Burgess and Maclean defect
Two British diplomats vanish and turn up years later in Moscow
In 1951 the diplomats Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, recruited by the NKVD as Cambridge students, fled to the USSR and lived in Kuybyshev; their defection was confirmed only in 1956 at a Moscow press conference. Suspicion fell on Kim Philby, who fled in 1963; the fourth was the royal art keeper Anthony Blunt, the fifth John Cairncross.
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Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1939–1945 World War II — 12 years earlier
- 1945 Founding of the United Nations — 6 years earlier
- 1947–1991 Cold War — 4 years earlier
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — 3 years earlier
- 1949 Founding of NATO — 2 years earlier
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1941–1944 Siege of Leningrad — 10 years earlier
- 1942–1943 Battle of Stalingrad — 9 years earlier
- 1945 German surrender and Victory Day — 6 years earlier
- 1957 Sputnik 1, the first satellite — 6 years later
- 1961 Gagarin's flight — 10 years later
Middle East
- 1948 Founding of the State of Israel — 3 years earlier
- 1948–1949 1948 Arab–Israeli War and the Nakba — 3 years earlier
- 1953 Iranian coup against Mosaddegh — 2 years later
- 1958 14 July Revolution in Iraq — 7 years later
- 1960 Founding of OPEC — 9 years later
Africa
- 1948 Apartheid begins in South Africa — 3 years earlier
- 1952 Egyptian revolution of 1952 — 1 year later
- 1956 The Suez Crisis — 5 years later
- 1958 Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart — 7 years later
- 1960 Year of Africa — 9 years later
Asia
- 1945 Atomic bombing of Hiroshima — 6 years earlier
- 1950–1953 Korean War — 1 year earlier
- 1953 First ascent of Everest — 2 years later
- 1966–1976 Cultural Revolution in China — 15 years later
- 1975–1979 The Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian genocide — 24 years later
Americas
- 1929 Wall Street Crash — 22 years earlier
- 1947 Invention of the transistor — 4 years earlier
- 1955 Salk polio vaccine declared safe — 4 years later
- 1969 Moon landing — 18 years later
- c. 1970 Mass deforestation of the Amazon begins — 19 years later
Oceania
- 1936 Death of the last thylacine — 15 years earlier
- 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor — 10 years earlier
- 1942 The Battle of Midway — 9 years earlier
- 1954 The Castle Bravo test at Bikini — 3 years later
- 1959 The Antarctic Treaty — 8 years later
Alive at the time
- Winston Churchill (aged 77)
- Joseph Stalin (aged 73)
- Albert Einstein (aged 72)
- Pablo Picasso (aged 70)
- Charlie Chaplin (aged 62)
- Mao Zedong (aged 58)
- Georgy Zhukov (aged 55)
- Nelson Mandela (aged 33)
- Martin Luther King Jr. (aged 22)
- Neil Armstrong (aged 21)