Deportations of the peoples of the Caucasus and Crimea
Whole peoples are branded traitors and exiled to Central Asia
From November 1943 to the summer of 1944 the NKVD deported entire peoples, accused of collaborating with the Germans, within days each: the Karachays, Kalmyks, Chechens and Ingush, Balkars (8 March 1944), Crimean Tatars and Meskhetian Turks. They were shipped in freight cars to Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, and tens of thousands died on the way and in the first years of exile. Their autonomies were abolished; most could return only in 1957, the Crimean Tatars only in the late 1980s.
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Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1939–1945 World War II — 5 years earlier
- 1945 Founding of the United Nations — 1 year later
- 1947–1991 Cold War — 3 years later
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — 4 years later
- 1949 Founding of NATO — 5 years later
Europe
- 1928 Discovery of penicillin — 16 years earlier
- 1933 Hitler comes to power — 11 years earlier
- 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War — 8 years earlier
- 1941–1945 The Holocaust — 3 years earlier
- 1953 Discovery of the DNA double helix — 9 years later
Middle East
- 1923 Treaty of Lausanne — 21 years earlier
- 1932 Kingdom of Saudi Arabia proclaimed — 12 years earlier
- 1948 Founding of the State of Israel — 4 years later
- 1948–1949 1948 Arab–Israeli War and the Nakba — 4 years later
- 1953 Iranian coup against Mosaddegh — 9 years later
Africa
- 1935–1937 Italy invades Ethiopia — 9 years earlier
- 1956 The Suez Crisis — 12 years later
- 1958 Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart — 14 years later
- 1960 Year of Africa — 16 years later
- 1963 The Organisation of African Unity is founded — 19 years later
Asia
- 1945 Atomic bombing of Hiroshima — 1 year later
- 1945 Indonesia proclaims independence — 1 year later
- 1947 Independence and Partition of India — 3 years later
- 1953 First ascent of Everest — 9 years later
- 1966–1976 Cultural Revolution in China — 22 years later
Americas
- 1929 Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression — 15 years earlier
- 1945 ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer — 1 year later
- 1947 Invention of the transistor — 3 years later
- 1955 Salk polio vaccine declared safe — 11 years later
- 1969 Moon landing — 25 years later
Oceania
- 1936 Death of the last thylacine — 8 years earlier
- 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor — 3 years earlier
- 1942 The Battle of Midway — 2 years earlier
- 1954 The Castle Bravo test at Bikini — 10 years later
- 1959 The Antarctic Treaty — 15 years later
Alive at the time
- Mahatma Gandhi (aged 75)
- Winston Churchill (aged 70)
- Joseph Stalin (aged 66)
- Albert Einstein (aged 65)
- Pablo Picasso (aged 63)
- Adolf Hitler (aged 55)
- Charlie Chaplin (aged 55)
- Mao Zedong (aged 51)
- Nelson Mandela (aged 26)
- Martin Luther King Jr. (aged 15)