1966 Tashkent earthquake
A quake right under the city leaves 300,000 homeless
On 26 April 1966 a shallow earthquake struck directly beneath central Tashkent. Deaths were relatively few (estimates range from 15 to 200), but tens of thousands of homes were destroyed and about 300,000 people left homeless. Builders from across the USSR rebuilt the city, replacing the old mud-brick centre with Soviet blocks.
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Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1947–1991 Cold War — 19 years earlier
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — 18 years earlier
- 1949 Founding of NATO — 17 years earlier
- 1980 Smallpox declared eradicated — 14 years later
- 1981 AIDS first described — 15 years later
Europe
- 1941–1945 The Holocaust — 25 years earlier
- 1953 Discovery of the DNA double helix — 13 years earlier
- 1968 May 1968 in France — 2 years later
- 1989 Invention of the World Wide Web — 23 years later
- 1989 Fall of the Berlin Wall — 23 years later
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1945 German surrender and Victory Day — 21 years earlier
- 1957 Sputnik 1, the first satellite — 9 years earlier
- 1961 Gagarin's flight — 5 years earlier
- 1985–1991 Perestroika — 19 years later
- 1989 Revolutions of 1989 — 23 years later
Middle East
- 1953 Iranian coup against Mosaddegh — 13 years earlier
- 1958 14 July Revolution in Iraq — 8 years earlier
- 1960 Founding of OPEC — 6 years earlier
- 1978 Camp David Accords — 12 years later
- 1979 Iranian Revolution — 13 years later
Africa
- 1958 Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart — 8 years earlier
- 1960 Year of Africa — 6 years earlier
- 1963 The Organisation of African Unity is founded — 3 years earlier
- 1967 First human heart transplant — 1 year later
- 1967–1970 Nigerian Civil War and Biafra — 1 year later
Americas
- 1960 Great Chilean earthquake — 6 years earlier
- 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis — 4 years earlier
- 1969 Moon landing — 3 years later
- c. 1970 Mass deforestation of the Amazon begins — 4 years later
- 1983 ARPANET adopts TCP/IP — 17 years later
Oceania
- 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor — 25 years earlier
- 1942 The Battle of Midway — 24 years earlier
- 1954 The Castle Bravo test at Bikini — 12 years earlier
- 1959 The Antarctic Treaty — 7 years earlier
Alive at the time
- Pablo Picasso (aged 85)
- Charlie Chaplin (aged 77)
- Mao Zedong (aged 73)
- Georgy Zhukov (aged 70)
- Nelson Mandela (aged 48)
- Martin Luther King Jr. (aged 37)
- Neil Armstrong (aged 36)
- Yuri Gagarin (aged 32)
- Bertrand Russell (aged 94)
- Harry S. Truman (aged 82)