Russian History Events

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...
1917 Mar 15
to 1917 Jul 20
 Russian Revolution
Russia in Upheaval When War Broke Out The rumblings of Revolution became audible in 1913, when an epidemic of strikes broke out in Petrograd (Saint Petersburg), Moscow and other indust...
1917 Jun 29
to 1917 Jul 20
 Russian Army Deserts and is Expelled from Galicia
Russian Army, 1,000,000 General Brusiloff General Kornilov General Erdelli General Gutor General Tcheremisoff Prince Gargarin German-Austro-Hungarian Army, 800,000 General Mac...
1917 Jul
to 1917 Oct
Bolsheviks Seize Control of the Russian Government
Social Revolutionary Army General Kornilov, Commander-in-Chief Bolshevik Army Leon Trotsky, Commander-in-Chief Through the June elections throughout continued to struggle for the ...
1917 Nov 28 Peace Talks Begin Between Russia and Germany
The Bolshevik delegates went through the farce of opening "peace parleys" with the Germans on November 28, 1917, crossing over into the German lines under a flag of truce. The Germans con...
1919 Mar 24 Joseph Stalin Marries Nadezhda Alliluyeva
Stalin's wife, who was one of Lenin's secretaries after the revolution, married him when she was 17 and he was 40. As a schoolgirl she looked up to him as a determined and devoted revolut...
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...
1940 Apr 3 Katyn Forest Massacre
On April 13, 1943, the Germans announced that mass graves had been discovered in the Katyn Forest, in their area of occupation, containing the bodies of thousands of Polish officers who h...
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 Apr 14 Joseph Stalin's Son Yakov Dzhugashvili Commits Suicide
THE truth behind the mysterious death of Stalin's son, Yakov Dzhugashvili, in a German concentration camp has finally been unravelled by Russian historians. For years German propagandi...
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 ...
1943 Nov 28
to 1943 Dec 1
 Tehran Conference
The first of only two wartime meetings between the three leaders, the Tehran Conference opened with Stalin brimming with confidence after several major victories on the Eastern Front. Ope...
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 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...
2009 Aug 27 Death of Sergei Mikhalkov
Sergei Mikhalkov, the author of the lyrics of the Soviet and Russian national anthems (and the father of the Russian film director Nikita Milhalkov), died in Moscow on August 27th 2009, a...