SMERSH is created
Soviet military counterintelligence is named 'Death to Spies'
In April 1943 Soviet military counterintelligence was named SMERSH, 'Death to Spies', a name coined by Stalin himself; Viktor Abakumov led it until it was abolished in May 1946. It hunted Abwehr agents, screened returning POWs, ran over 183 radio games against German intelligence, and later fought James Bond in Fleming's early novels.
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Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1918–1920 Spanish flu pandemic — 25 years earlier
- 1939–1945 World War II — 4 years earlier
- 1947–1991 Cold War — 4 years later
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — 5 years later
- 1949 Founding of NATO — 6 years later
Europe
- 1928 Discovery of penicillin — 15 years earlier
- 1933 Hitler comes to power — 10 years earlier
- 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War — 7 years earlier
- 1941–1945 The Holocaust — 2 years earlier
- 1953 Discovery of the DNA double helix — 10 years later
Middle East
- 1932 Kingdom of Saudi Arabia proclaimed — 11 years earlier
- 1941 Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran — 2 years earlier
- 1948 Founding of the State of Israel — 5 years later
- 1948–1949 1948 Arab–Israeli War and the Nakba — 5 years later
- 1953 Iranian coup against Mosaddegh — 10 years later
Africa
- 1935–1937 Italy invades Ethiopia — 8 years earlier
- 1948 Apartheid begins in South Africa — 5 years later
- 1952 Egyptian revolution of 1952 — 9 years later
- 1956 The Suez Crisis — 13 years later
- 1958 Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart — 15 years later
Asia
- 1942 Fall of Singapore — 1 year earlier
- 1943 Bengal famine — same year
- 1945 Atomic bombing of Hiroshima — 2 years later
- 1953 First ascent of Everest — 10 years later
- 1966–1976 Cultural Revolution in China — 23 years later
Americas
- 1929 Wall Street Crash — 14 years earlier
- 1933–1939 New Deal — 10 years earlier
- 1945 ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer — 2 years later
- 1947 Invention of the transistor — 4 years later
- 1955 Salk polio vaccine declared safe — 12 years later
Oceania
- 1936 Death of the last thylacine — 7 years earlier
- 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor — 2 years earlier
- 1942 The Battle of Midway — 1 year earlier
- 1954 The Castle Bravo test at Bikini — 11 years later
- 1959 The Antarctic Treaty — 16 years later
Alive at the time
- Nikola Tesla (aged 87)
- Mahatma Gandhi (aged 74)
- Winston Churchill (aged 69)
- Joseph Stalin (aged 65)
- Albert Einstein (aged 64)
- Pablo Picasso (aged 62)
- Adolf Hitler (aged 54)
- Charlie Chaplin (aged 54)
- Mao Zedong (aged 50)
- Georgy Zhukov (aged 47)