Soviet–Japanese War
The Red Army crushes the Kwantung Army in three weeks
On 8 August 1945, as agreed at Yalta, the USSR declared war on Japan and struck into Manchuria, ending Manchukuo. Soviet troops took southern Sakhalin, the Kurils and Korea north of the 38th parallel, and on 2 September Japan signed its surrender.
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Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1939–1945 World War II — 6 years earlier
- 1945 Founding of the United Nations — same year
- 1947–1991 Cold War — 2 years later
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — 3 years later
- 1949 Founding of NATO — 4 years later
Europe
- 1928 Discovery of penicillin — 17 years earlier
- 1933 Hitler comes to power — 12 years earlier
- 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War — 9 years earlier
- 1941–1945 The Holocaust — 4 years earlier
- 1953 Discovery of the DNA double helix — 8 years later
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1936–1938 Great Purge — 9 years earlier
- 1941–1944 Siege of Leningrad — 4 years earlier
- 1942–1943 Battle of Stalingrad — 3 years earlier
- 1945 German surrender and Victory Day — same year
- 1957 Sputnik 1, the first satellite — 12 years later
Middle East
- 1932 Kingdom of Saudi Arabia proclaimed — 13 years earlier
- 1941 Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran — 4 years earlier
- 1948 Founding of the State of Israel — 3 years later
- 1948–1949 1948 Arab–Israeli War and the Nakba — 3 years later
- 1953 Iranian coup against Mosaddegh — 8 years later
Africa
- 1935–1937 Italy invades Ethiopia — 10 years earlier
- 1948 Apartheid begins in South Africa — 3 years later
- 1952 Egyptian revolution of 1952 — 7 years later
- 1956 The Suez Crisis — 11 years later
- 1958 Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart — 13 years later
Americas
- 1929 Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression — 16 years earlier
- 1945 ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer — same year
- 1947 Invention of the transistor — 2 years later
- 1969 Moon landing — 24 years later
- c. 1970 Mass deforestation of the Amazon begins — 25 years later
Oceania
- 1936 Death of the last thylacine — 9 years earlier
- 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor — 4 years earlier
- 1942 The Battle of Midway — 3 years earlier
- 1954 The Castle Bravo test at Bikini — 9 years later
- 1959 The Antarctic Treaty — 14 years later
Alive at the time
- Mahatma Gandhi (aged 76)
- Winston Churchill (aged 71)
- Joseph Stalin (aged 67)
- Albert Einstein (aged 66)
- Pablo Picasso (aged 64)
- Adolf Hitler (aged 56)
- Charlie Chaplin (aged 56)
- Mao Zedong (aged 52)
- Nelson Mandela (aged 27)
- Martin Luther King Jr. (aged 16)