SOME NOTABLE DATES, 1914–1991

1914	World War I begins; St. Petersburg is renamed Petrograd.
1917	NOVEMBER 7—The “Great October Socialist Revolution”—Vladimir Lenin’s communist revolution.
1918	World War I ends; Moscow becomes the capital of the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic (St. Petersburg had been the capital of the Russian Empire since 1712).
1918–1921	Civil War.
1921–1922	Famine along the Volga River and in the Ukraine.
1922	Iosif Stalin becomes general secretary of the Communist Party.
1924	Lenin dies; Petrograd is renamed Leningrad.
1928–1932	The first five-year plan.
1925	through the mid-1930s—Stalin consolidates his power by systematically eliminating his rivals in the communist leadership.
1933	Adolf Hitler and the Nazis come to power in Germany.
1933–1937	Second five-year plan.
1936–1938	The Great Terror.
1938–1939	Lev Landau’s arrest and incarceration.
1938	Munich Agreement between the French-British alliance and Germany as a culmination of appeasement policy.
1938	December Lavrentii Beria becomes head of NKVD.
1939	AUGUST—German-Soviet Pact signed in Moscow.
1939–1941	Initial Soviet nuclear research of nuclear explosions follows the discovery of nuclear fission.
1939	SEPTEMBER—World War II begins with simultaneous attacks on Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union.
1939–1940	War between Finland and the Soviet Union.
1941	JUNE—Germany attacks the Soviet Union.
1941	FALL—Scientific institutions evacuate to Kazan.
1942–1943	Battle of Stalingrad.
1943	Soviet research of nuclear explosions resumed.
1944	JUNE—D-Day: The Western Allies open the Second Front.
1945	APRIL—F. D. Roosevelt dies; Harry Truman becomes US president; Hitler commits suicide.
1945	MAY—World War II ends in Europe.
1945	JULY—First atomic bomb tested in US; Potsdam conference of Stalin, Truman, and Winston Churchill/Clement Attlee; Truman informs Stalin about the successful test of US atomic bomb.
1945	AUGUST—US drops atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Japan surrenders.
1945–1948	Soviet Union builds up the system of satellite states in Eastern Europe.
1946	Soviet administrators and scientists discuss the possibility of thermonuclear weapons.
1949	Communist victory in China.
1949	AUGUST 29—Successful first Soviet test of nuclear device in the Semipalatinsk proving ground (Eastern Kazakhstan).
1950	President Truman’s decision about the development of the hydrogen bomb
1950–1953	Korean War.
1952-1953	Peak of anti-Semitic activities in the Soviet Union, “Doctors’ plot.”
1953	MARCH—Stalin dies.
1953	JUNE—Arrest, then execution of Beria.
1953	AUGUST 12—Soviet nuclear bomb test at Semipalatinsk; it is claimed to be the world’s first hydrogen bomb; in reality it is a boosted fission bomb with a minor fusion component—“layered cake” design (sloika).
1953	SEPTEMBER—Nikita Khrushchev becomes the first secretary of the Communist Party.
1955	Nikolai Bulganin replaces Georgii Malenkov as prime minister; remains prime minister until March 1958.
1955	Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin visit Great Britain, accompanied by Igor Kurchatov, the chief Soviet nuclear scientist.
1955	NOVEMBER 22—First Soviet hydrogen bomb test at Semipalatinsk; utilizes the radiation implosion technology.
1956	FEBRUARY—Twentieth Party Congress, Khrushchev unmasks Stalin’s crimes in a secret speech.
1956	First Soviet Nobel Prize, awarded to Nikolai Semenov in Chemistry.
1956	OCTOBER–NOVEMBER—Hungarian Revolution and its suppression by Soviet invasion.
1957	JUNE—Khrushchev consolidates his power by removing most old-timers from the leadership.
1957	OCTOBER—Sputnik.
1958	MARCH—Khrushchev assumes the office of prime minister in addition to party first secretary.
1958	Nobel Prizes for Soviet citizens: Pavel Cherenkov, Ilya Frank, and Igor Tamm in Physics; Boris Pasternak in Literature; Pasternak is blackmailed to decline the award.
1959	Khrushchev visits the US.
1960	Downing of the American U-2 spy plane.
1961	Yurii Gagarin, first human being in space orbit.
1961	OCTOBER—Twenty-Second Party Congress, Stalin’s body is removed from the Mausoleum.
1961	OCTOBER 30—Soviet hydrogen bomb test at Novaya Zemlya Archipelago proving ground; highest yield ever (50 megaton), nicknamed “Czar Bomb.”
1962	Lev Landau falls victim of tragic automobile accident; receives Nobel Prize.
1962	Cuban missile crisis.
1963	Nuclear test ban treaty signed.
1964	Khrushchev is removed from power; Leonid Brezhnev is the new Soviet leader.
1964	Nikolai Basov and Aleksandr Prokhorov share the Nobel Prize with Charles Townes for their work in quantum electronics leading to the discovery of maser and laser.
1968	JULY—Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty between the US and the Soviet Union
1968	AUGUST—Soviet and other Warsaw Treaty armies invade Czechoslovakia to abort democratization called the “Prague Spring.”
1970	Aleksander Solzhenitsyn is awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
1972	Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT).
1974	Solzhenitsyn is exiled from the Soviet Union.
1975	Andrei Sakharov is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize; Elena Bonner, his second wife, receives it because Sakharov is not allowed out of the country.
1978	Petr Kapitza receives the Nobel Prize.
1979	JUNE—Brezhnev and Jimmy Carter sign SALT II (though later it is not ratified).
1979	DECEMBER—Soviet Union starts Afghanistan War.
1980	JANUARY—Sakharov is exiled to Gorky.
1980	Many democratic countries boycott the Moscow Summer Olympics.
1981	Marital law in Poland; the Solidarity movement is banned.
1982	Brezhnev dies; former KGB chief Yurii Andropov is the new party leader.
1983	The Soviets shoot down a Korean civilian jetliner; President Ronald Reagan calls the Soviet Union the “Evil Empire”; declares the Strategic Defense Initiative.
1984	Andropov dies; Konstantin Chernenko becomes the Soviet party leader.
1985	MARCH—Chernenko dies; Mikhail Gorbachev becomes the Soviet party leader.
1985	NOVEMBER—Gorbachev-Reagan summit takes place in Geneva.
1986	APRIL—Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe.
1986	OCTOBER—Gorbachev-Reagan summit in Reykjavik.
1986	DECEMBER—Sakharov is released from exile; returns to Moscow.
1987	Gorbachev-Reagan summit in Washington, DC; Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty is signed.
1989	Soviet Union withdraws from Afghanistan; Congress of People’s Deputies in Moscow; East European communist regimes collapse.
1990	Reunification of Germany.
1991	AUGUST—Anti-democracy coup is defeated in Moscow.
1991	Collapse of the Soviet Union; independent Russia and fourteen other independent republics emerge; Leningrad is renamed St. Petersburg (but the surrounding region retains the name Leningradskaya Oblast’).