C. 25 def-wor (War) Flashcards
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 Alliance
The alliance of Great Britain, France, and Russia prior to and during the First World War.
Triple Entente
Failed German plan calling for a lightning attack through neutral Belgium and a quick defeat of France before turning on Russia.
Schlieffen Plan
A war in which distinctions 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.
total war
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.
trench warfare
Unplanned uprisings accompanied by violent street demonstrations begun in March 1917 (old calendar February) in Petrograd, Russia, that led to the abdication of the tsar and the establishment of a provisional government.
February Revolution
A huge, fluctuating mass meeting of two to three thousand workers, soldiers, and socialist intellectuals modeled on the revolutionary soviets of 1905.
Petrograd Soviet
Lenin’s radical, revolutionary arm of the Russian party of Marxist socialism, which successfully installed a dictatorial socialist regime in Russia.
Bolsheviks
Peace treaty signed in March 1918 between the Central Powers 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.
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk
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.
War Communism
The 1919 peace settlement that ended war between Germany and the Allied powers.
Treaty of Versailles
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.
Fourteen Points
A permanent international organization, established during the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, designed to protect member states from aggression and avert future wars.
League of Nations
The notion that peoples should be able to choose their own national governments through democratic majority-rule elections and live free from outside interference in nation-states with clearly defined borders.
national self-determination
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.
war guilt clause