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He was both the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Chairman of the Soviet Union's Council of Ministers. He began running the country as part of a joint leadership, but by the 1930s, he had seized power and had become the Soviet Union's de facto dictator. -
The uprising that brought Benito Mussolini to power in Italy in late October 1922 was known as the March on Rome. The March signaled the start of fascist rule and the end of the communist and liberal parliamentary regimes that had preceded it. -
Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazi Party, published Mein Kampf in 1925 as an autobiography. The work outlines Hitler's political philosophy and future plans for Germany, as well as the mechanism through which he became antisemitic. Mein Kampf was published in two volumes, the first in 1925 and the second in 1926. -
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics' first five-year plan was designed to kick-start rapid and large-scale industrialization across the country (USSR). -
Japan had invaded Manchuria without declaring war, in violation of League of Nations laws. Japan had a well-developed industry, but natural resources were scarce on the land. To compensate for a shortage of resources in Japan, Japan turned to Manchuria for oil, rubber, and lumber. -
The Holodomor, also known as the Terror-Famine or the Great Famine, was a famine in Soviet Ukraine that killed an estimated of about 3.5 million people between 1932 and 1933. The goal was to combat the counter-revolution and create communism in rural areas. -
Following a series of electoral successes for the Nazi Party, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany in 1933. He ruled with absolute power until his suicide in April 1945. -
Night of the Long Knives, in German history, purge of Nazi leaders by Adolf Hitler on June 30, 1934. Fearing that the paramilitary SA had become too powerful, Hitler ordered his elite SS guards to murder the organization's leaders, including Ernst Röhm. -
The Second Italo-Ethiopian War lasted from October 1935 to February 1937 and was a war of aggression between Italy and Ethiopia. The invasion of Ethiopia was intended to restore Italian national pride, which had been harmed by Ethiopia's victory over Italian forces at the Battle of Adowa in the nineteenth century (1896), which saved Ethiopia from Italian colonization. -
The Nuremberg Laws were antisemitic and racist laws passed by Nazi Germany on September 15, 1935, at a special meeting of the Reichstag held during the Nazi Party's annual Nuremberg Rally. -
The Great Purge, also known as the "Great Terror," was a ruthless political movement initiated by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin to purge opposition Communist Party members and everyone else he deemed a threat. According to most studies, at least 750,000 people were executed. More than a million people were sent to Gulags, or forced labor camps. -
Many factors contributed to the Spanish Civil War, but the collapse of Spanish democracy was one of the primary causes. The defeat of the Spanish political parties and organizations was due to their inability to negotiate and accept democratic norms. -
In 1931, Japan invaded the Chinese province of Manchuria in search of raw materials to fuel its expanding industries. By 1937, Japan had taken control of vast parts of China, and Chinese war crimes were common. During the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Nanjing Massacre, also known as the Nanjing Rape, was an incident of mass murder and mass rape committed by Japanese Army forces against the citizens of Nanjing, China's capital at the time. -
The November Pogrom, also known as Kristallnacht or the Night of Broken Glass, was a pogrom against Jews carried out by SA paramilitary forces and civilians throughout Nazi Germany on November 9–10, 1938. The German authorities stood by and did nothing. -
The invasion of Poland, also known as the September campaign, the 1939 defensive war, and the Poland campaign, was a Nazi Germany and Soviet Union assault on the Second Polish Republic that marked the start of World War II. -
The Pearl Harbor Attack was a surprise military assault by the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service on the United States on the naval base at Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, Territory of Hawaii, on December 7, 1941, just before 8:00.