The Ashgabat earthquake
In seconds one night, a city is reduced to rubble
In the early hours of 6 October 1948 a magnitude 7.3 earthquake almost completely destroyed Ashgabat. Estimates of the dead range from 10,000 to over 100,000; the Soviet press reported it only briefly, and its scale was long kept quiet.
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Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1939–1945 World War II — 9 years earlier
- 1945 Founding of the United Nations — 3 years earlier
- 1947–1991 Cold War — 1 year earlier
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — same year
- 1949 Founding of NATO — 1 year later
Europe
- 1928 Discovery of penicillin — 20 years earlier
- 1933 Hitler comes to power — 15 years earlier
- 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War — 12 years earlier
- 1941–1945 The Holocaust — 7 years earlier
- 1953 Discovery of the DNA double helix — 5 years later
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1936–1938 Great Purge — 12 years earlier
- 1941–1944 Siege of Leningrad — 7 years earlier
- 1942–1943 Battle of Stalingrad — 6 years earlier
- 1945 German surrender and Victory Day — 3 years earlier
- 1957 Sputnik 1, the first satellite — 9 years later
Middle East
- 1941 Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran — 7 years earlier
- 1948 Founding of the State of Israel — same year
- 1948–1949 1948 Arab–Israeli War and the Nakba — same year
- 1953 Iranian coup against Mosaddegh — 5 years later
- 1958 14 July Revolution in Iraq — 10 years later
Africa
- 1948 Apartheid begins in South Africa — same year
- 1952 Egyptian revolution of 1952 — 4 years later
- 1956 The Suez Crisis — 8 years later
- 1958 Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart — 10 years later
- 1960 Year of Africa — 12 years later
Americas
- 1929 Wall Street Crash — 19 years earlier
- 1945 ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer — 3 years earlier
- 1947 Invention of the transistor — 1 year earlier
- 1969 Moon landing — 21 years later
- c. 1970 Mass deforestation of the Amazon begins — 22 years later
Oceania
- 1936 Death of the last thylacine — 12 years earlier
- 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor — 7 years earlier
- 1942 The Battle of Midway — 6 years earlier
- 1954 The Castle Bravo test at Bikini — 6 years later
- 1959 The Antarctic Treaty — 11 years later
Alive at the time
- Mahatma Gandhi (aged 79)
- Winston Churchill (aged 74)
- Joseph Stalin (aged 70)
- Albert Einstein (aged 69)
- Pablo Picasso (aged 67)
- Charlie Chaplin (aged 59)
- Mao Zedong (aged 55)
- Georgy Zhukov (aged 52)
- Nelson Mandela (aged 30)
- Martin Luther King Jr. (aged 19)