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TODAY IN HISTORY

 



USSR established

In post-revolutionary Russia, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) is established, comprising a confederation of Russia, Belorussia, Ukraine, and the Transcaucasian Federation (divided in 1936 into the Georgian, Azerbaijan, and Armenian republics). Also known as the Soviet Union, the new communist state was the successor to the Russian Empire and the first country in the world to be based on Marxist socialism.

During the Russian Revolution of 1917 and subsequent three-year Russian Civil War, the Bolshevik Party under Vladimir Lenin dominated the soviet forces, a coalition of workers’ and soldiers’ committees that called for the establishment of a socialist state in the former Russian Empire. In the USSR, all levels of government were controlled by the Communist Party, and the party’s politburo, with its increasingly powerful general secretary, effectively ruled the country. Soviet industry was owned and managed by the state, and agricultural land was divided into state-run collective farms.

In the decades after it was established, the Russian-dominated Soviet Union grew into one of the world’s most powerful and influential states and eventually encompassed 15 republics–Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Belorussia, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. In 1991, the Soviet Union was dissolved following the collapse of its communist government.



MEXICO

1853

Southern U.S. border established

James Gadsden, the U.S. minister to Mexico, and General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, the president of Mexico, sign the Gadsden Purchase in Mexico City. The treaty settled the dispute over the location of the Mexican border west of El Paso.



1960S

1965

Ferdinand Marcos inaugurated president of the Philippines

Former Philippines Senate president Ferdinand Marcos is inaugurated president of the Southeast Asian archipelago nation. Marcos’ regime would span 20 years and become increasingly authoritarian and corrupt. Ferdinand Marcos was a law student in the late 1930s.



INVENTIONS & SCIENCE

1936

Sit-down strike begins in Flint

At 8 p.m. on December 30, 1936, in one of the first sit-down strikes in the United States, autoworkers occupy the General Motors Fisher Body Plant Number One in Flint, Michigan. 



WORLD WAR II

1884

Japanese prime minister Hideki Tojo is born

Hideki Tojo, prime minister of Japan during the war, is born in Tokyo. After graduating from the Imperial Military Academy and the Military Staff College, Tojo was sent to Berlin as Japan’s military attache after World War I. 



WORLD WAR I

1916

Rasputin is murdered

Sometime over the course of the night and the early morning of December 29-30, 1916, Grigory Efimovich Rasputin, a self-proclaimed holy man, is murdered by Russian nobles eager to end his influence over the royal family. 



ART, LITERATURE, AND FILM HISTORY

1968

Led Zeppelin filmed live for the first time

Within a year, they’d be big. Within two, they’d be huge. And within three, they’d be the biggest band in the world. But on December 30, 1968, the quartet of British rockers preparing for their fifth-ever gig in the United States were using propane heaters to keep themselves.




EARLY 20TH CENTURY US

1903

Fire breaks out in Chicago theater

A fire in the Iroquois Theater in Chicago, Illinois, kills more than 600 people on December 30, 1903. It was the deadliest theater fire in U.S. history. Blocked fire exits and the lack of a fire-safety plan caused most of the deaths. 



CRIME

1994

An anti-abortion activist goes on a murder spree

John Salvi III walks into two separate abortion clinics in Brookline, Massachusetts, and shoots workers with a rifle, killing two receptionists and wounding five other employees. He was captured the next day after firing 23 shots at a Norfolk, Virginia, medical clinic. 



CIVIL WAR

1862

U.S.S. Monitor sinks

On December 30, 1862, the U.S.S. Monitor sinks in a storm off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. Just nine months earlier, the ship had been part of a revolution in naval warfare when the ironclad dueled to a standstill with the C.S.S. Virginia (Merrimack)off Hampton Roads, Virginia.



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