AP Euro Chapter 25 Key Terms - War and Revolution

Triple Alliance

An alliance between Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy. (Italy left after realizing they were the aggressors and remained neutral until later in the war. The Ottoman Empire later joined making them the Central Powers.)

Triple Entente

An alliance between France, Britain and Russia. (Russia later called out of the war with more people joining this alliance later)

Schlieffen Plan

Failed German plan calling for a lightning attack through neutral Belgium and a quick defeat of France before turning on Russia.

Total War

A war in which distinction between the soldiers on the battlefield and civilians at home are blurred; and where the government plans and controls economic and social life in order to supply the armies at the front with supplies and weapons. Everyone plays a part in the war, army or not.

Trench Warfare

A type of fighting used in World War I behind rows of trenches, mines and barbed wire; the cost of lives was staggering and the gains in territory minimal.

February Revolution

Unplanned uprisings accompanied by violent street demonstrations begin in March 1917 (old calendar February) in Petrograd, Russia, that lead to the abdication of the tsar and the establishment of a provisional government.

Petrograd Soviet

A huge, fluctuating mass meeting of two to three thousand workers, soldiers and socialist intellectuals modeled on the revolutionary soviets of 1905.

Bolsheviks

Lenin’s radical, revolutionary arm of the Russian party of Marxist socialism, which successfully installed a dictatorial socialist regime in Russia.

Treaty of Brest-Litovsk

Peace treaty signed in March 1918 between the Central Powers (Germany mostly) and Russia that ended Russian participation in World War I and ceded Russian territories containing a third of the Russian Empire’s population to the Central Powers.

War Communism

The application of centralized state control during the Russian civil war, in which the Bolsheviks seized grain from peasants, introducing rationing, nationalized all banks and industry, and required everyone to work.

Treaty of Versailles

The 1919 peace settlement that ended war between Germany and the Allied Powers

Fourteen Points

Wilson’s 1918 peace proposal calling for an open diplomacy, a reduction of armaments, freedom of commerce and trade, the establishment of the League of Nations, and national self determination. This led to Germany to stop fighting to negotiate these terms.

League of Nations

A permanent international organization, established during the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, designed to protect member states from aggression and avery future wars

National Self-Determination

The notion that peoples should be able to choose their own national government through democratic majority-rule elections and live free from outside interference in nation-states with clearly defined borders

War guilt clause

An article in the Treaty of Versailles that declared that Germany (with Austria) was solely responsible for the war and had to pay reparations equal to all civilian damages caused by fighting

Mandate System

The plan to allow Britain and France to administer former ottoman territories, put into place after the end of the First World War.

Balfour Declaration

A 1917 British statement that declared British support of the National Home for the Jewish people in Palenstine