Biographies & Memoirs

Chronology

1878 (79?)

Ioseb Dzhugashvili (Stalin) born in Gori, Georgia, Russian Empire

1894–99

Stalin educated at Tiflis Orthodox Seminary, first contact with Marxist literature

1899–1905

Stalin’s revolutionary activity in Georgia

1906–17

Stalin suffers arrests and Siberian exile

1917

Stalin’s participation in Bolshevik Revolution

1918–21

Stalin as political commissar in civil war and commissar of nationalities

1919

First Congress of Comintern

1921–27

New Economic Policy

1922

Stalin becomes general secretary of the Communist Party

1928

Shakhty Trial

1929

Beginning of collectivization; first five-year plan launched

1932

Creation of Union of Soviet Writers

1934 (December)

Assassination of Kirov

1936

Beginning of show trials of leading Bolsheviks

1936–38

Great Terror

1939 (August)

Nazi-Soviet Pact

1939–40

Soviet-Finnish War; occupation of Baltic states and Bessarabia

1941 (April)

Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact

1941 (22 June)

Nazi invasion of Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa)

1941 (December)

Germans stopped at Moscow

1942 (June)

Major German offensive in Ukraine

1942–43

Battle of Stalingrad

1943 (May)

Dissolution of Comintern

1943 (July)

Battle of Kursk

1943 (September)

Stalin gives permission for a Church Council

1943 (November)

Tehran Conference

1943–44

Deportation of peoples of North Caucasus and Crimea

1944 (August–October)

Warsaw Uprising

1945 (February)

Election of Patriarch Aleksei; Yalta Conference

1945 (May)

Surrender of Nazi Germany

1945 (July–August)

Potsdam Conference

1946 (February)

Stalin’s election speech on inevitability of war

1946 (August)

Central Committee attack on Zoshchenko and Akhmatova

1946–47

Famine in Ukraine

1947

Creation of Cominform; currency reform in USSR

1948 (January)

Murder of Mikhoels

1948 (February)

Central Committee denunciation of decadence in music

1948 (June)

Cominform expels Yugoslavia

1948 (November)

Dissolution of Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

1949

Leningrad Affair

1953 (March)

Death of Stalin

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