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 at-tempt 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.
(HN,
9/18/98)(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 Ray-onists 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 bak-ing
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 vic-timization 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 Vis-sarionovich
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)
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 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 cre-ated for the
Czar. An American in 1994 paid $5.5 mil for the egg. Only 56 eggs were
commis-sioned 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 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 po-litical
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 pro-moted the capabilities of his VS-300 helicopter,
highlighting its possible rescue and military ap-plications.
(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 Bres-lau, 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
com-mander 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 bom-barded
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 Rus-sians 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 ac-countability" for U.S. lives and property
endangered. In Europe [Lithuania], the Germans encir-cled 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 sol-diers of the Turkish leader Enver. In 2006 Taner
Akcam authored “A Shameful Act: The Arme-nian 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 Kazimir Malevich, Russian
artist, painted "Suprematism."
(WSJ, 10/5/05, p.D14)
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 fa-vorite 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 celeb-rity.
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 16, Gregory Rasputin
(45), the Russian monk and confidant to Czarina Alexandra, was
assassinated by Prince Yussoupov (Youssoupoff). The monk who had
wielded powerful in-fluence 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 29, According to the New
Style calendar (Dec. 16th by the Old Style), Grigory Rasputin, the
so-called "Mad Monk" who had wielded great influence with Czar Nicholas
II, was murdered by a group of Russian noblemen 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 Rus-sian 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 sin-ning 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.
(HNPD, 12/30/98)(AP, 12/29/06)
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 8-12, Russia’s democratic
February revolution took place in Russia. The "February Revolution"
(according to the Old Style calendar that Russians used) 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 wide-spread starvation stemming from Russia’s staggering
losses in WWI. The czar, his wife Alex-andra, their four daughters and
son Alexis, heir to the throne, were held prisoner by the Bolshe-viks
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 un-der
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 gaso-line 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 immedi-ate 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 provi-sional 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. Keren-sky (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 gov-ernment 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 in-competence 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 main-tain
power until Lenin's Bolshevik followers stormed Petrograd and seized
all government op-erations. Lenin and his lieutenant, Leon Trotsky,
quickly confiscated land and nationalized in-dustry 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]
(CFA, '96, p.58)(V.D.-H.K.p.260-261)(AP,
11/7/97)(HNPD, 11/7/98)
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 re-sulted 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 So-cialism 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 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 Constitu-ent Assembly to be elected by the inhabitants
on the basis of universal, equal and secret suf-frage.
(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 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 Aus-tria forced Soviet Russia to sign the Peace of
Brest, which called for the establishment of 5 in-dependent 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. Peters-burg 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. Peters-burg to
Moscow.
(WSJ, 9/20/04, p.A20)
1918 Mar 14, An all-Russian
Congress of Soviets ratified a peace treaty with the Central Pow-ers.
(HN, 3/14/98)
1918 Mar 20, The Bolsheviks asked
for American aid to rebuild their army.
(HN, 3/20/98)
1918 May 28, Tatars declared
Azerbaijan, in Russian Caucasus, independent.
(HN, 5/28/98)
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 exe-cuted 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, 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 1, US troops landed in
Vladivostok, Siberia, and stayed until 1920. [see Sep 2]
(MC, 9/1/02)
1918 Sep 11, US troops landed in
Russia to fight the Bolsheviks.
(MC, 9/11/01)
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 2, Some 9,000 soldiers
from California and the Philippines began arriving at Vladi-vostok
under Gen. William S. Graves. His orders said to stay out of trouble.
(Ind, 5/4/02, 5A)
1918 Oct 18, Russian 10th Army
drove out White armies of Tsaritsyn (Stalingrad).
(MC, 10/18/01)
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 As-cent 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 Euro-pean
revolution.
(HNQ, 8/31/99)
1918 South Ossetians made a bid to
break away from Georgia and thousands fled in the en-suing 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 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 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 Rus-sia 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 dur-ing 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 con-demned 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 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 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 Manner-heim’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 Moun-tain 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 A treaty between Norway and
Russia allowed Russia to pursue mining in the Svalbard islands at
Spitsbergen.
(WSJ, 9/19/97, p.A1)(Econ, 10/11/08, p.70)
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 al-lowed to go to the US to promote his instrument and to
spy for the Soviets. He returned to Rus-sia 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 listen-ing 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 Rock-more (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)
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 12, Soviet troops invaded
neighboring Georgia.
(MC, 2/12/02)
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 Ma-chine." 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 be-came 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 The Soviet Union and Iran
signed agreements concerning the Caspian Sea.
(SFC, 8/11/98, p.A8)
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 pris-oners 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. Tuvan stamps are issued by Mos-cow in odds shapes and they
became collector's items.
(WSJ, 4/1/06, p.A5)
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 Un-ion was organized as a federation of RSFSR,
Ukrainian SSR, Belorussian SSR and Transcau-casian 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 re-public 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 cho-reographer. 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 initi-ating 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
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 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 wa-ters of
the USSR.
(HN, 12/15/98)
1924 Isaac Brodsky, Soviet
Realist, completed the monumental depiction: "The Second Con-gress 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. Al-though 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 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 mil-lion.
(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 liqui-dated.
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 Bol-shevik
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 So-viet
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 at-tempted
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 ama-teur 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 Autono-mous 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. Al-though
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. Ber-tram 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 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 revolu-tion" 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 in-cluded 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 The Soviet Union began
deporting land holders, known as kulaks, along with their fami-lies 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 govern-ment,
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)
1931 Feb 1, Boris Yeltsin
(d.2007), prime minister of Russia (1991-1992) and the first presi-dent
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 re-sponsible 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 opera-tor 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 af-ter 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. Be-ria, 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 So-viet 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 suc-cess, 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
"Mod-ernization 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 Gera-simovka 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 car-ried 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 methodi-cal
confiscation of all food by the Soviet secret police, cannibalism was
widespread.
(WSJ, 2/14/96, p.A-15)(SFC, 4/3/97, p.C2)(AP,
11/26/05)
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 — Mil-lions 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. Presi-dent 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)
1933-1945 In 2008 Latvian filmmaker Edvins Snore,
directed “Soviet Story.” It shows the close con-nections—philosophical,
political and organizational—between the Nazi and Soviet systems
be-ginning 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 sev-eral 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 pro-pulsion 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 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)
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 re-cord-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 Bel-yakov 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 Mediter-ranean.
(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 Their were sweeping purges across the
Soviet Union. 14 million people across Russia were estimated to have
died in the purges. Several hundred Americans were arrested in
Kare-lia, 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)
1938 Jan 1, Alexander Gelver, 24,
an American from Oshkosh, Wis., was executed in a Sta-linist 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 af-ter 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 de-clining influence,
Bukharin was secretly arrested and later tried on false charges for
"counter-revolutionary activities."
(HNQ, 12/12/00)
1938 May 10, Maxim Shostakovich,
conductor (Atlanta Symph), was born in Leningrad, Rus-sia.
(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 experi-ences.
(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 terri-tory. 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 19, Churchill signed
British-Russian anti-Nazi pact.
(DTnet 5/19/97)
1939 Aug 19, Vyacheslav Molotov
outlined the Soviet requirements to the German Ambassa-dor, 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 sec-tions
of Poland. World War II and Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union were
just around the cor-ner.
(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 Esto-nia 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 Po-land. [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 inva-sion 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
de-fense 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 Ka-relian 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 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 sec-tions
of Poland.
(WP, 6/29/96, p.A16)(AP, 8/23/97) (HNPD,
8/22/98)(HN, 8/23/98)
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 Rus-sians 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)
1939-1953 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 pris-oner 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. 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 Rus-sia's Supreme Court rejected
appeals to re-open the investigation.
(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)
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 au-thor’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 ar-mistice 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 Mos-cow, 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
simulta-neous 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 Cana-dian
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 25, The ‘parliaments’ of
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania declared themselves ‘provi-sional 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. (Opera-tion "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 Natha-lie Babel
edited the "Complete Works of Isaac Babel," translated by Peter
Constantine.
(SSFC, 11/25/01, p.M3)
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 de-ported 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 south-eastern 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 inva-sion 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, 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 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 21-Sep 26, The Soviet
Union's greatest defeat in WWII occurred during the encir-clement 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.
(HN, 8/25/98)
1941 Aug 25, German troops
conquered Novgorod, Leningrad.
(MC, 8/25/02)
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 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 has since been
renamed to St. Petersburg.
(WSJ, 2/21/96, p.A-15)(AP, 9/8/06)
1941 Sep 21, The German Army cut
off the Crimean Peninsula from the rest of the Soviet Un-ion.
(HN, 9/21/98)
1941 Sep 23, Germans staged an air
raid on the Russian naval base at Kronstadt. The battle-ship Marat sank.
(MC, 9/23/01)
1941 Sep, Shostakovich, a local
fire warden, composed his Seventh Symphony, the "Lenin-grad," 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 Mos-cow.
(MC, 10/12/01)
1941 Oct 15, Odessa, a Russian
port on the Black Sea which had been surrounded by Ger-man 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 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 Oc-tober 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, 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 Mys-noi
Bor under constant German shelling. The retreat was from a botched
campaign to free Len-ingrad, 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 Strug-gle 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 So-viet 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, 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 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 Vladi-vostok 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 Stalin-grad. 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. Stalin-grad 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 capi-tal.
(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
cor-ners.
(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 Stalin-grad.
(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 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 request-ing 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 Jul 5, The battle of Kursk,
the largest tank battle in history, began as German tanks at-tacked 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 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 coop-eration.
(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 relieved 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 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 expulsion of more
than 200,000 Tartars from Crimea by Soviet Union be-gan. They were
accused of collaborating with the Germans.
(SC, 5/18/02)
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 con-ference 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 be-trayed 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 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 Josef Stalin deported some
250,000 Tatars from Crimea to Uzbekistan. They did not being to return
home until the fall of the Soviet Union.
(SFC, 1/4/99, p.A8,9)
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)
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