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Triple Alliance
The alliance of Austria, Germany, and Italy. Italy left the alliance when war broke out in 1914 on the grounds that Austria had launched a war of aggression.
Triple Entente
The alliance of Great Britain, France, and Russia prior to and during the First World War.
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 distinctions between the soldiers on the battlefield and civilian 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.
Trench Warfare
A type of fighting used in World War I behind rows of trenches, mines, and barbed wire; the cost in lives was staggering and the gains in territory minimal.
February Revolution
Unplanned uprisings accompained by violent street demonstrations begun in March 1917 in Petrograd, Russia, that led 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 Central powers and Russia that ended Russian participation in WWI 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, introduced 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 open diplomacy, a reduction in armaments, freedom of commerce and trade, the establishment of the League of Nations, and national self-determination
League of Nations
A permanent international organization, established during the 19119 Paris Peace Conference, designed to protect member states from aggression and avert 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 the 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 a National Home for the Jewish people in Palestine.
