exceptionalism," where the US model could be different from the Marxist-Leninist model. The Wolfe's were put under house arrest for 6 months until the intervention of Dr. Julius Hammer.
(SFC, 1/17/00, p.C2)
1928 Maria Feodorovna (b.1847), the daughter of Denmark's King Christian IX and Queen Louise, died in Denmark. Princess Dagmar had married Russia’s Czar Alexander II and their six children included Nicholas II, who became czar in 1894. She fled St. Petersburg in 1917. Her casket rested alongside Danish kings and queens until 2006 when it was sent to Russia.
(AP, 9/23/06)
1929 Jan 18, Stalin banned Trotsky from the Politburo.
(MC, 1/18/02)
1929 Jan 31, Leon Trotsky was expelled from Russia to Turkey.
(WSJ, 2/29/96, p. A-14)(MC, 1/31/02)
1929 Aug 19, Sergei P. Diaghilev (b.1872), Russian dance master and leader of the Ballet Russes, died in Italy.
(www.imdb.com/name/nm1959850/bio)(SFC, 7/15/97, p.A18)
1929 Sep 21, Fighting between China and the Soviet Union broke out along the Manchurian border.
(HN, 9/21/98)
1929 Nov 18, Stalin sent troops to Manchuria.
(MC, 11/18/01)
1929 Dec 22, Soviet troops left Manchuria after a truce was reached with the Chinese over the Eastern Railway dispute.
(HN, 12/22/98)
1929 Marc Chagall (1887-1985) painted "The Rooster."
(SFC, 7/26/03, p.D1)
1929 The film "Arsenal" was based on a 1918 incident where the Bolsheviks battled national troops in Kiev.
(SFC, 6/4/99, p.C12)
1929 Joseph Stalin reset the Soviet calendar to give workers every 5th day off. Shifts were staggered so that factories could run without interruption. The staggered working week was abandoned after 3 years.
(Econ, 5/21/05, p.80)
1929 Stalin began the liquidation of the kulaks, i.e. independent farmers.
(V.D.-H.K.p.305)
1929 In Russia the Gorky Automobile Plant (GAZ) in Nizhny Novgorod was founded. Henry Ford was asked to help set up the Soviet car plant.
(Econ, 7/14/12, p.55)
1929 Tajikistan was created by Stalin to divide and rule the ethnic Muslim peoples of Central Asia.
(WSJ, 7/2/98, p.A1)
1929-1932 For some revisionists Stalin’s brutal 5-year plan had its roots in a worker "cultural revolution" against the NEP.
(WSJ, 3/26/98, p.A20)
1929-1953 Some 18 million people were sent to the Gulag, the vast Soviet prison system that included labor and concentration camps. In 2003 Ann Applebaum authored "Gulag: A History."
(SSFC, 4/27/03, M3)(NW, 4/28/03, p.13)
1930 Jan 21, Valentin Ignatyevich Filatyev, Russian cosmonaut, was born.
(MC, 1/21/02)
1930 Apr 30, The Soviet Union proposed military alliance with France and Great Britain.
(HN, 4/30/98)
1930 Sep 29, Ilya Repin (b.1944), Ukrainian born Russian artist and sculptor, died.
(www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Ilya-Repin)
1930 Dec 30, In Russia the Industrial Party trial came to a conclusion. The tribunal accused a group of Soviet engineers and economists of forming the “Industrial Party," which in collusion with France had supposedly plotted against the Bolshevik government. The entire case was fabricated.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Party_Trial)(Econ, 7/27/19, p.72)
1930 Soviet satirist Andrei Platonov wrote "The Foundation Pit," a dystopian novel. It was not published in the Soviet Union until 1987. The fanciful narrative captured the absurdities of living in the Stalinist era. In 2020 Andrey Gryazev’s compilation documentary "The Foundation Pit," premiered at the Berlin Film Festival. It opened with a pre-credits sequence of Russian newscasts reporting incidents in which hapless house owners or workers have been injured in accidents involving foundation pits.
(The Daily Beast, 2/26/20)
1930 The Soviet Union began deporting land holders, known as kulaks, along with their families as part of the rural collectivization process. The kulaks made up about a fifth of the Russian peasant class, which consisted of some 25 million households. In 2007 Lynne Viola authored “The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin's Special Settlements."
(WSJ, 4/26/07, p.D7)
1930 American industrialist Charles R. Crane bought 18 brass bells from the Soviet government, saving them from being melted down in Josef Stalin's purges that saw thousands of monks executed and churches and monasteries destroyed or turned into prisons, orphanages or animal barns. They hung for decades in the towers at Lowell House and Harvard Business School's Baker Library. In 2007 Harvard returned the largest of the bells, the Everyday Bell, to the Danilovsky Monastery and planned to return the rest in 2008.
(AP, 9/12/07)
1930s Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940) wrote his novel "The Master and Margarita." It satirized life under Stalin and was not published until 1966.
(SFEC, 6/25/00, BR p.1)
1930s The centralized gas heating system of the city of Moscow was constructed.
(SFC, 3/27/97, p.C4)
1930s The labor camp in Norilsk, Siberia, was built. It was later developed as a huge nickel complex.
(SFC, 7/29/97, p.A10)
1930-1960 Millions of people including ethnic Germans and Russian dissidents died during this period, unable to survive starvation and torture in a network of gulag camps scattered from Russia's Arctic tundra to the inhospitable Kazakh steppe.
(Reuters, 12/21/09)
1931 Feb 1, Boris Yeltsin (d.2007), prime minister of Russia (1991-1992) and the first president of the Republic of Russia (1991-1999), was born in the Ural Mts. of the USSR.
(SFC, 1/23/96, p.A8)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Yeltsin)(Econ, 4/28/07, p.98)
1931 Mar 2, Mikhail Gorbachev, Soviet Secretary-General (1985-91), was born. He was responsible for restructuring the Soviet economy (perestroika) and openness and information (glasnost). Mikhail Gorbachev rose through the ranks of the Communist Party as an expert in agricultural affairs. Born to a peasant family, Gorbachev worked on a farm as a combine operator before going to Moscow State University in 1950. He joined the party in 1952 and, upon graduation with a law degree in 1955, he became a full-time party official. In 1967 he graduated from the Stavropol Agricultural Institute and was named to the party’s Central Committee in 1971. He was promoted to the party Secretariat in 1978, earning a reputation as an innovator as party secretary of agriculture.
(HN, 3/2/99)(HNQ, 6/17/99)(WSJ, 12/1/07, p.A8)
1931 Mar 11, The USSR banned the sale or importation of Bibles.
(HN, 3/11/98)
1931 Mar 17, Stalin threw Krupskaja Lenin out of the Central Committee.
(MC, 3/17/02)
1931 Apr 27, Igor Oistrach, Russian violinist, son of David Oistrach, was born.
(MC, 4/27/02)
1931 Jun 24, The Soviet Union and Afghanistan signed a treaty of neutrality.
(HN, 6/24/98)
1931 Stalin ordered that Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral be blown up. It was rebuilt after the fall of the USSR and dedicated in 2000.
(WSJ, 8/2100, p.A1)
1931 USSR leader Joseph Stalin turned Abkhazia into an autonomous region of Georgia. Beria, his secret police chief, later resettled Georgians from the western part of the country in Abkhazia.
(Econ, 7/5/08, p.64)
1931 The US Dept. of Commerce issued a pamphlet titled “Employment for Americans in Soviet Russia." In the early 1930s hundreds of American immigrated to the Soviet Union in search of jobs and a new life. Many ended up in mass graves. In 2008 Tim Tzouliadis authored “The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia."
(Econ, 8/9/08, p.80)(SFC, 9/1/08, p.E3)
1932 Jan 5, Raisa Maximovna Titorenko Gorbachev, Russia's 1st lady (1982-1991), was born.
(MC, 1/5/02)
1932 Apr 4, Andrei Tarkovsky, Russian film maker, was born.
(DVD, Criterion, 1998)
1932 May 2, Walter Duranty of the NY Times won a Pulitzer Prize for his series on the Soviet Union that contained uncritical praise of Joseph Stalin. In 2003 a historian argued, without success, that the prize should be revoked due to Duranty's deliberate failure to cover the forced famine in the Ukraine that killed millions of people. In 2004 David C. Engerman authored "Modernization from the Other Shore," an American view of the Soviet experience."
(SFC, 10/23/03, p.A3)(SFC, 11/22/03, p.A3)(WSJ, 2/24/04, p.D8)
1932 May 25, Georgi Mikhailovich Grechko, USSR cosmonaut (Soyuz 17, 26, T-14), was born.
(SC, 5/25/02)
1932 Aug 25, Anatoli Yakovlevich Kartashov, Russian cosmonaut, was born.
(MC, 8/25/02)
1932 Oct 10, Dnjepr Dam in USSR, the world's biggest, was put into operation.
(MC, 10/10/01)
1932 Nov 9, Nadya Aliluieva (30), wife of Joseph Stalin, died.
(MC, 11/9/01)
1932 Nov 28, France & USSR signed not-attack treaty.
(DTnet, 11/28/97)
1932 Dec 30, The USSR barred food handouts for housewives under 36 years of age. They would now have to work to eat.
(HN, 12/30/98)
1932 The Gorky Automobile Works (GAZ) was founded in Nizhny Novgorod.
(USAT, 10/9/98, p.12A)
1932 Sep 3, In Soviet Russia Pavel Morozov (13) was allegedly killed by his relatives in Gerasimovka for having reporting his father to the state authorities. In 2005 Catriona Kelly authored “Comrade Pavlik: The Rise and Fall of a Soviet Boy Hero."
(Econ, 6/4/05, p.80)(http://encycl.opentopia.com/term/Pavlik_Morozov)
1932-1933 Stalin imposed terror and famine on the Ukraine, Kuban and Kazakhstan that was carried out be Lazar Kaganovich. Millions died in the famine. Stalin provoked what the Ukrainians called the Great Famine as part of his campaign to force Ukrainian peasants to give up their land and join collective farms. During the height of the famine, which was enforced by methodical confiscation of all food by the Soviet secret police, cannibalism was widespread. In 2017 Anne Applebaum authored "Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine".
(WSJ, 2/14/96, p.A-15)(SFC, 4/3/97, p.C2)(AP, 11/26/05)(Econ, 9/30/17, p.76)
1933 Jan 16, Oleg Grigoryevich Makarov (d.2003 at 70), USSR cosmonaut (Soyuz 12, 18A, 27, T-3), was born.
(MC, 1/16/02)(SFC, 5/31/03, p.A21)
1933 Mar 29, The front page of the New York Evening Post said "Famine Grips Russia — Millions Dying." The report was by Welsh journalist Gareth Jones who had recently sneaked into Ukraine, at the height of a famine engineered by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. Jones was killed by bandits in 1935 while covering Japan's expansion into China. In 2009 the diaries of Jones were put on display for the first time in London.
(AP, 11/13/09)
1933 May 12, Andrey Andreyevich Voznesensky, Russian poet, was born.
(HN, 5/12/01)
1933 May 24, Dmitri Shostakovitch's Preludes premiered in Moscow.
(MC, 5/24/02)
1933 Jul 18, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Russian poet, was born in Zima, Russia.
(HN, 7/18/01)(MC, 7/18/02)
1933 Nov 16, The United States and the Soviet Union established diplomatic relations. President Roosevelt sent a telegram to Soviet leader Maxim Litvinov, expressing hope that U.S.-Soviet relations would "forever remain normal and friendly."
(AP, 11/1697)
1933 Nov 17, US recognized USSR and opened trade.
(MC, 11/17/01)
1933 Dec 27, Josef Stalin called tensions with Japan a grave danger.
(HN, 12/27/01)
1933 Marc Chagall (1887-1985) painted "Nude Above Vitebsk."
(SFC, 7/26/03, p.D1)
1933 Yakov Chernikhov (d.1951) Russian architect, authored "101 Architectural Fantasies." His adventurous designs were poorly regarded by Soviet authorities and few of his buildings were constructed.
(AP, 8/8/06)
1933 Alexander Rodchenko, artist and photographer, was dispatched to document the White Sea-Baltic Canal project in which some 200,000 political prisoners were killed.
(WSJ, 7/8/98, p.A13)(Econ, 2/9/08, p.91)
1933 Stalin launched the Moscow Metro. It took 75,000 workers 3 years to complete the first 7-mile line.
(WSJ, 11/4/98, p.A1)
1933 George F. Kennan (1904-2005) established America’s first embassy in the Soviet Union.
(Econ, 11/12/11, p.97)
1933-1945 In 2008 Latvian filmmaker Edvins Snore, directed “Soviet Story." It shows the close connections—philosophical, political and organizational—between the Nazi and Soviet systems beginning in 1933 thru WWII.
(www.economist.com/world/europe/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11401983)
1934 Jan 22, Dmitri Shostakovich premiered his 1932 opera: "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District," in Leningrad.
(WSJ, 5/7/02, p.D7)(WSJ, 5/2/03, p.W6)
1934 Feb, The Chelyuskin, which set off in July 1933 from the port of Murmansk, Russia, for Vladivostok in the Pacific Ocean, got stranded among ice fields in the Bering Sea and sank off the coast of Chukotka. The trip of more than 4,500 miles was meant to demonstrate the Soviet government's assertion that cargo ships could safely take the northern route. Soviet aviators launched over two dozen flights to search for the survivors, and in early March finally evacuated about 10 women and 2 babies born during the sea voyage. Airmen brought out the rest of the passengers and crew men the following month. In 2006 Russian divers found the ship.
(AP, 9/22/06)
1934 Mar 9, Uri Gregarin (Yuri Gagarin), first man to orbit the Earth, was born.
(HN, 3/9/99)
1934 May, Stalin’s regime officially set up the Jewish Autonomous Region of Birobidzhan.
(SFEC, 5/31/98, p.7)
1934 Sep 18, The League of Nations admitted the Soviet Union. Joseph Avenol, secretary-general of the League of Nations, sold out the organization he had sworn to uphold.
(WUD, 1994, p.424,1682)(HN, 9/18/98)
1934 Dec 1, Sergei M. Kirov, a collaborator of Josef Stalin, was assassinated in Leningrad, a stronghold of opposition to Stalin. This resulted in a massive purge. Kirov was succeeded by Andrei Zdhanov, who became the virtual dictator of literary and artistic policies of the USSR.
(AP, 12/1/98)(SFC, 6/10/00, p.A12)
1934 William Henry Chamberlin, a journalist, published "Russia's Iron Age," which chronicled the depredations of Stalin.
(WSJ, 4/13/99, p.A16)
1934 The documentary film "Eyes on Russia, from the Caucasus to Moscow" was produced.
(SFC, 11/21/96, p.E2)
1934 Alexander Mosolov, composer, wrote his ballet "Steel."
(WSJ, 1/15/98, p.A17)
1934 There were 1,966 delegates to the 17th Soviet Party Congress. By the 1999 Congress 1,108 delegates were arrested and many shot as traitors. In 1999 J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov co-wrote "The Road To Terror," an examination of the Stalin purges that was a follow-up to Getty's 1985 work "Origins of the Great Purges." The standard account on the purges is "The Great Terror" (1968) by Robert Conquest.
(WSJ, 9/27/99, p.A32)(Econ, 12/3/05, p.79)
1934 The Soviet Union’s secret police organization-the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs-was better known as the NKVD. The NKVD replaced the State Political Administration, or GPU. The GPU had formerly been known as the Cheka. During World War II there were several reorganizations of the NKVD, out of which grew the MGB, or Ministry of State Security. The MGB evolved into the KGB in 1954.
(HNPD, 6/24/99)
1934 The Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was established.
(USAT, 9/2/04, p.13A)
1934-1938 Alexander Troyanovsky served as the first Soviet ambassador to the US.
(AP, 12/23/03)
1934-1998 Alfred Schnittke, composer, was born in Engels in the Volga republic. He later wrote scores for over 60 films.
(SFC, 8/5/98, p.A17)
1935 Jan 31, The Soviet premier told Japan to get out of Manchuria.
(HN, 1/31/99)
1935 Mar 22, Russia sold the Chinese Eastern Railway to Japan.
(HN, 3/22/97)
1935 Mar 30, Britain and Russia agreed on treaties intended to curb the power of the Reich.
(HN, 3/30/98)
1935 Apr 28, The Moscow 81-km underground opened.
(MC, 4/28/02)
1935 May 15, Kasimir Malevich (b.1878), Ukraine-born Cubist painter, died. He was a leader of the Suprematist movement in Russian painting. He pioneered the use of abstract geometrical elements and limited colors to demonstrate the supremacy of expressing feelings.
(WSJ, 6/21/99, p.B14)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazimir_Malevich)
1935 Aug 3, Georgi S. Shonin, cosmonaut (Soyuz 6), was born.
(SC, 8/3/02)
1935 Sep 19, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (b.1857), Russian scientist, died. He was a visionary and pioneer of astronautics. He theorized many aspects of human space travel and rocket propulsion decades before others, and played an important role in the development of the Soviet and Russian space programs. In 1932 Tsiolkovsky wrote "The Cosmic Philosophy," a summary of his philosophical ideas. He also wrote science fiction books, including "On The Moon" (1895), “Dreams of the Earth and Sky" (1895), and “Beyond the Earth" (1920).
(www.informatics.org/museum/tsiol.html)
1935 Hotel Moskva, designed by architect Alexei Shchusev, opened just off Red Square. It was later featured on the Stolichnaya Vodka label.
(AP, 7/22/03)
1935 In the Soviet Union the Stakhanovite campaign began in 1935 using the example of coal miner Aleksey Grigoriyevich Stakhanov who, by allegedly mining 102 tons of coal in one shift, exceeded and established new production norms. Someone known as a Stakhanovite was a member of the Soviet workers' elite by virtue of exceeding production norms and was rewarded with special privileges. Used in a great propaganda campaign from 1935 to the start of World War II, the higher production norms placed great pressure on other workers and often resulted in quality of goods sacrificed for quantity.
(HNQ, 10/3/98)
1935-1943 Georgi Dimitrov, a Bulgarian communist selected by Stalin, led the Comintern.
(WSJ, 6/6/03, p.W9)
1936 Feb 23, In Russia, an unmanned balloon rose to a record height of 25 miles.
(HN, 2/23/98)
1936 Feb 27, Ivan P. Pavlov (86), Russian physiologist (reflexes, "drooling dog" Nobel 1904), died.
(MC, 2/27/02)
1936 Mar 19, The U.S.S.R. signed a pact of assistance with Mongolia against Japan.
(HN, 3/19/98)
1936 May 2, "Peter and the Wolf," a symphonic tale for children by Sergei Prokofiev, had its world premiere in Moscow.
(AP, 5/2/97)
1936 Jun 18, Maxim Gorkei (Aleksvey Maksimovich Pyeshkov [aka Gorky], b.1868], Russian dramatist, died. "A good man can be stupid and still be good. But a bad man must have brains."
(WUD, 1994 p.611)(HN, 3/16/98)(AP, 2/23/01)(NG, 7/04, p.132)
1936 Jun 19, A total solar eclipse darkened Russian skies.
(NG, 7/04, p.132)
1936 Aug 19, A trial against Ljev Kamenev and Grigori Zinoviev, for alleged "Trotskyism," opened in Moscow.
(MC, 8/19/02)
1936 Nov-1936 Dec, In Spain hundreds of Franco supporters were killed at Paracuellos. Between 2,000 and 4,000 suspected supporters of the coup against the Second Spanish Republic, were killed by the Republican Army. The Soviet NKVD was later implicated.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracuellos_massacre)(Econ, 3/24/12, p.86)
1936 Dec 5, The New Constitution in the Soviet Union promised universal suffrage, but the Communist Party remained the only legal political party.
(HN, 12/5/98)
1936 Sergei Rachmaninoff composed his Third Symphony.
(WSJ, 1/14/02, p.A16)
1936 The USSR began using Vozrozhdeniye Island in the Aral Sea to test deadly germs. In 1988 anthrax from Sverdlovsk was shipped in and buried there.
(SFC, 3/24/03, p.A5)
1936 Stalin imposed a ban on abortion in the USSR.
(SSFC, 8/24/03, p.A11)
1936 A delegation from Los Angeles went to Birobidzhan, the Jewish Autonomous Region of Russia, to present a souvenir pamphlet, the fate of the delegation was unknown.
(SFEC, 5/31/98, p.7)
1936 Some 700 Soviet advisors were sent to Spain in an attempt to run and control the economy, government and armed forces. By the end of the civil war most were killed by Stalin’s purges.
(WSJ, 7/11/01, p.A15)
1936-1939 The Spanish Civil War has been commonly referred to as "a rehearsal for World War II" by historians because of the intervention by Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and the Soviet Union, and their use of the war to test new weapons and military techniques. It was fought between the liberal Second Spanish Republic government and right-wing rebel forces, including the fascist Falangists, monarchists and Nationalists. The rebels had the support of the Roman Catholic Church, in addition to Germany and Italy. The Government supporters, called Loyalists, had the support of communists, socialists, anarchists, the Soviet Union and volunteers from around the world who formed the International Brigades. Between 400,000 and 1 million were killed in the war, ultimately won by the rebels. In 2008 Paul Preston authored “We Saw Spain Die: Foreign correspondents in the Spanish Civil War." In 2012 Paul Preston authored “The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain."
(HNQ, 9//00)(Econ, 10/18/08, p.97)(Econ, 3/24/12, p.86)
1937 Jan 19, In the Soviet Union, the People's Commissars Council was formed under Molotov.
(HN, 1/19/99)
1937 Mar 6, Valentina Nikolayeva-Tereshkova, Russian astronaut, was born. She became the first women to orbit the Earth in 1963.
(HN, 3/6/99)
1937 Apr 18, Leon Trotsky called for the overthrow of Soviet leader Josef Stalin.
(HN, 4/18/98)
1937 Jun 6, Ivan Papanin (1894-1986) raised the Soviet flag over the North Pole-1 station. For 234 days the 4-man Papanin team carried out a wide range of scientific observations in the near-polar zone.
(Econ, 8/11/07, p.43)(www.mvk.ru/eng/about/press/publications/publication_105.shtm)
1937 Jun 12, The Soviet Union executed eight army leaders as a purge under Josef Stalin continued.
(AP, 6/12/97)(HN, 6/12/98)
1937 Jun 13, Stalin executed Russian officers Tuchachevski, Jakir, Putna & Uberevitch.
(MC, 6/13/02)
1937 Jun 20, Immediately upon their landing in Vancouver, [Wa.?] after their daring 1937 transpolar flight from Moscow to America, three Soviet airmen were treated to breakfast in the home of Brigadier General George C. Marshall, commander of Vancouver Barracks. The record-setting, 5,507-mile, 60-hour flight made the unexpected early-morning landing on June 20 in Vancouver as the Tupelov ANT-25 ran low on fuel. Marshall, alerted to the landing, rushed to Pearson Field and escorted the crew of Valery Chkalov, Georgy Baidukov and Aleksandr Belyakov back to his home where his wife prepared a hearty breakfast for them. The Soviets were feted in the U.S. for their accomplishment and each honored as Heroes of the Soviet Union.
(HNQ, 10/12/98)
1937 Jul 6, Vladimir Ashkenazy, pianist, conductor (Tchakowsky-1961), was born in Gorki, Russia.
(MC, 7/6/02)
1937 Jul 31, The Russian Politburo enabled Operative Order 00447. This led to the execution of some 193,000 people.
(MC, 7/31/02)
1937 Aug 5, Stalin signed NKVD order no 00447 that mandated all prison camps across the Soviet Union to be emptied.
(SFC, 7/17/97, p.A10)
1937 Sep 6, The Soviet Union accused Italy of torpedoing two Russian ships in the Mediterranean.
(HN, 9/6/98)
1937 Oct 7, Igor Moiseyev (b.1906), founder of the Moiseyev folk-dance troupe, offered the troupe’s first public performance in Moscow.
(WSJ, 1/12/98, p.A20)(www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-141047738.html)
1937 Oct 21, Dmitri Shostakovitch's 5th Symphony premiered.
(MC, 10/21/01)
1937 Oct-Nov, A 3-man panel, the "Osobaya Troika," signed death sentences that were sent to thousands of gulags across Russia and led to the massacre of 9,000 victims in the Karelia Forest at Medvezhyegorsk. The grave site was opened in Jul, 1997, and a monument was planned.
(SFC, 7/17/97, p.A10)
1937 Stalin ordered a major overhaul of Uzbek leadership and heads began to roll. The artist Alexander Rodchenko, who had designed the album "Ten Years of Uzbekistan," blotted out the photos of purged Uzbek leaders in his personal copy. It provided grist for the 1997 book by David King "The Commissar Vanishes," that describes how Stalin manipulated images for his benefit.
(WSJ, 10/29/97, p.A20)
1937 Stalin deported some 180,000 Soviet Koreans from their homes and farms and sent them by cattle car to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
(LSA, Fall/06, p.28)
1937 The USSR census of this year reported a decline in the population to 162 million and Stalin had the officials responsible for the count shot. He had told officials a year earlier that the count would be 170 million, which ignored those who died in famines and purges.
(WSJ, 12/1/99, p.A24)(Econ, 12/22/07, p.99)
1937-1938 There were sweeping purges across the Soviet Union. 14 million people across Russia were estimated to have died in the purges. At least 30,000 people were executed in Moscow. Several hundred Americans were arrested in Karelia, near the Finnish border. Several thousand Americans and Canadians had moved there to help develop the Soviet timber industry. 40,000 people a month were executed.
(SFEC, 12/22/96, BR p.7)(SFC, 7/17/97, p.A10)(SFEC, 11/9/97, p.A12)(SFC, 4/17/99, p.B3)(Econ, 11/5/16, p.43)
1938 Jan 1, Alexander Gelver, 24, an American from Oshkosh, Wis., was executed in a Stalinist purge.
(SFEC,11/9/97, p.A26)
1938 Mar 2, Trials of Soviet leaders began in the Soviet Union.
(SC, 3/2/02)
1938 Mar 17, Rudolf Nureyev, ballet dancer, choreographer (Kirov), was born in Russia.
(MC, 3/17/02)
1938 Mar, Nikolay Bukharin, a revolutionary economist who helped edit Pravda with Lenin, was put on trial and executed in the purges. He met Lenin in 1912 while in exile in Western Europe, but returned to Russia with the February revolution of 1917. Bukharin broke with Lenin over Lenin‘s support of peace with Germany, but championed Lenin‘s New Economic Policy after his death in 1924. It was partially this adherence that brought Bukharin into conflict with the Stalinist faction within the Politburo, losing his position in 1929. In early 1937, after years of declining influence, Bukharin was secretly arrested and later tried on false charges for "counterrevolutionary activities."
(HNQ, 12/12/00)
1938 May 10, Maxim Shostakovich, conductor (Atlanta Symph), was born in Leningrad, Russia.
(MC, 5/10/02)
1938 Jul 18, Vladimir M. Kirshon (35), Russian playwright, was executed.
(MC, 7/18/02)
1938 Aug 7, Konstantin S. Stanislavsky (75), Russian director (S Method), died.
(MC, 8/7/02)
1938 Nov 26, Poland renewed a non-aggression pact with the USSR to protect against a German invasion.
(HN, 11/26/98)
1938 Dec 8, L.P. Beria followed Nikolai Jezjov as head of Russian secret police.
(MC, 12/8/01)
1938 Dec 27, Osip Mandelstam (b.1891), Russian poet born in Poland to Jewish parents, died while in transit to a labor camp. In 1998 Emma Gerstein authored “Moscow Memoirs: Memories of Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam and Literary Russia Under Stalin." An English translation by John Crowfoot became available in 2004.
(SSFC, 9/11/04, p.M3)(www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk)
1938 Lev Razgon (d.1999 at 92) was sent to labor camp on charges of anti-state activities. He spent 17 years in labor camps and later published "Not A Thought-Up Story" about his experiences.
(SFC, 9/9/99, p.A21)
1938 Nikolai Ivanovich (b.1888), Russian editor, writer and Communist leader, was ordered shot by Stalin.
(WUD, 1994, p.195)(WSJ, 5/19/99, p.A20)
1938-1988 The Leningrad Philharmonic was led by Yevgeny Mravinsky.
(WSJ, 1/29/96, p. A-14)
1939 Feb 2, Hungary broke relations with the Soviet Union.
(HN, 2/2/99)
1939 Mar 22, Germany marched into Klaipeda (Memel), Lithuania. The Lithuanian warship Prezidentas Smetona was left without a harbor. The ship soon settled at Latvia’s port of Liepaja. In December Ltn. P. Labanauskas was named captain. In 1940 Soviet occupiers called for the ship to raise the Soviet flag, but Captain Labanauskas sailed the ship out of Soviet territory. The ship was later handed over to the Soviet Baltic fleet. On Jan 11, 1945, it hit a mine and sank off the coast of Finland.
(Voruta #27-28, Jul 1996, p.2)(http://tinyurl.com/cs545k)
1939 May 3, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin replaced Maxim Litvinov, the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs, with Vyacheslav Molotov.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxim_Litvinov)
1939 Aug 19, Vyacheslav Molotov outlined the Soviet requirements to the German Ambassador, Friedrich von Schulenburg. He insisted that trade agreements be signed and that a special protocol be made defining the German and Soviet spheres of interest.
(DrEE, 10/26/96, p.4)
1939 Aug 20, Soviet and German trade agreements were signed.
(DrEE, 10/26/96, p.4)
1939 Aug 23, German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs Vyacheslav M. Molotov signed a Treaty of Non-Aggression, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact freeing Hitler to invade Poland and Stalin to invade Finland. Secret protocols, made public years later, were added that assigned Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Bessarabia to be within the Soviet sphere of influence. Poland was partitioned along the rivers Narev, Vistula and San. Germany retained Lithuania enlarged by the inclusion of Vilnius. Just days after the signing, Germany invaded Poland, and by the end of September, both powers had claimed sections of Poland. World War II and Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union were just around the corner.
(WP, 6/29/96, p.A16)(DrEE, 9/28/96, p.3)(DrEE, 10/26/96, p.4)(AP, 8/23/97)(HNPD, 8/22/98)(HN, 8/23/98)
1939 Sep 17, The Soviet Union attacked Poland, more than two weeks after Nazi Germany launched its assault. They took 217,000 Poles prisoner and occupied eastern Poland within a week with losses of 737 dead and 2,000 wounded. The Polish submarine Orzel escaped from internment and went on to fight the Germans against long odds.
(AP, 9/17/97)(DrEE, 10/26/96, p.4)(HN, 9/17/98)(MC, 9/17/01)
1939 Sep 27, Germany occupied Warsaw as Poland surrendered after weeks of resistance to invading forces from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union during World War II.
(AP, 9/27/97)(HN, 9/27/98)
1939 Sep 28, The Boundary and Friendship Treaty between the USSR and Germany was supplemented by secret protocols to amend the secret protocols of Aug 23. Among other things Lithuania was reassigned to the Soviet sphere of influence. Poland’s partition line was moved eastwards from the Vistula line to the line of the Bug. Germany kept a small part of south-west Lithuania, the Uznemune region. A separate Soviet mutual defense pact was signed with Estonia that allowed 25,000 Soviet troops to be stationed there.
(DrEE, 9/28/96, p.3)(DrEE, 10/26/96, p.4)(DrEE, 10/26/96, p.4)
1939 Sep 29, Germany and the Soviet Union reached an agreement on the division of Poland. [see Sep 28]
(HN, 9/29/98)
1939 Sep 30, Germany and Russia agreed to partition Poland. [see Sep 28,29]
(MC, 9/30/01)
1939 Oct 5, The Soviets signed a mutual defense pact with Latvia that allowed 30,000 troops to be stationed there.
(DrEE, 10/26/96, p.4)
1939 Oct 5, Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov invited the Finnish Foreign Minister, Elias Erkko, to come to Moscow for political discussions. The Finns delayed the meeting until Oct 12. Field Marshall Gustaf Mannerheim prepared Finland for war.
(DrEE, 10/26/96, p.4)
1939 Oct 10, Lithuania signed a treaty that allowed a Soviet garrison of 20,000 troops to be stationed in the country in return for Vilnius and other regions with a population of 600,000.
(DrEE, 10/12/96, p.3)(DrEE, 10/26/96, p.4)
1939 Oct 12-Nov 8, Finnish special envoy, Juho Paasikivi, began negotiations in Moscow. The Finns refused to allow the establishment of Soviet military bases.
(DrEE, 10/26/96, p.4)
1939 Oct 30, USSR and Germany agreed on partitioning Poland. Hitler deported Jews.
(MC, 10/30/01)
1939 Nov 10-Mar 13,1940, Finland began to wage a defensive war against the Soviet Union for 104 days.
(DrEE, 10/26/96, p.4)
1939 Nov 26, Soviets charged Finland with an artillery attack on border.
(HN, 11/26/98)
1939 Nov 28, USSR scraped its non-aggression pact with Finland.
(HN, 11/28/98)
1939 Nov 29, Soviet planes bombed an airfield at Helsinki, Finland.
(HN, 11/29/98)
1939 Nov 30, The Russo-Finnish war began when Stalin attacked Finland with 4 armies, 540,000 men, 2485 tanks, and 2000 guns. Finnish troops were led by Field Marshall Gustaf Mannerheim. Over the next two weeks, a greatly outnumbered Finnish army resisted the invasion of nearly fifty Red Army divisions--over one million men. The Finnish used forest combat to inflict heavy damage on the Russian invaders. The British and French came to the Finnish defense in mid-December but by March, the "Peace of Moscow" treaty was signed, and Finland ceded 16,000-square miles of land to the Soviet Union, including the city of Vyborg and the Karelian Isthmus.
(DrEE, 10/26/96, p.4)(AP, 11/30/99)(MC, 12/30/01)
1939 Feb 27, Nadezjda K. Krupskaja (70), Russian revolutionary, wife of Lenin, died.
(MC, 2/27/02)
1939 Apr 16, Stalin requested a British, French and Russian anti-Nazi pact.
(MC, 4/16/02)
1939 May 23, Dmitri Shostakovitch was appointed professor at conservatory of Leningrad.
(MC, 5/23/02)
1939 May, In Manchuria a Japanese punitive attack failed and combined Soviet and Mongolian forces wiped out a 200-man Japanese unit. This marked the beginning of the conflict called the Nomonhan Incident by Japanese, the Battle of Khalkhin Gol by Russians. Gen. Georgy Zhukov destroyed the Kwantung Army.
(http://tinyurl.com/ml2j3oh)(Econ, 11/7/15, p.79)
1939 Aug 11, Sergei Rachmaninov had his last appearance in Europe.
(MC, 8/11/02)
1939 Aug 20, Russian offensive under Gen. Zhukov against Jap invasion in Mongolia.
(MC, 8/20/02)
1939 Aug 23, German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs Vyacheslav M. Molotov signed a Treaty of Non-Aggression, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact freeing Hitler to invade Poland and Stalin to invade Finland. Secret protocols, made public years later, were added that assigned Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Bessarabia to be within the Soviet sphere of influence. Poland was partitioned along the rivers Narev, Vistula and San. Germany retained Lithuania enlarged by the inclusion of Vilnius. Just days after the signing, Germany invaded Poland, and by the end of September, both powers had claimed sections of Poland.
(WP, 6/29/96, p.A16)(AP, 8/23/97) (HNPD, 8/22/98)(HN, 8/23/98)
1939 Aug, The Soviet Union and Japan fought a massive tank battle at Khalkhin-Gol on the Mongolian border. It was the largest armored battle in the world until that point. By the end of the month the Soviets claimed victory over the Japanese army at the Khalkhyn Gol river. This helped fend off a possible Japanese invasion of Russia with Nazi Germany in 1941.
(http://tinyurl.com/mx9xowj)
1939 Sep 15, The Soviet Union and Japan agreed to a cease-fire in Manchuria (later Mongolia), which took effect the following day.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battles_of_Khalkhin_Gol)
1939 Sep 27, Germany occupied Warsaw. Poland surrendered after 19 days of resistance to invading forces from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Poland had endured a brutal 3 day bombing campaign by the German Luftwaffe.
(AP, 9/27/97)(HN, 9/27/98)
1939 Nov 26, Soviets charged Finland with an artillery attack on border leading to a 105-day Winter War. Soviet Foreign Minister V.M. Molotov accused Finnish troops of firing at the Russians across the 800-mile (1,300km) border near the southeastern village of Mainila.
(AP, 11/26/02)(AP, 11/30/09)
1939 Dec 9, A Russian air raid was made on Helsinki.
(MC, 12/9/01)
1939 Dec 14, The Soviet Union was dropped from the League of Nations.
(AP, 12/14/97)
1939 Dec 25, Finnish troops entered Soviet territory.
(HN, 12/25/98)
1939 Prokofiev arranged the "Alexander Nevsky Cantata" from music he wrote for Sergei Eisenstein’s film.
(WSJ, 7/8/96,p.A9)
1939 Yuli Khariton and Yakow Zeldovich made the first Soviet calculations for nuclear fission.
(SFC, 12/20/96, p.B6)
1939 The USSR census of this year classified the results and reported 170 million to Stalin. Census officials responsible for the 1937 census had been shot for their count of 162 million.
(Econ, 12/22/07, p.99)
1939-1945 Norman Davies covered this period in his 2006 book “Europe at War 1939-1945: No Simple Victory." His central theme was the Western alliance with Stalin and its consequences. In 2012 Max Hastings authored “All Hell Let Loose: The World At War: 1939-1945." On average nearly 30,000 people were killed every day.
(Econ, 11/11/06, p.94)(Econ, 6/9/12, p.87)
1939-1953 This period is covered in Geoffrey Roberts’ 2007 book: “Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War."
(Econ, 1/6/07, p.68)
1940 Jan 11, Sergei Prokofiev's ballet Romeo and Juliet premiered in Leningrad.
(MC, 1/11/02)
1940 Jan 12, Soviet bombers raided cities in Finland.
(HN, 1/12/99)
1940 Feb 12, The U.S.S.R. signed a trade treaty with Germany to aid against the British blockade.
(HN, 2/12/97)
1940 Mar 2, Soviet armies conquered Tuppura Island, Finland.
(SC, 3/2/02)
1940 Mar 5, Stalin among others signed an Order for the massacre at Katyn, Poland. Soviet agents shot 21,768 Polish military officers, intellectuals and priests who had been taken prisoner during the invasion. Between April and May some 25,700 (15,000) Polish citizens were massacred by the Soviets in the Katyn and Miednoje (Mednoye) forests on the outskirts of Moscow and at Kharkov in western Russia (later Ukraine). Some 14,700 Polish officers were identified by their uniforms. Documents were made public in 1992 by Boris Yeltsin, Russia's first post-Soviet leader. They included a letter by Lavrenty Beria, head of the secret police, recommending the execution of the Polish prisoners of war. The letter bears the signatures of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and three other members of the Politburo. Excavations of the sites began in 1994. 6,313 Polish officers were all shot in the back of the head near Mednoye. 9,000 Russians were also massacred at the site. In 2008 Andrzej Wajda directed the film “Katyn." In 2004 Russia's top military prosecutor closed the investigation after concluding that the massacre did not constitute genocide. In 2009 Russia's Supreme Court rejected appeals to re-open the investigation. On April 7, 2010, Russian PM Vladimir Putin attended a memorial ceremony. Hours later he said Stalin had ordered the atrocity as revenge for the death of Red Army soldiers in Polish prisoner of war camps in 1920.
(AM, Jul/Aug ‘97 p.16)(SFEC, 9/3/00, p.A18)(AP, 3/6/05)(Econ, 6/21/08, p.65)(AP, 1/29/09)(SFC, 4/8/10, p.A2)(AP, 4/28/10)
1940 Mar 10, Mikhail Bulgakov (b.1891), Russian author, died in Moscow. His novel “The Master and Margarita," which satirized life under Stalin, was written between 1928 and the author’s death. It was not published until 1966-67 in the Russian journal Moskva, with some 60 pages cut.
(Econ, 3/13/04, p.86)(WSJ, 1/3/09, p.W6)
1940 Mar 12, Finland surrendered to Russia. Finland and the Soviet Union concluded an armistice during World War II. Fighting between the two countries flared again the following year.
(HN, 3/12/98)(AP, 3/12/98)
1940 Mar 13, The 105-day war between Russia and Finland ended with the signing of a treaty in Moscow. Finland capitulated conditionally to Soviet terms, but maintains its independence. Some 27,000 Finnish soldiers were killed and 43,000 wounded in a population of 3.7 million. The Soviet Union put its losses at 217,500 dead or wounded.
(HN, 3/13/01)(AP, 11/30/09)
1940 May 24, Joseph Brodsky, author (Less than 1, Nobel 1987), was born in the USSR.
(MC, 5/24/02)
1940 Jun 14, The Soviets presented an ultimatum to Lithuania that demanded the free entry of an unlimited number of troops. The government surrendered and Pres. Smetona left the country.
(DrEE, 10/26/96, p.4)
1940 Jun 15, The Soviets invaded Lithuania.
(DrEE, 10/26/96, p.4)
1940 Jun 16, Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov presented August Rei, Estonia’s envoy in Moscow, an ultimatum to allow an unlimited number of Soviet troops, which was accepted. Latvia received a similar ultimatum.
(DrEE, 10/26/96, p.4)(www.historycommission.ee/temp/conclusions_frame.htm)
1940 Jun 18, Soviet occupation was completed in the Baltics. For the Soviet intrusion into the German sphere of influence, Stalin compensated Germany with a payment of 7.5 million gold dollars.
(DrEE, 10/26/96, p.4)
1940 Jun 21, Estonia’s Pres. Päts appointed a new government led by PM Johannes Vares under pressure from Andrei Zhdanov, head of the Leningrad branch of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
(www.historycommission.ee/temp/conclusions_frame.htm)
1940 Jun 26, The Soviet Union delivered an ultimatum to Romania and 2 days later occupied Bessarabia and North Bukovina.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_Bessarabia_by_the_Soviet_Union)
1940 Jun 27, USSR returned to the Gregorian calendar.
(SC, 6/27/02)
1940 Jul 21, The new USSR-organized parliaments of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania held simultaneous sessions. They declared their countries to be soviet socialist republics and applied for admission to the USSR.
(www.historycommission.ee/temp/conclusions_frame.htm)
1940 Aug 3, The Supreme Soviet officially registered the acceptance of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania into the USSR.
(SC, 8/3/02)(www.historycommission.ee/temp/conclusions_frame.htm)
1940 Aug 20, Ramon Mercador (Mercader) del Rio, a Spanish Communist, posed as a Canadian businessman (aka Frank Jackson) and fatally wounded Leon Trotsky with an alpine ax to the back of the head in Mexico City. Trotsky died the next day.
(WSJ, 3/29/96, p.A-14)(TMC, 1994, p.1940)(SFC, 7/19/96, p.B1)(HN, 8/20/01)
1940 Aug 21, Leon Trotsky, exiled Communist revolutionary, died in Mexico City from wounds inflicted by an assassin the day before. Earlier this year Josef Grigulevich (27), a Lithuania-born KGB agent, established a safe house at Zook's Pharmacy in Santa Fe, NM, for the assassins of Leon Trotsky. The pharmacy, visible in archive photos, was replaced in 1990 by a Haagen-Dazs ice cream shop. Grigulevich was recruited by Soviet strongman Josef Stalin's secret police as a university student in Paris and learned the assassin's trade during the Spanish civil war. He later published 58 books on Latin American history. In 2011 intelligence expert E.B. Held authored "A Spy's Guide to Albuquerque and Santa Fe."
(AP, 8/21/08)(AFP, 2/4/11)
1940 Aug 25, The ‘parliaments’ of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania declared themselves ‘provisional Supreme Soviets’ and adopted new constitutions that were composed according to the example of the constitutions of already existing union republics of the USSR.
(www.historycommission.ee/temp/conclusions_frame.htm)
1940 Aug, The Armies of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were reorganized as territorial rifle corps of the Red Army and placed under the control of the political leaders of the Red Army.
(www.historycommission.ee/temp/conclusions_frame.htm)
1940 Oct 20, German troops reached the approaches to Moscow.
(HN, 10/20/98)
1940 Oct 25, German troops captured Kharkov and launched a new drive toward Moscow.
(HN, 10/25/98)
1940 Dec 18, Hitler dictated Directive No. 21 to crush Russia in a quick campaign. Adolf Hitler signed a secret directive ordering preparations for a Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. (Operation "Barbarossa" was launched in June 1941.)
(SFC,10/29/97, p.A23)(AP, 12/18/97)
1940 Prokofiev composed the opera "Betrothal in a Monastery." It was based on Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1775 work "The Duenna."
(WSJ, 5/7/98, p.A21)
1940 Moscow imposed the Cyrillic alphabet over the Roman alphabet.
(SFC, 1/2/97, p.A10)
1940 The Soviet Union and Iran signed more agreements concerning the Caspian Sea.
(SFC, 8/11/98, p.A8)
1940 Stalin ordered that steel mill be built at Cherepovets, 240 miles north of Moscow. He had been exiled there as a revolutionary in 1909. It produced its 1st steel in 1958.
(WSJ, 6/9/04, p.A8)
1940 Isaac Babel, Russian-Jewish author, was killed by a Soviet firing squad. In 2001 Nathalie Babel edited the "Complete Works of Isaac Babel," translated by Peter Constantine.
(SSFC, 11/25/01, p.M3)
1940 Russia seized Estonia’s presidential seal and regalia as it annexed the country. As of 2010 Russia continued to refuse to hand the items back.
(Econ, 4/10/10, p.64)
1941 Jan 10, The Soviets and the Germans agreed on the East European borders and the exchange of industrial equipment.
(HN, 1/10/99)
1941 Jan 21, The United States lifted the ban on arms to the Soviet Union.
(HN, 1/21/99)
1941 Mar 13, Hitler issued an edict calling for an invasion of the U.S.S.R.
(HN, 3/13/98)
1941 Apr 3, Churchill warned Stalin of German invasion.
(MC, 4/3/02)
1941 Apr 13, A Russian-Japan no-attack treaty went into effect.
(MC, 4/13/02)
1941 May 6, Dictator Josef Stalin assumed the Soviet premiership, replacing Vyacheslav M. Molotov.
(AP, 5/6/97)
1941 Jun 13, Thousands of Jewish community leaders in Bessarabia (Moldova) were deported to Siberia as part of the general purge. The Soviet Union, which had occupied the former Romanian province a year earlier, loaded 22,600 Moldovans on cargo trains bound for Siberia, where the deportees were used for forced labor.
(WSJ, 1/2/02, p.A18)(AP, 6/13/06)
1941 Jun 14, The Russian secret police gathered up some 40,000 men, women and children and exiled them to Siberia in cattle cars. This was the first of many shipments. Some 10,000 Estonians, more than 15,000 Latvians and between 16,000 and 18,000 Lithuanians were herded onto cattle trains and transported to the far eastern reaches of the Soviet Union, where many of them died.
(WP, 6/29/96, p.A16)(http://tinyurl.com/5jxmas)
1941 Jun 14, Over 10,000 people (10,861 according to some sources) were deported as whole families from Estonia. About 230 Estonian officers serving in the 22nd Estonian Territorial Corps of the Red Army were imprisoned at the summer camp of the Estonian Army in southeastern Estonia. Most of them were sent to the Norilsk prison camp, where most of them either died or were executed.
(www.historycommission.ee/temp/conclusions_frame.htm)
1941 Jun 22, German troops invaded Russia and thereby violated the 1939 Russo-German non-aggression pact. Under the codename Barbarossa, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the largest invasion of another country in history. In 2005 Constantine Pleshakov authored “Stalin’s Folly," and David E. Murphy authored "What Stalin Knew." Both provide accounts of the invasion and Stalin’s refusal to acknowledge warning signs.
(AP, 6/22/97)(HN, 6/22/98)(WSJ, 6/22/05, p.D12)
1941 Jun 22, Germany attacked the Soviet Union, its former ally. When the German forces entered the Polish city of Lviv (Lwov), they and their Ukrainian collaborators massacred Jews in the city and countryside. While occupying the area, Germans murdered Jews in the ghetto, the Belzec death camp and a forced labor camp, Janowska, with the final annihilation occurring in 1943.
(AP, 9/2/18)
1941 Jun 22, Estonians started armed resistance against Soviet occupation.
(MC, 6/22/02)
1941 Jun 22, Finland invaded Karelia. When Germany attacked the Soviet Union in summer 1941, Finland joined in and began re-taking the lost territory.
(www.publiscan.fi/cu13e-9.htm)
1941 Jun 24, President Franklin Roosevelt pledged all possible support to the Soviet Union.
(HN, 6/24/98)
1941 Jun 24, Germans advanced into Russia and took Vilnius, Brest-Litovsk and Kaunas.
(MC, 6/24/02)
1941 Jun 25, Finland declared war on the Soviet Union.
(HN, 6/25/98)
1941 Jun 25-26, Russians counter attacked at Rovno, Poland.
(MC, 6/25/02)
1941 Jun 26, Finland entered WW II against Russia.
(MC, 6/26/02)
1941 Jun 26, In Belarus Soviet NKVD mass-executed prisoners from Minsk in the nearby Tsagelnya forest. The wooden statue Mourning Ange, by sculptor Gennady Matusevich, was later erected at the location. Commemorative events are held every year in June. In 1942 Jonas Petruitis authored “Kaip jie mus sušaudė" (How They Shot Us Down).
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chervyen%E2%80%99)
1941 Jun 29, Nazi divisions in a surprise assault made sweeping advances toward Leningrad, Moscow, and Kiev. Joseph Stalin had ignored warnings that Hitler would betray the 1939 Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact. Over 500,000 square miles of Russian territory were taken in the first two months of the invasion.
(MC, 6/29/02)
1941 Jul 5, German troops reached the Dnieper River in the Soviet Union.
(HN, 7/5/98)
1941 Jul 12, Moscow was bombed by the German Luftwaffe for the first time.
(HN, 7/12/98)
1941 Jul 13, Britain and the Soviet Union signed a mutual aid pact, providing the means for Britain to send war materiel to the Soviet Union.
(HN, 7/13/98)
1941 Aug 2, German 11th Army surrounded 20 Russian divisions at Uman.
(MC, 8/2/02)
1941 Aug 5, The German army completed taking 410,000 Russian prisoners in Uman and Smolensk pockets in the Soviet Union.
(HN, 8/5/98)
1941 Aug 10, Great Britain and the Soviet Union promised aid to Turkey if it was attacked by the Axis.
(HN, 8/10/98)
1941 Aug 11, Soviet bombers raided Berlin but caused little damage.
(HN, 8/10/98)
1941 Aug 13, Red army evacuated Smolensk.
(MC, 8/13/02)
1941 Aug 19, The final German assault on Tallinn began.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_evacuation_of_Tallinn)
1941 Aug 21-Sep 26, The Soviet Union's greatest defeat in WWII occurred during the encirclement of the Ukrainian city of Kiev. The Germans took some 665,000 Soviet prisoners.
(HNQ, 8/12/98)
1941 Aug 22, Nazi troops reached Leningrad.
(MC, 8/22/02)
1941 Aug 25, British and Soviet forces entered Iran, opening up a route to supply the Soviet Union. Iran was invaded by the Allies with the Soviets controlling the north.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Mahabad)(HN, 8/25/98)
1941 Aug 25, German troops conquered Novgorod, Leningrad.
(MC, 8/25/02)
1941 Aug 27, The Soviet armada began to move out of Tallinn. By the next day 5 ships were sunk by German bombers and Soviet ships began to encounter minefields set by the Kriegsmarine and Finnish Navy. The Soviets succeeded in evacuating 165 ships, 28,000 passengers and 66,000 tons of equipment from Tallinn.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_evacuation_of_Tallinn)
1941 Aug 29, The German Einsatzkommando in Russia killed 1,469 Jewish children.
(MC, 8/29/01)
1941 Aug 30, The World War II siege of Leningrad began as Nazi forces took Mga.
(AP, 8/30/97)
1941 Aug 31, Marina Tsvetaeva (b.1892), Russian poet and writer, died. She wrote six plays in verse and narrative poems, including The Tsar Maiden (1920), and her epic about the Civil War, The Swans' Encampment, which glorified those who fought against the communists.
(Econ, 3/6/10, p.103)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marina_Tsvetaeva)
1941 Sep 8, The 900-day Siege of Leningrad by German forces began during World War II. The Siege of Leningrad, 400 miles northwest of Moscow, took place with Germany spread along a 2,000 mile front. It led to the death of at least one million Russians from starvation and disease. Leningrad was renamed back to St. Petersburg in 1991. In 2011 Anna Reid authored “Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II."
(WSJ, 2/21/96, p.A-15)(AP, 9/8/06)(Econ, 8/27/11, p.73)
1941 Sep 21, The German Army cut off the Crimean Peninsula from the rest of the Soviet Union.
(HN, 9/21/98)
1941 Sep 23, Germans staged an air raid on the Russian naval base at Kronstadt. The battleship Marat sank.
(MC, 9/23/01)
1941 Sep, Shostakovich, a local fire warden, composed his Seventh Symphony, the "Leningrad," during the German siege of his native city.
(SFC, 10/18/96, C9)(WSJ, 6/8/98, p.A21)
1941 Oct 2, Operation Typhoon, a German all-out drive against Moscow, began in earnest. In 2006 Rodric Braithwaite authored “Moscow 1941: A City and Its People at War."
(AP, 10/2/97)(http://www.bartcop.com/arc4110.htm)(Econ, 9/23/06, p.95)
1941 Oct 6, German troops renewed their offensive against Moscow.
(HN, 10/6/98)
1941 Oct 10, Soviet troops halted the German advance on Moscow.
(HN, 10/10/98)
1941 Oct 12, Russian government moved from Moscow to Volga as Nazis closed in on Moscow.
(MC, 10/12/01)
1941 Oct 15, Odessa, a Russian port on the Black Sea which had been surrounded by German troops for several weeks, was evacuated by Russian troops.
(HN, 10/15/98)
1941 Oct 16, Antanas Gustaitis (b.1898), Lithuanian aviation engineer, was shot to death in Moscow. He had designed 9 ANBO airplanes.
(LHC, 3/26/03)
1941 Oct 16, Germany advanced within 60 miles of Moscow.
(MC, 10/16/01)
1941 Oct 25, Germany attacked Moscow.
(MC, 10/25/01)
1941 Nov 2, German troops occupied Rostov.
(MC, 11/2/01)
1941 Nov 6, USA lent Soviet Union $1 million.
(MC, 11/6/01)
1941 Nov 7, Russians paraded across Red Square commemorating the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and afterward went directly to the front to defend Moscow from the approaching Nazi forces.
(AP, 11/7/10)
1941 Nov 12, Germany's drive to take Moscow halted.
(MC, 11/12/01)
1941 Nov 15, The German final attack on Moscow began. They advanced to within 25 miles of the center of Moscow.
(SFC,10/29/97, p.A23)
1941 Nov 23, German troops conquered Klin, NW of Moscow.
(MC, 11/23/01)
1941 Nov 27, USSR began a counter offensive, causing Germans to retreat.
(MC, 11/27/01)
1941 Nov 28, German troops vacated Rostov.
(MC, 11/28/01)
1941 Dec 4, Operation Taifun (Typhoon), which was launched by the German armies on October 2, 1941 as a prelude to taking Moscow, was halted because of freezing temperatures and lack of serviceable aircraft. Temperatures near Moscow fell to 40 degrees below zero the breech-blocks of German rifles froze solid. The engines of their vehicles would not start. The Soviets began a counter-attack with 17 armies and their T-34 tanks that included 25 Siberian divisions and the Nazis were forced to retreat in panic.
(SFC,10/29/97, p.A23)(HN, 12/4/98)
1941 Dec 5, Russian offensive in Moscow drove out the Nazi army.
(MC, 12/5/01)
1941 Dec 8, Russians took Krijukovo back from Germany.
(d.com, 12/8/02)
1941 Sergei Prokofiev composed his String Quartet No. 2 in F Major.
(www.karadar.net/Cataloghi/prokofiev.html)
1941 The Ballet Company of the Stanislavsky and Nenmirovich-Danchenko Moscow Music Theater was founded.
(WSJ, 1/13/98, p.A20)
1941 The amber room in St. Petersburg was dismantled by German officers and shipped to Konigsberg for safekeeping. The Allied bombing in 1945 was thought to have destroyed the work.
(SFC, 3/22/97, p.A16)
c1941-1945 Russian women combat pilots were called the "Night Witches" by the Germans they haunted during dark, scary nights of World War II. The embattled skies of the Soviet Union regularly saw women proving their worth in combat as bomber, night bomber and even as fighter pilots.
(HNQ, 2/19/02)
1941-1945 In 2005 Catherine Merridale authored “Ivan’s War: The Red Army 1941-1945.
(Econ, 10/22/05, p.86)
1942 Jan 7, Vasili Alexeyev, weightlifter (Olympic-gold-72, 76), was born in USSR.
(MC, 1/7/02)
1942 Feb 24, The SS Struma was sunk in the Black Sea by a Soviet torpedo. The ship with over 750 Jewish passengers fleeing Romania, had docked in Istanbul, but was denied entry to Palestinian territory by colonial power Britain. On Feb 23 Turkey towed the vessel to the Black Sea and set it adrift. Only one person survived.
(AP, 2/24/12)
1942 Feb, The Soviet government established the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC) to drum up int’l. support as the Red Army struggled against the German onslaught. As the war progressed the group collected evidence of atrocities and genocide and planned to publish its “Black Book." Incomplete versions appeared in the 1980s and the first complete version was published in Lithuania in 1993. In Russia it was published as “The Unknown Black Book." In 2008 an English translation was edited by Joshua Rubenstein and Ilya Altman.
(WSJ, 1/19/08, p.W8)
1942 Spring, Soviet soldiers retreated for 3 days through a corridor 50-yards wide in the Mysnoi Bor under constant German shelling. The retreat was from a botched campaign to free Leningrad, 150 miles to the north. The official death toll was 20,000, but some claim as many as 300,000.
(WSJ, 10/1/96, p.A20)
1942 Apr 8, The Soviets opened a rail link to the besieged city of Leningrad.
(HN, 4/8/99)
1942 Apr 20, The battle for Moscow ended. It officially lasted from September 30, 1941, to April 20, 1942, but in reality spanned more than those 203 days of unremitting mass murder, and marked the first time that Hitler's armies failed to triumph with their Blitzkrieg tactics. In 2007 Andrew Nagorski authored “The Greatest Battle: Stalin, Hitler, and the Desperate Struggle for Moscow That Changed the Course of World War II."
(WSJ, 1/11/08, p.W6)
1942 May 12, The Soviet Army launched its first major offensive of the war and took Kharkov in the eastern Ukraine from the German army.
(HN, 5/12/99)
1942 May 29, The German Army completed its encirclement of the Kharkov region of the Soviet Union. The Red Army had lost over 250,000 men including many prisoners.
(HN, 5/29/99)
1942 Jun 1, America began sending Lend-Lease materials to the Soviet Union.
(HN, 6/1/98)
1942 Jun 11, The United States and the Soviet Union signed a lend-lease agreement to aid the Soviet war effort in World War II.
(AP, 6/11/97)
1942 Jun 28, German troops launched “Operation Blue," an offensive to seize Soviet oil fields in the Caucasus and the city of Stalingrad.
(HN, 6/28/98)(WSJ, 1/14/07, p.P8)
1942 Jul 1, German troops captured Sevastopol, Crimea, in the Soviet Union.
(HN, 7/1/98)
1942 Jul 20, Time put Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovitch on its cover.
(MC, 7/20/02)
1942 Jul 24, The Soviet city of Rostov was captured by German troops.
(HN, 7/24/98)
1942 Jul 30, The Battle of Rzhev began as a Soviet offensive to recapture Rzhev and strike a blow against Germany's Army Group Center that would push them away from Moscow. It was part of a series of battles that lasted 15 months in the center of the Eastern Front. The effort involved enormous Soviet losses from persistent, poorly prepared attacks against well-fortified Nazi positions.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Rzhev,_Summer_1942)
1942 Jul, Hitler made his fateful decision to split the armies engaged in the offensive and to occupy the city of Stalingrad with the weaker of the 2 groups.
(WSJ, 1/14/07, p.P8)
1942 Aug 6, The Soviet city of Voronezh fell to the German army.
(HN, 8/6/98)
1942 Aug 9, In Russia conductor Karl Eliasberg led a performance of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony in Leningrad as it was besieged by the German army. A day earlier the Soviet army did a very vicious bombardment of the German army lines in order to silence the German guns, so the concert could take place without being interrupted.
(www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34292312)
1942 Aug 12, British premier Churchill arrived in Moscow to meet Stalin.
(MC, 8/12/02)
1942 Apr 18, The 16th plane of the Doolittle air strike against Japan landed outside Vladivostok in the Soviet Union following its mission. Nolan Herndon (1918-2007), the bombardier, later reported that their plane was used to test the Soviet resolve as an ally. The 5-man crew was held for over 13 months before escaping to a British Embassy in what later became Iran.
(SFC, 10/16/07, p.D8)
1942 Aug 19, Gen. Paulus ordered the German 6th Army to conquer Stalingrad.
(MC, 8/19/02)
1942 Aug 22, Mikhailmichel Fokine (b.1880), Russian ballet dancer, choreographer, died.
(MC, 8/22/02)
1942 Aug 23, German forces began an assault on the major Soviet industrial city of Stalingrad. From Aug. to Feb. 1943, The Battle of Stalingrad, 600 miles southeast of Moscow, was fought and ended with the encirclement and destruction of the German 6th Army Group. Stalingrad has since been renamed to Volgograd. In 1998 Antony Beevor published "Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege." The German in charge was Gen’l. Friedrich Paulus. 600 Luftwaffe bombers killed some 40,000 people in the first week of fighting.
(WSJ, 2/21/96, p.A-15)(WSJ, 7/8/98, p.A13)(HN, 8/23/98)(MC, 8/23/02)
1942 Aug 26, A Russian counter offensive began in Moscow.
(MC, 8/26/02)
1942 Sep 2, German troops entered Stalingrad.
(MC, 9/2/01)
1942 Sep 4, Soviet planes bombed Budapest in the war's first air raid on the Hungarian capital.
(HN, 9/4/98)
1942 Sep 7, The Red Army pushed back the German line northwest of Stalingrad. The Krummer Lauf allowed German infantry and motorized artillery units to actually fire around corners.
(HN, 9/7/98)
1942 Sep 17, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill met with Soviet Premier Josef Stalin in Moscow as the German Army rammed into Stalingrad.
(HN, 9/17/98)
1942 Sep 23, The Russian counter offensive at Stalingrad began.
(MC, 9/23/01)
1942 Sep 27, Heavy German assault in Stalingrad.
(MC, 9/27/01)
1942 Sep 28, Luftwaffe bombed Stalingrad.
(MC, 9/28/01)
1942 Oct 1, The German Army ground to a complete halt within the city of Stalingrad.
(HN, 10/1/98)
1942 Oct 5, 5,000 Jews of Dubno, Russia, were massacred.
(MC, 10/5/01)
1942 Oct 7, A single salvo Katyusha rocket destroyed a Nazi battalion in Stalingrad.
(MC, 10/7/01)
1942 Nov 19, During World War II, Russian forces launched their winter offensive against the Germans along the Don front. Soviet forces took the offensive at Stalingrad
(AP, 11/19/97)(HN, 11/19/98)
1942 Nov 20, The 26th Russian Armored Corps recaptured Perelazovski. A million Russians breached German lines in a Soviet army offensive.
(MC, 11/20/01)
1942 Nov 22, Soviet troops completed the encirclement of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad.
(HN, 11/22/98)
1942 Nov 23, Gen. Von Paulus asked Hitler's permission to surrender at Stalingrad. The German 4th and 6th Army were surrounded at Stalingrad.
(MC, 11/23/01)
1942 Nov, In Balkaria, Central Asia, a valley-full of women and children were hunted down in several villages and butchered by the joint NKVD and Red Army task force under the command of captain Nakin. This became known as the Cherek massacre.
(Econ, 4/3/10, p.86)(http://tinyurl.com/y7b5tse)
1942 Dec 22, The Soviets drove German troops back 15 miles at the Don River.
(HN, 12/22/98)
1943 Jan 9, Soviet planes dropped leaflets on the surrounded Germans in Stalingrad requesting their surrender with humane terms. The Germans refused.
(HN, 1/9/99)
1943 Jan 10, Russian offensive began against German 6th and 4th Armies near Stalingrad.
(MC, 1/10/02)
1943 Jan 11, The Soviet Red Army encircled Stalingrad.
(HN, 1/11/99)
1943 Jan 12, Soviet forces raised the siege of Leningrad.
(HN, 1/12/99)
1943 Jan 18, The Soviets announced they'd broken the long Nazi siege of Leningrad. It was another year before the siege was fully lifted.
(AP, 1/18/98)
1943 Jan 24, Hitler ordered Nazi troops at Stalingrad to fight to death.
(MC, 1/24/02)
1943 Jan 25, The last German airfield in Stalingrad was captured by the Red Army.
(HN, 1/25/99)
1943 Jan 26, Nikolai Vavilov (b.1887), Soviet botanist, died in prison. In 1929 he had traced the genealogy of the apple to Kazakhstan.
(SSFC, 5/25/08, Books p.3)(www.michaelpollan.com/article.php?id=54)
1943 Jan 30, Field marshal Friedrich von Paulus surrendered himself and his staff to Red Army troops in Stalingrad.
(HN, 1/30/99)
1943 Jan 31, The Battle of Stalingrad ended as small groups of German soldiers of the Sixth Army under Gen Friedrich von Paulus surrendered to the victorious Red Army forces.
(HN, 1/31/99)(MC, 1/31/02)
1943 Feb 2, The remainder of Nazi forces from the Battle of Stalingrad surrendered in a major World War II victory for the Soviets. 23 generals, 2,000 officers, and at least 130,000 German troops surrendered. This was later considered as the turning point of WW II.
(AP, 2/2/97)(HN, 2/2/99)(WSJ, 3/28/03, p.A1)
1943 Feb 3, Finland began talks with the Soviet Union.
(HN, 2/3/99)
1943 Feb 8, Red Army recaptured Kursk.
(MC, 2/8/02)
1943 Feb 9, The Russians took back Kursk 15 months after it fell to the Nazis.
(HN, 2/9/97)
1943 Feb 14, Soviets recaptured Rostov.
(MC, 2/14/02)
1943 Feb 16, The Red army conquered Kharkov.
(MC, 2/16/02)
1943 Mar 14, The Germans reoccupied Kharkov in the Soviet Union.
(HN, 3/14/98)
1943 Mar 18, Red Army evacuated Belgorod.
(MC, 3/18/02)
1943 Apr 13, Nazi's discovered a mass grave of Polish officers near Katyn. [see Apr 13, 1990]
(MC, 4/13/02)
1943 May 22, Stalin disbanded the Komintern.
(MC, 5/22/02)
1943 May, German captors took American POWs Capt. Donald B. Stewart and Lt. Col. John H. Van Vliet Jr. to view mummified corpses of Polish officers massacred in the Katyn forest. They used coded messages to report on the Soviet guilt, but it was suppressed by the Roosevelt administration until a report in 1952. Documents of their coded messages were made public in 2012.
(AP, 9/10/12)
1943 Jul 5, The battle of Kursk, the largest tank battle in history, began as German tanks attacked the Soviet salient.
(HN, 7/5/98)
1943 Jul 6, In the 2nd day of battle at Kursk some 25,000 Germans were killed.
(MC, 7/6/02)
1943 Jul 7, In the 3rd day of battle at Kursk the Germans occupied Dubrova. Erich Hartmann shot 7 Russian aircraft at Kursk.
(MC, 7/7/02)
1943 Jul 8, The 4th day of battle at Kursk: Gen Model used his last tank reserve.
(MC, 7/8/02)
1943 Jul 12, Russians beat Nazis in a tank battle at Prochorowka. Some 12,000 died.
(MC, 7/12/02)
1943 Jul 13, Greatest tank battle in history ended with Russia's defeat of Germany at Kursk. Almost 6,000 tanks took part and 2,900 were lost by Germany.
(MC, 7/13/02)
1943 Jul 23, Battle of Kursk, USSR, ended in Nazi defeat. 6,000 tanks took part.
(MC, 7/23/02)
1943 Aug 22, Soviet troops freed Kharkov.
(MC, 8/22/02)
1943 Aug 25, Red Army under Gen Vatutin recaptured Achtyrka.
(chblue.com, 8/25/01)
1943 Sep 24, Soviet forces reconquered Smolensk. [see Sep 25]
(MC, 9/24/01)
1943 Sep 25, The Red Army retook Smolensk from the Germans who were retreating to the Dnieper River in the Soviet Union. [see Sep 24]
(HN, 9/25/98)
1943 Oct 14, Some 300 of 600 prisoners escaped from the Nazi’s Sobibor death camp in Poland. Alexander Pechersky, a Russian officer of Jewish origin, roused his fellow prisoners to rebellion. The event was later documented in the book "Escape from Sobibor" by Richard Rashke (1982) and the film of the same name with Alan Arkin. Josef Vallaster, an Austrian guard, was among 11 SS officers and 11 Ukrainians killed in the escape. Most of the escaped prisoners were killed as they fled. Only 50 prisoners survived the war. Vallaster had operated the motor that funneled gas into Sobibor’s shower rooms. After the uprising at Sobibor, the Nazis shut it down and leveled it to the ground, replanting over it to cover their tracks.
(SFC, 7/11/03, p.A19)(SSFC, 2/17/08, p.A8)(AP, 8/21/12)(AFP, 10/14/13)
1943 Oct 19, Delegates from the USSR met with representatives from the Allied nations of Great Britain, the U.S., and China, in an attempt to hammer out a greater consensus on war aims, and to improve the rapidly cooling relations between the Soviet Union and its allies.
(MC, 10/19/01)
1943 Oct 30, The Molotov-Eden-Cordell Hull accord over operations at UN.
(MC, 10/30/01)
1943 Nov 6, Soviet forces reconquered Kiev.
(MC, 11/6/01)
1943 Nov 28, President Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Josef Stalin met in Tehran, Iran, to map out strategy during World War II.
(AP, 11/28/97)(DTnet, 11/28/97)(HN, 11/28/98)
1943 Dec 1, President Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Josef Stalin concluded their Tehran conference and agreed to Operation Overlord (D-Day).
(AP, 12/1/00)
1943 Dec 12, The exiled Czech government signed a treaty with the USSR for postwar cooperation.
(HN, 12/12/98)
1943 Dec 12, The German Army launched Operation Winter Tempest, the relief of the Sixth Army trapped in Stalingrad. The attempt to relieve Stalingrad fell short due to stubborn Soviet resistance and the Germans' indecision within the besieged city.
(HN, 12/12/98)
1943 Dec 20, "International" was no longer USSR National Anthem.
(MC, 12/20/01)
1943 Dec 20, Soviet forces halted a German army trying to relieve the besieged city of Stalingrad.
(HN, 12/20/98)
1943 Sergei Mikhalkov (96), an author favored by Stalin, was commissioned to write the lyrics for the Soviet and Russian national anthems. His lyrics, co-written with journalist El Registan and set to music by Alexander Alexandrov, lauded Stalin who "brought us up on loyalty to the people" and "inspired us to labor and to heroism."
(AP, 8/27/09)
1943 Dmitri Shostakovich composed his 8th Symphony.
(WSJ, 5/7/02, p.D7)
1943 Russia began producing palladium in Norilsk.
(WSJ, 3/6/00, p.A1)
1943-1957 The Kalmyks of southern Russia were banished to Siberia on charges of collaborating with the Nazis. In their absence their land was overgrazed and turned to desert. In an attempt to solve the problem the steppe was irrigated with water from the Volga which brought underlying salt to the surface and turned some of the land to marsh.
(SFC,11/6/97, p.D2)
1944 Jan 4, Soviet troops crossed the former Polish border.
(HN, 1/4/99)
1944 Jan 17, Russia rejected a Polish proposal to negotiate a boundary dispute.
(HN, 1/17/99)
1944 Jan 27, The Soviet Union announced the end of the deadly German siege of Leningrad, which had lasted 880 days with 600,000 killed.
(AP, 1/27/98)(MC, 1/27/02)
1944 Feb 23, Stalin ordered the mass deportation Caucasian Muslim nations. Chechens and Ingush to Kazakhstan were deported for resisting Soviet rule and abetting the Germans. "478,479 persons were evicted and loaded onto special railway cars, including 91,250 Ingush." More than a third of the population died before the rest were allowed to go home. Also deported were the Karachays, Balkars, and Meskhetian Turks.
(WSJ, 9/12/02, p.A8)(WSJ, 2/23/04, p.A16)(Econ, 2/12/05, p.22)
1944 Mar 8, The Soviet government celebrated International Women's Day by forcibly deporting almost the entire Balkar population to Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Omsk Oblast in Siberia. Starting on 8 March and finishing the following day, the NKVD loaded 37,713 Balkars onto 14 train echelons bound for Central Asia and Siberia.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balkars)
1944 Mar 18, The Russians reached the Rumanian border in the Balkans.
(HN, 3/18/98)
1944 Mar 21, Finland rejected a Soviet armistice.
(HN, 3/21/98)
1944 Apr 2, Soviet forces entered Romania, one of Germany's allied countries.
(HN, 4/2/01)
1944 Apr 10, Soviet forces liberated Odessa from Nazis.
(MC, 4/10/02)
1944 May 5, A Russian offensive took place against Sebastopol Krim.
(MC, 5/5/02)
1944 May 6, The Red Army besieged and captured Sevastopol in the Crimea.
(HN, 5/6/99)
1944 May 9, Russians recaptured Crimea by taking Sevastopol. [see May 6]
(MC, 5/9/02)
1944 May 18, The Soviet Union began the expulsion of more than 200,000 Tartars from Crimea. They were accused of collaborating with the Germans. Stalin deported some 250,000 Tatars from Crimea to Uzbekistan. They did not being to return home until the fall of the USSR.
(SC, 5/18/02)(SFC, 1/4/99, p.A8,9)
1944 Jun 29, A Russian assault battalion opened fire on German forces on the outskirts of Bobruisk, Belarus. As many as half of the 10,000 German soldiers were killed. In 1962 Nikolai Litvin, a Russian soldier present that day, completed his memoir. It was finally published in 2007 under the title "800 Days on the Eastern Front."
(WSJ, 6/30/07, p.P6)
1944 Jul 3, During World War II, Soviet forces recaptured Minsk.
(AP, 7/3/97)
1944 Jul 16, Soviet troops occupy Vilna, Lithuania, in their drive towards Germany.
(HN, 7/16/98)
1944 Jul 23, Soviet troops took Lublin, Poland, as the German army retreated.
(HN, 7/23/02)
1944 Jul 24, Soviet forces liberated the Majdanek concentration camp.
(MC, 7/24/02)
1944 Jul 31, The Soviet army took Kovno [Kaunas], the capital of Lithuania.
(HN, 7/31/98)
1944 Aug 21, The US, Britain, the Soviet Union and China opened the Dumbarton Oaks conference in Washington, D.C. It laid the foundation for the establishment of the UN.
(SFEC, 6/29/97, p.T10)(AP, 8/21/07)
1944 Aug 23, Romanian PM Ion Antonescu was dismissed by King Michael, paving the way for Romania to abandon the Axis in favor of the Allies. King Michael organized a coup against the pro-Nazi dictator, Marshal Ion Antonescu, but was double-crossed by Joseph Stalin and betrayed by the Allies who ceded the country to the Russians at the Yalta summit in 1945.
(SFC, 6/27/97, p.A16)(AP, 8/23/97)
1944 Aug 30, Ploesti, the center of the Rumanian oil industry, fell to Soviet troops.
(HN, 8/30/00)
1944 Oct 18, Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia during World War II.
(AP, 10/18/97)
1944 Oct 23, Soviet army invaded Hungary.
(MC, 10/23/01)
1944 Dec 13, Wassily Kandinsky (b.1866), Russian artist credited with the invention of abstract art, died in France. He held that shapes and colors in art, like notes in music, should represent feelings and emotions, not actual objects.
(WSJ, 8/13/99, p.W10)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wassily_Kandinsky)
1944 Dec 26, Advancing Soviet troops surrounded Budapest.
(HN, 12/26/98)
1944 The Russian film "Ivan the Terrible" was directed by Sergei Eisenstein with music by Prokofiev. It was planned as a 3-part epic. Part 2 was released after Stalin’s death and part 3 was never made.
(SFC,11/1/97, p.E3)
1944 Nikolai Baibakov (1911-2008) was named Stalin's oil commissioner. He was fired in 1985 by Mikhail Gorbachev, whose economic and social reforms preceded the Soviet collapse.
(AP, 4/2/08)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Baibakov)
1944 The Soviet army re-conquered Bessarabia. Only then were the two parts of present-day Moldova joined together to form the Moldavian SSR. At the same time, about one-third of Bessarabia, including its entire Black Sea coastline, was incorporated into the Ukrainian SSR. The Transdniester region, having long been part of the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union, remained more Russified and Sovietized than Right-Bank Moldavia.
(http://tinyurl.com/b7m4b)
1944 Some 150,000 Hungarian troops fought under Nazi command at the Don River. The Red army killed about 90,000 and thousands died trying to walk back to Hungary.
(SFC, 8/12/00, p.A11)
1944 The Soviet Union annexed Tuva and closed the region to the outside world.
(WSJ, 4/1/06, p.A5)
1944 The Normandie-Niemen Fighter Regiment, a Fighter unit of the French Air Force formed in 1942 as Groupe de Chasse Normandie 3, was redesignated as a Regiment (without and with "Niemen" designation the same year). The unit served on the Eastern Front of the European Theatre of World War II with the 1st Air Army. The regiment is notable for being one of only three units from Western Allied countries to see combat on the Eastern Front during World War II, and Normandie-Niemen was the only Western Allied unit to fight with the Soviet forces until the end of the war in Europe. Its battle honors included such names such as Bryansk, Orel 1943, Ielnia, Smolensk 1943, Orsha 1944, Berezina 1944, Niemen 1944, Chernyakhovsk 1945, Königsberg (later renamed Kaliningrad by the Soviets), Baltiysk 1945, and Pillau. In 1944 Joseph Stalin awarded the regiment the name Nieman, (thus becoming Normandie-Niemen) in recognition of its participation in the battles to liberate the river of the same name.
(https://wikivisually.com/wiki/Normandie-Niemen)
1944 Vasily Kononov (21) led a small band of pro-Soviet partisans in Latvia. He was arrested in 1998 for ordering the execution of 9 civilians in the village of Mazie Bati, whom he suspected of pro-Nazi sympathies, but maintained his innocence. In 2000 Latvia sentenced Kononov to 6 years in prison but he was soon freed pending further investigation. Russian president Vladimir Putin granted Kononov Russian citizenship.
(SFC, 4/26/00, p.A16)
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1911 Mar 20, Russian Premier Stolypin resigned in St. Petersburg.
(HN, 3/20/98)
1911 Sep 14, Russian Premier Piotr Stolypin was mortally wounded in an assassination attempt at the Kiev opera house.
(HN, 9/14/98)
1911 Sep 18, Russian Premier Piotr Stolypin (b.1862) died four days after being shot at the Kiev opera house by socialist lawyer Dimitri Bogroff. As governor of the Saratov province, Stolypin ruthlessly suppressed local peasant uprisings, and helped to squelch the revolutionary upheavals of 1905. As Prime Minister, Stolypin initiated major agrarian reforms that granted the right of private land ownership to the peasantry.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyotr_Stolypin)
1911 Sep 24, Konstantin Chernenko, president of the Soviet Union 1984-1985, was born.
(HN, 9/24/98)
1911 Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova developed rayonism (rayonnism), a style of abstract art, after hearing a series of lectures about Futurism by Marinetti in Moscow. The Rayonists sought an art that floated beyond abstraction, outside of time and space, and to break the barriers between the artist and the public.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayonism)
1911 Mendel Beilis was tried on charges of killing a Russian child to extract its blood for baking Passover matzos. He spent over 2 years in prison before a jury found him not guilty. Franz Kafka followed the story and may have transformed it into a universal symbol of arbitrary victimization in his "The Trial."
(WSJ, 10/17/00, p.A20)
1911 Russia exported 13.7 million tons of grain while some 30 million of its peasants suffered from famine.
(SFC, 7/11/98, p.B3)
1912 May 5, The Soviet Communist Party newspaper Pravda began publishing. Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili took the name Stalin, meaning "man of steel," about the time he helped found the Russian Communist newspaper Pravda. Stalin specialized in writing about national minorities in Russia and went on to become editor of Pravda.
(HN, 5/5/98)(HN, 12/21/98)(HNQ, 4/6/00)
1912 Nov 24, Austria denounced Serbian gains in the Balkans; Russia and France backed Serbia while Italy and Germany backed Austria.
(HN, 11/24/98)
1912 The novella “Hadji Murad" by Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) was published. Murad (d.1852) was an important Chechen leader during the resistance of the Caucasian peoples in 1711-1864 against the Russian Empire's seizure of the region.
(http://tinyurl.com/js9od)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadji_Murad)
1912 The Pushkin Museum opened in Moscow. It was scheduled to close in 2009 for a $380 million upgrade to be completed in 2012.
(WSJ, 5/21/08, p.D9)
1912 The Saint Nicholas Cathedral in Nice, with its two pointed spires and five crucifix-topped onion-shaped domes, was built under Nicholas II, nearly 50 years after his grandfather, Alexander II, bought the land it sits on.
(AP, 1/20/10)
1913 May 13, 1st 4 engine aircraft was built & flown by Igor Sikorsky of Russia.
(SS, Internet, 5/13/97)
1913 Nov 26, Russian kingdom forbade Polish congregation of speakers.
(MC, 11/26/01)
1913 Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935), Ukraine born artist, designed the costumes for the opera “Victory Over the Sun."
(Econ, 10/26/13, p.96)(Econ, 12/21/13, SR p.5)
1913 Phillip Malyavin, Russian artist, painted the portrait "Dancing woman."
(WSJ, 5/2/03, p.W6)
1913 The Faberge Imperial rock crystal egg with rose cut diamonds set in platinum was created for the Czar. An American in 1994 paid $5.5 mil for the egg. Only 56 eggs were commissioned by the czars and czarinas.
(SFEM, 6/9/96, p.19)
1913 Vladimir Mayakovsky, futurist poet, authored "Mayakovsky: A Tragedy."
(SFC, 8/12/00, p.B1)
1913 Three Russian ships sailed to the Greek island of Athos and bundled hundreds of Orthodox monks off to Odessa. The Russians feared that a dispute over reciting the name of Jesus Christ would lead to the expulsion of all Russians from Athos. The name dispute began in 1907 when the book “In the Mountains of the Caucasus" was written by a monk named Ilarion.
(Econ, 12/22/12, p.89)
1913 The US firm Harley-Davidson opened its 1st motorcycle dealership in St. Petersburg, Russia. It closed in 1917. In 2005 it opened a new dealership opened in Moscow.
(SFC, 5/13/05, p.C2)
1914 Jan 16, Maxim Gorky was authorized to return to Russia after an eight year exile for political dissidence.
(HN, 1/16/99)
1914 Feb 26, Russian aviator Igor Sikorsky carried 17 passengers in a twin engine plane in St. Petersburg. Igor Sikorsky, founder of Sikorsky Aircraft, produced a film in 1942 that promoted the capabilities of his VS-300 helicopter, highlighting its possible rescue and military applications.
(HN, 2/26/98)
1914 Mar 6, Kirill P. Kondrashin, conductor (Hollywood Bowl 1981), was born in Moscow, Russia.
(MC, 3/6/02)
1914 Mar 17, Russia increased the number of active duty military from 460,000 to 1,700,000.
(HN, 3/17/98)
1914 Jun 15, Yuri Andropov, Russian KGB chief, 1st secretary, was born.
(MC, 6/15/02)
1914 Jul 25, Russia declared that it would act to protect Serbian sovereignty.
(HN, 7/25/98)
1914 Jul 31, German Kaiser Wilhelm II threatened war and ordered Russia to demobilize.
(MC, 7/31/02)
1914 Aug 1, Germany declared war on Russia at the onset of World War I.
(AP, 8/1/07)
1914 Aug 2, Russian troops invade Eastern Prussia.
(MC, 8/2/02)
1914 Aug 3, German Admiral Souchon, commander of the battle cruisers Goeben and Breslau, received an unexpected change in his orders. After attacking the Algerian coast he was no longer to sail west to the Atlantic Ocean. Instead, he was now ordered to turn around and sail east to Turkey. His new mission was to persuade the neutral Turkish government to enter the war on the side of Germany. The 2 ships were sold to Turkey and Souchon was made commander of the Turkish navy. He took the ships into the Black Sea, where he bombarded the Russian cities of Odessa, Sebastopol and Novorossiysk without the knowledge or consent of the Turkish government.
(http://www.worldwar1.com/sfgb.htm)(ON, Dec, 1995)
1914 Aug 6, Austria-Hungary declared war against Russia and Serbia declared war against Germany.
(AP, 8/6/00)
1914 Aug 15, Anatol K. Liadov (59), Russian composer (Baba Yaga), died.
(MC, 8/15/02)
1914 Aug 20, German forces occupied Brussels, Belgium, during World War I.
(AP, 8/20/97)
1914 Aug 20, Russia won an early victory over Germany at Gumbinnen.
(HN, 8/20/98)
1914 Aug 27, 2nd day of battle at Tannenberg: Germany bombed Usdau.
(MC, 8/28/01)
1914 Aug 29, 4th day of Tannenberg: Russian Narev-army panics, Gen Martos caught.
(MC, 8/29/01)
1914 Aug 31, Germany defeated Russia at the battle at Tannenberg. Some 30,000 Russians died.
(MC, 8/31/01)
1914 Sep 1, Russia renamed St. Petersburg to Petrograd.
(MC, 9/1/02)
1914 Sep 5, The First Battle of the Marne began during World War I. The German First Army was led by Gen. Alexander von Kluck.
(AP, 9/5/97)(WSJ, 12/31/99, p.A10)
1914 Oct 28, The German cruiser Emden, disguised as a British ship, steamed into Penang Harbor near Malaya and sank the Russian light cruiser Zhemchug.
(HN, 10/28/99)
1914 Oct 29, A Turkish fleet including 2 German cruisers stormed the Black Sea and bombarded Odessa, Sevastopol and Theodosia. [see Aug 3]
(PC, 1992, p.706)(ON, Dec, 1995)
1914 Nov 2, Russia declared war with Turkey. [see Oct 29]
(HN, 11/2/98)
1914 Nov 25, Hindenburg called off Lodz offensive 40 miles from Warsaw, Poland. The Russians lost 90,000 to the Germans’ 35,000 in two weeks of fighting.
(HN, 11/25/98)
1915 Feb 10, President Wilson blasted the British for using the U.S. flag on merchant ships to deceive the Germans. He also warned the Kaiser that he would hold Germany "to a strict accountability" for U.S. lives and property endangered. In Europe [Lithuania], the Germans encircled and captured 100,000 Russians near Nieman River. When the United States entered World War I, propagandist George Creel set out to stifle anti-war sentiment.
(HN, 2/10/97)
1915 Jun 22, Austro-German forces occupied Lemberg on the Eastern Front as the Russians retreated.
(HN, 6/22/98)
1916 Jan 11, Russian General Yudenich launched a WWI winter offensive and advances west.
(HN, 1/11/99)
1915 Jan 31, Germans used poison gas on the Russians at Bolimov.
(HN, 1/31/99)
1915 Feb 7, Field marshal Paul von Hindenburg moved on Russians at Masurian Lakes.
(HN, 2/7/99)
1915 Feb 21, The 20th Russian Army corps surrendered.
(MC, 2/21/02)
1915 Apr 24-May 14, Turkey said Armenians had sided with Russia and issued a deportation order for the mass deportation of Armenians. Armenian organizations in Istanbul were closed and 235 members were arrested for treason. Turkish police arrested hundreds of the most prominent Armenians in Constantinople, took them into the hinterlands and shot them. With that the terror spread through "Turkish Armenia" spearheaded by the "Special Organization" of soldiers of the Turkish leader Enver. In 2006 Taner Akcam authored “A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility."
(AP, 4/24/97)(HN, 4/24/98)(SFC, 4/27/99, p.A10)(HNQ, 5/30/99)(Econ, 10/21/06, p.95)
1915 Aug 23, Czar Nicolaas II took control of the Russian Army.
(MC, 8/23/02)
1915 Apr 27, Alexander N. Scriabin (43), Russian pianist, composer (Prometheus), died.
(SFC, 2/16/99, p.B1)(MC, 4/27/02)
1915 Oct 19, Russia and Italy declared war on Bulgaria.
(MC, 10/19/01)
1915 Kasimir Malevich (1878-1935), Ukraine born pioneer of abstract art, painted "Suprematist Cross in Black Square." It featured a dark black square against a white background and was "emblematic of the avant-garde belief that abstraction penetrated to the essence of things, on which basis the world could be reinvented."
(SFC, 5/28/98, p.E5)(WSJ, 10/5/05, p.D14)(Econ, 10/26/13, p.96)
1915 Ingush and Chechen regiments led "the Brusilov breakthrough" on the Russian-German front. Their horse cavalry attacked an enemy force armed with heavy artillery.
(www.chechnyafree.ru)
1916 Jan 18, The Russians forced the Turkish 3rd Army back to Erzurum.
(HN, 1/18/99)
1916 Jan 29, Grigori Rasputin, Russian mystic, shaman, grubby peasant, and influential favorite of the Romanov court, survived a failed attempt to poison him. Prince Felix Yussoupov, an effete, wealthy young aristocrat, shot and killed Rasputin and in effect, brought down the Russian Empire. The prince dined out on his story for many decades, becoming a jet-set celebrity. He restored his old wealth, lost in the Soviet Revolution, by suing anyone who wrote about Rasputin without his permission. [see Dec 16, Dec 30, 1916]
(MC, 1/29/02)
1916 Feb 16, Russian troops conquered Erzurum, Armenia.
(MC, 2/16/02)
1916 Feb 26, Russian troops conquered Kermansjah, Persia.
(SC, 2/26/02)
1916 Mar 18, On the Eastern Front, the Russians countered the Verdun assault with an attack at Lake Naroch. The Russians lost 100,000 men and the Germans lost 20,000.
(HN, 3/18/98)
1916 Jun 26, Russian General Aleksei Brusilov renewed his offensive against the Germans.
(HN, 6/26/98)
1916 Aug 7, Persia formed an alliance with Britain and Russia.
(HN, 8/7/98)
1916 Aug 11, The Russia army took Stanislau, Poland, from the Germans.
(HN, 8/10/98)
1916 Nov 7, Grand duke Nikolai Nikolayevich warned the czar of an uprising.
(MC, 11/7/01)
1916 Dec 17, Gregory Rasputin (45), the Russian monk and confidant to Czarina Alexandra, died after he was shot by Prince Yussoupov (Youssoupoff). The monk, who had wielded powerful influence over the Russian court, was murdered by a group of noblemen. He was fed cakes and wine laced with cyanide, then shot a number of times and finally drowned. In 1957 Youssoupoff (d.1967) authored a memoir in France that in 2003 was translated into English: Lost Splendor: The Amazing Memoirs of the Man Who Killed Rasputin." A TV version of Rasputin was made for HBO in 1996 [see Dec. 30].
(WSJ, 3/25/96, p.A-15)(AP, 12/16/97)(SSFC, 11/30/03, p.M4)
1916 Dec 30, According to the New Style calendar (Dec. 17th by the Old Style), Grigory Rasputin, the so-called "Mad Monk" who had wielded great influence with Czar Nicholas II, was murdered in St. Petersburg. Rasputin drowned when he was thrown through a hole in the ice of the Neva River. When Rasputin was introduced to the Russian royal family in 1905, he demonstrated an ability to heal the royal son Alexis and was then welcomed into the family circle. Rasputin was considered a holy peasant, but his belief that sinning was necessary for salvation led him to seduce women and other scandalous behavior. A conspiracy, believing Rasputin had too much influence on the empress, formed to assassinate him, and on the night of December 29-30, they poisoned his wine--but he did not die. They shot him twice, but when he still refused to die, they drowned him [see Dec 17].
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigori_Rasputin)(AP, 12/29/06)
1916 A Russian submarine sank off Sweden’s eastern coast after it collided with a Swedish ship in poor visibility, killing all 18 crew members. Wreckage of the submarine was found in 2015.
(Reuters, 7/28/15)
1917 Feb 20, Ammunitions ship exploded in Archangel harbor, Russia, and about 1,500 died.
(MC, 2/20/02)
1917 Feb 23, The February revolution began in Russia (OS calendar). [see Mar 8]
(MC, 2/23/02)
1917 Feb 28, Russian Duma set up a Provisional Committee; workers set up Soviets.
(MC, 2/28/02)
1917 Mar 8, Russian women commenced a strike for "bread and peace" in response to the death over 2 million Russian soldiers in war. This was 23 February on the Julian calendar then in use in Russia. This day on the Gregorian calendar in use elsewhere was 8 March.
(www.internationalwomensday.com/about.asp#.VP5OouEYOok)
1917 Mar 8-1917 Mar 12, Russia’s democratic February revolution took place. The "February Revolution" (according to the Old Style calendar that Russians used it was Feb 23-27) began with rioting and strikes in the Russian army garrison at Petrograd.
(AP, 3/8/98)(LHC, 3/8/03)
1917 Mar 9, A Lithuanian committee in St. Petersburg accepted a declaration for Lithuanian autonomy.
(LHC, 3/9/03)
1917 Mar 12, Russian troops mutinied in the "February Revolution." [see Mar 8]
(HN, 3/12/99)
1917 Mar 15, Nicholas II, last Russian tsar, said he will abdicate.
(MC, 3/15/02)
1917 Mar 16, Nicholas II, Czar of Russia, abdicated in favor of his brother Michael. He was forced to sign a document of abdication after being brought down by political unrest and widespread starvation stemming from Russia’s staggering losses in WWI. The czar, his wife Alexandra, their four daughters and son Alexis, heir to the throne, were held prisoner by the Bolsheviks for several months at Tsarskoye Selo palace near Petrograd. In August 1917, the family was transported to distant Siberia to prevent any attempt to restore them to the throne. In July 1918, the entire royal family was executed by local Bolsheviks.
(HNPD, 3/16/99)
1917 Mar 17, Czar Michael abdicated after one day in favor of a provisional government under Prince George Evgenievich Lvov (55).
(PCh, 1992, p.722)
1917 Mar 22, The U.S. became the first to recognize the Kerensky Government in Russia.
(HN, 3/22/97)
1917 Mar, Revolutionary soldiers dug up the Rasputin’s grave and soaked his body in gasoline and set it ablaze in insure his death.
(WSJ, 3/25/96, p.A-15)
1917 Apr 3, Lenin left Switzerland for Petrograd.
(MC, 4/3/02)
1917 Apr 16, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin returned to Russia after years of exile to start the Bolshevik Revolution.
(AP, 4/16/97)(HN, 4/16/98)
1917 Apr 20, In the Pravda newspaper Lenin named Russia "Free land of world."
(MC, 4/20/02)
1917 May 1, Caucasian unity was proclaimed at the first Mountain People's Congress in Vladikavkaz. The idea of a Caucasus Confederation had its origins in the spring of 1917 and was developed further in 1918. At the Congress the "Alliance of United Mountain People of the North Caucasus and Dagestan", headed by T. Chermoev, a Chechen, R. Kaplanov, a Kumyk, P. Kotsev, a Kabardian, V. Dzhabagiev, an Ingush, and others, was officially established. The Abkhazian people also became full members of this alliance. A Mountain Peoples' Government was formed in November 1917.
(www.ciaonet.org/olj/crs/crs_1998sp/crs98sp_las01.html)
1917 Jun 10, 60,000 people of Petrograd welcomed Prince Kropotkin, who was banned 41 years earlier.
(MC, 6/10/02)
1917 Jun 16, The 1st Congress of Soviets convened in Russia.
(MC, 6/16/02)
1917 Jun 17, The Russian Duma met in secret session in Petrograd and voted for an immediate Russian offensive against the German Army.
(HN, 6/17/98)
1917 Jun 24, Russian Black Sea fleet mutinied at Sebastopol.
(MC, 6/24/02)
1917 Jul 20, Alexander Kerensky became the premier of Russia.
(HN, 7/20/98)
1917 Jun 29, The Ukraine proclaimed independence from Russia.
(HN, 6/29/98)
1917 Aug 4, Pravda called for the killing of all capitalists, priests and officers.
(MC, 8/4/02)
1917 Sep 3, Fanya Kaplan, the Russian who shot at Lenin on Aug 30th, was executed.
(MC, 9/3/01)
1917 Sep 15, Russia was proclaimed a republic by Alexander Kerensky, the head of a provisional government.
(AP, 9/15/97)
1917 Sep 17, The German Army recaptured the Russian [Latvian] Port of Riga from Russian forces.
(HN, 9/17/98)
1917 Oct 8, Leon Trotsky was named chairman of Petrograd Soviet.
(MC, 10/8/01)
1917 Oct 21, Petrograd's garrison accepted a Revolutionary Military Committee.
(MC, 10/21/01)
1917 Oct 23, Lenin spoke against Kamenev, Kollontai, Stalin and Trotsky.
(MC, 10/23/01)
1917 Oct 25(OS), In Russia Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Lenin seized power. Lenin (1870-1924) and Leon Trotsky (1879-1940), seized power from Russian socialist Alexander F. Kerensky (1881-1970) who had taken over the government in July of 1917. Kerensky sent troop on this day to shut down the Bolshevik press in Petrograd (Leningrad, St. Petersburg). Kerensky’s ministers at the Winter Palace surrendered in the face of Bolshevik armed might. [see Nov 7]
(www.marxists.org/history/ussr/revolution/)
1917 Nov 6, Bolshevik "October Revolution" (October 25 on the old Russian calendar), led by Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, seized power in Petrograd. [see Nov 7]
(HN, 11/6/98)
1917 Nov 7, (October 25 old style Julian calendar then used by Russia) The provisional government of Premier Aleksandr Kerensky fell to the Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. He called his followers the Bolsheviks, meaning the majority, when they formed for a short period the majority of a revolutionary committee. The Bolsheviks became a majority of the ruling group, but they were only a small part of the total Russian population. Decades of czarist incompetence and the devastation of World War I had wrecked the Russian economy and in March 1917, Czar Nicholas II abdicated. Kerensky's provisional government struggled to maintain power until Lenin's Bolshevik followers stormed Petrograd and seized all government operations. Lenin and his lieutenant, Leon Trotsky, quickly confiscated land and nationalized industry and in March 1918, Russia withdrew from World War I by signing the humiliating Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany. Bloody civil war raged in Russia for the next two years as the anti-Bolshevik White Army battled the Communists for control. [see Nov 6] This day became a national holiday and continued until it was abolished in late 2004.
(CFA, '96, p.58)(V.D.-H.K.p.260-261)(AP, 11/7/97)(HNPD, 11/7/98)(AP, 11/4/05)
1917 Nov 8, The People's Commissars "gave" authority to Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin.
(MC, 11/8/01)
1917 Nov 10, New Soviet government suspended freedom of the press.
(MC, 11/10/01)
1917 Nov 15, Kerensky fled and the Bolsheviks took command in Moscow.
(HN, 11/15/98)
1917 Nov 17, Lenin defended the "temporary" removal of freedom of the press.
(MC, 11/17/01)
1917 Nov 21, Maxim Gorki called Lenin a blind fanatic and unthinking adventurer.
(MC, 11/21/01)
1917 Nov 26, Bolsheviks offered armistice between Russian and the Central Powers.
(HN, 11/26/98)
1917 Dec 6, Finland declared independence from Russia (National Day).
(MC, 12/6/01)
1917 Dec 6, Former Czar Nicholas II and family were made prisoners by the Bolsheviks in Tobolsk.
(HN, 12/6/98)
1917 Dec 9, New Finnish Republic demanded the withdrawal of Russian troops.
(HN, 12/9/98)
1917 Dec 18, The Soviet regiment under Stalin and Lenin declared Finland Independent.
(MC, 12/18/01)
1917 Dec 20, Russian secret police in Czechoslovakia was formed under Felix Dzerzhinsky. He helped lead the Bolshevik revolution and set up the communist secret police, the Cheka, which later became the KGB.
(MC, 12/20/01)(WSJ, 10/15/02, p.D6)
1917 Dec 24, The Kaiser warned Russia that he would use "iron fist" and "shining sword" if peace was spurned.
(HN, 12/24/98)
1917 The Bolsheviks tried banning money in favor of barter after the revolution, but chaos resulted and they accepted money as a necessary evil.
(SFC, 2/11/98, p.B3)
1917 After the Bolshevik revolution Lenin named Stalin commissar of nationalities.
(HNQ, 4/6/00)
1917 Feliks Dzherzhinsky established the Cheka. It was transformed to the KGB in 1954.
(SFEC, 1/2/00, BR p.5)
1917 Chechens formed their 1st independent state, the Confederation of North Caucasian Peoples, following the Bolshevik Revolution. [see May 1]
(SSFC, 11/10/02, p.A11)
1917 The Don Cossacks declared their own independent republic during the unrest that led to the Bolshevik Revolution.
(SFC,10/28/97, p.A8)
1917-1991 This period was later covered by Martin Malia in "The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991."
(WSJ, 3/26/98, p.A20)
1918 Jan 2, Bolsheviks talked about resuming war unless the Germans quit Russian soil.
(HN, 1/2/99)
1918 Jan 19, The Latvian rifleman 6th Tukums regiment, sent to defend the Bolshevik headquarters in Smolny institute in St. Petersburg, took part in disbanding Russia’s Constituent Assembly.
(http://tinyurl.com/krxwaky)
1918 Jan 28, Leon Trotsky became leader of the Russian Communists.
(MC, 1/28/02)
1918 Jan 31, Russia joined the rest of the world and adopted the Gregorian calendar. The next day became February 14, 1918.
(www.ortelius.de/kalender/greg_en.php)
1918 Feb 5, The Soviets proclaimed the separation of church and state.
(HN, 2/5/99)
1918 Feb 16, The Council of Lithuania declared the independence of the State of Lithuania. The council also declared that the foundations of the state would be determined by a Constituent Assembly to be elected by the inhabitants on the basis of universal, equal and secret suffrage.
(DrEE, 10/5/96, p.5)(LHC, 2/16/03)
1918 Feb 22, Germany claimed the Baltic states, Finland and Ukraine from Russia.
(MC, 2/22/02)
1918 Feb 24, Estonia's Independence Day. Estonia proclaimed independence from Russia.
(LHC, 2/23/03)
1918 Mar 1, The state of Idel-Ural, a Tatar republic in Kazan under Sadri Maqsudi Arsal, united the region's Finno-Ugric and Turkic peoples. On March 28 it was defeated by the Red Army. Arsal escaped to Finland.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idel-Ural_State)(Econ., 1/30/21, p.69)
1918 Mar 3, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, the Ottoman Empire and Russia signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which ended Russian participation in World War I. Germany and Austria forced Soviet Russia to sign the Peace of Brest, which called for the establishment of 5 independent countries: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which ended Russian participation in World War I, was annulled by the November 1918 armistice. The treaty deprived the Soviets of White Russia.
(HN, 3/3/99)(LHC, 3/1/03)(AP, 3/3/08)
1918 Mar 4, Terek Autonomous Republic was established in RSFSR (until 1921).
(SC, 3/4/02)
1918 Mar 5, The Soviets moved the capital of Russia from Petrograd to Moscow. St. Petersburg shrunk to 35% of its previous size.
(HN, 3/5/98)(SFEC, 6/27/99, p.T11)
1918 Mar 9, Russian Bolshevik Party became the Communist Party.
(MC, 3/9/02)
1918 Mar 12, Vladimir I. Lenin published his reasons for moving the capital from St. Petersburg to Moscow.
(WSJ, 9/20/04, p.A20)
1918 Mar 14, An all-Russian Congress of Soviets ratified a peace treaty with the Central Powers.
(HN, 3/14/98)
1918 Mar 20, The Bolsheviks asked for American aid to rebuild their army.
(HN, 3/20/98)
1918 Mar 25, Belarus proclaimed independence from Russia. The Belarusian People's Republic lasted until 1919.
(LHC, 3/25/03)(AP, 3/25/18)
1918 Apr 6, Savva Mamontov, Russian industrialist, merchant, entrepreneur, and patron of the arts, died. He had supervised the construction of the Severnaya Railway linking Moscow with the Russian North. He was also involved into the building of Donetsk railway from 1876 to 1882.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savva_Mamontov)
1918 Apr 13, The Soviet Wartime and people’s commissariat issued an order to form Latvian Soviet rifleman division. The commander in charge was Jukums Vacietis. It was one of the first divisions in the Red Army.
(http://tinyurl.com/krxwaky)
1918 May 28, Tatars declared Azerbaijan, in Russian Caucasus, independent.
(HN, 5/28/98)
1918 May, Leon Trotsky ordered a Czech legion to surrender while it was scattered across the sixth-thousand-mile-long Trans-Siberian Railway. Rather than turn themselves in, the legion’s men mutinied.
(The National Interest, 9/3/19)
1918 Jul 17, Russian Tsar, Nicholas II, was executed at Ekaterinburg by the Bolsheviks under orders from Lenin. His wife, son, 4 daughters, and 4 servants were also executed. The family mass grave was discovered by a former KGB agent in 1979 in the Urals and only 9 bodies were found. The bodies were dug up in 1991. A 1997 documentary film by Victoria Lewis, "Mystery of the Last Tsar," told the story. The Czar, his wife, three children and four servants were executed by a 12-man firing squad in the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg. A reburial of the family was scheduled in St. Petersburg for Jul 17, 1998.
(SFC, 4/5/97, p.E3)(SFC, 2/28/98, p.A8)(SFC, 7/15/98, p.A9)(AP, 7/17/07)
1918 Jul 17, Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna (b.1864) was murdered at a mine the village of Siniachikha. The Cheka beat Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich Romanov, Princes Ioann Konstantinovich, Konstantin Konstantinovich, Igor Konstantinovich, Vladimir Pavlovich Paley, Feodor Remez (Grand Duke Sergei's secretary), and Varvara Yakovleva, a sister from the Grand Duchess's convent, before throwing their victims into a pit, Elizabeth being the first. Hand grenades were then hurled down the shaft, but only one victim, Feodor Remez, died as a result of the grenades. Finally a large quantity of brushwood was shoved into the opening and set alight.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princess_Elisabeth_of_Hesse_and_by_Rhine_%281864%E2%80%931918%29)
1918 Jul, The US War Dept. assigned some 9,000 soldiers from California and the Philippines for duty in Siberia.
(Ind, 5/4/02, 5A)
1918 Aug 2, A British force landed in Archangel, Russia, to support White Russian opposition to the Bolsheviks.
(HN, 8/2/98)
1918 Aug 15, Russia severed diplomatic ties with US.
(MC, 8/15/02)
1918 Aug 16, US troops overthrew Archangel (Russia).
(MC, 8/16/02)
1918 Aug 30, Lenin, the new leader of Soviet Russia, was shot & wounded after a speech.
(MC, 8/30/01)
1918 Aug, Lenin gave a command to suppress a peasant revolt in Penza with orders to hang no fewer than one hundred known kulaks.
(WSJ, 10/23/96, p.A19)
1918 Sep 2, Some 9,000 soldiers from California and the Philippines began arriving at Vladivostok under Gen. William S. Graves. His orders said to stay out of trouble. US President Woodrow Wilson sent the Polar Bear Expedition to Russia in response to requests from the governments of Great Britain and France to join the Allied Intervention in North Russia (also known as the North Russia Campaign). The Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War fought the Red Army in the surrounding region from September 1918 through to July 1919.
(Ind, 5/4/02, 5A)(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_Bear_Expedition)
1918 Sep 19, American troops of the Allied North Russia Expeditionary Force received their baptism of fire near the town of Seltso against Soviet forces.
(HN, 9/19/99)
1918 Sep, Some 13 thousand US troops were placed under British command, and launched on a six-week offensive that pushed back Red Army troops towards the River Dvina and the Vologda railhead. The US troops were soon defending a series of strongpoints strung along the railway lines running to Murmansk and connecting Arkhangelsk to Vologda. The American Expeditionary Force to Siberia had an even more peculiar objective: helping extract friendly Czech soldiers.
(The National Interest, 9/3/19)
1918 Oct 18, Russian 10th Army drove out White armies of Tsaritsyn (Stalingrad).
(MC, 10/18/01)
1918 Nov 11, Some 2,500 Bolsheviks, backed by gunboats and led by a “giant of a man" named Melochofski, assaulted a company of three hundred US infantry in the village of Tulgas, two hundred miles south of Arkhangelsk, overrunning their hospital.
(The National Interest, 9/3/19)
1918 Nov 13, Soviet Russia annulled the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty.
(http://tinyurl.com/krxwaky)
1918 Dec 11, Alexander Solzhenitsyn (d.2008), Russian writer, was born. He won the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize and is famous for “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" (1962) and "The Gulag Archipelago" (1973). Daniel J. Mahoney later authored "Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Ascent From Ideology."
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn)(WSJ, 10/11/01, p.A20)
1918 Arthur Ransome (1884-1967), British agent and writer, wrote a propaganda pamphlet titled: “On Behalf of Russia: An Open Letter to America." In 2009 Roland Chambers authored “The Last Englishman: The Double Life of Arthur Ransome."
(Econ, 8/29/09, p.73)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Ransome)
1918 Lenin established the Collegium on Affairs of Museums and Protection of Monuments of Art and Antiquity.
(AM, Jul/Aug ‘97 p.33)
1918 Konstantin Stanislavsky founded an opera theater.
(WSJ, 1/13/98, p.A20)
1918 Gustaf Mannerheim led a Finnish victory over much larger Bolshevik and Finnish Red Guard forces.
(DrEE, 10/26/96, p.4)
1918 Idel-Ural (Volga-Ural), a 1917 union of Finno-Ugric people in the middle of Russia, was crushed by the Bolsheviks. Its foreign minister Sadri Maqsudi Arsal was welcomed in Finland and then Estonia.
(Econ, 12/24/05, p.73)
1918 "Special departments," later known as the FSB, were established to spy on the military as the Communist Party absorbed officers who had served under the just-deposed czar.
(SFC, 2/17/00, p.D3)
1918 In Russia Jacob Ivanovich Moiseeff of Minsk headed the Trans-Siberian Railway. His daughter Nadya Jacobova Moiseeva was born in 1918 and escaped to Shanghai after the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931.
(SFC, 12/2/97, p.A22)
1918 Nikolay Bukharin, member of the central committee of the Bolshevik Party and editor of Pravda, led the "Left Communists" in opposition to V.I. Lenin’s signing the Brest-Litovsk treaty with Germany and withdrawing Russia from World War I. Bukharin-a major Marxist theoretician and economist-and the Left Communists proposed to transform the war into a general European revolution.
(HNQ, 8/31/99)
1918 South Ossetians made a bid to break away from Georgia and thousands fled in the ensuing violence.
(WSJ, 8/27/08, p.A12)
1919 Jan 15, Peasants in Central Russia rose against the Bolsheviks.
(HN, 1/15/99)
1919 Jan 24, Grand Prince Pavel Alexandrovich, a son of Czar Alexander II, and grand princes Nikolai Mikhailovich, Georgy Mikhailovitch and Dmitry Konstantinovich, nephews of the czar, were executed at the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg. They were posthumously rehabilitated in 1999 by the Russian office of the prosecutor general.
(SFC, 6/10/99, p.C3)
1919 Feb 8, Lithuanian and German military forces forced the Bolsheviks from Kedainiai.
(LHC, 2/8/03)
1919 Feb 27, The Bolsheviks took Lithuania and joined it with White Russia as a single Soviet republic. Litbel lasted until June 25.
(LHC, 2/27/03)
1919 Feb, The Polish–Soviet War began and continued to March 1921. It was an armed conflict between Soviet Russia and Soviet Ukraine against the Second Polish Republic and the Ukrainian People's Republic, four states in post-World War I Europe.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish-Soviet_War)
1919 Mar 2, The 1st congress of Communist Int’l. opened at the Kremlin.
(SC, 3/2/02)
1919 Mar 19, A typhoid epidemic raged in Petrograd, Russia, killing 200 daily.
(HN, 3/19/98)
1919 Mar 23, Bashkir ASSR (Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic) in the RSFSR (Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic) was constituted.
(SS, 3/23/02)
1919 Mar 23, Moscow's Politburo-Central Committee formed.
(SS, 3/23/02)
1919 Apr 20, Polish Army captured Vilno (Vilnius), Lithuania from Soviet Army.
(HN, 4/20/97)
1919 Jun 6, Finland declared war on Bolsheviks.
(MC, 6/6/02)
1919 Jun, In Siberia four hundred guerillas caught a sleeping American encampment at Romanovka by surprise, killing twenty-four American soldiers out of a force of seventy-two.
(The National Interest, 9/3/19)
1919 Nov 7, US police raided offices of Union of Russian Workers.
(MC, 11/7/01)
1919 Nov 14, Red Army captured Omsk, Siberia.
(MC, 11/14/01)
1919 Dec 21, J. Edgar Hoover gallantly deported anarchist, feminist Emma Goldman to Russia for agitating against forced conscription in the US.
(WSJ, 12/11/95, p.A-1)(MC, 12/21/01)
1919 Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko founded a music theater.
(WSJ, 1/13/98, p.A20)
1919 Lenin created the Comintern to supervise the int'l. revolutionary movement.
(WSJ, 6/6/03, p.W9)
1919 The Bolsheviks began repressions and millions of Cossacks died. Their institutions were destroyed and many fled the country.
(SFC,10/28/97, p.A8)
1920 Jan 16, Allies lifted the blockade on trade with Russia.
(HN, 1/16/99)
1920 Feb 7, Adm. Alexander Kolchak (b.1874), commander of the White Army in Siberia during the civil war that followed the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, was executed by a firing squad in Irkutsk about a month after relinquishing command of anti-Bolshevik forces. He was condemned in Soviet law as a counterrevolutionary. In 2004 efforts began to exonerate him.
(AP, 12/7/04)(www.firstworldwar.com/bio/kolchak.htm)
1920 Feb 9, The Svalbard Treaty gave Norway sovereignty over the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, but allowed other countries to establish settlements there and to exploit its natural resources. The treaty allowed Russia to pursue mining at Spitsbergen. By 2017 there were more than 40 countries party to the treaty.
{Norway, Russia}
(WSJ, 9/19/97, p.A1)(Econ, 10/11/08, p.70)(Econ, 10/2/04, p.52)(Reuters, 10/26/17)(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard)
1920 Feb 27, The U.S. rejected a Soviet peace offer as propaganda.
(HN, 2/27/98)
1920 Mar 7, The Bolsheviks opened major offensive on the Polish front.
(HN, 3/7/98)
1920 Apr 1, The last members of the US Siberian expedition withdrew from Russia with a loss of over 400 lives.
(http://tinyurl.com/y4erkevn)(The National Interest, 9/3/19)
1920 Apr 5, Japanese forces landed in Vladivostok.
(HN, 5/5/97)
1920 Apr 28, Azerbaijan joined the USSR. The Red Army invaded Azerbaijan and turned the country into a Soviet Republic.
(HN, 4/28/98)(CO, Grolier’s Amer. Acad. Enc./ Azerbaijan)
1920 Jul 8, The Galician Soviet Socialist Republic (Galician SSR) was formed and lasted to September 21, 1920, during the Polish-Soviet War within the area of the South-Western front of the Red Army.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galician_Soviet_Socialist_Republic)
1920 Jul 12, Lithuania and Russia signed a peace treaty in Moscow.
(LC, 1998, p.20)
1920 Oct 14, In the Dorpart Treaty the Soviet Bolsheviks reaffirmed Finnish independence, gave Finland the ice-free port of Pechenga towards the Arctic Ocean and put the Finnish border 18 miles west of Leningrad. The treaty, signed by Stalin, was precipitated by Gustaf Mannerheim’s victory over much larger Bolshevik and Finnish Red Guard forces in 1918.
(DrEE, 10/26/96, p.4)
1920 Nov, White Russian Major Gen’. Paul Petroff entrusted 20 boxes of gold coins and 2 boxes of gold bullion to Colonel R. Isome of the Japanese forces that occupied part of Siberia in order to cross Manchuria and not loose the money to bandits. He was fleeing to the anti-Bolshevik stronghold at Vladivostok. The money was never returned. The events were later documented by his son Serge Petroff in the 1997 book "Let the War Rage."
(SFC,10/17/97, p.D2)
1920 Nov, Chechens joined with other Caucasian peoples to form the Republic of the Mountain Peoples. Chechens had rebelled during the civil war that followed the Russian Revolution of 1917, clashing with local Cossacks and the anti-Communist White forces as well as with the Communists' Red Army. With the establishment of Soviet authority in the region.
(www.chechnyawar.com/history)
1920 Isaac Babel (d.1940) wrote a wartime diary as he rode horseback with Budyonny’s First Cavalry Army as the Cossacks participated in the Bolshevik invasion of Poland. An essay on the diary was written by Cynthia Ozick in her 1996 book: "Fame & Folly."
(WSJ, 5/22/96, p.A-18)
1920 Leon Theremin (d.1993) invented the theremin musical instrument. He was a Russian physicist who invented the instrument made of vacuum tubes and oscillators. In 1927 he was allowed to go to the US to promote his instrument and to spy for the Soviets. He returned to Russia in late 1938. [He was later abducted by operators of Stalin and taken back to Moscow where he is forced to work on devices for the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs.] He was sent to Siberia for a year and then back to Moscow to work on aircraft design. He later designed some listening devices. [see 1945] The theremin was an early electronic instrument with an eerie, sliding tone. The 1994 film "Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey," featured the instrument. Clara Rockmore (d.1998 at 88), born Clara Reisenberg in Vilnius, became a theremin virtuoso, and was the focus of the 1998 video documentary: "Clara Rockmore, The Greatest Theremin Virtuoso."
(WSJ, 9/19/95, p.A20)(SFC, 5/12/98, p.A21)(ON, 11/01, p.8)
1920 Russia became the first country to allow abortion.
(Econ, 5/19/07, p.66)
1920 During the Russian Civil War, Mongolia was invaded by a White Russian force of 5,000 men. Freiherr Roman Nikolai Maximilian von Ungern-Sternberg hoped to use Mongolia as a base to restore the Romanov regime. During his 130-day rule he ordered that Commissars, Communists, and Jews, together with their families, be exterminated. In 2009 James Palmer authored “The Bloody White Baron: The Extraordinary Story of the Russian Nobleman Who Became the Last Khan of Mongolia."
(www.gobiexpeditions.com)(Econ, 2/14/09, p.96)
1920 During Polish-Soviet war thousands of captured Red Army men were placed in the camp of Тuchola, Poland. These POWs lived in trenches, while famine, cold, and infectious diseases killed tens of prisoners daily. In the winter 1920/1921 POWs had a death rate of about 25%, which was attributed to malnutrition, poor sanitary conditions, lack of fuel and medicines, and physical maltreatment by the Polish supervisors.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuchola)
1920s Dziga Vertov created a cinematic mosaic of Moscow in his film "The Man With a Movie Camera."
(SFEC, 2/2/97, DB. p.8)
1920s The New Economic Policy (NEP) of Lenin was elaborated by Nikolai Bukharin.
(WSJ, 3/26/98, p.A20)
1921 Feb 8, Pjotr A. Kropotkin (78), Russian anarchist and son of Prince Alexei Petrovich Kropotkin, died. Books by Peter Kropotkin included “Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution" (1902)
(www.en.wikipedia.org)
1921 Feb 26, The Russo-Persian Treaty of Friendship was signed in Moscow between representatives of Iran and the Soviet Russia. Both the Soviet Russia and Iran were given full and equal shipping rights in the Caspian Sea along with the right to fly their respective national flags on their commercial vessels.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Persian_Treaty_of_Friendship_(1921))
1921 Feb 12, Soviet troops invaded neighboring Georgia.
(MC, 2/12/02)
1921 Feb 28, A treaty between the Bolshevik government of Russia and the amir of Afghanistan is signed. British Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon states on one occasion that the Soviet government has offered the Afghans a subsidy of £100,000 a year.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1921_in_Afghanistan)
1921 Mar 1, Sailors revolted in Kronstadt, Russia.
(SC, 3/1/02)
1921 Mar 7, Red Army under Trotsky attacked the sailors of Kronstadt.
(MC, 3/7/02)
1921 Mar 16, Britain signed a bilateral trade agreement with Russia.
(HN, 3/16/98)
1921 Mar 21, Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP) was promulgated by decree.
(www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/RUSnep.htm)
1921 Apr 9, Russo-Polish conflict ended with the signing of the Riga Treaty.
(HN, 4/9/98)
1921 Apr 15, Georgi Timofeyevich Beregovoi, USSR cosmonaut (Soyuz 3), was born.
(MC, 4/15/02)
1921 May 21, Andrei Sakharov, Russian physicist, was born. He is known as "the father of the Soviet H-bomb" and was the first recipient of the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize.
(HN, 5/21/99)
1921 Sep 21, Pope Benedictus XV donated 1 million lire to feed Russians.
(MC, 9/21/01)
1921 Oct 4, League of Nations refused to assist starving Russians.
(MC, 10/4/01)
1921 Oct 18, Russian Soviets granted Crimean independence.
(HN, 10/18/98)
1921 Aleksandr Rodchenko, artist, created his whimsical "Project for a Perpetual Motion Machine." He also painted his “Triptych" in this year.
(WSJ, 7/8/98, p.A13)(WSJ, 10/5/05, p.D14)
1921 Yevgeny Zamyatin (d.1937), Russian author, completed his novel “We." It offended communist censors and did not appear in print in Russia until 1988. Editions outside Russia became available in 1924. In 2006 Natasha Randall made a new English translation.
(WSJ, 7/26/06, p.D11)
1921 Afghanistan signed a Treaty of Friendship with the Soviet Union.
(WSJ, 9/20/01, p.A12)
1921 The borders of Armenia were gerrymandered when the Caucasus territories were made part of the Soviet Union. This made the area of Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous enclave of mostly Armenians surrounded by Azerbaijan dependent on Moscow. The site of Ani, former capital of Armenia, was ceded to Turkey.
(SFC, 2/4/98, p.C2)(WSJ, 3/18/98, p.A18)(Econ, 6/17/06, p.59)
1921 The Red Army forced the Chechen government into exile and took nominal control. Armed resistance continued. The "Mountain Peoples' Government" was forced to emigrate as Soviet power became established in the Caucasus.
(SSFC, 11/10/02, p.A11)(www.ciaonet.org/olj/crs/crs_1998sp/crs98sp_las01.html)
1921 The League of Nations granted the Aland Island group to the new Finnish Republic.
(WSJ, 12/5/97, p.A1)
1921 In Mongolia Damdiny Sukhbaatar, supported by the Bolshevik administration in Moscow, organized a force that, with the help of Red Army troops, defeated the White Russians and drove off the Chinese.
(www.gobiexpeditions.com)
1921 In Russia a mineral exploration mission discovered coal deposits Vorkuta, 1,200 miles northeast of Moscow. The 1st coal mine there opened in 1931 using prisoner labor. Use of prisoners for mining ended in 1962.
(ST, 7/29/04, p.A3)
1921 A Soviet famine began with a drought that caused massive crop failures, including total crop failure on about 20% of Soviet farmland. a Soviet estimate put the death toll at 5.1 million.
(www.overpopulation.com/faq/Health/hunger/famine/soviet_famine.html)
1921-1944 The Soviets allowed Tuva to call itself independent as the Tuvan People’s Republic. Tannu Tuva stamps were issued by Moscow in odds shapes and they became collector's items.
(WSJ, 4/1/06, p.A5)(Econ, 11/7/15, p.46)
1922 Feb 1, Lieutenant Colonel I. Matuszewski, the head of the II department of the Polish Joint Staff, informed the military minister of Poland in the letter, that 22,000 prisoners of war were lost in the camp of Tuchola during its existence.
(www.search.com/reference/Prisoner-of-war_camp)
1922 Apr 3, Stalin was appointed General Secretary of Communist Party.
(MC, 4/3/02)
1922 Apr 16, A German-Russia treaty was signed in Italy. It recognized the Soviet Union.
(MC, 4/16/02)
1922 May 26, Lenin suffered a stroke.
(MC, 5/26/02)
1922 May 29, Jevgeni B. Vachtangov (39), Armenian-Russian actor, director, died.
(SC, 5/29/02)
1922 Nov 27, Allied delegates barred Soviets from Near East peace conference.
(HN, 11/27/98)
1922 Dec 30, Vladimir I. Lenin proclaimed the establishment of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Soviet Russia was renamed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The Soviet Union was organized as a federation of RSFSR, Ukrainian SSR, Belorussian SSR and Transcaucasian SSR.
(AP, 12/30/97)(HN, 12/30/98)(MC, 12/30/01)
1922 The Constructivist group of artists in Russia issued a manifesto calling for the defeat of art, which they regarded as the enemy of technology. Alexander Rodchenko (1891-1956), a painter turned photographer, was founding member of the group.
(Econ, 2/9/08, p.91)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandr_Rodchenko)
1922 The Red October Heat and Power Plant opened in St. Petersburg, Russia.
(SSFC, 12/22/02, p.F8)
1922 In the Rapallo Treaty Germany recognized Lenin's regime.
(WSJ, 8/5/99, p.A16)
1922 The Soviet government divided the North Caucasus along ethnic lines, separating the Chechen Autonomous Oblast from the Republic of the Mountain Peoples and abolishing the republic itself in 1924.
(www.chechnyawar.com/history)(USAT, 9/2/04, p.13A)
1922 Lenin deported 70 of the best minds in Russia along with their families. In 2006 Lesley Chamberlain authored “The Philosophy Steamer: Lenin and the Exile of the Intelligentsia."
(Econ, 3/18/06, p.80)
1922 South Ossetia became an autonomous region within the Soviet Republic of Georgia.
(WSJ, 8/27/08, p.A12)
1923 Feb 9, Soviet Aeroflot airlines formed.
(MC, 2/9/02)
1923 Feb 15, Yelena Bonner, soviet dissident, wife of Andre Sakharov, was born in Moscow.
(MC, 2/15/02)
1923 Mar 4, Lenin's last article in Pravda (about Red bureaucracy) was published.
(SC, 3/4/02)
1923 Mar 15, Lenin was felled by his 3rd stroke.
(MC, 3/15/02)
1923 Tamara Geva (d.1991), Russian ballet dancer, married George Balanchine, ballet choreographer. The couple traveled to East Prussia in 1924 with the Soviet State Dancers and then defected to Paris where they joined Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballet Russes.
(SFC,12/13/97, p.A23)(Econ, 4/12/08, p.94)
1924 Jan 21, Russian revolutionary Vladimir Ilyich Lenin died at age 53 and a major struggle for power in the Soviet Union began. A triumvirate led by Joseph Stalin succeeded Lenin. By 1928, Stalin had assumed absolute power, ruling as an often brutal dictator until his death in 1953 of a brain hemorrhage. In 1998 Vladimir Brovkin published "Russia After Lenin." After the death of Lenin, Bukharin became a full member of the Politburo and opposed the policy of initiating rapid industrialization and collectivization in agriculture-a position shared by Stalin at the time. In 2000 Robert Service authored "Lenin."
(TMC, 1994, p.1924)(AP, 1/21/98)(WSJ, 8/3/98, p.A12)(HNQ, 8/31/99)
1924 Jan 24, The Russian city of Petrograd (formerly St. Petersburg) was renamed Leningrad in honor of the late revolutionary leader. It has since been re-named St. Petersburg.
(AP, 1/24/99)
1924 Jan 27, Lenin's body was laid in a marble tomb on Red Square near the Kremlin.
(HN, 1/27/99)
1924 Feb 1, Soviet Union was formally recognized by Britain.
(MC, 2/1/02)
1924 Feb 7, Mussolini government exchanged diplomats with USSR.
(MC, 2/7/02)
1924 Mar 15, Sweden recognized the U.S.S.R.
(HN, 3/15/98)
1924 May 12, Russian-American poet Alexander Esenin-Volpin was born in Leningrad. A notable dissident, political prisoner and a leader of the Soviet human rights movement, he spent total of fourteen years incarcerated and repressed by the Soviet authorities in prisons, psikhushkas and exile.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Esenin-Volpin)
1924 Nov 14, Leonid B. Kogan, violinist (Lenin Prize-1952), was born in Dnepropetrovsk, Russia.
(MC, 11/14/01)
1924 Dec 15, Soviets warned the U.S. against repeated entry of ships into the territorial waters of the USSR.
(HN, 12/15/98)
1924 Isaac Brodsky, Soviet Realist, completed the monumental depiction: "The Second Congress of the Comintern," which took place in the Uritsky Palace.
(Econ, 10/11/03, p.85)
1924 The film "Kino-Eye" was the first genuine Soviet documentary and showed people from all walks of life who didn't know they were being filmed.
(SFC, 6/4/99, p.C12)
1924 The film "Strike" was Sergei Eisenstein's first feature.
(SFC, 6/4/99, p.C12)
1924 Lenin established the State Restoration Workshop to nationalize and protect Russian cultural heritage.
(AM, Jul/Aug ‘97 p.33)
1924 The Bolsheviks formed the Moldovan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR), aka Transdniestria, as a basis for later taking over a chunk of Romania.
(WSJ, 7/8/97, p.A1,8)(http://tinyurl.com/b7m4b)
1924 Stalin divided remnants of Turkistan into the current Central Asian republics.
(SFC, 1/2/97, p.A10)
1924 After the death of Lenin Bukharin became a full member of the Politburo and opposed the policy of initiating rapid industrialization and collectivization in agriculture-a position shared by Stalin at the time. When, in 1928, Stalin reversed his view, Bukharin's power diminished. Although he participated in writing the 1936 Soviet constitution, he was ultimately expelled from the Communist Party in 1937 for being a Trotskyite, was falsely accused and found guilty of counterrevolutionary activities and espionage. Bukharin was executed in 1938.
(HNQ, 8/31/99)
1925 Jan 16, Leon Trotsky was dismissed as CEO of Russian Revolution Military Council. Stalin took power over Trotsky.
(TMC, 1994, p.1925)(MC, 1/16/02)
1925 Mar 7, The Soviet Red Army occupied Outer Mongolia.
(HN, 3/7/98)
1925 Mar 23, Aleksei Kuropatkin (76), Russian General, minister of War, died.
(SS, 3/23/02)
1925 Mar 30, Stalin supported rights of non-Serbian Yugoslavians.
(MC, 3/30/02)
1925 Jul 10, The official news agency of the Soviet Union, TASS, was established.
(AP, 7/10/97)
1925 Dec 18, Soviet leaders Lev Kamenev and Grigori Zinoviev broke with Stalin.
(HN, 12/18/98)
1925 Sergei Prokofiev composed his opera "The Gambler."
(WSJ, 4/16/01, p.A14)
1925 “The White Guard," a novel by Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940) of Kiev during the Russian civil war, first appeared in part in serial form. A stage version titled “The Days of the Turbins" ran from 1926-1941. The novel was not reprinted in Russia until 1966.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Guard)(Econ, 8/9/14, p.67)
1925 Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940), Russian writer, medical doctor and playwright, published his novel "The Fatal Eggs." Here a pestilence spawned by a professor's research threatens not only his marriage, but civilization itself.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Bulgakov)(Econ, 3/28/20, p.74)
1925 Fragments of Ivan Bunin’s “Cursed Days," compiled of diaries and notes he made while in Moscow and Odessa in 1918-1920, were first published by the Paris-based Vozrozhdenye newspaper. A full version appeared in 1936. It was banned in the USSR until the 1980s. Bunin (1870-1953) was the first Russian writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1933).
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursed_Days)
1925 Eisenstein made his classic silent film "Potemkin."
(SFC, 1/4/97, p.E1)
1926 Feb 28, Svetlana Alliluyeva, daughter of Josef Stalin, author (My Life), was born.
(HN, 2/28/98)(MC, 2/28/02)
1926 Mar 26, U.S. oil companies bought 190,000 tons of kerosene from Russia for $3.2 million.
(HN, 3/25/98)
1926 Mar 30, Feliks E. Dzerzjinski (48), Lithuanian organizer (KGB), died. Felix Dzerzhinsky was the founder of the communist secret police, the Cheka.
(MC, 3/30/02)(WSJ, 10/15/02, p.D6)
1926 May 12, Dmitri Shostakovitch's 1st Symphony premiered in Leningrad.
(MC, 5/12/02)
1926 Sep 27, Lithuania and the Soviet Union agreed to a 5-year treaty.
(LC, 1998, p.16)
1926 Oct 19, Russian Politburo threw out Leon Trotsky and his followers.
(MC, 10/19/01)
1926 Oct 25, Galina Vishnevskaya, soprano (Madame Butterfly), was born in Leningrad.
(MC, 10/25/01)
1926 Nov 19, Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from Politburo in the USSR.
(HN, 11/19/98)
1926 Dec 5, Sergei Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin," debuted.
(MC, 12/5/01)
1926 The Russian film "Po Zakonu" (By the Law) was directed by Lev Kuleshov. It was based on the Jack London story "The Unexpected."
(SFC, 7/8/99, p.E4)
1927 Mar 27, Mstislav Leopold Rostropovich, cellist, conductor, was born in Baku, Azerbaijan, USSR.
(MC, 3/27/02)(Internet)
1927 May 5, Dmitri Shostakovitch' 1st Symphony, premiered in Berlin.
(MC, 5/5/02)
1927 Jul 18, Vasily Polenov (b.1844), Russian painter, died.
(http://tinyurl.com/737kp)
1927 Oct 29, Russian archaeologist Peter Kozloff uncovered the tomb of Genghis Khan in the Gobi Desert.
(HN, 10/29/98)
1927 Nov 12, Josef Stalin became the undisputed ruler of the Soviet Union as Leon Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party.
(AP, 11/12/97)
1927 Dec 14, China and Soviet Union broke relations.
(AP, 12/14/02)
1927 Dec 27, Stalin's faction won All-Union Congress in USSR. Trotsky was expelled.
(MC, 12/27/01)
1927 Dec, Leonid Kulik (d.1942), Russian expert on meteorites, delivered his report to the Russian Academy of Sciences on his 2nd trip to the Tunguska site in Siberia regarding the 1908 meteorite explosion. He estimated that the meteorite had weighed several thousand metric tons and convinced the academy to sponsor another expedition in 1928.
(ON, 6/08, p.8)
1927 Josef Stalin purged much of the Tatar intelligentsia in the Crimea.
(SFC, 1/4/99, p.A8)
1927 Sergius, a Greek Orthodox bishop, signed an agreement accepting the Soviet Union as a “civil motherland."
(Econ, 10/18/08, p.69)
1927 The monastery of Saint Serafim Sarofsky in the village of Deveyevo, Russia, was liquidated. The 266 year old complex was used to store lumber and vegetables until 1991 when it was returned to the church.
(SFC, 5/18/96, p.A-11)
1927 Prince John Kropotkin, son of Russian Prince Alexei Kropotkin, was beaten to death on a Paris street. Soviet agents were suspected.
(SFC, 7/5/04, p.B4)
1928 Jan 10, The Soviet Union ordered the exile of Leon Trotsky. Stalin triumphed over Bolshevik Party opposition led by Trotsky, Leo Kamenev, and Gregory Zinoviev.
(AP, 1/10/98)(SFEC, 5/31/98, p.7)
1928 Jan 11, Leon Trotsky, a leader of the Bolshevik revolution and early architect of the Soviet state, was shipped out by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to Alma-Ata in remote Soviet Central Asia. Later he was banished from the USSR.
(MC, 1/11/02)
1928 Jan 25, Eduard Shevardnadze, foreign minister of USSR, was born in Soviet Georgia.
(MC, 1/25/02)
1928 Mar 22, Peasants in the Soviet Union protested food shortages there.
(HN, 3/22/97)
1928 May 24, The dirigible Italia crashed while attempting to reach Spitzbergen. Nine men survived the initial crash. In 2000 Wilbur Cross authored "Disaster at the Pole," a revised edition of the 1960 version of the disaster led by Italian aviator Umberto Nobile. The Russian film "Krasnaya palatka" (1969), starring Sean Connery, detailed the Nobile expedition and attempted rescue. This movie was released in North America under the title "The Red Tent."
(ON, 10/00, p.6)(SSFC, 1/7/01, Par p.14)(www.imdb.com/title/tt0067315/)
1928 Jun 3, An amateur radio operator in Archangel, Russian, picked up a distress signal from the crew of the Italia and reported the crew’s location. A 2nd report from an American amateur changed the location and proved to be a hoax.
(ON, 10/00, p.6)
1928 Galina Ulanova (1910-1988), ballerina, made her debut in Leningrad’s Maryinsky Ballet.
(SFEC, 3/22/98, p.C5)
1928 Stalin introduced the 1st Soviet Five-Year Plan. Stalin pushed his farm collectivization program killing and displacing millions of peasants.
(TMC, 1994, p.1928)(WSJ, 2/24/04, p.D8)
1928 Stalin began his plans for the resettlement of Jews to Birobidzhan, an area of land the size of Belgium on the Russian-Chinese border. It was officially declared the Jewish Autonomous Region and by 1930 some 230,000 people lived in colonies there. Yiddish language and culture was fostered but worship was forbidden.
(SFEM, 5/24/98, p.4)
1928 Stalin reversed his view on rapid industrialization and Bukharin's power diminished. Although Bukharin participated in writing the 1936 Soviet constitution, he was ultimately expelled from the Communist Party in 1937 for being a Trotskyite, was falsely accused and found guilty of counterrevolutionary activities and espionage. Bukharin was executed in 1938.
(HNQ, 8/31/99)
1928 In the USSR a show trial of the North Caucasus Shakhty engineers paved the way for Stalin’s consolidation of power in 1929. They were accused of sabotaging coal production in Shakhty on orders from the Germans. The trial initiated a period of terror against technicians and engineers. The trial resulted in five of the 53 accused engineers being sentenced to death and another 44 sent to prison.
(Econ, 4/4/09, p.53)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakhty_Trial)
1928 Bertram and Ella Goldberg Wolfe, activists in the Comintern, went to Moscow as guests of the Communist Party. The Comintern was Communism's international governing body. Bertram clashed with Stalin over the idea of "American Exceptionalism," where the US model could be different from the Marxist-Leninist model. The Wolfe's were put under house arrest for 6 months until the intervention of Dr. Julius Hammer.
(SFC, 1/17/00, p.C2)
1928 Maria Feodorovna (b.1847), the daughter of Denmark's King Christian IX and Queen Louise, died in Denmark. Princess Dagmar had married Russia’s Czar Alexander II and their six children included Nicholas II, who became czar in 1894. She fled St. Petersburg in 1917. Her casket rested alongside Danish kings and queens until 2006 when it was sent to Russia.
(AP, 9/23/06)
1929 Jan 18, Stalin banned Trotsky from the Politburo.
(MC, 1/18/02)
1929 Jan 31, Leon Trotsky was expelled from Russia to Turkey.
(WSJ, 2/29/96, p. A-14)(MC, 1/31/02)
1929 Aug 19, Sergei P. Diaghilev (b.1872), Russian dance master and leader of the Ballet Russes, died in Italy.
(www.imdb.com/name/nm1959850/bio)(SFC, 7/15/97, p.A18)
1929 Sep 21, Fighting between China and the Soviet Union broke out along the Manchurian border.
(HN, 9/21/98)
1929 Nov 18, Stalin sent troops to Manchuria.
(MC, 11/18/01)
1929 Dec 22, Soviet troops left Manchuria after a truce was reached with the Chinese over the Eastern Railway dispute.
(HN, 12/22/98)
1929 Marc Chagall (1887-1985) painted "The Rooster."
(SFC, 7/26/03, p.D1)
1929 The film "Arsenal" was based on a 1918 incident where the Bolsheviks battled national troops in Kiev.
(SFC, 6/4/99, p.C12)
1929 Joseph Stalin reset the Soviet calendar to give workers every 5th day off. Shifts were staggered so that factories could run without interruption. The staggered working week was abandoned after 3 years.
(Econ, 5/21/05, p.80)
1929 Stalin began the liquidation of the kulaks, i.e. independent farmers.
(V.D.-H.K.p.305)
1929 In Russia the Gorky Automobile Plant (GAZ) in Nizhny Novgorod was founded. Henry Ford was asked to help set up the Soviet car plant.
(Econ, 7/14/12, p.55)
1929 Tajikistan was created by Stalin to divide and rule the ethnic Muslim peoples of Central Asia.
(WSJ, 7/2/98, p.A1)
1929-1932 For some revisionists Stalin’s brutal 5-year plan had its roots in a worker "cultural revolution" against the NEP.
(WSJ, 3/26/98, p.A20)
1929-1953 Some 18 million people were sent to the Gulag, the vast Soviet prison system that included labor and concentration camps. In 2003 Ann Applebaum authored "Gulag: A History."
(SSFC, 4/27/03, M3)(NW, 4/28/03, p.13)
1930 Jan 21, Valentin Ignatyevich Filatyev, Russian cosmonaut, was born.
(MC, 1/21/02)
1930 Apr 30, The Soviet Union proposed military alliance with France and Great Britain.
(HN, 4/30/98)
1930 Sep 29, Ilya Repin (b.1944), Ukrainian born Russian artist and sculptor, died.
(www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Ilya-Repin)
1930 Dec 30, In Russia the Industrial Party trial came to a conclusion. The tribunal accused a group of Soviet engineers and economists of forming the “Industrial Party," which in collusion with France had supposedly plotted against the Bolshevik government. The entire case was fabricated.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Party_Trial)(Econ, 7/27/19, p.72)
1930 Soviet satirist Andrei Platonov wrote "The Foundation Pit," a dystopian novel. It was not published in the Soviet Union until 1987. The fanciful narrative captured the absurdities of living in the Stalinist era. In 2020 Andrey Gryazev’s compilation documentary "The Foundation Pit," premiered at the Berlin Film Festival. It opened with a pre-credits sequence of Russian newscasts reporting incidents in which hapless house owners or workers have been injured in accidents involving foundation pits.
(The Daily Beast, 2/26/20)
1930 The Soviet Union began deporting land holders, known as kulaks, along with their families as part of the rural collectivization process. The kulaks made up about a fifth of the Russian peasant class, which consisted of some 25 million households. In 2007 Lynne Viola authored “The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin's Special Settlements."
(WSJ, 4/26/07, p.D7)
1930 American industrialist Charles R. Crane bought 18 brass bells from the Soviet government, saving them from being melted down in Josef Stalin's purges that saw thousands of monks executed and churches and monasteries destroyed or turned into prisons, orphanages or animal barns. They hung for decades in the towers at Lowell House and Harvard Business School's Baker Library. In 2007 Harvard returned the largest of the bells, the Everyday Bell, to the Danilovsky Monastery and planned to return the rest in 2008.
(AP, 9/12/07)
1930s Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940) wrote his novel "The Master and Margarita." It satirized life under Stalin and was not published until 1966.
(SFEC, 6/25/00, BR p.1)
1930s The centralized gas heating system of the city of Moscow was constructed.
(SFC, 3/27/97, p.C4)
1930s The labor camp in Norilsk, Siberia, was built. It was later developed as a huge nickel complex.
(SFC, 7/29/97, p.A10)
1930-1960 Millions of people including ethnic Germans and Russian dissidents died during this period, unable to survive starvation and torture in a network of gulag camps scattered from Russia's Arctic tundra to the inhospitable Kazakh steppe.
(Reuters, 12/21/09)
1931 Feb 1, Boris Yeltsin (d.2007), prime minister of Russia (1991-1992) and the first president of the Republic of Russia (1991-1999), was born in the Ural Mts. of the USSR.
(SFC, 1/23/96, p.A8)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Yeltsin)(Econ, 4/28/07, p.98)
1931 Mar 2, Mikhail Gorbachev, Soviet Secretary-General (1985-91), was born. He was responsible for restructuring the Soviet economy (perestroika) and openness and information (glasnost). Mikhail Gorbachev rose through the ranks of the Communist Party as an expert in agricultural affairs. Born to a peasant family, Gorbachev worked on a farm as a combine operator before going to Moscow State University in 1950. He joined the party in 1952 and, upon graduation with a law degree in 1955, he became a full-time party official. In 1967 he graduated from the Stavropol Agricultural Institute and was named to the party’s Central Committee in 1971. He was promoted to the party Secretariat in 1978, earning a reputation as an innovator as party secretary of agriculture.
(HN, 3/2/99)(HNQ, 6/17/99)(WSJ, 12/1/07, p.A8)
1931 Mar 11, The USSR banned the sale or importation of Bibles.
(HN, 3/11/98)
1931 Mar 17, Stalin threw Krupskaja Lenin out of the Central Committee.
(MC, 3/17/02)
1931 Apr 27, Igor Oistrach, Russian violinist, son of David Oistrach, was born.
(MC, 4/27/02)
1931 Jun 24, The Soviet Union and Afghanistan signed a treaty of neutrality.
(HN, 6/24/98)
1931 Stalin ordered that Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral be blown up. It was rebuilt after the fall of the USSR and dedicated in 2000.
(WSJ, 8/2100, p.A1)
1931 USSR leader Joseph Stalin turned Abkhazia into an autonomous region of Georgia. Beria, his secret police chief, later resettled Georgians from the western part of the country in Abkhazia.
(Econ, 7/5/08, p.64)
1931 The US Dept. of Commerce issued a pamphlet titled “Employment for Americans in Soviet Russia." In the early 1930s hundreds of American immigrated to the Soviet Union in search of jobs and a new life. Many ended up in mass graves. In 2008 Tim Tzouliadis authored “The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia."
(Econ, 8/9/08, p.80)(SFC, 9/1/08, p.E3)
1932 Jan 5, Raisa Maximovna Titorenko Gorbachev, Russia's 1st lady (1982-1991), was born.
(MC, 1/5/02)
1932 Apr 4, Andrei Tarkovsky, Russian film maker, was born.
(DVD, Criterion, 1998)
1932 May 2, Walter Duranty of the NY Times won a Pulitzer Prize for his series on the Soviet Union that contained uncritical praise of Joseph Stalin. In 2003 a historian argued, without success, that the prize should be revoked due to Duranty's deliberate failure to cover the forced famine in the Ukraine that killed millions of people. In 2004 David C. Engerman authored "Modernization from the Other Shore," an American view of the Soviet experience."
(SFC, 10/23/03, p.A3)(SFC, 11/22/03, p.A3)(WSJ, 2/24/04, p.D8)
1932 May 25, Georgi Mikhailovich Grechko, USSR cosmonaut (Soyuz 17, 26, T-14), was born.
(SC, 5/25/02)
1932 Aug 25, Anatoli Yakovlevich Kartashov, Russian cosmonaut, was born.
(MC, 8/25/02)
1932 Oct 10, Dnjepr Dam in USSR, the world's biggest, was put into operation.
(MC, 10/10/01)
1932 Nov 9, Nadya Aliluieva (30), wife of Joseph Stalin, died.
(MC, 11/9/01)
1932 Nov 28, France & USSR signed not-attack treaty.
(DTnet, 11/28/97)
1932 Dec 30, The USSR barred food handouts for housewives under 36 years of age. They would now have to work to eat.
(HN, 12/30/98)
1932 The Gorky Automobile Works (GAZ) was founded in Nizhny Novgorod.
(USAT, 10/9/98, p.12A)
1932 Sep 3, In Soviet Russia Pavel Morozov (13) was allegedly killed by his relatives in Gerasimovka for having reporting his father to the state authorities. In 2005 Catriona Kelly authored “Comrade Pavlik: The Rise and Fall of a Soviet Boy Hero."
(Econ, 6/4/05, p.80)(http://encycl.opentopia.com/term/Pavlik_Morozov)
1932-1933 Stalin imposed terror and famine on the Ukraine, Kuban and Kazakhstan that was carried out be Lazar Kaganovich. Millions died in the famine. Stalin provoked what the Ukrainians called the Great Famine as part of his campaign to force Ukrainian peasants to give up their land and join collective farms. During the height of the famine, which was enforced by methodical confiscation of all food by the Soviet secret police, cannibalism was widespread. In 2017 Anne Applebaum authored "Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine".
(WSJ, 2/14/96, p.A-15)(SFC, 4/3/97, p.C2)(AP, 11/26/05)(Econ, 9/30/17, p.76)
1933 Jan 16, Oleg Grigoryevich Makarov (d.2003 at 70), USSR cosmonaut (Soyuz 12, 18A, 27, T-3), was born.
(MC, 1/16/02)(SFC, 5/31/03, p.A21)
1933 Mar 29, The front page of the New York Evening Post said "Famine Grips Russia — Millions Dying." The report was by Welsh journalist Gareth Jones who had recently sneaked into Ukraine, at the height of a famine engineered by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. Jones was killed by bandits in 1935 while covering Japan's expansion into China. In 2009 the diaries of Jones were put on display for the first time in London.
(AP, 11/13/09)
1933 May 12, Andrey Andreyevich Voznesensky, Russian poet, was born.
(HN, 5/12/01)
1933 May 24, Dmitri Shostakovitch's Preludes premiered in Moscow.
(MC, 5/24/02)
1933 Jul 18, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Russian poet, was born in Zima, Russia.
(HN, 7/18/01)(MC, 7/18/02)
1933 Nov 16, The United States and the Soviet Union established diplomatic relations. President Roosevelt sent a telegram to Soviet leader Maxim Litvinov, expressing hope that U.S.-Soviet relations would "forever remain normal and friendly."
(AP, 11/1697)
1933 Nov 17, US recognized USSR and opened trade.
(MC, 11/17/01)
1933 Dec 27, Josef Stalin called tensions with Japan a grave danger.
(HN, 12/27/01)
1933 Marc Chagall (1887-1985) painted "Nude Above Vitebsk."
(SFC, 7/26/03, p.D1)
1933 Yakov Chernikhov (d.1951) Russian architect, authored "101 Architectural Fantasies." His adventurous designs were poorly regarded by Soviet authorities and few of his buildings were constructed.
(AP, 8/8/06)
1933 Alexander Rodchenko, artist and photographer, was dispatched to document the White Sea-Baltic Canal project in which some 200,000 political prisoners were killed.
(WSJ, 7/8/98, p.A13)(Econ, 2/9/08, p.91)
1933 Stalin launched the Moscow Metro. It took 75,000 workers 3 years to complete the first 7-mile line.
(WSJ, 11/4/98, p.A1)
1933 George F. Kennan (1904-2005) established America’s first embassy in the Soviet Union.
(Econ, 11/12/11, p.97)
1933-1945 In 2008 Latvian filmmaker Edvins Snore, directed “Soviet Story." It shows the close connections—philosophical, political and organizational—between the Nazi and Soviet systems beginning in 1933 thru WWII.
(www.economist.com/world/europe/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11401983)
1934 Jan 22, Dmitri Shostakovich premiered his 1932 opera: "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District," in Leningrad.
(WSJ, 5/7/02, p.D7)(WSJ, 5/2/03, p.W6)
1934 Feb, The Chelyuskin, which set off in July 1933 from the port of Murmansk, Russia, for Vladivostok in the Pacific Ocean, got stranded among ice fields in the Bering Sea and sank off the coast of Chukotka. The trip of more than 4,500 miles was meant to demonstrate the Soviet government's assertion that cargo ships could safely take the northern route. Soviet aviators launched over two dozen flights to search for the survivors, and in early March finally evacuated about 10 women and 2 babies born during the sea voyage. Airmen brought out the rest of the passengers and crew men the following month. In 2006 Russian divers found the ship.
(AP, 9/22/06)
1934 Mar 9, Uri Gregarin (Yuri Gagarin), first man to orbit the Earth, was born.
(HN, 3/9/99)
1934 May, Stalin’s regime officially set up the Jewish Autonomous Region of Birobidzhan.
(SFEC, 5/31/98, p.7)
1934 Sep 18, The League of Nations admitted the Soviet Union. Joseph Avenol, secretary-general of the League of Nations, sold out the organization he had sworn to uphold.
(WUD, 1994, p.424,1682)(HN, 9/18/98)
1934 Dec 1, Sergei M. Kirov, a collaborator of Josef Stalin, was assassinated in Leningrad, a stronghold of opposition to Stalin. This resulted in a massive purge. Kirov was succeeded by Andrei Zdhanov, who became the virtual dictator of literary and artistic policies of the USSR.
(AP, 12/1/98)(SFC, 6/10/00, p.A12)
1934 William Henry Chamberlin, a journalist, published "Russia's Iron Age," which chronicled the depredations of Stalin.
(WSJ, 4/13/99, p.A16)
1934 The documentary film "Eyes on Russia, from the Caucasus to Moscow" was produced.
(SFC, 11/21/96, p.E2)
1934 Alexander Mosolov, composer, wrote his ballet "Steel."
(WSJ, 1/15/98, p.A17)
1934 There were 1,966 delegates to the 17th Soviet Party Congress. By the 1999 Congress 1,108 delegates were arrested and many shot as traitors. In 1999 J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov co-wrote "The Road To Terror," an examination of the Stalin purges that was a follow-up to Getty's 1985 work "Origins of the Great Purges." The standard account on the purges is "The Great Terror" (1968) by Robert Conquest.
(WSJ, 9/27/99, p.A32)(Econ, 12/3/05, p.79)
1934 The Soviet Union’s secret police organization-the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs-was better known as the NKVD. The NKVD replaced the State Political Administration, or GPU. The GPU had formerly been known as the Cheka. During World War II there were several reorganizations of the NKVD, out of which grew the MGB, or Ministry of State Security. The MGB evolved into the KGB in 1954.
(HNPD, 6/24/99)
1934 The Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was established.
(USAT, 9/2/04, p.13A)
1934-1938 Alexander Troyanovsky served as the first Soviet ambassador to the US.
(AP, 12/23/03)
1934-1998 Alfred Schnittke, composer, was born in Engels in the Volga republic. He later wrote scores for over 60 films.
(SFC, 8/5/98, p.A17)
1935 Jan 31, The Soviet premier told Japan to get out of Manchuria.
(HN, 1/31/99)
1935 Mar 22, Russia sold the Chinese Eastern Railway to Japan.
(HN, 3/22/97)
1935 Mar 30, Britain and Russia agreed on treaties intended to curb the power of the Reich.
(HN, 3/30/98)
1935 Apr 28, The Moscow 81-km underground opened.
(MC, 4/28/02)
1935 May 15, Kasimir Malevich (b.1878), Ukraine-born Cubist painter, died. He was a leader of the Suprematist movement in Russian painting. He pioneered the use of abstract geometrical elements and limited colors to demonstrate the supremacy of expressing feelings.
(WSJ, 6/21/99, p.B14)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazimir_Malevich)
1935 Aug 3, Georgi S. Shonin, cosmonaut (Soyuz 6), was born.
(SC, 8/3/02)
1935 Sep 19, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (b.1857), Russian scientist, died. He was a visionary and pioneer of astronautics. He theorized many aspects of human space travel and rocket propulsion decades before others, and played an important role in the development of the Soviet and Russian space programs. In 1932 Tsiolkovsky wrote "The Cosmic Philosophy," a summary of his philosophical ideas. He also wrote science fiction books, including "On The Moon" (1895), “Dreams of the Earth and Sky" (1895), and “Beyond the Earth" (1920).
(www.informatics.org/museum/tsiol.html)
1935 Hotel Moskva, designed by architect Alexei Shchusev, opened just off Red Square. It was later featured on the Stolichnaya Vodka label.
(AP, 7/22/03)
1935 In the Soviet Union the Stakhanovite campaign began in 1935 using the example of coal miner Aleksey Grigoriyevich Stakhanov who, by allegedly mining 102 tons of coal in one shift, exceeded and established new production norms. Someone known as a Stakhanovite was a member of the Soviet workers' elite by virtue of exceeding production norms and was rewarded with special privileges. Used in a great propaganda campaign from 1935 to the start of World War II, the higher production norms placed great pressure on other workers and often resulted in quality of goods sacrificed for quantity.
(HNQ, 10/3/98)
1935-1943 Georgi Dimitrov, a Bulgarian communist selected by Stalin, led the Comintern.
(WSJ, 6/6/03, p.W9)
1936 Feb 23, In Russia, an unmanned balloon rose to a record height of 25 miles.
(HN, 2/23/98)
1936 Feb 27, Ivan P. Pavlov (86), Russian physiologist (reflexes, "drooling dog" Nobel 1904), died.
(MC, 2/27/02)
1936 Mar 19, The U.S.S.R. signed a pact of assistance with Mongolia against Japan.
(HN, 3/19/98)
1936 May 2, "Peter and the Wolf," a symphonic tale for children by Sergei Prokofiev, had its world premiere in Moscow.
(AP, 5/2/97)
1936 Jun 18, Maxim Gorkei (Aleksvey Maksimovich Pyeshkov [aka Gorky], b.1868], Russian dramatist, died. "A good man can be stupid and still be good. But a bad man must have brains."
(WUD, 1994 p.611)(HN, 3/16/98)(AP, 2/23/01)(NG, 7/04, p.132)
1936 Jun 19, A total solar eclipse darkened Russian skies.
(NG, 7/04, p.132)
1936 Aug 19, A trial against Ljev Kamenev and Grigori Zinoviev, for alleged "Trotskyism," opened in Moscow.
(MC, 8/19/02)
1936 Nov-1936 Dec, In Spain hundreds of Franco supporters were killed at Paracuellos. Between 2,000 and 4,000 suspected supporters of the coup against the Second Spanish Republic, were killed by the Republican Army. The Soviet NKVD was later implicated.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracuellos_massacre)(Econ, 3/24/12, p.86)
1936 Dec 5, The New Constitution in the Soviet Union promised universal suffrage, but the Communist Party remained the only legal political party.
(HN, 12/5/98)
1936 Sergei Rachmaninoff composed his Third Symphony.
(WSJ, 1/14/02, p.A16)
1936 The USSR began using Vozrozhdeniye Island in the Aral Sea to test deadly germs. In 1988 anthrax from Sverdlovsk was shipped in and buried there.
(SFC, 3/24/03, p.A5)
1936 Stalin imposed a ban on abortion in the USSR.
(SSFC, 8/24/03, p.A11)
1936 A delegation from Los Angeles went to Birobidzhan, the Jewish Autonomous Region of Russia, to present a souvenir pamphlet, the fate of the delegation was unknown.
(SFEC, 5/31/98, p.7)
1936 Some 700 Soviet advisors were sent to Spain in an attempt to run and control the economy, government and armed forces. By the end of the civil war most were killed by Stalin’s purges.
(WSJ, 7/11/01, p.A15)
1936-1939 The Spanish Civil War has been commonly referred to as "a rehearsal for World War II" by historians because of the intervention by Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and the Soviet Union, and their use of the war to test new weapons and military techniques. It was fought between the liberal Second Spanish Republic government and right-wing rebel forces, including the fascist Falangists, monarchists and Nationalists. The rebels had the support of the Roman Catholic Church, in addition to Germany and Italy. The Government supporters, called Loyalists, had the support of communists, socialists, anarchists, the Soviet Union and volunteers from around the world who formed the International Brigades. Between 400,000 and 1 million were killed in the war, ultimately won by the rebels. In 2008 Paul Preston authored “We Saw Spain Die: Foreign correspondents in the Spanish Civil War." In 2012 Paul Preston authored “The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain."
(HNQ, 9//00)(Econ, 10/18/08, p.97)(Econ, 3/24/12, p.86)
1937 Jan 19, In the Soviet Union, the People's Commissars Council was formed under Molotov.
(HN, 1/19/99)
1937 Mar 6, Valentina Nikolayeva-Tereshkova, Russian astronaut, was born. She became the first women to orbit the Earth in 1963.
(HN, 3/6/99)
1937 Apr 18, Leon Trotsky called for the overthrow of Soviet leader Josef Stalin.
(HN, 4/18/98)
1937 Jun 6, Ivan Papanin (1894-1986) raised the Soviet flag over the North Pole-1 station. For 234 days the 4-man Papanin team carried out a wide range of scientific observations in the near-polar zone.
(Econ, 8/11/07, p.43)(www.mvk.ru/eng/about/press/publications/publication_105.shtm)
1937 Jun 12, The Soviet Union executed eight army leaders as a purge under Josef Stalin continued.
(AP, 6/12/97)(HN, 6/12/98)
1937 Jun 13, Stalin executed Russian officers Tuchachevski, Jakir, Putna & Uberevitch.
(MC, 6/13/02)
1937 Jun 20, Immediately upon their landing in Vancouver, [Wa.?] after their daring 1937 transpolar flight from Moscow to America, three Soviet airmen were treated to breakfast in the home of Brigadier General George C. Marshall, commander of Vancouver Barracks. The record-setting, 5,507-mile, 60-hour flight made the unexpected early-morning landing on June 20 in Vancouver as the Tupelov ANT-25 ran low on fuel. Marshall, alerted to the landing, rushed to Pearson Field and escorted the crew of Valery Chkalov, Georgy Baidukov and Aleksandr Belyakov back to his home where his wife prepared a hearty breakfast for them. The Soviets were feted in the U.S. for their accomplishment and each honored as Heroes of the Soviet Union.
(HNQ, 10/12/98)
1937 Jul 6, Vladimir Ashkenazy, pianist, conductor (Tchakowsky-1961), was born in Gorki, Russia.
(MC, 7/6/02)
1937 Jul 31, The Russian Politburo enabled Operative Order 00447. This led to the execution of some 193,000 people.
(MC, 7/31/02)
1937 Aug 5, Stalin signed NKVD order no 00447 that mandated all prison camps across the Soviet Union to be emptied.
(SFC, 7/17/97, p.A10)
1937 Sep 6, The Soviet Union accused Italy of torpedoing two Russian ships in the Mediterranean.
(HN, 9/6/98)
1937 Oct 7, Igor Moiseyev (b.1906), founder of the Moiseyev folk-dance troupe, offered the troupe’s first public performance in Moscow.
(WSJ, 1/12/98, p.A20)(www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-141047738.html)
1937 Oct 21, Dmitri Shostakovitch's 5th Symphony premiered.
(MC, 10/21/01)
1937 Oct-Nov, A 3-man panel, the "Osobaya Troika," signed death sentences that were sent to thousands of gulags across Russia and led to the massacre of 9,000 victims in the Karelia Forest at Medvezhyegorsk. The grave site was opened in Jul, 1997, and a monument was planned.
(SFC, 7/17/97, p.A10)
1937 Stalin ordered a major overhaul of Uzbek leadership and heads began to roll. The artist Alexander Rodchenko, who had designed the album "Ten Years of Uzbekistan," blotted out the photos of purged Uzbek leaders in his personal copy. It provided grist for the 1997 book by David King "The Commissar Vanishes," that describes how Stalin manipulated images for his benefit.
(WSJ, 10/29/97, p.A20)
1937 Stalin deported some 180,000 Soviet Koreans from their homes and farms and sent them by cattle car to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
(LSA, Fall/06, p.28)
1937 The USSR census of this year reported a decline in the population to 162 million and Stalin had the officials responsible for the count shot. He had told officials a year earlier that the count would be 170 million, which ignored those who died in famines and purges.
(WSJ, 12/1/99, p.A24)(Econ, 12/22/07, p.99)
1937-1938 There were sweeping purges across the Soviet Union. 14 million people across Russia were estimated to have died in the purges. At least 30,000 people were executed in Moscow. Several hundred Americans were arrested in Karelia, near the Finnish border. Several thousand Americans and Canadians had moved there to help develop the Soviet timber industry. 40,000 people a month were executed.
(SFEC, 12/22/96, BR p.7)(SFC, 7/17/97, p.A10)(SFEC, 11/9/97, p.A12)(SFC, 4/17/99, p.B3)(Econ, 11/5/16, p.43)
1938 Jan 1, Alexander Gelver, 24, an American from Oshkosh, Wis., was executed in a Stalinist purge.
(SFEC,11/9/97, p.A26)
1938 Mar 2, Trials of Soviet leaders began in the Soviet Union.
(SC, 3/2/02)
1938 Mar 17, Rudolf Nureyev, ballet dancer, choreographer (Kirov), was born in Russia.
(MC, 3/17/02)
1938 Mar, Nikolay Bukharin, a revolutionary economist who helped edit Pravda with Lenin, was put on trial and executed in the purges. He met Lenin in 1912 while in exile in Western Europe, but returned to Russia with the February revolution of 1917. Bukharin broke with Lenin over Lenin‘s support of peace with Germany, but championed Lenin‘s New Economic Policy after his death in 1924. It was partially this adherence that brought Bukharin into conflict with the Stalinist faction within the Politburo, losing his position in 1929. In early 1937, after years of declining influence, Bukharin was secretly arrested and later tried on false charges for "counterrevolutionary activities."
(HNQ, 12/12/00)
1938 May 10, Maxim Shostakovich, conductor (Atlanta Symph), was born in Leningrad, Russia.
(MC, 5/10/02)
1938 Jul 18, Vladimir M. Kirshon (35), Russian playwright, was executed.
(MC, 7/18/02)
1938 Aug 7, Konstantin S. Stanislavsky (75), Russian director (S Method), died.
(MC, 8/7/02)
1938 Nov 26, Poland renewed a non-aggression pact with the USSR to protect against a German invasion.
(HN, 11/26/98)
1938 Dec 8, L.P. Beria followed Nikolai Jezjov as head of Russian secret police.
(MC, 12/8/01)
1938 Dec 27, Osip Mandelstam (b.1891), Russian poet born in Poland to Jewish parents, died while in transit to a labor camp. In 1998 Emma Gerstein authored “Moscow Memoirs: Memories of Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam and Literary Russia Under Stalin." An English translation by John Crowfoot became available in 2004.
(SSFC, 9/11/04, p.M3)(www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk)
1938 Lev Razgon (d.1999 at 92) was sent to labor camp on charges of anti-state activities. He spent 17 years in labor camps and later published "Not A Thought-Up Story" about his experiences.
(SFC, 9/9/99, p.A21)
1938 Nikolai Ivanovich (b.1888), Russian editor, writer and Communist leader, was ordered shot by Stalin.
(WUD, 1994, p.195)(WSJ, 5/19/99, p.A20)
1938-1988 The Leningrad Philharmonic was led by Yevgeny Mravinsky.
(WSJ, 1/29/96, p. A-14)
1939 Feb 2, Hungary broke relations with the Soviet Union.
(HN, 2/2/99)
1939 Mar 22, Germany marched into Klaipeda (Memel), Lithuania. The Lithuanian warship Prezidentas Smetona was left without a harbor. The ship soon settled at Latvia’s port of Liepaja. In December Ltn. P. Labanauskas was named captain. In 1940 Soviet occupiers called for the ship to raise the Soviet flag, but Captain Labanauskas sailed the ship out of Soviet territory. The ship was later handed over to the Soviet Baltic fleet. On Jan 11, 1945, it hit a mine and sank off the coast of Finland.
(Voruta #27-28, Jul 1996, p.2)(http://tinyurl.com/cs545k)
1939 May 3, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin replaced Maxim Litvinov, the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs, with Vyacheslav Molotov.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxim_Litvinov)
1939 Aug 19, Vyacheslav Molotov outlined the Soviet requirements to the German Ambassador, Friedrich von Schulenburg. He insisted that trade agreements be signed and that a special protocol be made defining the German and Soviet spheres of interest.
(DrEE, 10/26/96, p.4)
1939 Aug 20, Soviet and German trade agreements were signed.
(DrEE, 10/26/96, p.4)
1939 Aug 23, German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs Vyacheslav M. Molotov signed a Treaty of Non-Aggression, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact freeing Hitler to invade Poland and Stalin to invade Finland. Secret protocols, made public years later, were added that assigned Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Bessarabia to be within the Soviet sphere of influence. Poland was partitioned along the rivers Narev, Vistula and San. Germany retained Lithuania enlarged by the inclusion of Vilnius. Just days after the signing, Germany invaded Poland, and by the end of September, both powers had claimed sections of Poland. World War II and Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union were just around the corner.
(WP, 6/29/96, p.A16)(DrEE, 9/28/96, p.3)(DrEE, 10/26/96, p.4)(AP, 8/23/97)(HNPD, 8/22/98)(HN, 8/23/98)
1939 Sep 17, The Soviet Union attacked Poland, more than two weeks after Nazi Germany launched its assault. They took 217,000 Poles prisoner and occupied eastern Poland within a week with losses of 737 dead and 2,000 wounded. The Polish submarine Orzel escaped from internment and went on to fight the Germans against long odds.
(AP, 9/17/97)(DrEE, 10/26/96, p.4)(HN, 9/17/98)(MC, 9/17/01)
1939 Sep 27, Germany occupied Warsaw as Poland surrendered after weeks of resistance to invading forces from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union during World War II.
(AP, 9/27/97)(HN, 9/27/98)
1939 Sep 28, The Boundary and Friendship Treaty between the USSR and Germany was supplemented by secret protocols to amend the secret protocols of Aug 23. Among other things Lithuania was reassigned to the Soviet sphere of influence. Poland’s partition line was moved eastwards from the Vistula line to the line of the Bug. Germany kept a small part of south-west Lithuania, the Uznemune region. A separate Soviet mutual defense pact was signed with Estonia that allowed 25,000 Soviet troops to be stationed there.
(DrEE, 9/28/96, p.3)(DrEE, 10/26/96, p.4)(DrEE, 10/26/96, p.4)
1939 Sep 29, Germany and the Soviet Union reached an agreement on the division of Poland. [see Sep 28]
(HN, 9/29/98)
1939 Sep 30, Germany and Russia agreed to partition Poland. [see Sep 28,29]
(MC, 9/30/01)
1939 Oct 5, The Soviets signed a mutual defense pact with Latvia that allowed 30,000 troops to be stationed there.
(DrEE, 10/26/96, p.4)
1939 Oct 5, Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov invited the Finnish Foreign Minister, Elias Erkko, to come to Moscow for political discussions. The Finns delayed the meeting until Oct 12. Field Marshall Gustaf Mannerheim prepared Finland for war.
(DrEE, 10/26/96, p.4)
1939 Oct 10, Lithuania signed a treaty that allowed a Soviet garrison of 20,000 troops to be stationed in the country in return for Vilnius and other regions with a population of 600,000.
(DrEE, 10/12/96, p.3)(DrEE, 10/26/96, p.4)
1939 Oct 12-Nov 8, Finnish special envoy, Juho Paasikivi, began negotiations in Moscow. The Finns refused to allow the establishment of Soviet military bases.
(DrEE, 10/26/96, p.4)
1939 Oct 30, USSR and Germany agreed on partitioning Poland. Hitler deported Jews.
(MC, 10/30/01)
1939 Nov 10-Mar 13,1940, Finland began to wage a defensive war against the Soviet Union for 104 days.
(DrEE, 10/26/96, p.4)
1939 Nov 26, Soviets charged Finland with an artillery attack on border.
(HN, 11/26/98)
1939 Nov 28, USSR scraped its non-aggression pact with Finland.
(HN, 11/28/98)
1939 Nov 29, Soviet planes bombed an airfield at Helsinki, Finland.
(HN, 11/29/98)
1939 Nov 30, The Russo-Finnish war began when Stalin attacked Finland with 4 armies, 540,000 men, 2485 tanks, and 2000 guns. Finnish troops were led by Field Marshall Gustaf Mannerheim. Over the next two weeks, a greatly outnumbered Finnish army resisted the invasion of nearly fifty Red Army divisions--over one million men. The Finnish used forest combat to inflict heavy damage on the Russian invaders. The British and French came to the Finnish defense in mid-December but by March, the "Peace of Moscow" treaty was signed, and Finland ceded 16,000-square miles of land to the Soviet Union, including the city of Vyborg and the Karelian Isthmus.
(DrEE, 10/26/96, p.4)(AP, 11/30/99)(MC, 12/30/01)
1939 Feb 27, Nadezjda K. Krupskaja (70), Russian revolutionary, wife of Lenin, died.
(MC, 2/27/02)
1939 Apr 16, Stalin requested a British, French and Russian anti-Nazi pact.
(MC, 4/16/02)
1939 May 23, Dmitri Shostakovitch was appointed professor at conservatory of Leningrad.
(MC, 5/23/02)
1939 May, In Manchuria a Japanese punitive attack failed and combined Soviet and Mongolian forces wiped out a 200-man Japanese unit. This marked the beginning of the conflict called the Nomonhan Incident by Japanese, the Battle of Khalkhin Gol by Russians. Gen. Georgy Zhukov destroyed the Kwantung Army.
(http://tinyurl.com/ml2j3oh)(Econ, 11/7/15, p.79)
1939 Aug 11, Sergei Rachmaninov had his last appearance in Europe.
(MC, 8/11/02)
1939 Aug 20, Russian offensive under Gen. Zhukov against Jap invasion in Mongolia.
(MC, 8/20/02)
1939 Aug 23, German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs Vyacheslav M. Molotov signed a Treaty of Non-Aggression, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact freeing Hitler to invade Poland and Stalin to invade Finland. Secret protocols, made public years later, were added that assigned Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Bessarabia to be within the Soviet sphere of influence. Poland was partitioned along the rivers Narev, Vistula and San. Germany retained Lithuania enlarged by the inclusion of Vilnius. Just days after the signing, Germany invaded Poland, and by the end of September, both powers had claimed sections of Poland.
(WP, 6/29/96, p.A16)(AP, 8/23/97) (HNPD, 8/22/98)(HN, 8/23/98)
1939 Aug, The Soviet Union and Japan fought a massive tank battle at Khalkhin-Gol on the Mongolian border. It was the largest armored battle in the world until that point. By the end of the month the Soviets claimed victory over the Japanese army at the Khalkhyn Gol river. This helped fend off a possible Japanese invasion of Russia with Nazi Germany in 1941.
(http://tinyurl.com/mx9xowj)
1939 Sep 15, The Soviet Union and Japan agreed to a cease-fire in Manchuria (later Mongolia), which took effect the following day.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battles_of_Khalkhin_Gol)
1939 Sep 27, Germany occupied Warsaw. Poland surrendered after 19 days of resistance to invading forces from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Poland had endured a brutal 3 day bombing campaign by the German Luftwaffe.
(AP, 9/27/97)(HN, 9/27/98)
1939 Nov 26, Soviets charged Finland with an artillery attack on border leading to a 105-day Winter War. Soviet Foreign Minister V.M. Molotov accused Finnish troops of firing at the Russians across the 800-mile (1,300km) border near the southeastern village of Mainila.
(AP, 11/26/02)(AP, 11/30/09)
1939 Dec 9, A Russian air raid was made on Helsinki.
(MC, 12/9/01)
1939 Dec 14, The Soviet Union was dropped from the League of Nations.
(AP, 12/14/97)
1939 Dec 25, Finnish troops entered Soviet territory.
(HN, 12/25/98)
1939 Prokofiev arranged the "Alexander Nevsky Cantata" from music he wrote for Sergei Eisenstein’s film.
(WSJ, 7/8/96,p.A9)
1939 Yuli Khariton and Yakow Zeldovich made the first Soviet calculations for nuclear fission.
(SFC, 12/20/96, p.B6)
1939 The USSR census of this year classified the results and reported 170 million to Stalin. Census officials responsible for the 1937 census had been shot for their count of 162 million.
(Econ, 12/22/07, p.99)
1939-1945 Norman Davies covered this period in his 2006 book “Europe at War 1939-1945: No Simple Victory." His central theme was the Western alliance with Stalin and its consequences. In 2012 Max Hastings authored “All Hell Let Loose: The World At War: 1939-1945." On average nearly 30,000 people were killed every day.
(Econ, 11/11/06, p.94)(Econ, 6/9/12, p.87)
1939-1953 This period is covered in Geoffrey Roberts’ 2007 book: “Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War."
(Econ, 1/6/07, p.68)
1940 Jan 11, Sergei Prokofiev's ballet Romeo and Juliet premiered in Leningrad.
(MC, 1/11/02)
1940 Jan 12, Soviet bombers raided cities in Finland.
(HN, 1/12/99)
1940 Feb 12, The U.S.S.R. signed a trade treaty with Germany to aid against the British blockade.
(HN, 2/12/97)
1940 Mar 2, Soviet armies conquered Tuppura Island, Finland.
(SC, 3/2/02)
1940 Mar 5, Stalin among others signed an Order for the massacre at Katyn, Poland. Soviet agents shot 21,768 Polish military officers, intellectuals and priests who had been taken prisoner during the invasion. Between April and May some 25,700 (15,000) Polish citizens were massacred by the Soviets in the Katyn and Miednoje (Mednoye) forests on the outskirts of Moscow and at Kharkov in western Russia (later Ukraine). Some 14,700 Polish officers were identified by their uniforms. Documents were made public in 1992 by Boris Yeltsin, Russia's first post-Soviet leader. They included a letter by Lavrenty Beria, head of the secret police, recommending the execution of the Polish prisoners of war. The letter bears the signatures of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and three other members of the Politburo. Excavations of the sites began in 1994. 6,313 Polish officers were all shot in the back of the head near Mednoye. 9,000 Russians were also massacred at the site. In 2008 Andrzej Wajda directed the film “Katyn." In 2004 Russia's top military prosecutor closed the investigation after concluding that the massacre did not constitute genocide. In 2009 Russia's Supreme Court rejected appeals to re-open the investigation. On April 7, 2010, Russian PM Vladimir Putin attended a memorial ceremony. Hours later he said Stalin had ordered the atrocity as revenge for the death of Red Army soldiers in Polish prisoner of war camps in 1920.
(AM, Jul/Aug ‘97 p.16)(SFEC, 9/3/00, p.A18)(AP, 3/6/05)(Econ, 6/21/08, p.65)(AP, 1/29/09)(SFC, 4/8/10, p.A2)(AP, 4/28/10)
1940 Mar 10, Mikhail Bulgakov (b.1891), Russian author, died in Moscow. His novel “The Master and Margarita," which satirized life under Stalin, was written between 1928 and the author’s death. It was not published until 1966-67 in the Russian journal Moskva, with some 60 pages cut.
(Econ, 3/13/04, p.86)(WSJ, 1/3/09, p.W6)
1940 Mar 12, Finland surrendered to Russia. Finland and the Soviet Union concluded an armistice during World War II. Fighting between the two countries flared again the following year.
(HN, 3/12/98)(AP, 3/12/98)
1940 Mar 13, The 105-day war between Russia and Finland ended with the signing of a treaty in Moscow. Finland capitulated conditionally to Soviet terms, but maintains its independence. Some 27,000 Finnish soldiers were killed and 43,000 wounded in a population of 3.7 million. The Soviet Union put its losses at 217,500 dead or wounded.
(HN, 3/13/01)(AP, 11/30/09)
1940 May 24, Joseph Brodsky, author (Less than 1, Nobel 1987), was born in the USSR.
(MC, 5/24/02)
1940 Jun 14, The Soviets presented an ultimatum to Lithuania that demanded the free entry of an unlimited number of troops. The government surrendered and Pres. Smetona left the country.
(DrEE, 10/26/96, p.4)
1940 Jun 15, The Soviets invaded Lithuania.
(DrEE, 10/26/96, p.4)
1940 Jun 16, Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov presented August Rei, Estonia’s envoy in Moscow, an ultimatum to allow an unlimited number of Soviet troops, which was accepted. Latvia received a similar ultimatum.
(DrEE, 10/26/96, p.4)(www.historycommission.ee/temp/conclusions_frame.htm)
1940 Jun 18, Soviet occupation was completed in the Baltics. For the Soviet intrusion into the German sphere of influence, Stalin compensated Germany with a payment of 7.5 million gold dollars.
(DrEE, 10/26/96, p.4)
1940 Jun 21, Estonia’s Pres. Päts appointed a new government led by PM Johannes Vares under pressure from Andrei Zhdanov, head of the Leningrad branch of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
(www.historycommission.ee/temp/conclusions_frame.htm)
1940 Jun 26, The Soviet Union delivered an ultimatum to Romania and 2 days later occupied Bessarabia and North Bukovina.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_Bessarabia_by_the_Soviet_Union)
1940 Jun 27, USSR returned to the Gregorian calendar.
(SC, 6/27/02)
1940 Jul 21, The new USSR-organized parliaments of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania held simultaneous sessions. They declared their countries to be soviet socialist republics and applied for admission to the USSR.
(www.historycommission.ee/temp/conclusions_frame.htm)
1940 Aug 3, The Supreme Soviet officially registered the acceptance of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania into the USSR.
(SC, 8/3/02)(www.historycommission.ee/temp/conclusions_frame.htm)
1940 Aug 20, Ramon Mercador (Mercader) del Rio, a Spanish Communist, posed as a Canadian businessman (aka Frank Jackson) and fatally wounded Leon Trotsky with an alpine ax to the back of the head in Mexico City. Trotsky died the next day.
(WSJ, 3/29/96, p.A-14)(TMC, 1994, p.1940)(SFC, 7/19/96, p.B1)(HN, 8/20/01)
1940 Aug 21, Leon Trotsky, exiled Communist revolutionary, died in Mexico City from wounds inflicted by an assassin the day before. Earlier this year Josef Grigulevich (27), a Lithuania-born KGB agent, established a safe house at Zook's Pharmacy in Santa Fe, NM, for the assassins of Leon Trotsky. The pharmacy, visible in archive photos, was replaced in 1990 by a Haagen-Dazs ice cream shop. Grigulevich was recruited by Soviet strongman Josef Stalin's secret police as a university student in Paris and learned the assassin's trade during the Spanish civil war. He later published 58 books on Latin American history. In 2011 intelligence expert E.B. Held authored "A Spy's Guide to Albuquerque and Santa Fe."
(AP, 8/21/08)(AFP, 2/4/11)
1940 Aug 25, The ‘parliaments’ of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania declared themselves ‘provisional Supreme Soviets’ and adopted new constitutions that were composed according to the example of the constitutions of already existing union republics of the USSR.
(www.historycommission.ee/temp/conclusions_frame.htm)
1940 Aug, The Armies of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were reorganized as territorial rifle corps of the Red Army and placed under the control of the political leaders of the Red Army.
(www.historycommission.ee/temp/conclusions_frame.htm)
1940 Oct 20, German troops reached the approaches to Moscow.
(HN, 10/20/98)
1940 Oct 25, German troops captured Kharkov and launched a new drive toward Moscow.
(HN, 10/25/98)
1940 Dec 18, Hitler dictated Directive No. 21 to crush Russia in a quick campaign. Adolf Hitler signed a secret directive ordering preparations for a Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. (Operation "Barbarossa" was launched in June 1941.)
(SFC,10/29/97, p.A23)(AP, 12/18/97)
1940 Prokofiev composed the opera "Betrothal in a Monastery." It was based on Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1775 work "The Duenna."
(WSJ, 5/7/98, p.A21)
1940 Moscow imposed the Cyrillic alphabet over the Roman alphabet.
(SFC, 1/2/97, p.A10)
1940 The Soviet Union and Iran signed more agreements concerning the Caspian Sea.
(SFC, 8/11/98, p.A8)
1940 Stalin ordered that steel mill be built at Cherepovets, 240 miles north of Moscow. He had been exiled there as a revolutionary in 1909. It produced its 1st steel in 1958.
(WSJ, 6/9/04, p.A8)
1940 Isaac Babel, Russian-Jewish author, was killed by a Soviet firing squad. In 2001 Nathalie Babel edited the "Complete Works of Isaac Babel," translated by Peter Constantine.
(SSFC, 11/25/01, p.M3)
1940 Russia seized Estonia’s presidential seal and regalia as it annexed the country. As of 2010 Russia continued to refuse to hand the items back.
(Econ, 4/10/10, p.64)
1941 Jan 10, The Soviets and the Germans agreed on the East European borders and the exchange of industrial equipment.
(HN, 1/10/99)
1941 Jan 21, The United States lifted the ban on arms to the Soviet Union.
(HN, 1/21/99)
1941 Mar 13, Hitler issued an edict calling for an invasion of the U.S.S.R.
(HN, 3/13/98)
1941 Apr 3, Churchill warned Stalin of German invasion.
(MC, 4/3/02)
1941 Apr 13, A Russian-Japan no-attack treaty went into effect.
(MC, 4/13/02)
1941 May 6, Dictator Josef Stalin assumed the Soviet premiership, replacing Vyacheslav M. Molotov.
(AP, 5/6/97)
1941 Jun 13, Thousands of Jewish community leaders in Bessarabia (Moldova) were deported to Siberia as part of the general purge. The Soviet Union, which had occupied the former Romanian province a year earlier, loaded 22,600 Moldovans on cargo trains bound for Siberia, where the deportees were used for forced labor.
(WSJ, 1/2/02, p.A18)(AP, 6/13/06)
1941 Jun 14, The Russian secret police gathered up some 40,000 men, women and children and exiled them to Siberia in cattle cars. This was the first of many shipments. Some 10,000 Estonians, more than 15,000 Latvians and between 16,000 and 18,000 Lithuanians were herded onto cattle trains and transported to the far eastern reaches of the Soviet Union, where many of them died.
(WP, 6/29/96, p.A16)(http://tinyurl.com/5jxmas)
1941 Jun 14, Over 10,000 people (10,861 according to some sources) were deported as whole families from Estonia. About 230 Estonian officers serving in the 22nd Estonian Territorial Corps of the Red Army were imprisoned at the summer camp of the Estonian Army in southeastern Estonia. Most of them were sent to the Norilsk prison camp, where most of them either died or were executed.
(www.historycommission.ee/temp/conclusions_frame.htm)
1941 Jun 22, German troops invaded Russia and thereby violated the 1939 Russo-German non-aggression pact. Under the codename Barbarossa, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the largest invasion of another country in history. In 2005 Constantine Pleshakov authored “Stalin’s Folly," and David E. Murphy authored "What Stalin Knew." Both provide accounts of the invasion and Stalin’s refusal to acknowledge warning signs.
(AP, 6/22/97)(HN, 6/22/98)(WSJ, 6/22/05, p.D12)
1941 Jun 22, Germany attacked the Soviet Union, its former ally. When the German forces entered the Polish city of Lviv (Lwov), they and their Ukrainian collaborators massacred Jews in the city and countryside. While occupying the area, Germans murdered Jews in the ghetto, the Belzec death camp and a forced labor camp, Janowska, with the final annihilation occurring in 1943.
(AP, 9/2/18)
1941 Jun 22, Estonians started armed resistance against Soviet occupation.
(MC, 6/22/02)
1941 Jun 22, Finland invaded Karelia. When Germany attacked the Soviet Union in summer 1941, Finland joined in and began re-taking the lost territory.
(www.publiscan.fi/cu13e-9.htm)
1941 Jun 24, President Franklin Roosevelt pledged all possible support to the Soviet Union.
(HN, 6/24/98)
1941 Jun 24, Germans advanced into Russia and took Vilnius, Brest-Litovsk and Kaunas.
(MC, 6/24/02)
1941 Jun 25, Finland declared war on the Soviet Union.
(HN, 6/25/98)
1941 Jun 25-26, Russians counter attacked at Rovno, Poland.
(MC, 6/25/02)
1941 Jun 26, Finland entered WW II against Russia.
(MC, 6/26/02)
1941 Jun 26, In Belarus Soviet NKVD mass-executed prisoners from Minsk in the nearby Tsagelnya forest. The wooden statue Mourning Ange, by sculptor Gennady Matusevich, was later erected at the location. Commemorative events are held every year in June. In 1942 Jonas Petruitis authored “Kaip jie mus sušaudė" (How They Shot Us Down).
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chervyen%E2%80%99)
1941 Jun 29, Nazi divisions in a surprise assault made sweeping advances toward Leningrad, Moscow, and Kiev. Joseph Stalin had ignored warnings that Hitler would betray the 1939 Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact. Over 500,000 square miles of Russian territory were taken in the first two months of the invasion.
(MC, 6/29/02)
1941 Jul 5, German troops reached the Dnieper River in the Soviet Union.
(HN, 7/5/98)
1941 Jul 12, Moscow was bombed by the German Luftwaffe for the first time.
(HN, 7/12/98)
1941 Jul 13, Britain and the Soviet Union signed a mutual aid pact, providing the means for Britain to send war materiel to the Soviet Union.
(HN, 7/13/98)
1941 Aug 2, German 11th Army surrounded 20 Russian divisions at Uman.
(MC, 8/2/02)
1941 Aug 5, The German army completed taking 410,000 Russian prisoners in Uman and Smolensk pockets in the Soviet Union.
(HN, 8/5/98)
1941 Aug 10, Great Britain and the Soviet Union promised aid to Turkey if it was attacked by the Axis.
(HN, 8/10/98)
1941 Aug 11, Soviet bombers raided Berlin but caused little damage.
(HN, 8/10/98)
1941 Aug 13, Red army evacuated Smolensk.
(MC, 8/13/02)
1941 Aug 19, The final German assault on Tallinn began.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_evacuation_of_Tallinn)
1941 Aug 21-Sep 26, The Soviet Union's greatest defeat in WWII occurred during the encirclement of the Ukrainian city of Kiev. The Germans took some 665,000 Soviet prisoners.
(HNQ, 8/12/98)
1941 Aug 22, Nazi troops reached Leningrad.
(MC, 8/22/02)
1941 Aug 25, British and Soviet forces entered Iran, opening up a route to supply the Soviet Union. Iran was invaded by the Allies with the Soviets controlling the north.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Mahabad)(HN, 8/25/98)
1941 Aug 25, German troops conquered Novgorod, Leningrad.
(MC, 8/25/02)
1941 Aug 27, The Soviet armada began to move out of Tallinn. By the next day 5 ships were sunk by German bombers and Soviet ships began to encounter minefields set by the Kriegsmarine and Finnish Navy. The Soviets succeeded in evacuating 165 ships, 28,000 passengers and 66,000 tons of equipment from Tallinn.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_evacuation_of_Tallinn)
1941 Aug 29, The German Einsatzkommando in Russia killed 1,469 Jewish children.
(MC, 8/29/01)
1941 Aug 30, The World War II siege of Leningrad began as Nazi forces took Mga.
(AP, 8/30/97)
1941 Aug 31, Marina Tsvetaeva (b.1892), Russian poet and writer, died. She wrote six plays in verse and narrative poems, including The Tsar Maiden (1920), and her epic about the Civil War, The Swans' Encampment, which glorified those who fought against the communists.
(Econ, 3/6/10, p.103)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marina_Tsvetaeva)
1941 Sep 8, The 900-day Siege of Leningrad by German forces began during World War II. The Siege of Leningrad, 400 miles northwest of Moscow, took place with Germany spread along a 2,000 mile front. It led to the death of at least one million Russians from starvation and disease. Leningrad was renamed back to St. Petersburg in 1991. In 2011 Anna Reid authored “Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II."
(WSJ, 2/21/96, p.A-15)(AP, 9/8/06)(Econ, 8/27/11, p.73)
1941 Sep 21, The German Army cut off the Crimean Peninsula from the rest of the Soviet Union.
(HN, 9/21/98)
1941 Sep 23, Germans staged an air raid on the Russian naval base at Kronstadt. The battleship Marat sank.
(MC, 9/23/01)
1941 Sep, Shostakovich, a local fire warden, composed his Seventh Symphony, the "Leningrad," during the German siege of his native city.
(SFC, 10/18/96, C9)(WSJ, 6/8/98, p.A21)
1941 Oct 2, Operation Typhoon, a German all-out drive against Moscow, began in earnest. In 2006 Rodric Braithwaite authored “Moscow 1941: A City and Its People at War."
(AP, 10/2/97)(http://www.bartcop.com/arc4110.htm)(Econ, 9/23/06, p.95)
1941 Oct 6, German troops renewed their offensive against Moscow.
(HN, 10/6/98)
1941 Oct 10, Soviet troops halted the German advance on Moscow.
(HN, 10/10/98)
1941 Oct 12, Russian government moved from Moscow to Volga as Nazis closed in on Moscow.
(MC, 10/12/01)
1941 Oct 15, Odessa, a Russian port on the Black Sea which had been surrounded by German troops for several weeks, was evacuated by Russian troops.
(HN, 10/15/98)
1941 Oct 16, Antanas Gustaitis (b.1898), Lithuanian aviation engineer, was shot to death in Moscow. He had designed 9 ANBO airplanes.
(LHC, 3/26/03)
1941 Oct 16, Germany advanced within 60 miles of Moscow.
(MC, 10/16/01)
1941 Oct 25, Germany attacked Moscow.
(MC, 10/25/01)
1941 Nov 2, German troops occupied Rostov.
(MC, 11/2/01)
1941 Nov 6, USA lent Soviet Union $1 million.
(MC, 11/6/01)
1941 Nov 7, Russians paraded across Red Square commemorating the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and afterward went directly to the front to defend Moscow from the approaching Nazi forces.
(AP, 11/7/10)
1941 Nov 12, Germany's drive to take Moscow halted.
(MC, 11/12/01)
1941 Nov 15, The German final attack on Moscow began. They advanced to within 25 miles of the center of Moscow.
(SFC,10/29/97, p.A23)
1941 Nov 23, German troops conquered Klin, NW of Moscow.
(MC, 11/23/01)
1941 Nov 27, USSR began a counter offensive, causing Germans to retreat.
(MC, 11/27/01)
1941 Nov 28, German troops vacated Rostov.
(MC, 11/28/01)
1941 Dec 4, Operation Taifun (Typhoon), which was launched by the German armies on October 2, 1941 as a prelude to taking Moscow, was halted because of freezing temperatures and lack of serviceable aircraft. Temperatures near Moscow fell to 40 degrees below zero the breech-blocks of German rifles froze solid. The engines of their vehicles would not start. The Soviets began a counter-attack with 17 armies and their T-34 tanks that included 25 Siberian divisions and the Nazis were forced to retreat in panic.
(SFC,10/29/97, p.A23)(HN, 12/4/98)
1941 Dec 5, Russian offensive in Moscow drove out the Nazi army.
(MC, 12/5/01)
1941 Dec 8, Russians took Krijukovo back from Germany.
(d.com, 12/8/02)
1941 Sergei Prokofiev composed his String Quartet No. 2 in F Major.
(www.karadar.net/Cataloghi/prokofiev.html)
1941 The Ballet Company of the Stanislavsky and Nenmirovich-Danchenko Moscow Music Theater was founded.
(WSJ, 1/13/98, p.A20)
1941 The amber room in St. Petersburg was dismantled by German officers and shipped to Konigsberg for safekeeping. The Allied bombing in 1945 was thought to have destroyed the work.
(SFC, 3/22/97, p.A16)
c1941-1945 Russian women combat pilots were called the "Night Witches" by the Germans they haunted during dark, scary nights of World War II. The embattled skies of the Soviet Union regularly saw women proving their worth in combat as bomber, night bomber and even as fighter pilots.
(HNQ, 2/19/02)
1941-1945 In 2005 Catherine Merridale authored “Ivan’s War: The Red Army 1941-1945.
(Econ, 10/22/05, p.86)
1942 Jan 7, Vasili Alexeyev, weightlifter (Olympic-gold-72, 76), was born in USSR.
(MC, 1/7/02)
1942 Feb 24, The SS Struma was sunk in the Black Sea by a Soviet torpedo. The ship with over 750 Jewish passengers fleeing Romania, had docked in Istanbul, but was denied entry to Palestinian territory by colonial power Britain. On Feb 23 Turkey towed the vessel to the Black Sea and set it adrift. Only one person survived.
(AP, 2/24/12)
1942 Feb, The Soviet government established the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC) to drum up int’l. support as the Red Army struggled against the German onslaught. As the war progressed the group collected evidence of atrocities and genocide and planned to publish its “Black Book." Incomplete versions appeared in the 1980s and the first complete version was published in Lithuania in 1993. In Russia it was published as “The Unknown Black Book." In 2008 an English translation was edited by Joshua Rubenstein and Ilya Altman.
(WSJ, 1/19/08, p.W8)
1942 Spring, Soviet soldiers retreated for 3 days through a corridor 50-yards wide in the Mysnoi Bor under constant German shelling. The retreat was from a botched campaign to free Leningrad, 150 miles to the north. The official death toll was 20,000, but some claim as many as 300,000.
(WSJ, 10/1/96, p.A20)
1942 Apr 8, The Soviets opened a rail link to the besieged city of Leningrad.
(HN, 4/8/99)
1942 Apr 20, The battle for Moscow ended. It officially lasted from September 30, 1941, to April 20, 1942, but in reality spanned more than those 203 days of unremitting mass murder, and marked the first time that Hitler's armies failed to triumph with their Blitzkrieg tactics. In 2007 Andrew Nagorski authored “The Greatest Battle: Stalin, Hitler, and the Desperate Struggle for Moscow That Changed the Course of World War II."
(WSJ, 1/11/08, p.W6)
1942 May 12, The Soviet Army launched its first major offensive of the war and took Kharkov in the eastern Ukraine from the German army.
(HN, 5/12/99)
1942 May 29, The German Army completed its encirclement of the Kharkov region of the Soviet Union. The Red Army had lost over 250,000 men including many prisoners.
(HN, 5/29/99)
1942 Jun 1, America began sending Lend-Lease materials to the Soviet Union.
(HN, 6/1/98)
1942 Jun 11, The United States and the Soviet Union signed a lend-lease agreement to aid the Soviet war effort in World War II.
(AP, 6/11/97)
1942 Jun 28, German troops launched “Operation Blue," an offensive to seize Soviet oil fields in the Caucasus and the city of Stalingrad.
(HN, 6/28/98)(WSJ, 1/14/07, p.P8)
1942 Jul 1, German troops captured Sevastopol, Crimea, in the Soviet Union.
(HN, 7/1/98)
1942 Jul 20, Time put Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovitch on its cover.
(MC, 7/20/02)
1942 Jul 24, The Soviet city of Rostov was captured by German troops.
(HN, 7/24/98)
1942 Jul 30, The Battle of Rzhev began as a Soviet offensive to recapture Rzhev and strike a blow against Germany's Army Group Center that would push them away from Moscow. It was part of a series of battles that lasted 15 months in the center of the Eastern Front. The effort involved enormous Soviet losses from persistent, poorly prepared attacks against well-fortified Nazi positions.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Rzhev,_Summer_1942)
1942 Jul, Hitler made his fateful decision to split the armies engaged in the offensive and to occupy the city of Stalingrad with the weaker of the 2 groups.
(WSJ, 1/14/07, p.P8)
1942 Aug 6, The Soviet city of Voronezh fell to the German army.
(HN, 8/6/98)
1942 Aug 9, In Russia conductor Karl Eliasberg led a performance of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony in Leningrad as it was besieged by the German army. A day earlier the Soviet army did a very vicious bombardment of the German army lines in order to silence the German guns, so the concert could take place without being interrupted.
(www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34292312)
1942 Aug 12, British premier Churchill arrived in Moscow to meet Stalin.
(MC, 8/12/02)
1942 Apr 18, The 16th plane of the Doolittle air strike against Japan landed outside Vladivostok in the Soviet Union following its mission. Nolan Herndon (1918-2007), the bombardier, later reported that their plane was used to test the Soviet resolve as an ally. The 5-man crew was held for over 13 months before escaping to a British Embassy in what later became Iran.
(SFC, 10/16/07, p.D8)
1942 Aug 19, Gen. Paulus ordered the German 6th Army to conquer Stalingrad.
(MC, 8/19/02)
1942 Aug 22, Mikhailmichel Fokine (b.1880), Russian ballet dancer, choreographer, died.
(MC, 8/22/02)
1942 Aug 23, German forces began an assault on the major Soviet industrial city of Stalingrad. From Aug. to Feb. 1943, The Battle of Stalingrad, 600 miles southeast of Moscow, was fought and ended with the encirclement and destruction of the German 6th Army Group. Stalingrad has since been renamed to Volgograd. In 1998 Antony Beevor published "Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege." The German in charge was Gen’l. Friedrich Paulus. 600 Luftwaffe bombers killed some 40,000 people in the first week of fighting.
(WSJ, 2/21/96, p.A-15)(WSJ, 7/8/98, p.A13)(HN, 8/23/98)(MC, 8/23/02)
1942 Aug 26, A Russian counter offensive began in Moscow.
(MC, 8/26/02)
1942 Sep 2, German troops entered Stalingrad.
(MC, 9/2/01)
1942 Sep 4, Soviet planes bombed Budapest in the war's first air raid on the Hungarian capital.
(HN, 9/4/98)
1942 Sep 7, The Red Army pushed back the German line northwest of Stalingrad. The Krummer Lauf allowed German infantry and motorized artillery units to actually fire around corners.
(HN, 9/7/98)
1942 Sep 17, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill met with Soviet Premier Josef Stalin in Moscow as the German Army rammed into Stalingrad.
(HN, 9/17/98)
1942 Sep 23, The Russian counter offensive at Stalingrad began.
(MC, 9/23/01)
1942 Sep 27, Heavy German assault in Stalingrad.
(MC, 9/27/01)
1942 Sep 28, Luftwaffe bombed Stalingrad.
(MC, 9/28/01)
1942 Oct 1, The German Army ground to a complete halt within the city of Stalingrad.
(HN, 10/1/98)
1942 Oct 5, 5,000 Jews of Dubno, Russia, were massacred.
(MC, 10/5/01)
1942 Oct 7, A single salvo Katyusha rocket destroyed a Nazi battalion in Stalingrad.
(MC, 10/7/01)
1942 Nov 19, During World War II, Russian forces launched their winter offensive against the Germans along the Don front. Soviet forces took the offensive at Stalingrad
(AP, 11/19/97)(HN, 11/19/98)
1942 Nov 20, The 26th Russian Armored Corps recaptured Perelazovski. A million Russians breached German lines in a Soviet army offensive.
(MC, 11/20/01)
1942 Nov 22, Soviet troops completed the encirclement of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad.
(HN, 11/22/98)
1942 Nov 23, Gen. Von Paulus asked Hitler's permission to surrender at Stalingrad. The German 4th and 6th Army were surrounded at Stalingrad.
(MC, 11/23/01)
1942 Nov, In Balkaria, Central Asia, a valley-full of women and children were hunted down in several villages and butchered by the joint NKVD and Red Army task force under the command of captain Nakin. This became known as the Cherek massacre.
(Econ, 4/3/10, p.86)(http://tinyurl.com/y7b5tse)
1942 Dec 22, The Soviets drove German troops back 15 miles at the Don River.
(HN, 12/22/98)
1943 Jan 9, Soviet planes dropped leaflets on the surrounded Germans in Stalingrad requesting their surrender with humane terms. The Germans refused.
(HN, 1/9/99)
1943 Jan 10, Russian offensive began against German 6th and 4th Armies near Stalingrad.
(MC, 1/10/02)
1943 Jan 11, The Soviet Red Army encircled Stalingrad.
(HN, 1/11/99)
1943 Jan 12, Soviet forces raised the siege of Leningrad.
(HN, 1/12/99)
1943 Jan 18, The Soviets announced they'd broken the long Nazi siege of Leningrad. It was another year before the siege was fully lifted.
(AP, 1/18/98)
1943 Jan 24, Hitler ordered Nazi troops at Stalingrad to fight to death.
(MC, 1/24/02)
1943 Jan 25, The last German airfield in Stalingrad was captured by the Red Army.
(HN, 1/25/99)
1943 Jan 26, Nikolai Vavilov (b.1887), Soviet botanist, died in prison. In 1929 he had traced the genealogy of the apple to Kazakhstan.
(SSFC, 5/25/08, Books p.3)(www.michaelpollan.com/article.php?id=54)
1943 Jan 30, Field marshal Friedrich von Paulus surrendered himself and his staff to Red Army troops in Stalingrad.
(HN, 1/30/99)
1943 Jan 31, The Battle of Stalingrad ended as small groups of German soldiers of the Sixth Army under Gen Friedrich von Paulus surrendered to the victorious Red Army forces.
(HN, 1/31/99)(MC, 1/31/02)
1943 Feb 2, The remainder of Nazi forces from the Battle of Stalingrad surrendered in a major World War II victory for the Soviets. 23 generals, 2,000 officers, and at least 130,000 German troops surrendered. This was later considered as the turning point of WW II.
(AP, 2/2/97)(HN, 2/2/99)(WSJ, 3/28/03, p.A1)
1943 Feb 3, Finland began talks with the Soviet Union.
(HN, 2/3/99)
1943 Feb 8, Red Army recaptured Kursk.
(MC, 2/8/02)
1943 Feb 9, The Russians took back Kursk 15 months after it fell to the Nazis.
(HN, 2/9/97)
1943 Feb 14, Soviets recaptured Rostov.
(MC, 2/14/02)
1943 Feb 16, The Red army conquered Kharkov.
(MC, 2/16/02)
1943 Mar 14, The Germans reoccupied Kharkov in the Soviet Union.
(HN, 3/14/98)
1943 Mar 18, Red Army evacuated Belgorod.
(MC, 3/18/02)
1943 Apr 13, Nazi's discovered a mass grave of Polish officers near Katyn. [see Apr 13, 1990]
(MC, 4/13/02)
1943 May 22, Stalin disbanded the Komintern.
(MC, 5/22/02)
1943 May, German captors took American POWs Capt. Donald B. Stewart and Lt. Col. John H. Van Vliet Jr. to view mummified corpses of Polish officers massacred in the Katyn forest. They used coded messages to report on the Soviet guilt, but it was suppressed by the Roosevelt administration until a report in 1952. Documents of their coded messages were made public in 2012.
(AP, 9/10/12)
1943 Jul 5, The battle of Kursk, the largest tank battle in history, began as German tanks attacked the Soviet salient.
(HN, 7/5/98)
1943 Jul 6, In the 2nd day of battle at Kursk some 25,000 Germans were killed.
(MC, 7/6/02)
1943 Jul 7, In the 3rd day of battle at Kursk the Germans occupied Dubrova. Erich Hartmann shot 7 Russian aircraft at Kursk.
(MC, 7/7/02)
1943 Jul 8, The 4th day of battle at Kursk: Gen Model used his last tank reserve.
(MC, 7/8/02)
1943 Jul 12, Russians beat Nazis in a tank battle at Prochorowka. Some 12,000 died.
(MC, 7/12/02)
1943 Jul 13, Greatest tank battle in history ended with Russia's defeat of Germany at Kursk. Almost 6,000 tanks took part and 2,900 were lost by Germany.
(MC, 7/13/02)
1943 Jul 23, Battle of Kursk, USSR, ended in Nazi defeat. 6,000 tanks took part.
(MC, 7/23/02)
1943 Aug 22, Soviet troops freed Kharkov.
(MC, 8/22/02)
1943 Aug 25, Red Army under Gen Vatutin recaptured Achtyrka.
(chblue.com, 8/25/01)
1943 Sep 24, Soviet forces reconquered Smolensk. [see Sep 25]
(MC, 9/24/01)
1943 Sep 25, The Red Army retook Smolensk from the Germans who were retreating to the Dnieper River in the Soviet Union. [see Sep 24]
(HN, 9/25/98)
1943 Oct 14, Some 300 of 600 prisoners escaped from the Nazi’s Sobibor death camp in Poland. Alexander Pechersky, a Russian officer of Jewish origin, roused his fellow prisoners to rebellion. The event was later documented in the book "Escape from Sobibor" by Richard Rashke (1982) and the film of the same name with Alan Arkin. Josef Vallaster, an Austrian guard, was among 11 SS officers and 11 Ukrainians killed in the escape. Most of the escaped prisoners were killed as they fled. Only 50 prisoners survived the war. Vallaster had operated the motor that funneled gas into Sobibor’s shower rooms. After the uprising at Sobibor, the Nazis shut it down and leveled it to the ground, replanting over it to cover their tracks.
(SFC, 7/11/03, p.A19)(SSFC, 2/17/08, p.A8)(AP, 8/21/12)(AFP, 10/14/13)
1943 Oct 19, Delegates from the USSR met with representatives from the Allied nations of Great Britain, the U.S., and China, in an attempt to hammer out a greater consensus on war aims, and to improve the rapidly cooling relations between the Soviet Union and its allies.
(MC, 10/19/01)
1943 Oct 30, The Molotov-Eden-Cordell Hull accord over operations at UN.
(MC, 10/30/01)
1943 Nov 6, Soviet forces reconquered Kiev.
(MC, 11/6/01)
1943 Nov 28, President Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Josef Stalin met in Tehran, Iran, to map out strategy during World War II.
(AP, 11/28/97)(DTnet, 11/28/97)(HN, 11/28/98)
1943 Dec 1, President Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Josef Stalin concluded their Tehran conference and agreed to Operation Overlord (D-Day).
(AP, 12/1/00)
1943 Dec 12, The exiled Czech government signed a treaty with the USSR for postwar cooperation.
(HN, 12/12/98)
1943 Dec 12, The German Army launched Operation Winter Tempest, the relief of the Sixth Army trapped in Stalingrad. The attempt to relieve Stalingrad fell short due to stubborn Soviet resistance and the Germans' indecision within the besieged city.
(HN, 12/12/98)
1943 Dec 20, "International" was no longer USSR National Anthem.
(MC, 12/20/01)
1943 Dec 20, Soviet forces halted a German army trying to relieve the besieged city of Stalingrad.
(HN, 12/20/98)
1943 Sergei Mikhalkov (96), an author favored by Stalin, was commissioned to write the lyrics for the Soviet and Russian national anthems. His lyrics, co-written with journalist El Registan and set to music by Alexander Alexandrov, lauded Stalin who "brought us up on loyalty to the people" and "inspired us to labor and to heroism."
(AP, 8/27/09)
1943 Dmitri Shostakovich composed his 8th Symphony.
(WSJ, 5/7/02, p.D7)
1943 Russia began producing palladium in Norilsk.
(WSJ, 3/6/00, p.A1)
1943-1957 The Kalmyks of southern Russia were banished to Siberia on charges of collaborating with the Nazis. In their absence their land was overgrazed and turned to desert. In an attempt to solve the problem the steppe was irrigated with water from the Volga which brought underlying salt to the surface and turned some of the land to marsh.
(SFC,11/6/97, p.D2)
1944 Jan 4, Soviet troops crossed the former Polish border.
(HN, 1/4/99)
1944 Jan 17, Russia rejected a Polish proposal to negotiate a boundary dispute.
(HN, 1/17/99)
1944 Jan 27, The Soviet Union announced the end of the deadly German siege of Leningrad, which had lasted 880 days with 600,000 killed.
(AP, 1/27/98)(MC, 1/27/02)
1944 Feb 23, Stalin ordered the mass deportation Caucasian Muslim nations. Chechens and Ingush to Kazakhstan were deported for resisting Soviet rule and abetting the Germans. "478,479 persons were evicted and loaded onto special railway cars, including 91,250 Ingush." More than a third of the population died before the rest were allowed to go home. Also deported were the Karachays, Balkars, and Meskhetian Turks.
(WSJ, 9/12/02, p.A8)(WSJ, 2/23/04, p.A16)(Econ, 2/12/05, p.22)
1944 Mar 8, The Soviet government celebrated International Women's Day by forcibly deporting almost the entire Balkar population to Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Omsk Oblast in Siberia. Starting on 8 March and finishing the following day, the NKVD loaded 37,713 Balkars onto 14 train echelons bound for Central Asia and Siberia.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balkars)
1944 Mar 18, The Russians reached the Rumanian border in the Balkans.
(HN, 3/18/98)
1944 Mar 21, Finland rejected a Soviet armistice.
(HN, 3/21/98)
1944 Apr 2, Soviet forces entered Romania, one of Germany's allied countries.
(HN, 4/2/01)
1944 Apr 10, Soviet forces liberated Odessa from Nazis.
(MC, 4/10/02)
1944 May 5, A Russian offensive took place against Sebastopol Krim.
(MC, 5/5/02)
1944 May 6, The Red Army besieged and captured Sevastopol in the Crimea.
(HN, 5/6/99)
1944 May 9, Russians recaptured Crimea by taking Sevastopol. [see May 6]
(MC, 5/9/02)
1944 May 18, The Soviet Union began the expulsion of more than 200,000 Tartars from Crimea. They were accused of collaborating with the Germans. Stalin deported some 250,000 Tatars from Crimea to Uzbekistan. They did not being to return home until the fall of the USSR.
(SC, 5/18/02)(SFC, 1/4/99, p.A8,9)
1944 Jun 29, A Russian assault battalion opened fire on German forces on the outskirts of Bobruisk, Belarus. As many as half of the 10,000 German soldiers were killed. In 1962 Nikolai Litvin, a Russian soldier present that day, completed his memoir. It was finally published in 2007 under the title "800 Days on the Eastern Front."
(WSJ, 6/30/07, p.P6)
1944 Jul 3, During World War II, Soviet forces recaptured Minsk.
(AP, 7/3/97)
1944 Jul 16, Soviet troops occupy Vilna, Lithuania, in their drive towards Germany.
(HN, 7/16/98)
1944 Jul 23, Soviet troops took Lublin, Poland, as the German army retreated.
(HN, 7/23/02)
1944 Jul 24, Soviet forces liberated the Majdanek concentration camp.
(MC, 7/24/02)
1944 Jul 31, The Soviet army took Kovno [Kaunas], the capital of Lithuania.
(HN, 7/31/98)
1944 Aug 21, The US, Britain, the Soviet Union and China opened the Dumbarton Oaks conference in Washington, D.C. It laid the foundation for the establishment of the UN.
(SFEC, 6/29/97, p.T10)(AP, 8/21/07)
1944 Aug 23, Romanian PM Ion Antonescu was dismissed by King Michael, paving the way for Romania to abandon the Axis in favor of the Allies. King Michael organized a coup against the pro-Nazi dictator, Marshal Ion Antonescu, but was double-crossed by Joseph Stalin and betrayed by the Allies who ceded the country to the Russians at the Yalta summit in 1945.
(SFC, 6/27/97, p.A16)(AP, 8/23/97)
1944 Aug 30, Ploesti, the center of the Rumanian oil industry, fell to Soviet troops.
(HN, 8/30/00)
1944 Oct 18, Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia during World War II.
(AP, 10/18/97)
1944 Oct 23, Soviet army invaded Hungary.
(MC, 10/23/01)
1944 Dec 13, Wassily Kandinsky (b.1866), Russian artist credited with the invention of abstract art, died in France. He held that shapes and colors in art, like notes in music, should represent feelings and emotions, not actual objects.
(WSJ, 8/13/99, p.W10)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wassily_Kandinsky)
1944 Dec 26, Advancing Soviet troops surrounded Budapest.
(HN, 12/26/98)
1944 The Russian film "Ivan the Terrible" was directed by Sergei Eisenstein with music by Prokofiev. It was planned as a 3-part epic. Part 2 was released after Stalin’s death and part 3 was never made.
(SFC,11/1/97, p.E3)
1944 Nikolai Baibakov (1911-2008) was named Stalin's oil commissioner. He was fired in 1985 by Mikhail Gorbachev, whose economic and social reforms preceded the Soviet collapse.
(AP, 4/2/08)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Baibakov)
1944 The Soviet army re-conquered Bessarabia. Only then were the two parts of present-day Moldova joined together to form the Moldavian SSR. At the same time, about one-third of Bessarabia, including its entire Black Sea coastline, was incorporated into the Ukrainian SSR. The Transdniester region, having long been part of the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union, remained more Russified and Sovietized than Right-Bank Moldavia.
(http://tinyurl.com/b7m4b)
1944 Some 150,000 Hungarian troops fought under Nazi command at the Don River. The Red army killed about 90,000 and thousands died trying to walk back to Hungary.
(SFC, 8/12/00, p.A11)
1944 The Soviet Union annexed Tuva and closed the region to the outside world.
(WSJ, 4/1/06, p.A5)
1944 The Normandie-Niemen Fighter Regiment, a Fighter unit of the French Air Force formed in 1942 as Groupe de Chasse Normandie 3, was redesignated as a Regiment (without and with "Niemen" designation the same year). The unit served on the Eastern Front of the European Theatre of World War II with the 1st Air Army. The regiment is notable for being one of only three units from Western Allied countries to see combat on the Eastern Front during World War II, and Normandie-Niemen was the only Western Allied unit to fight with the Soviet forces until the end of the war in Europe. Its battle honors included such names such as Bryansk, Orel 1943, Ielnia, Smolensk 1943, Orsha 1944, Berezina 1944, Niemen 1944, Chernyakhovsk 1945, Königsberg (later renamed Kaliningrad by the Soviets), Baltiysk 1945, and Pillau. In 1944 Joseph Stalin awarded the regiment the name Nieman, (thus becoming Normandie-Niemen) in recognition of its participation in the battles to liberate the river of the same name.
(https://wikivisually.com/wiki/Normandie-Niemen)
1944 Vasily Kononov (21) led a small band of pro-Soviet partisans in Latvia. He was arrested in 1998 for ordering the execution of 9 civilians in the village of Mazie Bati, whom he suspected of pro-Nazi sympathies, but maintained his innocence. In 2000 Latvia sentenced Kononov to 6 years in prison but he was soon freed pending further investigation. Russian president Vladimir Putin granted Kononov Russian citizenship.
(SFC, 4/26/00, p.A16)
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