Totalitarianism, the Interwar Period, and the Rise of Fascism and Nazism

Vocabulary practice flashcards covering interwar totalitarian regimes, Fascist Italy, Soviet communism under Lenin and Stalin, the Great Depression, the Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany, and the events leading to World War II.

Totalitarianism

A system of government where a ruler or ruling party exercises absolute authority and seeks complete control over political life and society through ideology, state control, modern technology, and police terror.

Benito Mussolini

The founder of Italy's Fascist movement who ruled as dictator from 1922 to 1943 after leading the March on Rome and taking the title Il Duce.

Blackshirts

Fascist supporters in Italy who used violent tactics against political opponents in the period of political unrest and economic hardship following World War I.

Il Duce

The Italian title meaning "the leader," adopted by Benito Mussolini after establishing his dictatorship in Italy.

Fascism

An authoritarian, antidemocratic, and anticommunist political movement that glorifies extreme nationalism, obedience to a strong leader, militarism, and aggressive territorial expansion.

Vladimir Lenin

The Bolshevik leader of the Russian Revolution of 1917 who headed the Soviet government, introduced the New Economic Policy in 1921, and died in January 1924.

New Economic Policy

An economic program introduced by Vladimir Lenin in 1921 that permitted limited private trade and small businesses to help the Soviet economy recover after the civil war.

Leon Trotsky

A leading Bolshevik who organized the Red Army during the Russian Civil War, competed with Joseph Stalin for power after Lenin's death, was exiled, and was later assassinated in 1940.

Joseph Stalin

The dictator who ruled the Soviet Union from the late 1920s until his death in 1953, creating a centralized state through five-year plans, forced collectivization, purges, and the Gulag system.

Five-Year Plans

State economic initiatives initiated by Joseph Stalin in 1928 that set demanding production goals for agriculture and heavy industries like steel, coal, and machinery.

Collectivization

The Soviet policy of combining individual peasant holdings into large, state-controlled farms called collectives to supply grain to industrial cities and control food production.

Kulaks

Relatively prosperous peasants in the Soviet Union who were branded as enemies of collectivization and subjected to arrest, deportation, imprisonment, and execution.

Holodomor

A devastating, state-induced famine in Soviet Ukraine during 1932–1933, also known as the Terror Famine, resulting from forced collectivization and grain requisitions that killed millions.

Gulag

The Soviet system of forced-labor camps where political dissidents and accused criminals faced severe conditions, exhaustion, hunger, disease, and high mortality rates.

The Great Purge

A campaign of political terror in the Soviet Union, especially from 1936 to 1938, during which Stalin's regime imprisoned, tried, or executed millions of party members, military officers, and citizens.

The Great Depression

A global economic downturn that started in 1929 and lasted through much of the 1930s, characterized by bank collapses, high unemployment, overproduction, and reduced trade.

Dawes Plan

A 1924 financial agreement that reorganized German reparation payments and arranged American loans to stabilize Germany's economy during the Weimar period.

Protectionism

An economic policy in which nations raised tariffs to protect domestic industries, causing retaliatory tariffs that drastically curtailed international trade during the Great Depression.

Weimar Republic

Germany's democratic government from 1919 to 1933 that struggled with political violence, economic crises such as hyperinflation, and public outrage over the Treaty of Versailles.

Hyperinflation of 1923

A severe economic crisis in Germany where the currency lost value extremely rapidly and domestic consumer prices escalated uncontrollably.

Adolf Hitler

The leader of the Nazi Party who became chancellor of Germany in 1933, assumed the title Führer in 1934, initiated World War II in Europe, and directed the Holocaust.

Paul von Hindenburg

A German military commander and president of the Weimar Republic who appointed Adolf Hitler as chancellor in January 1933 and died in 1934.

Nazism

The totalitarian ideology of the National Socialist German Workers' Party incorporating fascism, radical German nationalism, antisemitism, expansionism, and belief in an "Aryan" master race.

Lebensraum

A German term meaning "living space," representing the Nazi expansionist policy of conquering foreign lands to provide territory for the German nation.

Führer

The German title meaning "leader," assumed by Adolf Hitler in 1934 after merging the offices of president and chancellor following the death of Paul von Hindenburg.

Night of the Long Knives

A June 1934 purge ordered by Adolf Hitler in which leaders of the SA paramilitary group and other political rivals were executed to consolidate power and gain the loyalty of the army.

Anschluss

The annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany in March 1938, achieved through heavy political intimidation without allowing a free national referendum.

Appeasement

The foreign policy adopted by Britain and France in the 1930s of giving in to aggressive territorial demands made by Adolf Hitler to prevent another war.

Munich Agreement

A September 1938 treaty negotiated between European powers without Czechoslovakian representation, granting the Sudetenland border region to Nazi Germany.

Sudetenland

A border territory of Czechoslovakia with a large German-speaking population that was annexed by Nazi Germany under the Munich Agreement in September 1938.

Neville Chamberlain

The British prime minister from 1937 to 1940 who proclaimed "peace for our time" after the Munich Agreement before declaring war on Germany following the invasion of Poland.

The Holocaust

The state-sponsored, systematic murder of six million Jewish people and millions of others carried out by Nazi Germany and its collaborators.