On a muggy July night in 1917, American journalist Arno Dosch-Fleurot joined the protestors parading along Petrograd’s Nevsky Prospekt when gunshots suddenly rang out. Banners pleading for liberty and freedom crashed to the ground as blood stained the Russian capital’s most fashionable thoroughfare. After diving for cover in a gutter, the New York World correspondent came face-to-face with a Russian officer and asked him what was happening. “The Russians, my countrymen, are idiots,” he replied. “This is a white night of madness.”
4. November 16, 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt ended almost 16 years of American non-recognition of the Soviet Union following a series of negotiations in Washington, D.C. with the Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs
5. In the Soviet Union, the first Five-Year Plan (1928–32), implemented by Joseph Stalin, concentrated on developing heavy industry and collectivizing agriculture, at the cost of a drastic fall in consumer goods.
