6 октября 1948 года  случилось землетрясение в Ашхабаде

It practically wiped out the capital of Turkmenistan and took away a hundred and ten thousand lives. The newspapers did not write about it back then: it was not customary to darken the working spirit of the Soviet people with tragedies and cataclysms. Even the Soviet Encyclopedic Dictionary of the early eighties does not mention the cataclysm: only a message about the fact that Ashgabat was rebuilt according to the general plan of 1949 can give an inquisitive reader a hint that before Ashgabat had experienced one of the most famous catastrophic earthquakes in the world, as it is now classified by modern reference books.