* 1949 – Patrick Hernandez, French singer and songwriter

* 1949 – Horst Ludwig Störmer, German physicist, Nobel laureate

* 1949 – Scott Turow, American writer

* 1874 – Cyriel Verschaeve, Flemish clergyman ( d. 1949 )

* 1949 – Phil Garner, American baseball manager

* 1949 – António Guterres, Portuguese politician, Prime Minister of Portugal

* 1949 – Jeff Cook, American singer-songwriter and musician ( Alabama )

* 1949 – Dino Bravo, Italian-Canadian wrestler ( d. 1993 )

* 1949 – Alan Campbell, Irish pastor

* 1949 – Clarence Richard Silva, American bishop

* 1949 – Jonathan Kellerman, American author

* 1949 – Ted Simmons, American baseball player

* 1949 – Bobby Clarke, Canadian ice hockey player

* 1949 – Philippe Petit, French tightrope walker

* 1949 – Jim Brunzell, American wrestler

* 1949 – James Fallows, American journalist

* 1949 – Bertalan Farkas, Hungarian astronaut

After 1890 came philosopher Josiah Royce ( 1855 – 1916 ), botanist Liberty Hyde Bailey ( 1858 – 1954 ), the Southern Agrarians of the 1920s and 1930s, novelist John Steinbeck ( 1902 – 1968 ), historian A. Whitney Griswold ( 1906 – 1963 ), environmentalist Aldo Leopold ( 1887 – 1948 ), Ralph Borsodi ( 1886 – 1977 ), and present-day authors Wendell Berry ( b. 1934 ), Gene Logsdon ( b. 1932 ), Paul Thompson, and Allan C. Carlson ( b. 1949 ).

* 1949 – Kurmanbek Bakiyev, Kyrgyzstani politician, 2nd President of Kyrgyzstan

* 1949 – Ray Nettles, American football player ( d. 2009 )

The first Soviet atomic device was tested on August 29, 1949.

The Eastern leaders retaliated against these steps by integrating the economies of their nations in Comecon, their version of the Marshall Plan ; exploding the first Soviet atomic device in 1949 ; signing an alliance with People's Republic of China in February 1950 ; and forming the Warsaw Pact, Eastern Europe's counterpart to NATO, in 1955.

* 1949 – Mikhail Boyarsky, Soviet / Russian actor and singer

After the detonation of the first Soviet fission bomb in August 1949, he, along with Isidor Rabi, wrote a strongly worded report for the committee which opposed the development of a hydrogen bomb on moral and technical grounds.

The German Democratic Republic ( GDR ; German: Deutsche Demokratische Republik or DDR ), informally known as East Germany ( German: Ostdeutschland ), was a socialist state established by the Soviet Union in 1949 out of the Soviet zone of occupied Germany, including East Berlin of the Allied-occupied capital city.

In 1955, the USSR declared the Soviet occupation zone – the historic middle portion of Germany – to be a sovereign state named the Deutsche Demokratische Republik ( German Democratic Republic, established in 1949 ), while the Red Army and the Western Allies ' occupation forces remained in place under the tripartite Potsdam Agreement ( 1945 ) which established the Allied Occupation of Germany.

Germany 1949: West Germany ( blue ) comprised the Western Allies ' zones, excluding the Saar ( protectorate ) | Saarland ( purple ); the Soviet zone, East Germany ( red ) surrounded West Berlin ( yellow )

In 1949 the Soviet zone became the " Deutsche Demokratische Republik " – " DDR " (" German Democratic Republic " – " GDR ", simply often " East Germany "), under control of the German Communist Party.

In 1949, the insurgents suffered a major blow, as Yugoslavia closed its borders following the split between Marshal Josip Broz Tito with the Soviet Union.

In 1949 Albania adopted the basic elements of the Soviet fiscal system, under which state enterprises paid direct contributions to the treasury from their profits and kept only a share authorized for self-financed investments and other purposes.

Mao in 1949 set China in an isolationist, and communist country, along with their Soviet benefactors.

In 1949, the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Romania founded the Comecon in accordance with Stalin's desire to enforce Soviet domination of the lesser states of Central Europe and to mollify some states that had expressed interest in the Marshall Plan, and which were now, increasingly, cut off from their traditional markets and suppliers in Western Europe.

By 1949 the U. S. and Britain agreed that West Germany had to be rearmed to strengthen the defenses of Western Europe against a possible Soviet invasion.

Revolutionary socialist governments espousing Marxist concepts took power in a variety of countries in the 20th century, leading to the formation of such socialist states as the Soviet Union in 1922 and the People's Republic of China in 1949.

* Venona: Soviet Espionage and the American Response ( CIA publication ), contains letter from agents in 1949 about Klaus Fuchs.

* Viktor Kuznetsov ( footballer ) ( born 1949 ), Soviet international footballer

In December 1944, Beria's NKVD was assigned to supervise the Soviet atomic bomb project (" Task No. 1 "), which built and tested a bomb by 29 August 1949.

* 1949 – The Soviet Union lifts its blockade of Berlin.

* 1949 – Natalia Kuchinskaya, Soviet gymnast

China returned to civil war between the Western-backed Kuomintang versus Mao Zedong's Communists supported by the Soviet Union with the Communists seizing control of all of mainland China in 1949, creating the People's Republic of China ( PRC ).

The consolidation of Syngman Rhee's government in the South with American military support and the suppression of the October 1948 insurrection ended hopes that the country could be reunified by way of Stalinist revolution in the South, and from early 1949 Kim sought Soviet and Chinese support for a military campaign to reunify the country by force.