Historical Events
The Succession Struggle and the Left Opposition
The succession struggle began in the autumn of 1923, when Trotsky and the signatories of the Declaration of the 46 challenged the triumvirate of Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev over the stifling of intraparty democracy. The three were running the party in Lenin's absence. After Lenin's death in January 1924, the triumvirate used Trotsky's "Lessons of October" as a pretext to remove him from his post as War Commissar, then fractured when Stalin's "socialism in one country" doctrine drove Zinoviev and Kamenev into opposition. In 1926 Trotsky joined forces with Zinoviev and Kamenev to form the United Opposition, but they were repeatedly defeated by the Stalin-Bukharin alliance. Their last public act, carrying independent slogans at the tenth-anniversary October Revolution demonstration on 7 November 1927, was dispersed by the OGPU, and they were expelled from the Party days later. The Fifteenth Party Congress in December 1927 declared the Left Opposition's views incompatible with party membership and expelled 75 leading activists, sealing Stalin's sole victory.
The Horthy regime: from the White Terror to the turn to the right
After the Soviet Republic fell in 1919, officer detachments of Horthy’s National Army carried out the Hungarian White Terror against Communists, Social Democrats and Jews, and in 1920 Horthy became regent of a kingdom without a king. Stripped of more than two-thirds of its territory by the Treaty of Trianon, Hungary made border revision its national aim, and its numerus clausus of 1920 was Europe’s first post-war anti-Jewish law. István Bethlen stabilised the regime with an open-ballot franchise, a pact with the Social Democrats and a League of Nations loan, while the illegal Communist Party was crushed by the Rákosi trials and the hanging of Sallai and Fürst. After the Depression Gyula Gömbös aligned Hungary with Italy and Germany, and the Darányi government’s Győr programme and First Jewish Law of 1938 heralded the next era.
The Five-Year Plans and the Soviet Transformation
From 1928 to 1937, two Five-Year Plans transformed a peasant country into an industrial power, a turn of world-historical scale. Beginning from a grain procurement crisis, collectivization and crash industrialization produced giant construction projects such as Magnitogorsk and Dneprostroi, a mass literacy campaign, and the entry of women into factories and universities. Yet forced collectivization convulsed the countryside, and in 1932–1933 a famine born of excessive procurement and harvest failure killed millions. The achievements and the sacrifices of this decade remain a single, inseparable history.
From Jinggangshan to Yan’an: the soviet bases and the Long March
After the massacres of 1927 Mao and Zhu De built a Red Army and a rural base at Jinggangshan, and in 1931 the Chinese Soviet Republic was proclaimed at Ruijin. After Chiang Kai-shek’s five encirclement campaigns the Red Army abandoned Jiangxi in October 1934 and marched ten thousand kilometres; at the Zunyi Conference of 1935 Mao took military command. Arrival in northern Shaanxi in 1936 and the Xi’an Incident opened the way to an anti-Japanese united front.
The Holodomor and the Collectivisation Famine
The Holodomor was a man-made famine that killed approximately 3.9 million people in Soviet Ukraine between 1932 and 1933. Its direct cause was the unmeetable grain procurement quotas imposed on Ukraine by Stalin's leadership, which was pursuing forced collectivisation and accelerated industrialisation. Although the 1931 harvest had collapsed, procurement targets were maintained; from autumn 1932, Kremlin emissaries such as Molotov and Kaganovich were dispatched to strip the countryside of grain. Villages that failed to meet quotas were blacklisted and subjected to economic blockade, and in January 1933 Stalin and Molotov sealed the borders of Ukraine and the Kuban, preventing starving peasants from fleeing to areas where food might be found. The famine struck grain-growing regions across the Soviet Union, but losses were heaviest in Ukraine. Soviet authorities denied the famine's existence until late 1987.
The Comintern’s Popular Front turn
Having treated social democracy as its main enemy from 1928, the Comintern began to change course after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 and the anti-fascist struggles in France and Austria in 1934. At the Seventh World Congress in July–August 1935 Dimitrov defined fascism as the open terrorist dictatorship of finance capital and set out an anti-fascist Popular Front, reaching socialists and the middle classes, as the new tactic. The line led to Popular Front governments in France and Spain and to the anti-Japanese united front in China, but it collapsed amid the Great Purge and the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939.
The Fascist Riot of 6 February 1934
On the evening of 6 February 1934 the far-right leagues pushed toward the Chamber of Deputies across the Place de la Concorde in Paris, and police fire left fifteen dead. The Stavisky financial scandal had spent six weeks turning ordinary distress into fury at a parliament seen as bought, and the far-right press, seizing on Stavisky's origins in a Jewish immigrant family, worked that fury into antisemitic agitation. The next day Prime Minister Édouard Daladier resigned although he held a parliamentary majority, the first time in the Third Republic that the street brought down a government. Nine more died in a Communist demonstration three days later, and on 12 February the Socialist and Communist columns, marching separately to a general strike, met at the Place de la Nation and embraced to shouts of 'Unity!'. Historians no longer read that night as an organised coup, but to a left one year into Hitler's rule it was a dress rehearsal for a French fascism. That fear broke the social-fascism line, produced the July pact of unity of action, and led the following year to Georgi Dimitrov's report on the popular front.
The French Popular Front and the Strikes of 1936
Formed by Socialists, Communists and Radicals after the far-right leagues' riot of February 1934, the Popular Front won the elections of May 1936 and brought Léon Blum to power. In the interval between victory and taking office, the greatest strike wave in French history erupted: 12,142 strikes with 1.83 million participants in June alone, three quarters of them a new kind of strike in which workers occupied their factories, eating and sleeping beside the machines. In the Matignon Agreements of the night of 7 June, employers conceded wage rises, collective bargaining and union rights all at once, and parliament immediately legislated two weeks of paid holidays and the 40-hour week. But through non-intervention in Spain, the devaluation of the franc and the 'pause' in reform, the coalition crumbled from within, and the defeat of the general strike of November 1938 closed the Popular Front era.
The Spanish Civil War
The military rising of July 1936 was checked not by the government but by the arming of the unions, and in Catalonia and Aragon that response became a revolution in which factories and land passed into the workers' hands. While the Non-Intervention Agreement pushed by Britain and France blocked the legal government from buying arms, Germany and Italy armed the rebels, and in practice only the Soviet Union and Mexico would sell to the Republic. Soviet intervention kept the Republic standing, but it also sharpened the quarrel between those who held that the war had to be won before the revolution and those who answered that stopping the revolution would remove the reason to fight, until in May 1937 the argument broke into street fighting in Barcelona.
The Great Purge
The Great Purge of 1937–38 was state violence carried out through the combined machinery of the NKVD, party organizations, and prosecution. It was not one order alone, but a process in which quotas, operational orders, coerced confessions, local competition, and fear amplified one another.
The Soviet-Japanese Border Wars and the Neutrality Pact
The Soviet-Japanese Border Wars were armed conflicts fought between the Soviet Union and Mongolia on one side and Japan and Manchukuo on the other, centred on the Battle of Lake Khasan (1938) and the Battles of Khalkhin Gol (1939). The trigger was a dispute over the demarcation of the Manchukuo-Mongolia border, but the deeper driver was the Kwantung Army's 'Strike North' faction testing Soviet military strength. At Lake Khasan, Japanese forces briefly occupied the disputed area but withdrew under Soviet counterattack. At Khalkhin Gol, Georgy Zhukov assembled 57,000 troops and over 500 tanks, and between 20 and 31 August 1939 destroyed the Japanese 23rd Division in a double envelopment. The defeat crushed the Strike North faction in Tokyo. On 13 April 1941, the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact was signed. When Germany invaded the USSR that June, Japan honoured the pact and refused to join the attack, instead turning south: a decision that led to Pearl Harbor.
The war with Japan and the second united front
In the full-scale war that began with the Marco Polo Bridge incident of July 1937 Japan occupied the coastal cities and railways and the Nationalist government withdrew to Chongqing. The Red Army, reorganised as the Eighth Route and New Fourth Armies, spread base areas behind enemy lines. After the New Fourth Army incident of 1941 the united front was hollow, and the rectification movement at Yan’an completed Mao’s party. At Japan’s surrender in 1945 the Communists had 1.2 million members, 900,000 regular troops and liberated areas of a hundred million people.
The Nazi-Soviet Pact and the Partition of Eastern Europe
The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was signed on the night of 23 August 1939 in the Moscow Kremlin by Soviet Foreign Commissar Vyacheslav Molotov and German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. Alongside public non-aggression clauses, it contained a secret additional protocol carving Eastern Europe into Soviet and German spheres of influence. With Anglo-French collective-security talks deadlocked by Poland's refusal to admit Soviet troops, Stalin chose the German option. Germany invaded Poland a week later; on 17 September, the Soviet Union invaded from the east. On 28 September the two powers sealed the partition with the German–Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty, revising the secret protocol to transfer Lithuania to the Soviet sphere in exchange for handing Lublin and parts of Warsaw to Germany. The pact served as the platform for the Soviet annexation of the Baltic states, the Winter War against Finland, and the seizure of Bessarabia, remaining in force until Germany tore it up on 22 June 1941.
The Winter War
The Winter War was the 105-day Soviet-Finnish war that began with the Soviet invasion of 30 November 1939 and ended with the Moscow Peace Treaty of March 1940. Having placed Finland in its sphere under the secret protocol of the Nazi-Soviet pact, the Soviet Union demanded a shift of the Karelian Isthmus border and a lease on the Hanko peninsula in the name of defending Leningrad; when Finland refused, it attacked, using the shelling at Mainila as a pretext. The Red Army was overwhelmingly superior in men and equipment, but its command had been gutted by the Great Purge and it was unprepared for winter forest warfare — whole divisions were encircled and destroyed at Suomussalmi, and the advance stalled before the Mannerheim Line.
Axis-occupied Europe: collaboration and resistance
At their peak in 1941–1942 the Axis powers ruled more than half of the continent’s population. Their methods varied — annexation, the General Government in Poland, Reichskommissariats, military administration and collaborating regimes such as Quisling’s, Nedić’s, Pavelić’s and Vichy — but everywhere occupation meant plunder. The Hunger Plan and the Greek famine, the forced labour of some 12 million people, and the Holocaust, in which about six million Jews were murdered in the extermination camps of occupied Poland and in mass shootings across Eastern Europe, all took place under occupation, carried out with the help of collaborating governments, local administrations and some 500,000 foreigners in the Waffen-SS. Resistance ranged from the underground press and strikes to guerrilla war and uprisings, and after June 1941 Communist-led movements grew alongside, and sometimes against, those loyal to the governments-in-exile. The occupiers answered with hostage quotas, the Night and Fog decree and massacres such as Lidice, Kragujevac and Oradour. Occupation ended in 1944–1945 amid risings in Paris, Warsaw, Slovakia and Prague, and the liberated countries turned to purging collaborators.
The Fall of France and the Vichy Regime
This event covers Germany's conquest of France from 10 May 1940 through the 1944 liberation, the collapse of the Third Republic, and rule from Vichy. French commanders combined Maginot Line defence with an advance into Belgium, but German forces broke through the Ardennes, crossed the Meuse, and raced to the Channel. German troops entered Paris on 14 June; despite the Dunkirk evacuation, organized French resistance collapsed. Philippe Pétain requested an armistice on 17 June, and the agreement signed on 22 June left the north and Atlantic coast occupied while the south remained under Vichy. On 10 July the National Assembly granted Pétain full powers. Vichy then collaborated through antisemitic laws, police roundups, economic extraction, and labor mobilization. German and Italian occupation of the southern zone in November 1942 ended its limited autonomy; liberation in 1944 ended the regime.
The annexation of the Baltic states and the June 1941 deportation
Under the secret protocol of the Nazi–Soviet Pact, the Soviet Union forced mutual assistance treaties and Soviet bases on Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in September–October 1939, giving Lithuania Vilnius in return. In June 1940, as Paris fell, it sent the three states ultimatums and occupied them with the Red Army, and Vladimir Dekanozov, Andrey Vyshinsky and Andrei Zhdanov installed the “people’s governments” of Justas Paleckis, Augusts Kirhenšteins and Johannes Vares. People’s Parliaments chosen in single-list elections in July petitioned to join the Soviet Union, and on 3–6 August the three states became Soviet republics. Antanas Smetona fled abroad, while Konstantin Päts, Kārlis Ulmanis and Johan Laidoner were taken to the Soviet Union; the United States refused recognition in the Welles Declaration. After a year of nationalisation and arrests, tens of thousands were deported to Siberia on the night of 14 June 1941, eight days before Germany invaded the Soviet Union.
Battle of Britain
The Battle of Britain was the air campaign fought from July 1940 to May 1941 between Germany's Luftwaffe and Britain's Royal Air Force for control of the English Channel and British airspace. After France and the Low Countries fell, Germany sought either to force Britain into negotiations or to invade it, which required destroying RAF Fighter Command and gaining air superiority to protect a cross-Channel operation. In July the Luftwaffe attacked shipping and ports, in August it concentrated on airfields and radar, and from 7 September it shifted to large raids on London and other cities. Britain combined radar, observers, a command network, and Hurricane and Spitfire fighters to prevent German daylight dominance, while Germany postponed an invasion indefinitely in September 1940. Night bombing continued until May 1941, but it did not drive Britain out of the war.
Hungary on the Axis side: from the Vienna Awards to the Don
Between 1938 and 1941 Hungary regained part of the lands lost at Trianon through the two Vienna Awards and the occupation of Ruthenia and Yugoslav territory, paying for it by joining the Tripartite Pact and passing three Jewish laws. After Teleki’s suicide in protest at the invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941, Bárdossy’s government declared war on the Soviet Union on the pretext of the Kassa bombing, and the Kamianets-Podilskyi deportations, the Novi Sad raid and Jewish labour service followed. When the Second Army was destroyed on the Don in January 1943, Kállay’s government sought a secret armistice with the Western Allies. Hitler, who learned of it, decided in March 1944 to occupy Hungary.
Hungary under German occupation: from Operation Margarethe to the siege of Budapest
On 19 March 1944 German troops occupied Hungary, which had been seeking an armistice with the Allies. Regent Horthy stayed in office, and the Interior Ministry and gendarmerie of Döme Sztójay’s government, together with Eichmann’s commando, deported some 437,000 Jews to Auschwitz between May and July. Amid international protest Horthy halted the deportations in early July and in August installed the Lakatos government, which signed a preliminary armistice with the Soviet Union; but his armistice proclamation of 15 October collapsed under Germany’s Operation Panzerfaust and the Arrow Cross coup of Ferenc Szálasi. The Arrow Cross shot Budapest’s Jews on the banks of the Danube and sent them on foot to the border, while neutral diplomats saved people with protective papers. Encircled on 26 December 1944, Budapest fell to the Soviet army on 13 February 1945.
The Baltic states under German occupation: from the June Uprising through the Holocaust to the retreat of 1944
When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the June Uprising and a provisional government arose in Lithuania and the Forest Brothers fought the Summer War in Estonia, but Germany refused to recognise independence and placed the three countries in Reichskommissariat Ostland. Stahlecker’s Einsatzgruppe A, Jäger’s Einsatzkommando 3 and Jeckeln’s men, with local collaborators such as Lithuanian and Latvian police battalions and the Arajs Kommando, shot Jews in the Kaunas pogrom and at the Ninth Fort, Ponary and Rumbula; most of the victims died before the end of 1941. The remaining ghettos were liquidated in 1943, and Germany mobilised Balts into Waffen-SS legions, though the Lithuanians boycotted the call-up. In 1944, after the defence of Narva and the Tannenberg Line, the Red Army retook the Baltic states; the Tief government’s attempt to restore independence collapsed within four days, and tens of thousands fled west.
The Great Patriotic War
The Great Patriotic War, opened by Nazi Germany with a surprise invasion in June 1941, was the largest land war in human history. Recovering from the catastrophic losses of the first year, the Soviet Union moved its industrial base bodily eastward and rearmed, reversed the tide at Moscow, Stalingrad, and Kursk, and drove on to Berlin in 1945 to bring down Nazi Germany. Roughly 80 percent of the ground combat power of the Wehrmacht was destroyed on the Eastern Front, and it was the multinational Soviet people who bore the overwhelming burden of defeating fascism.
Siege of Leningrad
The Siege of Leningrad was the German and Finnish land encirclement, bombardment, and blockade of the Soviet city from September 8, 1941, to January 27, 1944. Germany's Operation Barbarossa aimed to seize the city and remove a major industrial and naval base on the Baltic, while Finnish advances pressed it from the north. The Leningrad Front, the Baltic Fleet, the city party organisation, and residents improvised defences and kept factories and military units operating, but food and fuel ran short, producing mass starvation and disease during the winter of 1941–42. Lake Ladoga shipping and the winter ice road became the city's only lifeline. Soviet forces opened a narrow land corridor on January 18, 1943, then drove German forces away in the Leningrad-Novgorod Offensive in January 1944, ending the siege.
The Pacific War
The Pacific War was the 1941 to 1945 conflict that entered its full phase when Japan attacked American and British positions on 7 December 1941. Its background was the war in China since 1937 and Japan's drive for resources and empire. Facing sanctions on oil and strategic materials, Japanese leaders sought Southeast Asian resources and hoped to shock the United States into negotiation, but Pearl Harbor brought it into total war. Japan rapidly seized the Philippines, Malaya, Singapore, and the Dutch East Indies, yet Coral Sea and Midway exposed the limits of its offensive. From Guadalcanal in 1942, Allied offensives across the Southwest and Central Pacific gained ground. The recapture of the Philippines and seizure of the Marianas in 1944 brought Japan within bombing range. In 1945 blockade, bombing, Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the atomic bombings, and the Soviet entry into the war against Japan converged. Japan announced surrender on 15 August and signed the Instrument of Surrender in Tokyo Bay on 2 September.