Stalin concludes his long-standing rivalry with Trotsky, expelling him from the USSR three years after removing him from the Politburo

Vladimir Mayakovsky's play The Bedbug is directed in Moscow by Meyerhold with incidental music by Shostakovich

Russia adopts a Five Year Plan aiming to boost industrial output by 200% within that period

25 million peasants are moved from the land to provide cheap labour in Stalin's new factories

Six million Russian peasants die after being transported to agricultural labour camps in Siberia

The town of Maxim Gorky's birth, Nizhny-Novgorod, is renamed Gorky in his honour

Dmitry Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District has its premiere in Leningrad's Maly Theatre

Sergei Rachmaninov writes the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini in his villa beside Lake Lucerne

USSR joins the League of Nations, after Germany leaves the organization

Sergei Kirov, head of the party in Leningrad, is assassinated in his office, giving Stalin the pretext for his first massive purge

Leningrad's opera and ballet company is renamed the Kirov, in memory of the city's recently assassinated commissar

Stalin stages the first of the Moscow show trials, designed to eliminate any surviving high-level opponents

Maxim Gorky dies in suspicious circumstances while undergoing routine medical treatment in the USSR

On Stalin's orders Dmitry Shostakovich is attacked in Pravda for providing 'chaos instead of music'

Rachmaninov completes his Third Symphony, and records it two years later with the Philadelphia Orchestra

At the same time as the Moscow show trials, millions are purged from the Russian Communist party nation-wide

Russian film-maker Sergei Eisenstein directs Alexander Nevsky, with music by Prokofiev

Lavrenty Beria is appointed head of Stalin's state security organization, the NKVD

The first of many ballets to Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet score is premiered in Czechoslovakia

Stalin appoints Vyacheslav Molotov as People's Commissar of Foreign Affairs for the USSR

A Franco-British military mission arrives in Moscow to persuade Stalin to join a pact in defence of Poland

Ribbentrop flies to Moscow to sign a Nonaggression Pact with Molotov, depriving Britain and France of an ally

A secret protocol, attached to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, divides Poland and the Baltic states between Germany and Russia

Nazi murder squads (Einsatzgruppen) kill Poland's elite

Soviet troops cross the borders of Finland, beginning the brief Russo-Finnish War, in keeping with the secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact