Twentieth-Century Rejections of Liberalism – Key Vocabulary

These flashcards cover essential vocabulary and key events surrounding twentieth-century communist and fascist rejections of liberalism, helping students recall definitions and contextual significance.

Censorship

Government restriction of expression or access to ideas, justified as protecting the common good.

Collectivization

Policy of taking privately owned land and merging it into large, collectively worked farms.

Communism

System in which property is owned by the community; people work for the common benefit and receive according to need.

Dissent

The political act or right of openly disagreeing with authority or policy.

Emancipation

Process of being freed from legal, social, or political restrictions.

Eugenics

Controlled human breeding to encourage ‘desirable’ traits and eliminate ‘undesirable’ ones.

Fascism

Extreme right-wing, anti-democratic nationalism that produced totalitarian regimes in Italy and Germany.

Gulag

Network of forced-labour prison camps across the Soviet Union, often in remote Siberia.

Indoctrination

Teaching people to accept beliefs uncritically, usually through schools, media, and youth groups.

Propaganda

Biased or misleading information spread to promote a cause or damage an opponent.

Radical (political)

Favoring extreme, revolutionary change that rejects past traditions.

Reactionary

Opposing change and idealizing a past social or political order; accepts inequality.

Scapegoat

Individual or group unfairly blamed for others’ problems for reasons of convenience.

Serf

Low-income farmer legally bound to land owned by a landlord in feudal systems.

Totalitarianism

Government seeking complete control over public and private life through coercion and ideology.

Bloody Sunday (1905)

Massacre of peaceful petitioners at Czar’s Winter Palace, sparking revolutionary unrest in Russia.

Bolsheviks

Lenin’s revolutionary Marxist faction that seized power in Russia in 1917.

War Communism

Lenin’s 1918-21 policy of state control over industry, trade, and food during the civil war.

New Economic Policy (NEP)

Lenin’s 1921 market-oriented reforms that allowed limited capitalism to revive the Soviet economy.

Five-Year Plan

Stalin’s centrally planned program setting production quotas to industrialize the USSR rapidly.

Kulaks

Prosperous peasant farmers targeted and persecuted during Soviet collectivization.

Holodomor

Man-made Ukrainian famine (1932-33) resulting from collectivization; over seven million dead.

Great Purge

Stalin’s 1936-38 campaign of arrests and executions to eliminate real or perceived opposition.

Weimar Republic

Germany’s liberal democratic government (1919-33) established after WWI.

Treaty of Versailles

1919 peace treaty that imposed harsh penalties and reparations on Germany.

Hyperinflation (Germany 1923)

Rapid, uncontrolled price increases that wiped out German savings after WWI.

Dawes Plan

1924 U.S.-backed loans and payment schedule to help Germany meet reparations.

Autarky

Economic self-sufficiency; Nazi goal to reduce reliance on foreign imports.

Reichstag Fire Decree (1933)

Emergency law suspending civil liberties in Germany after the parliament fire.

Enabling Act (1933)

Law allowing Hitler to pass legislation without Reichstag approval, creating a dictatorship.

Night of the Long Knives

Hitler’s 1934 purge of SA leaders and other rivals to consolidate power.

SA (Sturmabteilung)

Nazi Party’s original paramilitary wing, also called Storm Troopers or Brownshirts.

Aryan Race

Nazis’ supposed ‘pure’ Germanic master race exalted in racial ideology.

Nuremberg Laws (1935)

Statutes defining Jews racially and stripping them of citizenship and rights.

Lebensborn

Nazi program encouraging births of racially ‘pure’ Aryan children.

Untermenschen

Nazi term for ‘sub-humans’—peoples considered racially or socially inferior.

Ghetto

Confined district where Nazis forcibly segregated Jews before deportation to camps.

Holocaust

Systematic Nazi genocide that murdered about six million Jews and millions of others.

Cult of the Leader

Totalitarian practice of glorifying one ruler as infallible and supreme.