Russia Events

1838
to 1842
The First Anglo-Afghan War
The First Anglo–Afghan War lasted from 1839 to 1842. It was one of the first major conflicts during the Great Game, the 19th century competition for power and influence in Central Asia be...
1878
to 1880
The Second Anglo-Afghan War
The Second Anglo-Afghan War refers to a war between the United Kingdom and Afghanistan that lasted from 1878 to 1880. After tension between Russia and Britain in Europe ended with the ...
1878 Dec 18 Joseph Stalin Is Born
Joseph Stalin, was born in Gori, Georgia on 21st December, 1879. He was his mother's fourth child to be born in less than four years. The first three died and as Joseph was prone to bad h...
1888 Oct 29 Borki Train Disaster
On October 17 [N.S. October 29], 1888, the imperial train returning from the south derailed at the station of Borki, leaving twenty-one dead and thirty-seven injured. The railroad car car...
1896 May 18 Khodynka Tragedy
Nicholas II was crowned Tsar of Russia on May 14 , 1896. Four days later, a banquet was going to be held for the people at Khodynka Field. In the area of one town square, theaters, 150 bu...
1903 Joseph Stalin Joins The Bolsheviks
At the Second Congress of the Social Democratic Labour Party in London in 1903, there was a dispute between Vladimir Lenin and Julius Martov, two of SDLP's leaders. Lenin argued for a sma...
1906 Joseph Stalin Marries Ekaterina Svanidze
In about 1904 Stalin had married a pious Georgian girl, Ekaterina Svanidze. She died some three years later and left a son, Jacob, whom his father treated with contempt, calling him a wea...
1907 Mar 18 Joseph Stalin's Son Yakov Is Born
Yakov Dzhugashvili had never been popular with his father, whom he held in dread. Stalin disapproved of his choice of wife, Yulia Meltzer, a ballet dancer. When war broke out for the Russ...
1907 Aug 31 Signing of the Anglo-Russian Entente
The Anglo-Russian Entente or the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 was an accord signed on 31 August 1907 in St. Petersburg by Count Alexander Izvolsky, Foreign Minister of the Russian Emp...
1908 Jun 20 Tunguska Event
It is generally accepted that the Tunguska event resulted from the catastrophic disruption of a large meteor high above the ground. Previous studies have yielded diverse interpretations a...
1908 Jun 30 Tunguska Explosion
[T]he peasants saw a body shining very brightly (too bright for the naked eye) with a bluish-white light... The body was in the form of 'a pipe', i.e. cylindrical. The sky was cloudless, ...
1912 Joseph Stalin Becomes Editor of 'Pravda'
Stalin served as the editor of Pravda {Truth} in 1913 and wrote his first treatise, Marxism and the National Question in 1914. Just prior to its publication, Stalin was exiled to Siberia ...
1914 Aug 17 Battle of Stallupönen
On August 17 Rennenkampf started the invasion of Prussia, marching the First Army directly westward towards the German lines. Although he faced no resistance, Rennenkampf stopped his adva...
1914 Aug 20 Battle of Gumbinnen
The Battle of Gumbinnen, initiated by forces of the German Empire on August 20, 1914, was the first major German offensive on the Eastern Front during the First World War. Due to the hast...
1914 Sep 9 First Battle of the Masurian Lakes Begins
The First Battle of the Masurian Lakes was a German offensive in the Eastern Front during the early stages of World War I. It pushed the Russian First Army back across its entire front, e...
1916 Oct 20 Battleship 'Imperatritsa Mariya' Magazine Explosion
The second class, the three-ship Imperatritsa Maria-class, were true dreadnoughts. Displacing 22,600 tons, armed with 12 X 12-inch guns, and capable of 21 knots, they tipped the balance o...
1918
to 1920
Russian Civil War
Russian Civil War... (1918-20), conflict in which the Red Army successfully defended the newly formed Bolshevik government against various Russian and interventionist anti-Bolshevik armie...
1918 Aug 30 Fanny Kaplan Attempts to Assassinate Vladimir Lenin
According to official accounts, on August 30, 1918, Lenin was speaking at a Moscow factory called "Hammer and Sickle". As Lenin left the building and before he entered his car, Fanny Kapl...
1919 Feb
to 1921 Mar
Polish-Soviet War
In the Polish-Soviet War (1920–1921), the Soviets battled the Poles all the way back to Warsaw, but Polish forces eventually drove the Soviets out of the country. The Soviets sued for pea...
1921 Feb 15
to 1921 Mar 17
 Soviet Invasion of Georgia
In January, 1921 the Soviet Government decided to annex Georgia. The 11th Red Army was to advance into Georgia on the pretext of supporting the “peasants and workers rebellion against the...
1926 Feb 28 Joseph Stalin's Daughter Svetlana Is Born
Svetlana was Communist leader Joseph Stalin’s only daughter. Her mother was his second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva. Raised by a nurse she only occasionally saw her parents. She was only six...
1928 Stalin Begins Collectivization Of Agriculture
To satisfy the state's need for increased food supplies, the First Five-Year Plan called for the organization of the peasantry into collective units that the authorities could easily cont...
1928 Stalin's First Five-Year Plan Begins
The first Five Year Plan introduced in 1928, concentrated on the development of iron and steel, machine-tools, electric power and transport. Joseph Stalin set the workers high targets. He...
1932
to 1933
The Ukrainian Holodomor
In recent years this national tragedy has become widely known as the Holodomor (from moryty holodom ‘to kill by means of starvation’). This tragic event was (1) a planned repression of th...
1932 Nov 9 Nadezhda Alliluyeva Dies
It was customary to bury not only rulers, but their wives, too, at the Novodevichy cemetery. At this point we would like to recall the wife of Joseph Stalin, Nadezhda Alliluyeva. This wom...
1934 Dec 1 Sergey Kirov is Killed
Sergey Kirov, a leader of the Russian Revolution and a high-ranking member of the Politburo, is shot to death at his Leningrad office by Communist Party member Leonid Nikolayev, likely at...
1936
to 1938
The Great Purge of 1936-1938
At three publicized show trials held in Moscow between 1936 and 1938, dozens of these Old Bolsheviks, including Zinov'ev, Kamenev, and Bukharin, confessed to improbable crimes against the...
1939 Aug 24 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (Treaty of Non-Aggression between the Third German Reich and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics)
The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, colloquially named after the Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and the German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, was an agreement officially ti...
1940 Jan 1 Joseph Stalin Is Named Time Magazine's 'Person Of The Year'
Since J. Stalin became the supreme power in Russia, much of the Revolution's history has been rewritten to magnify his part in those stirring events. Trotsky's part has been completely er...
1941 Apr 13 Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact Is Signed
The Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact was signed between Russia and Japan two years after the war between Russia and Japan at the Manchurian and Mongolian borders slowed inconclusively. The...
1943 Jan 4 Joseph Stalin Is Named Time Magazine's 'Person Of The Year' For A Second Time
"The year 1942 was a year of blood and strength. The man whose name means steel in Russian, whose few words of English include the American expression "tough guy" was the man of 1942. Only..." —Time Magazine
1943 Sep 8 Joseph Stalin Reestablishes The Russian Orthodox Church
The catastrophic course of combat in the beginning of World War II forced Stalin to mobilize all the national resources for defense, including the Russian Orthodox Church as the people's ...
1949 Dec 21 The 'International Stalin Prize for Strengthening Peace Among Peoples' Is Created
In June 1948, however, the leader of the Soviet-Norwegian Friendship Society and Communist Party member, Christian Hilt, wrote a letter to Stalin in which he proposed to set up a Maxim Go...
1952 Mar 10 Joseph Stalin Drafts The 'Stalin Note'
In a 1952 exchange of notes between the Soviet Union and the Western occupation powers, Stalin proposed new negotiations for a peace treaty in which German unification would be coupled wi...
1953 Jan 13 Joseph Stalin Alleges 'Doctors Plot' To Assassinate Soviet Leaders
Shortly before he died on March 5, 1953, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin accused nine doctors, six of them Jews, of plotting to poison and kill the Soviet leadership. The innocent men were a...
1957 Sep 29 Kyshtym Disaster
On 29 September 1957 a chemical explosion in the radioactive waste storage site involved some 20 million curies of material. When the cooling system of a radioactive waste containment uni...
1957 Oct 4 Soviet Union Launches Sputnik 1 Satellite
Sputnik 1 was the world's first Earth-orbiting artificial satellite. It was launched into a low altitude elliptical orbit by the Soviet Union on 4 October 1957, and was the first in a ser...
1962 Feb 10 Francis Gary Powers is Secretly Exchanged for Rudolf Ivanovich Abel at the Border of East Germany and West Berlin
When the U.S. government learned of Powers' disappearance over the Soviet Union, it issued a cover statement claiming a "weather plane" had crashed after its pilot had "difficulties with ...
1963 Oct 11 State Department Announces Recent Release of Two Russian Spies in Exchange for Two Americans
[Marvin Makinen] completed the fourth year of his undergraduate education at the Free University of Berlin as an exchange student from the University of Pennsylvania. Traveling in the Sov...
1975 Dec 10 Andrei Sakharov is Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov (Russian: Андре́й Дми́триевич Са́харов) (May 21, 1921 – December 14, 1989) was an eminent Soviet nuclear physicist, dissident and human rights activist. Sakhar...
1979 Apr 2 Sverdlovsk Anthrax Leak
In all, 96 people were hospitalized for anthrax during the Sverdlovsk outbreak of 1979, including cutaneous cases. Of these 96 hospitalized people, 6 were admitted to hospitals in Sverdlo...
1979 Apr 27 Five Prisoners Released from Soviet Union in Exchange for Two Soviet Spies
On 20 May 1978, three Soviet foreign intelligence officers were arrested in New Jersey while collecting an agent's report from a secret cache. One of them, the attaché of the Soviet missi...
1982 Oct 20 Luzhniki Disaster
On the evening of 20 October 1982 Spartak were playing Dutch club Haarlem for a place in the last 16 of the Uefa Cup. They would win the match on the way to a 5-1 aggregate victory, but i...
1983 Jul 21 Coldest Temperature on Earth is Recorded
The lowest temperature ever recorded at the surface of the Earth was −89.2 °C (−129 °F; 184 K) at the Russian Vostok Station in Antarctica July 21, 1983. Lower temperatures have been achi...
1983 Sep 1 Korean Air Lines Flight 007 Shot Down by Soviet Jet Interceptors
Soviet jet fighters intercept a Korean Airlines passenger flight in Russian airspace and shoot the plane down, killing 269 passengers and crewmembers. The incident dramatically increased ...
1984 Oct 11 Runway Collision Causes Explosion of Aeroflot Flight 3352
Flight 3352 as approaching Omsk in poor weather; light rain, visibility 2 miles, 300 feet ceiling. Landing lights were switched off as they caused a reflection due to the drizzle. Immedia...
1985 Jun 11 United States and Eastern Bloc Exchange Alleged Spies in Deal Involving 29 People
Marian Zacharski (born in Gdynia, Poland in 1951, raised in nearby Sopot), was a Polish Intelligence officer arrested in 1981 and convicted of espionage against the United States. After f...
1986 Feb 11 Release of Soviet Dissident Anatoly B. Shcharansky in Exchange for Alleged Soviet Spies
Shcharansky's treatment had symbolized the plight of the Soviet "refuseniks," people who had been refused permission to emigrate and then harassed in various ways for insisting on their d...
1990 Dec 10 Mikhail Gorbachev is Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
The Norwegian Nobel Committee has made this award in recognition of the leading role he has played in the radical changes that have taken place in East-West relations. President Gorbachev...
1995 Sep 28 Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (Oslo II) signed
Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip or Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement, or simply the Interim Agreement, also known as Oslo 2 (or Oslo II), and alternately known a...