Great Purge
Mass arrests and executions sweep the Soviet Union
In 1936–1938 the USSR conducted mass political repression, including the Moscow show trials. According to NKVD records, about 1.5 million people were arrested and some 680,000 executed in 1937–1938 alone.
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Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1918–1920 Spanish flu pandemic — 18 years earlier
- 1939–1945 World War II — 3 years later
- 1947–1991 Cold War — 11 years later
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — 12 years later
- 1949 Founding of NATO — 13 years later
Europe
- 1919 Treaty of Versailles — 17 years earlier
- 1928 Discovery of penicillin — 8 years earlier
- 1933 Hitler comes to power — 3 years earlier
- 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War — same year
- 1941–1945 The Holocaust — 5 years later
Middle East
- 1915 Armenian genocide — 21 years earlier
- 1916 Sykes–Picot Agreement — 20 years earlier
- 1916–1918 The Arab Revolt — 20 years earlier
- 1932 Kingdom of Saudi Arabia proclaimed — 4 years earlier
- 1948 Founding of the State of Israel — 12 years later
Africa
- 1922 Discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb — 14 years earlier
- 1935–1937 Italy invades Ethiopia — 1 year earlier
- 1956 The Suez Crisis — 20 years later
- 1958 Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart — 22 years later
- 1960 Year of Africa — 24 years later
Asia
- 1931 China floods — 5 years earlier
- 1934–1935 Long March — 2 years earlier
- 1945 Atomic bombing of Hiroshima — 9 years later
- 1945 Indonesia proclaims independence — 9 years later
- 1953 First ascent of Everest — 17 years later
Americas
- 1914 Opening of the Panama Canal — 22 years earlier
- 1929 Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression — 7 years earlier
- c. 1930–1936 Dust Bowl — 6 years earlier
- 1945 ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer — 9 years later
- 1947 Invention of the transistor — 11 years later
Oceania
- 1936 Death of the last thylacine — same year
- 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor — 5 years later
- 1942 The Battle of Midway — 6 years later
- 1954 The Castle Bravo test at Bikini — 18 years later
- 1959 The Antarctic Treaty — 23 years later
Alive at the time
- Nikola Tesla (aged 80)
- Mahatma Gandhi (aged 67)
- Ernest Rutherford (aged 65)
- Winston Churchill (aged 62)
- Joseph Stalin (aged 58)
- Albert Einstein (aged 57)
- Pablo Picasso (aged 55)
- Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (aged 55)
- Adolf Hitler (aged 47)
- Charlie Chaplin (aged 47)