AP Euro. Ch. 27

Triple Entente

Alliance of Great Britain, and France, and Russia in the First World War.

Balfour Declaration

a 1917 British mandate that declared British support of a National Home for the Jewish People in Palestine

Three Emperors League

a conservative alliance which linked the monarchs of Austria-Hungary, Germany and Russia against radical movements.

Constituent Assembly

a freely elected assembly promised by the Bolsheviks, but permanently disbanded after one day under Lenins orders after the Bolsheviks won less than one forth of the elected delegates.

Petrograd Soviet

a huge, fluctuating mass meeting of two thousand to three thousand workers, soldiers and socialist intellectuals, modeled on the revolutionary soviets of 1905.

League of Nations

a permanent international organization established during the peace conference in Paris in January 1919, designed to protect member states from aggression and avert future wars.

Army Order No. 1

a radical order of the Petrograd soviet that stripped officers of their authority and placed power in the hands of elected committees of common soldiers.

trench warfare

fighting behind rows of trenches, mines and barbed wire, the cost in lives was staggering and the gains in territory minimal.

total war

in each country during the First World War, a government of national unity which began to plan and control economic and social life in order to make the greatest possible military effort.

Bolsheviks

majority group, Lenins camp of the Russian party of Marxian socialism.

War Raw Materials Board

masterminded by Walter Rathenau, set up by the German government to ration and distribute raw materials.

Lusitania

the British passenger liner sunk by a German submarine that claimed 1,000 lives.

war communism

the application of the total war concept to a civil conflict, the Bolsheviks seized grain from peasants, introduced rationing, nationalized all banks and industry, and required everyone to work.

Cheka

the re-established tsarist secret police, which hunted down and executed thousands of real or suspected foes, sowing fear and silencing opposition.

Treaty of Versailles

treaty by which Germany's army was limited to 100,000 men and Germany was declared responsible for the war and had therefore to pay reparations equal to all civilian damages caused by the war.