World War I Terms Flashcards
The Bolsheviks return from exile
In April 1917 the German government offered safe passage to Lenin through Germany to Russia. The aim of the Germans in this affair was to use a kind of psychological warfare against the enemy’s home front. It was to promote rebellion against the Provisional Government. Lenin took control and pulled Russia out of the war.
The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk
On December 3, 1917, a peace conference opened between the Bolsheviks and Germany at Brest-Litovsk. Meanwhile the people within the western borders of old Russia, with German backing, proclaimed their national independence. The Bolsheviks, since they would not or could not fight, were obliged to sign with Germany a treaty to which they vehemently objected, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of March 3, 1918. By this treaty Russia acknowledged the independence of Poland, the Ukraine, Finland, and the Baltic provinces.
Provisional Government in Russia
Took over in 1917 after Nicholas II abdicated. Held power from March 1917 to November 1917. Its members believed that a liberal and parliamentary regime could not succeed in Russia unless the German Empire were defeated. They took steps, therefore, to prosecute the war with a new vigor.
The “planned economy”
Was first applied in WWI as the warring states attempted to direct all the wealth, resources, and moral purpose of their societies to a single end.
The “rationalization” of production
The coordination of production in the interests of the country. Labor was discouraged from protesting against hours or wage scales, and the big unions generally agreed to refrain from strikes.
The allocation of manpower
Military conscription was the first step. Draft boards told some men to report to the army, granting exemptions to others to work safely in war industries.
Export controls
Governments controlled all foreign trade. Foreign trade became a state monopoly, in which private firms operated under strict licenses and quotas.
Shipping and imports
Each government set up a shipping board to expand shipbuilding at any cost and to assign available shipping space to whatever purposes (troop movements, rubber imports, foodstuffs) the government considered most urgent.
German “war socialism”
Their government controls became more thorough and more efficient. Rathenau organized a requisition of natural resources to help produce enough nitrogen for explosives.
Mortgaging the future
To pay the debt, they were bound for years to export more than they imported.
Industry spreads
The rest of the world began accelerating its industrialization. Civilian goods which for the time being could not be obtained from Europe were being sold by other countries such as Japan. Many countries began creating their own industries to manufacture materials which were unavailable elsewhere for themselves.
Propaganda and public opinion
Civilians, deprived and overworked, needed to be kept emotionally at a high pitch. The new mass press and new motion pictures proved to be ideal media for the direction of popular thinking.
War poets
Much of the early literary patriotism turned into cynicism, pessimism, and despair. War poets were condemning the horrors of a senseless war and mocking the propaganda that flowed from every national government.
Freud and Spengler
The psychological studies of Freud increasingly emphasized the raw power of human aggression. Postwar novel “Civilization and its Discontents” offered pessimistic descriptions of the endless struggles between humanity’s deep irrational drives and civilized moral standards. Spengler’s book, “The Decline of the West,” became a best selling account of how western civilization had fallen into crisis and decay.
Tzara, Mann, Yeats
The Dada movement during which Tzara rejected the structures of traditional literature and generated nihilistic criticisms of western rationality and social conventions.
Mann set his novel, “The Magic Mountain,” within a Swiss sanatorium in which sick people debate the flawed traditions of western civilization. Yeats’s poem, “The Second Coming”.
