Battles of Khalkhin Gol
Zhukov's troops encircle the Japanese on the Mongolian border
From May to September 1939 Soviet and Mongolian forces fought Japan's Kwantung Army over the disputed Mongolia–Manchukuo border. In August Georgy Zhukov's group encircled and routed the Japanese, a defeat that pushed Japan towards its 1941 neutrality pact with the USSR.
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Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1918–1920 Spanish flu pandemic — 21 years earlier
- 1939–1945 World War II — same year
- 1947–1991 Cold War — 8 years later
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — 9 years later
- 1949 Founding of NATO — 10 years later
Europe
- 1928 Discovery of penicillin — 11 years earlier
- 1933 Hitler comes to power — 6 years earlier
- 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War — 3 years earlier
- 1941–1945 The Holocaust — 2 years later
- 1953 Discovery of the DNA double helix — 14 years later
Middle East
- 1915–1917 Armenian genocide — 24 years earlier
- 1916 Sykes–Picot Agreement — 23 years earlier
- 1932 Kingdom of Saudi Arabia proclaimed — 7 years earlier
- 1941 Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran — 2 years later
- 1948 Founding of the State of Israel — 9 years later
Africa
- 1922 Discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb — 17 years earlier
- 1935–1937 Italy invades Ethiopia — 4 years earlier
- 1948 Apartheid begins in South Africa — 9 years later
- 1952 Egyptian revolution of 1952 — 13 years later
- 1956 The Suez Crisis — 17 years later
Asia
- 1937–1938 Nanjing Massacre — 2 years earlier
- 1942 Fall of Singapore — 3 years later
- 1943 Bengal famine — 4 years later
- 1945 Atomic bombing of Hiroshima — 6 years later
- 1953 First ascent of Everest — 14 years later
Americas
- 1914 Opening of the Panama Canal — 25 years earlier
- 1929 Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression — 10 years earlier
- 1933–1939 New Deal — 6 years earlier
- 1945 ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer — 6 years later
- 1947 Invention of the transistor — 8 years later
Oceania
- 1936 Death of the last thylacine — 3 years earlier
- 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor — 2 years later
- 1942 The Battle of Midway — 3 years later
- 1954 The Castle Bravo test at Bikini — 15 years later
- 1959 The Antarctic Treaty — 20 years later
Alive at the time
- Nikola Tesla (aged 83)
- Mahatma Gandhi (aged 70)
- Winston Churchill (aged 65)
- Joseph Stalin (aged 61)
- Albert Einstein (aged 60)
- Pablo Picasso (aged 58)
- Adolf Hitler (aged 50)
- Charlie Chaplin (aged 50)
- Mao Zedong (aged 46)
- Nelson Mandela (aged 21)