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1940s |
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7 May 1945 |
Second World War: Germany surrenders. |
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14 August 1945 |
Second World War: Japan surrenders. |
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5 March 1946 |
Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ speech. |
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12 March 1947 |
Harry S. Truman proposes the ‘Truman Doctrine’. |
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5 June 1947 |
Announcement of the Marshall Plan. |
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25 February 1948 |
Communist takeover in Czechoslovakia. |
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24 June 1948 |
Start of the Berlin Blockade. |
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4 April 1949 |
NATO established by Washington Treaty. |
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12 May 1949 |
End of the Berlin Blockade. |
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23 May 1949 |
Formal division into East and West Germany. |
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29 August 1949 |
Soviet Union detonate their first atomic bomb. |
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1 October 1949 |
People’s Republic of China founded. |
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1950s |
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February 1950 |
Start of the McCarthy era. |
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25 June 1950 |
Start of the Korean War. |
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19 October 1950 |
China enters Korean War. |
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1 November 1952 |
USA detonate world’s first hydrogen bomb. |
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5 March 1953 |
Death of Stalin. |
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16 June 1953 |
Uprising in East Germany. |
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27 July 1953 |
End of Korean War. |
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21 July 1954 |
Vietnam divided at the 17th parallel. |
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14 May 1955 |
Formation of the Warsaw Pact. |
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25 February 1956 |
Khrushchev denounces Stalin’s method of rule. |
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June 1956 |
Polish Uprising. |
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23 October 1956 |
Start of Hungarian Uprising. |
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November 1956 |
Suez Crisis. |
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10 November 1956 |
End of the Hungarian Uprising. |
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4 October 1957 |
Soviet Union launches the first satellite, or Sputnik, into space. |
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January 1958 |
Chairman Mao launches the Great Leap Forward. |
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1 January 1959 |
Fidel Castro takes power in Cuba. |
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September 1959 |
Khrushchev visits USA. |
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26 September 1959 |
Start of Vietnam War. |
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1960s |
|
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May 1960 |
US U-2 spy plane shot down over Moscow. |
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12 April 1961 |
Soviet astronaut, Yuri Gagarin, becomes the first man in space. |
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17 April 1961 |
US-backed Bay of Pigs invasion. |
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12–13 August 1961 |
Berlin Wall erected. |
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October 1962 |
Cuban Missile Crisis. |
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June 1963 |
John F. Kennedy visits West Berlin. |
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22 November 1963 |
Assassination of Kennedy. |
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2 August 1964 |
Gulf of Tonkin incident escalates Vietnam War. |
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16 May 1966 |
Chairman Mao launches the Cultural Revolution. |
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5–10 June 1967 |
Arab-Israeli Six-Day War. |
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4 April 1968 |
Assassination of Martin Luther King. |
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August 1968 |
Soviet tanks crush Czechoslovakian revolt. |
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20 July 1969 |
USA lands first man on the moon. |
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1970s |
|
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February 1972 |
Richard Nixon visits China. |
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26 May 1972 |
SALT I signed. |
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15 January 1973 |
Nixon halts US bombing of North Vietnam. |
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30 April 1973 |
North Vietnamese tanks enter Saigon. |
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6–25 October 1973 |
Arab-Israeli ‘Yom Kippur’ War. |
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8 August 1974 |
Nixon resigns following Watergate scandal. |
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30 April 1975 |
South Vietnam surrenders. End of war. |
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30 August 1975 |
Helsinki Accords signed. |
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16 October 1978 |
Karol Wojtyla appointed Pope John Paul II. |
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1 April 1979 |
Islamic republic proclaimed in Iran. |
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24 December 1979 |
Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. |
|
1980s |
|
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13 December 1981 |
Martial law imposed in Poland and Solidarity banned. |
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1 September 1983 |
Soviet fighter plane shoots down a Korean civilian airliner. |
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26 April 1986 |
Explosion at nuclear power plant at Chernobyl. |
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12 June 1987 |
Ronald Reagan visits West Berlin. |
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15 May 1988 |
Soviet troops start to withdraw from Afghanistan. |
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15 February 1989 |
Soviet withdrawal completed. |
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16 June 1989 |
Reburial and state funeral of Imre Nagy. |
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June 1989 |
Student uprising in Beijing. |
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24 August 1989 |
First post-war, non-communist eastern European government comes to power in Poland. |
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7 October 1989 |
East Germany celebrates fortieth anniversary. |
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9 October 1989 |
Fall of the Berlin Wall. |
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17 November 1989 |
Start of the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. |
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25 December 1989 |
Execution of Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu in Romania. |
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1990s |
|
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11 March–4 May 1990 |
Baltic States declare independence. |
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3 October 1990 |
Germany reunified. |
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12 June 1991 |
Boris Yeltsin elected president of the Russian Federation. |
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June 1991 |
Last Soviet tanks leave eastern Europe. |
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1 July 1991 |
Warsaw Pact dissolved. |
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19 August 1991 |
Failed communist coup in Russia. |
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8 December 1991 |
Founding of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). |
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25 December 1991 |
Gorbachev resigns. |
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31 December 1991 |
USSR formally dissolved. |