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New Economic Policy in U.S.S.R.
The N.E.P. re-established limited economic freedom in an attempt to rebuild agriculture and industry. Now peasant producers were permitted to sell their surpluses in free markets, and private traders and small handicraft manufacturers were allowed to reappear. -
Stalin's First Five-Year Plan
The five-year plans marked the beginning of a renewed attempt to mobilize and transform Soviet society along socialist lines. The ultimate goal of the plans was to generate new attitudes, new loyalties, and a new socialist humanity. -
Lateran Agreement
Benito Mussolii drew increasing support from the Catholic Church by reorganizing the Vatican as a tiny independent state, and he agreed to give the church heavy financial support. The pope expressed his satisfaction and urged Italians to supports Mussolini's government. -
Start of Collectivization in Soviet Union
Peasants all over the Soviet Union were ordered to give up their land and animals and become members of collective farms, although they contitinued to live in their own homes. -
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The Great Depression
Economies worldwide were devestated after the first World War. -
Enabling Act
Gave Hitler absolute dictatorial power for four years. Armed with the Enabling Act, Hitler and the Nazi's moved to smash or control all independent organizations. Their deceitful stress on legality, coupled with dived-and-conquer techniques, disarmed the opposition until it was too late for effective resistance. -
Sergei Kirov is Murdered
Kirov was Stalin's number two man and although Stalin himself probably ordered Kirov's murder, he used the incedent to launch a reign of terror. -
Nuremberg Laws
Classified as Jewish anyone having one or more Jewish grandparents and deprived Jews of all rights of citizenship. -
Elie Halevy writes "The Era of Tyrannies"
Halevy wrote that the variations of modern totalitarian tyranny - fascism, Nazism, and communism - could be thought of as feuding brothers" with a common father: the nature of war. Writers such as Halevy believed that the crucial experience of World War I was carried further by Lenin and the Bolsheviks during the Russian civil war. -
Start of the Great Purges Under Stalin
Sixteen prominent Old Bolsheviks confessed to all manner of plots against Stalin in spectacular public trials in Moscow, beginning the Great Purges. Stalin's mass purges remain baffling, for almost all historians believe that those perged posed no threat and confessed to crimes they had not committed. -
Germany Occupies Czech Lands
Hitler accelerated his aggresion and in a shocking violation of his seldom assurances that the Sudetenland was his last territorial demand, Hitler's armies occupied the Czech lands while Slovakia became a puppet state. -
Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact is Signed
In an about-face that stunned the world, Hitler offered and Stalin signed a ten-year Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact. Eact dictator promised to remian neutral if the other became involved in war. An attatched secret protocol ruthlessly divided eastern Europe into German and Soviet zones. -
Germany Invades Poland
German armies and warplanes smashed into Poland from three sides. -
Britain and France Declare War on Germany
The Second World War had begun. -
Germany Invades Soviet Union
German armies suddenly attacked the Soiev Union along a vast front and by October, Leningrad was practically surrounded, Moscow was besieged, and most of Ukraine had been overrun. -
Pearl Harbor; U.S. Enters War
Japan attacked the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Hitler immediately declared war on the U.S, and Japanese forces advanced swiftly into Southeast Asia. -
Allied Invasion at Normandy
American and British forces under General Dwight Eisenhower landed on the beaches of Normandy, France, in history's greatest naval invasion. In a hundred days, more than 2 million men and almost halld a million vehicles pushed inland and broke through German lines. -
Atomic Bombs Dropped on Japan
The U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki iin Japan. Mass bombings of cities and civilians, one of the terrible new practices of World War II, had ended in the final nightmare - unprecedented human destruction in a single bliding flash. Eight days later , the Japanese announced their surrender. -
Truman Doctrine
This was aimed at "containing" communism to areas already occupied by the Red Army. -
Marshall Plan
Secretray of Stae George C. Marshall offered Europe economic aid to help rebuild. Stalin refused Marshall Plan assistance for all of eastern Europe. He purged the last remaining noncommunist elements from the coalition governments of eastern Europe and established Soviet-style, one-party communist dictatorships. -
Formation of NATO
The U.S. formed an anti-Soviet military alliance of Western governments: the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Stalin countered this by tightening his hold on his satellites, later united in the Warsaw Pact. Europe was divided into two hostile blocs. -
Simone de Beauvoir writes "The Second Sex"
Characterizing herself as a "dutiful daugheter" of the bourgeoisie in her childhood, the adolescent Beauvoir came to see her pios and submissive mother as foolishly renouncing any self-expression outside of home and marriage and showing Beauvoir the dangers of a life she did not want. -
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De-Stalinization of Soviet Union
The Communist party jealously maintained its monopoly on political power, but Nikita Khrushchev shook up the party and brought in new members. Some resources were shifted from hevy industry and the military toward conssumer goods and agriculture, and Stalinist controls over workers were relaxed. -
Boris Paternak writes "Doctor Zhivago"
It tells the story of a prerevolutionary intellectual who rejects the violence and brutality of the revolution of 1917 and the Stalinist years. Even as he is destroyed, he triumphs because of his humanity and Christian spirit. -
Formation of Common Market
The six nations of the Coal and Steel Community signed the Treay of Rome which created the European Economic Community. The first goal of the treaty was a gradual reduction of all tariffs among the six in order ro create a single market almost as large as that of the U.S. -
Building of Berlin Wall
Khrushchev ordered the East Germans to build a wall between East and West Berlin, thereby sealing off West Berlin in clear violation of existing access agreements between the Great Powers. The recently elected U.S. president John F. Kennedy, acquised to the construction of the Berlin Wall. -
Cuban Missle Crisis
Khrushchev ordered missles with nuclear warheads installed in Fidel Castro's communist Cuba and President Kennedy countered with a naval blockade of Cuba. After a tense diplomatic crisis, Khrushchev looked like a bumbling buffon; his influenced, already slipping, declined rapidly after the Cuban fiasco. -
"One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich"
Writen by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, this novel portrays in grim detail the life in a Stalinist concentration camp - a life to which Solzhenitsyn himself had been unjustly condemned - and is a damning indictment of the Stalinist past. -
Formation of National Organization for Women
Betty Friedan founded N.O.W. to press for women's rights. It flourished, growing from seven hundred members in 1967 to forty thoughsand in 1974. Throughout the 1970's, a proliferation of publications, conferences, and institutions devoted to women's issues reinforced the emerging international movement. -
Student Protests in Paris
Students occupied buildings and took over the University of Paris, which led to violent clashes with the police. Most students demanded both changes in the curriculem and a real voice in running the university. The student rebellion signaled the end of an era and the return of unrest and uncertainty. -
O.P.E.C. Oil Embargo
The Arab-led Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries declared an embargo on oil shipments to the U.S., Israel's ally, and within a year crude oil prices quadrupled. -
Glasnost in the Soviet Union
Very popular in a country where censorship, dull uniformity, and outright lies had long characterized public discourse, the newfound "openness" of the government and the media marked an astonishing break with the past. -
The Single European Act
Laid Down a detailed legal framework for establishing a single market, which would ass the free movement of labor, capital, and services to the existing free trade in goods. -
Solidarity Movement in Poland
Led by feisty Lenin Shipyards electrician and devout Catholic Lech Walesa, shipyard workers proceeded to organize their free and democratic trade union. Walesa was sworn in as Poland's new noncommunist leader. -
Collapse of the Berlin Wall
In a desperate attempt to stabalize the protests in East Germany, the East German governemnt opened the Berlin Wall and people danced for joy atop the grim symbol of the prison state. -
Velvet Revolution
In, Czechoslovakia, communism died in an almsot good-humored ousting of Communist bosses in only ten days. This so-called Velvet Revolution grew out of popular demonstrations led by students, intellectuals, and a dissident playwright turned moral revolutionary named Vaclav Havel. -
Reunification of Germany
East Germany merged into West Germany, forming henceforth a single nation under the West German laws and constitution. The peaceful reunification of Germany accelerated the peace agreements to liquidate the cold war. -
Maastricht Treaty
This treaty set strict financial criteria for joining the proposed monetary union, with its single currency, and set 1999 as the target date for its establishment. The treaty also anticipated the development of common policies on defense and foreign affairs after achieving monetary union. -
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Civil War in Yugoslavia
Many observeres feared that national and ethnic hatreds would spread throughput eastern Europe and infect western Europe in the form of racial histility toward minorities and immigrants. -
Failed coup in Russia Againstt Gorbachev
The attempted coup collapsed in the face of massive popular resistance, which rallied around Boris Yeltsin, recently elected president of the Russian Federation by universal sufferage. The army supported Yeltsin, and Gorbachev was rescued and returned to power as head of the Soviet Union. -
"The End of History and the Last Man"
Written by Francis Fukuyama who wrote that first fascism and Nazism and then communism had been definitively bested by liberal democratic politics and market economies. -
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"Shock Therapy" in Russia
Designed to make a clean break with the state planning and move quickly to market mechanisms and private property. It actually ended up causing a decline of the economy. -
Creation of the European Union
All European states wished to become or remain fullfledged members of the European society of nations and to jion eventually an ever-expanding European Community. States that embraced national hatred and ethnic warfare, most notably Serbia, were branded outlaws and boycotted and isolated. -
Cronin writes "The World the Cold War Made"
James Cronin noted that the fall of communism also marked the return of nationalism and national history. The cold war and the superpowers generally kept their allies and clients in line, either by force or by granting them conditional aid. -
Terrorist Attack on the U.S.
Two hijacked passenger planes from Boston crashed into and destroyed the World Trade Center towers in New York City. Shortly thereafter a third plane crashed uinto the Pentagon, and a fourth, believed to be headed for the White House or the U.S. Capital, crashed into a field in rural Pennsylvania. -
War in Afghanistan
By this time, Ame were directing precision air strikes that devasted Taliban and al-Qauda troops, and a rejuvenated Narthern Alliance took the offensive. -
New Euro Currency
When brand-new euros entered the billfolds of all euro-zone citizens as their unified common currency, built confidence and brought an acceleration of arduous but triumphant negotiations, -
Muslim Headscarves Banned in French Schools
In a controversial and widely debated decision, the right-center government of Jacques Chirac banned the wearing of headscarves by Muslim girls in public schools (as well as the wearing of crosses by Christians and skullcaps by Jews). The government insisted that religious symbols in the classroom were incompatible with France's republican tradition of strictly secular, non sectarian public education. -
European Union Expands
The European Union added 70 million people and expanded to include 455 million citizens in twenty-five different countries. The largest newcomer was Poland, followed in descending size by the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia, Slovakia, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Malta, and Cyprus.
