" The term made an impact into English pulp science fiction starting from Jack Williamson's The Cometeers ( 1936 ) and the distinction between mechanical robots and fleshy androids was popularized by Edmond Hamilton's Captain Future ( 1940 – 1944 ).

* 1940 – Homero Aridjis, Mexican writer and diplomat

* 1940 – Pedro Armendáriz Jr., Mexican actor

* 1874 – William B. Bankhead, American politician ( d. 1940 )

* 1892 – Johnny Dodds, American jazz clarinetist and saxophonist ( d. 1940 )

* 1940 – John Hagee, American pastor and televangelist

* 1940 – Herbie Hancock, American jazz musician, bandleader, and composer

* 1857 – Eugen Bleuler, Swiss psychiatrist ( d. 1940 )

* 1940 – Burt Young, American actor

* 1874 – Carl Bosch, German chemist and engineer, Nobel Prize laureate ( d. 1940 )

* 1940 – Sonny Sharrock, American guitarist ( Last Exit ) ( d. 1994 )

* 1940 – Estonia was illegally annexed by the Soviet Union.

* 1940 – Louise Sorel, American actress

* 1857 – Manuel de Escandón, Mexican polo player ( d. 1940 )

* 1940 – Bill Musselman, American basketball coach ( d. 2000 )

* 1940 – Beko Ransome-Kuti, Nigerian doctor and activist ( d. 2006 )

* 1940 – Will Tura, Belgian singer-songwriter, musician, and composer

2 # 1 ( Jan., 1940 ), pp. 87 – 104 in JSTOR

* 1881 – Otto Toeplitz, German mathematician ( d. 1940 )

* 1940 – Mervyn Kitchen, English cricketer and umpire

* 1940 – Ram Loevy, Israeli screenwriter and director

* 1940 – World War II: Italian forces begin the invasion of British Somaliland.

* 1940 – Lance Alworth, American football player

* 1940 – Martin Sheen, American actor

In 1940, Russian construction workers found ancient ruins during the construction of a highway between Abakan and the nearby district center village of Askyz ( Аскыз ).

* 1940 – Boris Ignatyev, Russian footballer and manager

Finland's foreign politics before this deal had been varied: independence from Imperial Russia with support of Imperial Germany in 1917 ; participation in the Russian Civil War ( without official declaration of war ) alongside the Triple Entente 1918 – 1920 ; a non-ratified alliance with Poland in 1922 ; association with the neutralist and democratic Scandinavian countries in the 1930s ended by the Winter War ( 1939 ); and finally in 1940, a rapprochement with Nazi Germany, the only power able to protect Finland against the expansionist Soviet Union, leading to the Continuation War in 1941.

* 1940 – Vyacheslav Ionov, Russian sprinter ( b. 2012 )

* Yevgeny Alexeyevich Kornilov ( b. 1940 ), Russian historian and media researcher

Leon Trotsky (, ; – 21 August 1940 ), born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army.

* 1940 – Alexander Obolensky, Russian prince and Rugby footballer ( b. 1916 )

* 1879 – Leon Trotsky, Russian revolutionary ( d. 1940 )

Impressed by the German campaign of 1940 against France, the Soviet People's Commissariat of Defence ( Defence Ministry, Russian abbreviation NKO ) ordered the creation of nine mechanized corps on 6 July 1940.

An isolated population in the Laptev Sea is considered by some authorities, including many Russian biologists and the canonical Mammal Species of the World, to be a third subspecies, O. r. laptevi ( Chapskii, 1940 ), and is managed as such in Russia.

* January 28 – Vsevolod Meyerhold, Russian Theatre Practitioner ( d. 1940 )

** Mikhail Bulgakov, Russian writer ( d. 1940 )

* November 7 – Leon Trotsky, Russian revolutionary ( d. 1940 )

In 1940, Russian botanists Serebriakova and Sizov proposed a complex classification in which they also recognized C. sativa and C. indica as separate species.

* ( 1940 ) in The Don Flows Home to the Sea by Mikhail Sholokhov, numerous characters contract typhus during the Russian Civil War.

* Russian — Blok, Alexander: The Fairground Booth a. k. a. The Puppet Show ( 1906 ); Evreinov, Nikolai: A Merry Death ( 1908 ), Today's Columbine ( 1915 ), The Chief Thing ( 1921 ; turned into film, La Comédie du bonheur, in 1940 ).

The Luftwaffe also used the technique in order to help their small bombers, and the enormous Gigant, Messerschmitt Me 321 glider, conceived in 1940 for the invasion of Britain, and used to supply the Russian front which also had air tow assistance from up to three bombers, into the air with loads that would have made the takeoff run too long otherwise.

It was forcibly suppressed by Russian Communists in 1940, but later was revived.

Russian and American explorers brought both Roman Catholic and Russian Orthodox religious influences, however, the village's Russian Orthodox practitioners left to establish Lower Kalskag 2 miles down river in 1940.

Besides US-led regime changes there were numerous regime changes produced by the Soviet Union, such as in Outer Mongolia, in Tannu Tuva in 1921, in the independent republics in the Caucasus during the Russian civil war, in the Baltic states in 1940, and in all of the East European countries that fell under Soviet rule due to the Yalta agreements of 1943.

* Bronisław Bohatyrewicz ( 1870 – 1940 ), Polish and Russian General, murdered in the Katyn Massacre