Read history

22 September 1932: circular No. 168/76

On 22 September 1932 the Ukrainian SSR's workers' and peasants' militia issued secret circular No. 168/76, ordering intensified action against people violating a ban on selling grain from the new harvest before 15 January 1933.

An OGPU report of the same date described resistance across Soviet Ukraine to grain collection: strikes by entire work brigades and collective farms, obstruction of grain removals, and clashes with local authorities, with up to 1,000 people reported in some actions.

The next day, central authorities refused a requested seed loan to collective and state farms.

Months too late to be a beginning

No credible source identifies 22 September as the day the famine began. Scholarly reference material documents famine conditions by late 1931 and widespread starvation with tens of thousands of deaths in Soviet Ukraine during early 1932.

A famine has no defensible single-day onset; this date is better documented as a day of intensified repression inside a catastrophe already under way.

Even the enforcement documents disagree

Document collections differ on the date of the Supreme Court–OGPU enforcement instruction for the 7 August property law: one collection prints 22 September, while an SBU archival publication dates the instruction to 13 September with Politburo approval on 16 September.

The Ukrainian famine formed part of a broader Soviet famine that also struck Kazakhstan and Russia, though "Holodomor" usually denotes the Ukrainian catastrophe.

Scholars continue to debate genocidal intent and the relationship between all-Union agricultural policy and measures directed particularly at Ukraine.

28 September 1939, 13:15, Rakowiec

At 13:15 on 28 September 1939, at the former Skoda aircraft-engine factory in Rakowiec, General Tadeusz Kutrzeba and German General Johannes Blaskowitz signed Warsaw's capitulation agreement. Kutrzeba signed for the commander of Army Warsaw; Blaskowitz signed as commander of the German 8th Army.

The bombardment of 25 September had wrecked water and power infrastructure. Shortages and mounting casualties made continued defence untenable, and the capital's military and civic leaders opened ceasefire negotiations on 27 September.

More than 6,000 Polish soldiers and about 25,000 civilians died during the siege.

The terms, and the curfew

Polish officers went into captivity under honour terms while conscripted enlisted men were to be released. Polish forces had to surrender their weapons by noon on 30 September.

Artillery fire ceased and Warsaw began its transition from defended capital to German-occupied city.

Mayor Stefan Starzyński, who had stayed in the city and joined the expanded Polish delegation, issued a 19:00–05:00 curfew under German direction.

The fighting did not stop that day

Modlin surrendered on 29 September, sending about 35,000 soldiers into captivity. General Franciszek Kleeberg's Independent Operational Group Polesie began laying down its arms near Kock at 10:00 on 6 October, with roughly 17,000 Polish soldiers and officers entering German captivity.

Nor did resistance end with the regular campaign. The underground Service for Poland's Victory had been organised in Warsaw on 27 September, the day before the capitulation was signed.

Victory or death

As the Axis position deteriorated on 3 November 1942, Adolf Hitler rejected Erwin Rommel's request to withdraw and ordered continued resistance. The associated directive declared that the troops could be led only to victory or death.

Rommel described his army that day as being crushed by the sheer weight of the British attack.

An army with 24 tanks

Operation Supercharge, launched during the night of 1–2 November, intensified the attrition of a Panzer Army Africa already short of fuel, replacements and operational armour. On 2 November the German Africa Corps reported 24 operational tanks.

Bernard Montgomery's Eighth Army had assembled more than 190,000 personnel and more than 1,000 tanks for the battle. Rommel had warned on 2 November that gradual annihilation was the likely outcome.

The confusion of the next day

Some Axis formations had already begun pulling back to avoid encirclement, producing a tangled sequence of withdrawal, attempted compliance with Hitler's order, and final retreat. Sources differ over whether Rommel merely requested permission to withdraw or had already ordered it before the message arrived.

The decisive British breakthrough and the renewed general Axis retreat belong principally to 4 November. Albert Kesselring visited Rommel that day and supported giving him freedom of action, but authorisation came too late to save much of the nonmotorised infantry, while part of the motorised force escaped westward.

Baikonur, 16 June 1963

The Soviet Union launched Vostok 6 from Baikonur on 16 June 1963 with Valentina Tereshkova as its sole occupant, making her the first woman to enter space and orbit Earth.

She was twenty-six, a textile worker and experienced amateur parachutist, and the first person placed in orbit without prior pilot training. Her radio call sign was Chaika — "Seagull."

Two Vostoks in orbit at once

Vostok 6 joined Valery Bykovsky's already-orbiting Vostok 5. During the first orbit the two spacecraft came within about five kilometres and the cosmonauts established radio communication.

This was not a rendezvous. Neither spacecraft had the capability to manoeuvre toward the other.

Live from inside the capsule

Within hours, Soviet television was showing live pictures of Tereshkova inside her one-person capsule, and she and Bykovsky transmitted a joint message to Nikita Khrushchev.

The Soviet government had authorized a female-cosmonaut group expressly to ensure that the first woman in space would be Soviet. Nikolai Kamanin, who headed cosmonaut training, favoured Tereshkova partly for her parachuting, her public presence and her political credentials.

31 March 1966: a backup goes up

The Soviet Union launched Luna 10 from Baikonur on 31 March 1966 aboard a Molniya-M rocket.

It was not the spacecraft the programme had intended to fly. An earlier Ye-6S attempt had already failed, and that failure was announced under the cover name Kosmos 111. Luna 10 was the backup craft, and it went up in its place.

Launch was not arrival

Leaving Baikonur only put Luna 10 on a path to the Moon. Nothing about the launch could make it a lunar satellite: capture required a retrograde braking burn out at the far end of the trajectory, firing the engine backwards to shed speed rather than gain it.

So the launch bought a trajectory and a deadline. A course correction on 1 April refined the approach for the encounter three days after lift-off.

What 31 March made possible

On 3 April the braking engine fired at 18:44 UTC and the Moon captured the spacecraft, making Luna 10 the first human-made object to orbit a body other than Earth — a separate event, three days downstream of this one.

The first artificial satellite of the Moon was the one the Soviet Union had kept in reserve.

A boundary, not a battle

In the three-phase chronology Trần Văn Trà later supplied, Phase III of the 1968 General Offensive–General Uprising ran from 17 August to 23 September 1968.

The consulted histories treat that closing date as a retrospective campaign boundary rather than a dated surrender, ceasefire, final recapture or other discrete battlefield act.

What the third wave produced

The August–September drive failed to produce the intended decisive result or popular uprising, while earlier losses left communist forces needing replacements and increasingly confined to lower-level activity.

A contemporary US diplomatic assessment by Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker called the third offensive abortive and reported that allied forces had assumed the military initiative by the quarter's end, while warning that communist strategy had not definitively changed.

Where the periodizations disagree

Many American narratives end “Tet” in March or early April; a State Department overview describes the third phase as about six weeks long, while a Defense Department overview ends Tet in early April. Some operational accounts carry individual third-phase fighting several days past 23 September.

The phrase itself is ambiguous — it can mean the famous January–February urban attacks, or the broader three-wave campaign running into September, depending on the historian.

Communist activity after the endpoint diminished mainly to shelling, sabotage and terrorism, while the South Vietnamese government intensified rural pacification; the war continued.

The threshold cleared

On 5 March 1970 the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons entered into force. Article IX required deposits from the three depositary governments — the United States, United Kingdom and Soviet Union — plus at least 40 other signatory states.

The United States deposited its ratification in London, Moscow and Washington that day, and the Soviet Union completed its deposits the same day. Britain had deposited in 1968. A contemporary Congressional account reports 47 ratifying nations.

11:23 a.m., Washington

At a State Department ceremony, President Richard Nixon announced that its completion had put the treaty into force and made it United States law.

That was the moment a negotiated text became binding on its original parties.

A 180-day clock starts

Entry into force began the timetable under Article III: non-nuclear-weapon parties had 180 days to begin negotiating safeguards agreements with the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Two of today's treaty-recognized nuclear-weapon states were not parties that day. France and the People's Republic of China acceded only in 1992.

Two arrivals, more than two hours apart

On 5 September 1978, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin arrived separately at Camp David, the U.S. presidential retreat in Maryland's Catoctin Mountains, for a summit convened by President Jimmy Carter.

Carter welcomed Sadat at the helipad from about 2:30 to 2:57 p.m., and Begin from about 4:40 to 5:16 p.m. The official chronology describes both welcomes as non-substantive. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance had accompanied Sadat from Andrews Air Force Base.

The evening meeting

The first substantive presidential discussion of the day ran from 8:30 to 10:53 p.m., and it was Carter with Begin alone. They covered the proposed summit procedure and the importance of the conference.

Sadat and Begin did not hold a substantive joint negotiation that day.

Nothing signed

Direct Egypt–Israel contacts had stalled after Sadat's 1977 Jerusalem initiative, which is why Carter had invited both leaders to a secluded tripartite summit.

By nightfall both delegations were installed and the summit was underway. It ran through 17 September — twelve elapsed days across thirteen calendar dates.

1 November 1993: the Union starts operating

The Treaty on European Union entered into legal force on 1 November 1993, and the European Union began operating around three pillars: the European Communities, the Common Foreign and Security Policy, and cooperation in Justice and Home Affairs.

The European Economic Community was renamed the European Community that day. The other existing Communities continued inside the first pillar, and the twelve treaty parties became the initial EU member states.

What Germany's deposit set in motion

Germany, the last of the twelve signatories, deposited its ratification instrument on 13 October 1993. Under the treaty's final clause, the delayed treaty therefore took effect on the first day of the following month.

The German Federal Constitutional Court had cleared the way on 12 October, holding that Maastricht did not strip the Bundestag of constitutionally indispensable democratic powers. The treaty had originally aimed at 1 January 1993; ratification disputes moved the date back by ten months.

Citizenship, and a stronger Parliament

The treaty introduced Union citizenship for nationals of member states, carrying treaty rights that included voting in local and European Parliament elections in a citizen's member state of residence. That citizenship supplemented national citizenship rather than replacing it.

The co-decision procedure took effect, increasing the European Parliament's legislative role. Parliament also gained authority to approve the Commission as a body and to appoint the European Ombudsman.

21 April 1994: press release no. 1772

The International Committee of the Red Cross issued press release no. 1772 from Geneva on 21 April 1994, warning that "tens, maybe hundreds of thousands" had been killed during the preceding two weeks of massacres in Rwanda. It said the exact number of victims would never be known.

The ICRC did not identify all of the estimated dead as Tutsi. Tutsi were the principal targets of the genocide, and moderate Hutu were murdered as well.

Wounded who could not leave

The release reported several hundred thousand displaced people massed in northern and southern Rwanda. In Kigali, it said, wounded people could neither safely reach hospitals nor leave after treatment.

About 30 ICRC delegates had been working since the violence began, alongside Rwandese Red Cross volunteers and a French Médecins Sans Frontières team, despite attacks on medical transport. The ICRC described their effort as a drop in the ocean.

The same day, in New York

Separately on 21 April, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 912, authorising a reduction of UNAMIR to 270 personnel of all ranks and limiting its duties principally to mediation, feasible humanitarian relief and monitoring. The reduction was not a consequence of the ICRC's warning; the two decisions simply fell on the same date.

Philippe Gaillard, head of the ICRC delegation in Kigali, publicly used the word "genocide" on Radio France Internationale the following day.

About 5 p.m. in the command bunker

The Viet Minh's final offensive had begun on 6 May. During the afternoon of 7 May 1954 its forces captured the remaining central French strongpoints and reached the command area.

In the late afternoon, Christian de Castries reported to headquarters in Hanoi — René Cogny held the last radio contact — and ordered the central garrison to stop fighting.

Viet Minh troops entered de Castries's command bunker and captured him there, at about 17:00 local time.

Isabelle fought on

The end was not a single valley-wide moment. The isolated southern strongpoint Isabelle did not cease resistance with the central camp; its attempted breakout failed and it was overrun early on 8 May.

French accounts describe an order to cease fire and subsequent capture rather than a formal capitulation ceremony. About 10,300 French Union personnel were taken prisoner, roughly 4,400 of them wounded, at the close of a battle conventionally dated at 57 days.

What 7 May did not settle

The defeat did not itself end the First Indochina War. Fighting elsewhere continued until the Geneva ceasefires.

The Geneva Conference had already convened before the camp fell, and its Indochina phase opened on 8 May; the defeat transformed those negotiations rather than causing the conference to be called. The 17th parallel they later fixed was a provisional military demarcation line for regrouping forces, explicitly not a political or territorial boundary.

19 October 1812: moving at five in the morning

Napoleon's main army evacuated Moscow and the surrounding area on 19 October 1812, ending the principal phase of the French occupation. His orders set the army in motion at 5 a.m. toward Murat's position by the Desna road, and he established his next headquarters at Troitsk, southwest of the city.

He had written three days earlier that ruined, depopulated Moscow had no military value and could not support his wounded — he had already sent 2,000 to 3,000 sick and wounded toward Smolensk.

South first, and not everybody at once

The initial movement went toward Kaluga and the comparatively unexhausted country south of Moscow, rather than straight back down the devastated Smolensk road. George Nafziger estimates the departing force at about 95,000 men and some 500 cannon, with as many as 40,000 wagons.

Mortier stayed behind with a rearguard and explosives prepared in the Kremlin. The last French regiments did not leave Moscow until early on 23 October.

Back onto the stripped road

The fighting at Maloyaroslavets on 24 October closed off the economical southern advance.

Maloyaroslavets was not a simple battlefield defeat. French forces held the ruins, but the strategic result induced Napoleon to abandon the southern route and return toward Smolensk over the already devastated invasion road.