Global History II - Regents Review Topic 7 & 8 Vocab

Global History and Geography Regents Review Vocabulary

Topic 7 - Unit 10.5 World War 1

Topic 8 - Unit 10.5 Russian Totalitarianism

Topic 7 As the 1900’s began, the people of Europe had enjoyed nearly a century of relative peace. However, forces were pushing the continent toward war. Nationalistic feelings, a glorification of the military, imperial rivalries, and tangled alliances led to unrest. War has sparked in the Balkans, but soon all of Europe was at war. Industrialization and technology had allowed nations to develop more destructive weapons that resulted in millions of casualties. As Russia left the war and the United States entered, the Allies gained control and an armistice was signed. The costs of the war was enormous. Global problems remained, the Treaty of Versailles punished Germany. The League of Nations had menial power. Old empires had collapsed, and new nations had come into being. Nationalism continued to cause conflict in the world.

Topic 8 Factors such as dissatisfaction with czarist rules, peasant unrest, and economic difficulties created long-term discontent in Russia. After a revolution in 1905, Czar Nicholas II agreed to reforms, but they failed to solve underlying problems. Hardships caused by World War 1 sparked a revolution that ended Nicholas’ reign. Promises of peace, land, and bread allowed Vladimir Lenin and his Bolsheviks, later called Communists, to gain control of the country. After Lenin’s death, Joseph Stalin created a communist dictatorship that controlled every aspect of people’s lives. He brought the economy completely under government control. Stalin industrialized the country, focusing on heavy industry. Stalin also brought agriculture under state control, causing mass starvation in the process.

Militarism - opinions of people who believe that a country should use military strength to gain power

Bosnia and Herzegovina - Country in Southeast Europe on the Balkan Peninsula

Serbia - Integral part of Yugoslavia in the Balkans

Powder Keg - term used to describe the situation in the Balkan Region before World War 1

Black Hand - lawless secret society engaged in criminal activities such as terrorism

Franz Ferdinand - archduke of Austria-Hungary; his assassination triggered the outbreak of World War I

Triple Entente - Association between Great Britain, France, and Russia

Triple Alliance - Alliance between Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy

Lusitania - a swift-moving British cruise liner traveling from New York to Liverpool, England; which was sunk by German U-Boats

Treaty of Brest-Litovsk - a separate peace treaty signed on 3 March 1918 between Russia and the Central Powers, that ended Russia's participation in World War I

Trench Warfare - warfare in which opposing armed forces attack, counterattack, and defend from relatively permanent systems of trenches dug into the ground

Total War - mobilization, refusal to compromise, the blurring of roles between soldier and civilians, and total control of society

Propaganda - manipulation of information to influence public opinion

Neutral - the legal status arising from the abstention of a state from all participation in a war between other states

Armistice - an agreement for the cessation of active hostilities between two or more states

Self-Determination - a nation—a group of people with similar political ambitions—can seek to create its own independent government or state

Treaty of Versailles - was signed by Germany and the Allied Nations on June 28, 1919, formally ending World War One

League of Nations - an international organization, headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, created after the First World War to provide a forum for resolving international disputes

Alexander II - Emperor of Russia, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Finland from 2 March 1855 until his assassination on 13 March 1881

Russification - the policy of enforcing Russian culture on the vast numbers of ethnic minorities that lived in the Russian Empire

Pogrom - a violent riot incited with the aim of massacring or expelling an ethnic or religious group, particularly Jews

Nicholas II - the last Czar of the Russian Empire who ruled between 1894 and 1917

Russian Revolution of 1905 - a wave of mass political and social unrest then began to spread across the vast areas of the Russian Empire

Lenin - served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1924 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924

Bolshevik - a member of the extremist wing of the Russian Social Democratic party that seized power in Russia by the Revolution of November 1917

New Economic Policy - a radical shift in Bolshevik economic strategy

Stalin - the dictator of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics USSR from 1929 to 1953

Great Purge - Stalin's campaign to solidify his power over the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the state

Gulags - a system of forced labor camps established during Joseph Stalin's reign as dictator of the Soviet Union

Totalitarianism - a form of government that attempts to assert total control over the lives of its citizens

Command Economy - requires that a nation's central government own and control the means of production

Five-Year Plans - method of planning economic growth over limited periods, through the use of quotas, used first in the Soviet Union and later in other socialist states

Collectivization - to give up individual ownership of an industry and form a collaborative group instead

Holodomor - the starvation of millions of Ukrainians in 1932–33 as a result of Soviet policies

Forced Famine - a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians

Ukrainian Kulaks - a peasant who owns a prosperous farm and a substantial allotment of land, which he works with the help of hired labor

Leon Trotsky - a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He was a central figure in the establishment of Soviet Russia and the Soviet Union

Soviet Union - a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991