1939Hitler and Stalin’s foreign ministers sign the Nazi-Soviet pact
Through the 1930s Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union had treated each other as mortal enemies, and in the summer of 1939 Britain and France were still trying to bring Moscow into an alliance against Hitler. But Stalin distrusted the Western powers, and Hitler wanted a free hand to attack Poland without having to fight the Soviet Union as well. In August secret talks moved quickly, and the German foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, flew to Moscow.
On 23 August 1939 Ribbentrop and the Soviet foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, signed a ten-year non-aggression pact, each side promising not to attack the other. A secret protocol divided eastern Europe between them: Poland was to be split, and Finland, Estonia and Latvia fell into the Soviet sphere, with Lithuania added soon afterwards. Germany invaded Poland nine days later, and the Soviet Union denied the protocol’s existence until 1989. Since 2009, 23 August has been marked in the European Union as a day of remembrance for the victims of totalitarian regimes.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: German-Soviet Pact ↗
1989The Baltic Way: a human chain 600 kilometres long
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had been independent between the two world wars, but in 1940 they were occupied and annexed by the Soviet Union under the secret terms of the Nazi-Soviet pact. By 1989, as Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms loosened controls, popular movements in all three countries were demanding that Moscow admit the truth about the pact and accept that the annexation had been illegal.
On the evening of 23 August 1989, the pact’s fiftieth anniversary, people from all three nations joined hands in an unbroken chain about 600 kilometres long, from Tallinn through Riga to Vilnius. It was organised by the Popular Fronts of Estonia and Latvia and Lithuania’s Sąjūdis movement; estimates of the number taking part vary, running up to two million. The peaceful protest drew the eyes of the world to the Baltic cause, and within two years all three countries had regained their independence. The documents of the Baltic Way are now on UNESCO’s Memory of the World register.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: UNESCO Memory of the World: The Baltic Way ↗
1514Ottoman guns break the Safavid cavalry at Chaldiran
In the early 1500s the young Shah Ismail I founded the Safavid dynasty in Iran and made Shia Islam its state faith. His influence reached deep into eastern Anatolia, where many Turkmen tribes followed him, and this alarmed the Sunni Ottoman Empire. Sultan Selim I, who had seized the Ottoman throne from his father in 1512, set out to destroy the threat, and in 1514 he marched east with a huge army.
On 23 August 1514 the two armies met on the plain of Chaldiran, in north-western Iran. Ismail’s army was built around its famous cavalry, while Selim’s had heavy cannon and Janissary infantry armed with muskets. The Safavid charges broke against the Ottoman guns, and Ismail was defeated and fled. Selim went on to occupy the Safavid capital, Tabriz, for a time. The battle gave the Ottomans eastern Anatolia and roughly fixed the frontier between the Turkish and Iranian worlds for centuries.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Britannica: Battle of Chāldirān ↗
1927Sacco and Vanzetti are executed in Massachusetts
Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were Italian immigrants and anarchists living in Massachusetts. In 1920 they were arrested for the murder of a paymaster and a guard during a robbery in South Braintree, and in 1921 they were convicted and sentenced to death. Many people, in America and abroad, believed that the evidence against them was weak and that the trial had been coloured by prejudice against immigrants and radicals, and their appeals dragged on for six years.
Despite protests and petitions from around the world, the two men were executed in the electric chair at Charlestown State Prison just after midnight on 23 August 1927. Huge crowds followed their funeral through Boston. Exactly fifty years later, on 23 August 1977, Governor Michael Dukakis issued a proclamation stating that they had not been treated justly and that any stigma should be removed from their names.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Mass.gov: Sacco and Vanzetti, the executions and funeral ↗
1958Chinese guns open fire on Kinmen and start a new Taiwan Strait crisis
After the Chinese Civil War, Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government held Taiwan and a handful of small islands just off the mainland coast, among them Kinmen (Quemoy) and Matsu. The Communist People’s Republic claimed them all, and the United States had promised to help defend Taiwan. In the summer of 1958 Mao Zedong decided to test that promise.
On 23 August 1958 Communist artillery opened a massive bombardment of the Kinmen islands, firing tens of thousands of shells on the first day alone. The United States sent warships to the strait and escorted Nationalist convoys to resupply the garrison, while the world feared that the crisis might grow into a wider war. After some weeks the shelling eased, and the two Chinese sides settled into a strange routine of firing shells, many of them filled with leaflets, on alternate days, which went on until 1979.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: US Office of the Historian: The Taiwan Straits crises, 1954-55 and 1958 ↗
