Red Army troops capture Krasnovodsk in February 1920, and establish Bolshevik rule over the Transcaspian province, called the Turkmen province after 1921.

The province forms part of the Turkistan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, while the remaining districts of Turkmenistan are embodied in the Bukharan and Khorezmian Soviet Socialist republics formed in 1920.

The Allies had organized the Occupied Enemy Territory Administration after the armistice to provide an interim government for Palestine, Syria, and Iraq.

The General Syrian Congress had convened in Damascus in July 1919 and called for Allied recognition of an independent Syria, including Palestine, with Faisal as its king.

When no action is taken on the proposal, the congress unilaterally proclaims Syria independent and confirms Faisal as king in March 1920.

Iraqi representatives similarly announce their country's independence as a monarchy under Abdullah.

The League of Nations Council rejects both pronouncements, and in April the San Remo Conference decides on enforcing the Allied mandates in the Middle East.

French troops occupy Damascus in July, and Faisal is served with a French ultimatum to withdraw from Syria.

He goes into exile, but the next year will be installed by the British as king of Iraq.

At the same time, Abdullah is organizing resistance against the French in Syria, arousing both French ire and British consternation.

Assembling a motley force of about two thousand tribesmen, he moves north from Mecca, halting in Amman in March 1920.

In October the British high commissioner for Palestine calls a meeting of East Bank sheikhs at As Salt to discuss the future of the region, whose security is threatened by the incursion of Wahhabi sectarians (adherents of a puritanical Muslim sect who stress the unity of God) from Najd in the Arabian Peninsula. 

It becomes clear to the British that Abdullah, who remains in Amman, could be accepted as a ruler by the Bedouin tribes and in that way be dissuaded from involving himself in Syria.

Muslim leaders from the Deoband and Aligarh movements join Mohandas K. Gandhi in mobilizing the masses for the 1920 (and 1921) demonstrations of civil disobedience and noncooperation in response to the massacre at Amritsar.

At the same time, Gandhi endorses the Khilafat Movement, thereby placing many Hindus behind what had been solely a Muslim demand.

Despite impressive achievements, however, the Khilafat Movement fails.

Turkey rejects the caliphate and becomes a secular state.

Furthermore, the religious, mass-based aspects of the movement alienate such Western-oriented constitutional politicians as Mohammad Ali Jinnah, who resigns from Congress in the Nagpur session in December 1920.

Other Muslims also are uncomfortable with Gandhi's leadership.

The movement fails to lay a lasting foundation of Indian unity and serves only to aggravate Hindu-Muslim differences among masses that are being politicized.

As India moves closer to the self-government implied in the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms, rivalry over what might be called the spoils of independence accentuates the differences between the communities.

In 1920, Oppenheimer gains control of the De Beers Consolidated Mines.

Ibn Sa'ud's son fifteeen-year-old son Faysal, with the help of the Ikhwan, captures the province of Asir, the southwestern highlands between the Hejaz and Yemen, in 1920.

In Bosnia and Herzegovina, one of the most important changes of the post-1918 period is the gradual expropriation of Muslim estates, with land being parceled out to the peasants.

The result is a concentration of the Muslim population in the urban centers.

In 1920, the Italians occupying Libya recognize Idris as Emir of Cyrenaica.

The Italian Fascist movement evolves into a powerful “radicalism of the right” and is supported by many industrialists, army officers and Po Valley landowners.

Greece’s King Alexander dies in October 1920.

Venizelos and his Liberal part unexpectedly lose the November, 1920 elections.

A plebiscite on December 5 restores the deposed Constantine to the throne.

I. G. Farben, in 1920, signs working agreements with Sandoz and Ciba-Geigy in Switzerland.

Woodstock-based painter Frank Swift Chase summers in 1920 on Nantucket Island, where he establishes his first art school; he will be the leading teacher of painting here for three decades.

Dubbed "the dean of Nantucket artists" by the Artists Association of Nantucket, he is largely responsible for the development of this community as a true art colony.

Born in St Louis, Missouri, on March 12, 1886, the fourth child of Grace (née Metcalfe) and Charles Denison Chase, he attended public elementary school and high school in St Louis.

Despite a mathematical mind, he had not progressed to college, instead working as an assistant in his father's laboratory at the Aluminum Company of America in Bauxite, Arkansas.

His father, an Alcoa chemist, is noted among the pioneers of experimentation with the use of nitroglycerin in mining.

Britain controls the manufacture, distribution, and sale of narcotics through the Dangerous Drug Act of 1920.