Fourth Five-Year Plan approved

The Soviet government announced that it would enter the war against Japan on August 9, citing the Allied declaration and wartime commitments. The move reshaped the final campaign in Northeast Asia and...

Soviet and Mongolian troops launched a major offensive into Japanese-occupied Manchuria. The campaign ended Japanese control in the region and created new geopolitical realities for Chinese, Korean,...

Japan signed the instrument of surrender aboard the USS Missouri. The war’s end did not resolve the political futures of Korea, China, and other Asian territories affected by Japanese empire and the...

The first national parliamentary election since 1937 took place under one-party rule and with official candidates unopposed. The vote projected postwar legitimacy while offering no competitive route...

A gathering organized under Soviet security pressure repudiated the Union of Brest and declared the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church absorbed by the Russian Orthodox Church. Clergy who refused faced...

The Security Council deferred further proceedings until May 6 after the Soviet government said withdrawal had begun and would take five or six weeks. Iran’s appeal challenged the continued presence of...

The Soviet state maintained rationing amid scarcity, uneven recovery, and a poor harvest. Reconstruction targets and state procurement shaped access to food, with rural households and regions such...

A Central Committee resolution condemned Zvezda and Leningrad, and Andrei Zhdanov publicly attacked writers and satirists. The intervention marked a broad campaign to discipline intellectual life in...

Severe drought followed several years of poor precipitation. The crop failure interacted with procurement, distribution, and reconstruction policy to produce a famine that struck Ukraine and...

Archival records and survivor testimony document hunger, disease, and rising mortality in the Moldavian SSR. The crisis was especially severe in Bessarabia and southern districts, where drought,...