Historical Events
Battle of Stalingrad
The Battle of Stalingrad was the major engagement fought from July 17, 1942, to February 2, 1943, around Stalingrad and the lower Don and Volga rivers in the Soviet Union. Germany launched Case Blue to seize southern oil and communications, but Adolf Hitler turned the capture of Stalingrad into a separate priority, dispersing the offensive. The German Sixth Army and Fourth Panzer Army reached the city in late August and attacked its ruins, while Vasily Chuikov's Sixty-second Army held a narrow strip along the Volga, reinforced across the river and relying on close combat. From November 19 the Red Army launched Operation Uranus, broke through the German army's Romanian-held flanks from north and south, and linked near Kalach on November 23. The encircled German force survived failed relief and inadequate air supply only briefly, began surrendering in January 1943, and capitulated on February 2.
The Second Front and the Normandy Landings
The Second Front and the Normandy Landings trace how the western European offensive demanded by the Soviet Union after Germany invaded it in 1941 was finally opened by Allied Operation Overlord on 6 June 1944. The delay reflected a real dispute: the Soviet Union needed a western front to relieve pressure in the east, while British and American commanders argued that an invasion without enough troops, landing craft, supplies, and air superiority could fail catastrophically. Britain and the United States first attacked in North Africa and Italy, then committed to a cross-Channel invasion at the 1943 conferences and concentrated men and matériel in southern England. On 6 June 1944, Allied forces under Dwight D. Eisenhower landed airborne troops and then assaulted five beaches, Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword. Deception led German commanders to expect the main blow at Pas-de-Calais, but fortified positions and fighting imposed heavy losses. By the end of June the Allies had converted the beachhead into a supplied front, creating the base for the liberation of Paris in August and the advance toward Germany.
The Italian Campaign and the Fall of Mussolini
The Italian Campaign was the Mediterranean theatre of the Second World War, beginning with the Allied invasion of Sicily in July 1943 and ending with the surrender of German forces in Italy in May 1945. After defeat in North Africa and sustained bombing, parts of the Fascist regime and the monarchy concluded that continuing the war would destroy the state, while the Allies sought to remove Italy from the war and tie down German forces in the south. After Sicily fell, the Fascist Grand Council deposed Benito Mussolini, and Pietro Badoglio's government signed the Armistice of Cassibile on 3 September. When announced on 8 September, German forces occupied central and northern Italy and rescued Mussolini, who established the Italian Social Republic. Allied troops landed at Salerno and Taranto, but the Apennines, Gustav Line, Anzio, and Monte Cassino made the advance costly. Rome fell in June 1944, yet fighting continued at the Gothic Line. In April 1945, the Allied offensive and a partisan uprising broke the northern front. Mussolini was captured and executed, and German Army Group C surrendered on 2 May.
The French Resistance and the Liberation of France
The French Resistance and the Liberation of France was the process of resistance and state reconstruction that began with Germany’s defeat of France and the establishment of the Vichy regime in 1940, and ended with the Allied landings in Normandy and Provence and the liberation of French territory in 1944. German occupation, Vichy collaboration and repression, forced labour, and antisemitic policy created the conditions of resistance. Charles de Gaulle’s Free France and diverse forces inside France, including Communists, Socialists, Republicans, and Catholics, pursued different aims through clandestine newspapers, intelligence, escape networks, strikes, sabotage, and armed struggle. In 1943 Jean Moulin organised the National Resistance Council (CNR) to coordinate the principal movements. In 1944 the Resistance was consolidated as the French Forces of the Interior (FFI), supported the Allied advance, and took part in the uprising in Paris. After Paris was liberated in August 1944, de Gaulle’s provisional government asserted the continuity of the Republic, denying the Vichy regime national legitimacy.
Warsaw Uprising
The Warsaw Uprising was an armed rising by the Polish Home Army from 1 August to 2 October 1944 against German occupation, intended to liberate the capital and assert Polish sovereignty before Soviet forces and a Soviet-backed authority took control. The approaching Red Army, German evacuation measures, and the unresolved dispute between the London government-in-exile and the Soviet Union over Poland’s borders and government pushed the decision forward. The Home Army seized parts of the city and built an underground administration, but German reinforcements and mass violence against civilians turned the battle into a siege. Western airdrops were limited, while Soviet forces remained east of the Vistula and offered only restricted assistance in September. After 63 days the Home Army capitulated, and Germany deported the population and systematically demolished Warsaw.
The Yugoslav Partisan War
The Yugoslav Partisan War was the Communist-led armed struggle fought from the Axis invasion and partition of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in April 1941 until 1945. After Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia organized a nationwide rising against the occupiers and their collaborationist regimes. Led by Josip Broz Tito, the Partisans grew from guerrilla detachments into a regular army while competing with the royalist Chetniks and fighting a civil war inside the wider anti-Axis conflict. They survived major Axis offensives, especially the battles of the Neretva and Sutjeska, won Allied support and recognition in 1943, and liberated Belgrade with Soviet forces in 1944. In March 1945 the army was reorganized as the Yugoslav Army, and the Partisan victory made possible a socialist federal state in place of the monarchy.
Greek Resistance and the Dekemvriana
Greek Resistance and the Dekemvriana was a resistance struggle and power conflict that began with Axis occupation in 1941 and led to the Varkiza Agreement in 1945. Against the occupation by Germany, Italy, and Bulgaria, the Communist-led National Liberation Front (EAM) and its Greek People's Liberation Army (ELAS) became the largest forces through work in the countryside and cities amid famine and collaboration. When German troops withdrew in October 1944, EAM controlled most of Greece, but Britain sought to preserve the monarchy and a non-EAM government, while the Soviet Union effectively accepted Greece as a British sphere of influence. On 1 December, General Ronald Scobie ordered the resistance forces to disarm. EAM ministers resigned, and police fire at a demonstration in Athens on 3 December began 37 days of fighting among British and government forces and ELAS. British reinforcements and firepower forced EAM to withdraw, and on 12 February 1945 the Varkiza Agreement accepted ELAS dissolution and disarmament.
The Yalta and Potsdam Conferences
In February 1945 at the Crimean resort of Yalta, Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill, and in July and August at Potsdam outside Berlin, Stalin, Truman and Attlee, sat down to frame the postwar world. Yalta settled the occupation and reparation of Germany, Poland's borders and government, the Declaration on Liberated Europe, and the design of the United Nations with its Security Council veto; the USSR promised to enter the war against Japan for the return of southern Sakhalin and the Kurils. Potsdam handled the principles of German demilitarisation and denazification and the working of Poland's western border. Outside the conference rooms another age had already begun: when Truman hinted at a weapon of unusual force, Stalin showed nothing, for his intelligence had long since told him of the bomb.
Albanian liberation and establishment of the republic
Following the occupiers’ withdrawal and partisan victory in 1944, Enver Hoxha’s leadership consolidated power. The 1946 proclamation of a people’s republic and constitution established the postwar regime’s legal framework.
The Soviet reoccupation of the Baltic states: the Forest Brothers and the deportations of 1949
Between the summer of 1944 and the surrender in Courland in May 1945 the Red Army reoccupied the Baltic states, and the returning republican leaders rebuilt the Soviet system under the supervision of Central Committee bureaus in Moscow. Tens of thousands of Forest Brothers who had fled conscription and repression into the forests fought on — in Lithuania united from 1949 in the Union of Lithuanian Freedom Fighters — but were worn down by the MGB, the destruction battalions and infiltration. Operation Vesna in 1948 and Operation Priboi, which sent more than 90,000 people to Siberia and other remote regions in March 1949, destroyed the resistance’s base and forced through collectivisation. In 1950 Estonia’s Eighth Plenum purged the leadership for “bourgeois nationalism”, while Russian-speaking immigration, industrialisation and the repression of the churches went on. After Stalin’s death in 1953 Beria’s nationality policy was reversed within three months.
The Soviet Entry into the War against Japan
The Manchurian Strategic Offensive Operation, from 9 August to 2 September 1945, was the last major land campaign of World War II. At Yalta in February 1945, Stalin promised to enter the war against Japan within two to three months of Germany's surrender; a secret protocol awarded the USSR southern Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, and a Port Arthur lease. The Soviets denounced the Neutrality Pact in April and moved over 400,000 troops and 2,000 tanks from Europe to the Far East. On 8 August, Molotov declared war; just after midnight, Vasilevsky's 1.5 million men attacked from the west, east, and north simultaneously. The Kwantung Army had over 700,000 troops but its best units had been transferred to the Pacific. Soviet armored superiority and operational skill destroyed organized resistance in ten days. Some 600,000 Japanese prisoners were sent to Siberian camps.
The People's Democracies of Eastern Europe
From the summer of 1944, coalition governments with communist participation were formed in Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary as the Red Army arrived, in the Soviet zone of Germany, and in Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Albania, which had been liberated largely by their own forces. Each country passed through land reform and the nationalisation of major industry. The elections of 1945–46 produced divided results in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, while in Poland and Romania the official counts diverge from records published later. In 1947 the other coalition parties were pushed out through dissolution, splits and trials, and between 1946 and 1948 the social democratic parties were merged into the communist parties. Over the same years "people's democracy" was explained first as a "new road" distinct from the Soviet system and then, in December 1948, redefined as a form of the dictatorship of the proletariat. By 1949 constitutions and single-list elections had fixed the new order in every country, and trials and purges had begun inside the parties themselves.
Poland: From the Lublin Committee to the United Workers' Party
When the Soviet-sponsored Polish Committee of National Liberation installed itself in Lublin in July 1944, Poland had two governments: the exile government in London and the committee in Lublin. Under the Yalta agreement a Provisional Government of National Unity was formed in June 1945, Mikołajczyk returned as deputy prime minister, and the United States and Britain recognised it. Land reform and the nationalisation of major industry were passed by several parties of the coalition together. The Ministry of Public Security and the Soviet NKVD faced the underground successors of the Home Army, and there were two amnesties, in 1945 and 1947. The official results of the referendum of June 1946 and the election of January 1947 were landslides for the government bloc; the tallies published after 1989 show different figures. Mikołajczyk left Poland in October 1947. Gomułka's "Polish road" was condemned as a "rightist-nationalist deviation" in September 1948 and he was removed; in December the Workers' Party and the Socialist Party merged into the Polish United Workers' Party.
Romania: From 23 August to the People's Republic
On 23 August 1944 King Michael I arrested Ion Antonescu and took Romania over to the Allies. The Moscow armistice of 12 September installed an Allied Control Commission run by the Soviet command, and the coalition governments of Sănătescu and Rădescu collided with the demands of the communist-led National Democratic Front. In late February 1945 Soviet deputy foreign minister Vyshinsky came to Bucharest to demand a change of government; on 6 March the Groza government took office and decreed land reform. From August to the following January the king refused to sign its decrees, an episode settled after the Moscow foreign ministers'' conference by the addition of two opposition ministers. The election of 19 November 1946 was officially won by the government bloc with 69.8 per cent; party documents published later record different figures. After the peace treaty came into force in 1947 the National Peasant Party was dissolved and Maniu tried, and on 30 December the king abdicated and the People's Republic was proclaimed. In February 1948 the Communist and Social Democratic parties merged as the Romanian Workers' Party.
Bulgaria: From the Fatherland Front to the Kostov Trial
After the Soviet Union declared war on Bulgaria on 5 September 1944 and crossed the frontier on the 8th, the Fatherland Front of Communists, Agrarians, Zveno and Social Democrats took power in Sofia in the early hours of the 9th. The People's Court executed the regents and ministers on 1 February 1945, and the Bulgarian army fought alongside the Red Army in Yugoslavia and Hungary. The Agrarian Union split in 1945 between Petkov's opposition and those who stayed in the Front; after the referendum of 1946 abolished the monarchy, the Grand National Assembly election of October gave the Communists a majority and the opposition 28 per cent. In 1947 Petkov was arrested in parliament and executed in September, and in December the Dimitrov constitution and the nationalisation law were passed. The Social Democrats were merged into the Communist Party in 1948, and at the Fifth Congress in December Dimitrov defined people's democracy as a form of the dictatorship of the proletariat. In 1949 Dimitrov died and the deputy prime minister Kostov was tried and executed.
Hungary: From the Smallholders' Victory to the Rajk Trial
Hungary's post-war politics began at the Provisional National Assembly in Debrecen in December 1944 and took shape with the general election of 4 November 1945, in which the Smallholders won 57 per cent. At the demand of Voroshilov, chairman of the Allied Control Commission, the four-party coalition continued and the interior ministry went to the Communists. In March 1946 the Left Bloc demanded the expulsion of Smallholder deputies; in February 1947 Soviet forces arrested the Smallholders' general secretary Béla Kovács; in May Prime Minister Ferenc Nagy resigned from abroad. In the "blue ballot" election of 31 August the Communists became the largest party with 22.3 per cent. The Social Democrats merged with the Communists in June 1948, and Cardinal Mindszenty was arrested in December. A single-list election in May 1949 and the constitution of 20 August established the People's Republic; in September the former interior minister László Rajk was tried, and he was executed in October.
Czechoslovakia: from the Košice programme to February 1948
In the National Front coalition launched by the Košice programme of 1945, the Communists came first in the free election of 1946 and formed Gottwald’s government. When their popularity fell after the Marshall Plan was refused in 1947, they turned the resignation of non-Communist ministers over a police purge in February 1948 into a seizure of power, forcing Beneš to give way with action committees, militia and the threat of a general strike. The May constitution and a single-list election made Czechoslovakia a people’s democracy.
The Marshall Plan and the Cold War
When the United States proposed the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe in 1947, the Soviet Union cast it as an attempt to subordinate Europe to American capital. Molotov broke off the Paris talks, and Stalin blocked the Eastern European states from taking the aid. With Zhdanov’s declaration of “two camps” and the founding of the Cominform, the world hardened into the two blocs of the Cold War.
The Berlin Blockade and Airlift
The Berlin Blockade (24 June 1948 – 12 May 1949) was the first large-scale confrontation of the Cold War, in which the Soviet Union cut all rail, road, and water access to the Allied-controlled western sectors of Berlin. The immediate trigger was the Western introduction of the Deutsche Mark into the western occupation zones in June 1948, sealing the economic division from the Soviet zone. Joseph Stalin calculated that the blockade would force the West either to abandon the currency reform or withdraw from West Berlin. Instead, the Truman administration answered with the Berlin Airlift: over 15 months, American and British air forces flew more than 278,000 sorties, delivering 2.33 million tons of food, coal, and fuel. At its peak, one transport landed in Berlin every 30 seconds. A parallel Western counter-blockade on East Germany caused severe shortages of coal and steel.
Social reform in northern Korea and founding of the DPRK
After liberation, people’s committees and communist organizations formed new institutions in northern Korea under Soviet military occupation. Land reform and nationalization of major industries took place in 1946, before the state’s founding.
The August Revolution and the First Indochina War
When Japan surrendered in August 1945 the Viet Minh took power in the August Revolution and proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam on 2 September. France’s attempt at reconquest became war in December 1946, and from 1950, with China and the United States backing the two sides, a front of the Cold War. The French surrendered at Điện Biên Phủ in May 1954, and the Geneva Accords of July divided Vietnam at the 17th parallel.
The Tito-Stalin Split
The Tito-Stalin split was the first open fracture in the socialist camp: in June 1948 the Cominform expelled the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia had won its liberation and its revolution with its own partisan army rather than the Red Army, and was correspondingly less bound to Moscow's instructions. Friction over the Balkan federation project and support for the Greek civil war, and resentment of the Soviet advisers and intelligence networks inside Yugoslavia, accumulated until Stalin demanded submission through an exchange of letters and a Cominform resolution. The resolution pronounced the Yugoslav party to have left Marxism-Leninism for the road of nationalism; against expectation, the party closed ranks around its leadership and held out. Under economic blockade by the Soviet bloc, border provocations and reported invasion planning, Yugoslavia accepted Western aid and began building its own model of workers' self-management.
The Chinese Civil War
After Japan’s surrender the Chongqing talks and Marshall’s mediation could not stop the two parties’ armed competition. When full civil war began in 1946 the Nationalists took cities but were pushed back in Manchuria by Lin Biao’s Northeast Field Army, and in the three campaigns of 1948–1949 — Liaoshen, Huaihai and Pingjin — they lost 1.5 million men. In April 1949 the People’s Liberation Army crossed the Yangtze and Chiang Kai-shek retreated to Taiwan.
Establishment of the People’s Republic of China
On 1 October 1949 Mao Zedong proclaimed the People’s Republic of China in Beijing after Communist victories across much of the mainland. The Nationalist government relocated to Taiwan.