Turksib: the golden link
Rails from north and south meet in the Kazakh steppe
The Turkestan–Siberia Railway, about 1,450 km long, was built to carry Siberian grain and timber to Central Asia and cotton back north. In April 1930 the last rails were laid at Aina-Bulak, a ceremony Ilf and Petrov satirised in The Little Golden Calf.
Wikipedia (Russian) · Wikipedia (English) · 20th century
Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1914–1918 World War I — 16 years earlier
- 1918–1920 Spanish flu pandemic — 12 years earlier
- 1939–1945 World War II — 9 years later
- 1947–1991 Cold War — 17 years later
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — 18 years later
Europe
- 1919 Treaty of Versailles — 11 years earlier
- 1928 Discovery of penicillin — 2 years earlier
- 1933 Hitler comes to power — 3 years later
- 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War — 6 years later
- 1941–1945 The Holocaust — 11 years later
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1917 October Revolution — 13 years earlier
- 1929–1933 Collectivization in the Soviet Union — 1 year earlier
- 1936–1938 Great Purge — 6 years later
- 1941–1944 Siege of Leningrad — 11 years later
- 1942–1943 Battle of Stalingrad — 12 years later
Middle East
- 1908 Oil struck at Masjed Soleyman — 22 years earlier
- 1915–1917 Armenian genocide — 15 years earlier
- 1916 Sykes–Picot Agreement — 14 years earlier
- 1923 Treaty of Lausanne — 7 years earlier
- 1932 Kingdom of Saudi Arabia proclaimed — 2 years later
Africa
- 1922 Discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb — 8 years earlier
- 1935–1937 Italy invades Ethiopia — 5 years later
- 1948 Apartheid begins in South Africa — 18 years later
- 1952 Egyptian revolution of 1952 — 22 years later
Americas
- 1914 Opening of the Panama Canal — 16 years earlier
- 1920–1933 Prohibition in the United States — 10 years earlier
- 1929 Wall Street Crash — 1 year earlier
- c. 1930–1936 Dust Bowl — same year
- 1933–1939 New Deal — 3 years later
Oceania
- 1911 Amundsen reaches the South Pole — 19 years earlier
- 1912 The death of Scott's polar party — 18 years earlier
- 1936 Death of the last thylacine — 6 years later
- 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor — 11 years later
- 1942 The Battle of Midway — 12 years later
Alive at the time
- Thomas Edison (aged 83)
- Nikola Tesla (aged 74)
- Marie Curie (aged 63)
- Mahatma Gandhi (aged 61)
- Ernest Rutherford (aged 59)
- Winston Churchill (aged 56)
- Joseph Stalin (aged 52)
- Albert Einstein (aged 51)
- Pablo Picasso (aged 49)
- Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (aged 49)