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| 1948, Feb.–March |
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| The USSR concluded treaties of friendship and mutual assistance with Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria. | 1 |
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| Feb. 10 |
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| The Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) accused Soviet composers, including Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev, and Aram Khachaturian, of losing touch with the masses by showing bourgeois influences in their works. The accused confessed and repented. | 2 |
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| April 6 |
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| The USSR concluded a military assistance pact with Finland. | 3 |
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| Aug |
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| A further ideological shake-up occurred when the biologist Trofim Lysenko, backed by the Central Committee, condemned the generally accepted “formal genetics,” based on the findings of Gregor Mendel, and substituted the outmoded teachings of Ivan Michurin, as being in complete accordance with Marxian doctrine. | 4 |
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| Aug. 31 |
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| Death of Andrei Zhdanov, deputy premier and one of the party's leading ideologists. | 5 |
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