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Serving in the Russian Civil War before overseeing the Soviet Union's establishment Stalin assumed leadership over the country. -
Benito Mussolini's so-called march on Rome took place in Italy. This moment was of global importance. It marked the first fascist takeover of power in the world, set in place a regime that would govern for 20 years, and inspired other far-right movements. -
Hitler’s book, Mein Kampf (‘My Struggle’) was published. He wrote it in prison, where he was serving a sentence for a failed coup he attempted. -
Stalin launched his First Five-Year Plan to speed up the process of industrialization in the Soviet Union so that it could compete with output levels in developed capitalist economies. -
Japan invades Manchuria seeking to get raw materials to fuel its growing industries. -
A man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine that killed millions of Ukrainians. The Holodomor was part of the wider Soviet famine which affected the major grain-producing areas of the Soviet Union. -
The Nazi Party assumes control of the German state when German President Paul von Hindenburg appoints Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler as Chancellor at the head of a coalition government. -
The Night of the Long Knives represented a triumph for Hitler and a turning point for the German government. It established Hitler as "the supreme leader of the German people", as he put it in his 13 July speech to the Reichstag. -
The Nazi regime's Nuremberg Race Laws of September 1935 made Jews legally different from their non-Jewish neighbors. -
A war of aggression that was fought between Italy and Ethiopia. -
Joseph Stalin imprisoned in Gulag labor camps and executed rival communists, military officers, ethnic minorities, wreckers, and citizens accused of plotting against Communism. -
Military revolt against the Republican government of Spain, supported by conservative elements within the country. When an initial military coup failed to win control of the entire country, a bloody civil war ensued, fought with great ferocity on both sides -
The Anti-Comintern Pact was an agreement between Germany, Italy, and Japan, that they would work together to stop the spread of Communism around the globe. -
A mass killing and the ravaging of Chinese citizens and capitulated soldiers by soldiers of the Japanese Imperial Army after its seizure of Nanjing, China. -
Kristallnacht or the Night of Broken Glass, also called the November pogrom, was a pogrom against Jews carried out by the Nazi Party's Sturmabteilung paramilitary and Schutzstaffel.