IB History Europe Key Definitions

An Italian electoral law passed in November 1923, named after Baron Giacomo Acerbo who proposed it. It changed Italy's electoral system to give the party or coalition winning at least 25% of the national vote two-thirds of all parliamentary seats. This "majority premium" guaranteed Mussolini's Fascist coalition would dominate parliament after the April 1924 elections, even if many votes were won through fraud and intimidation.

A territorial dispute between Finland and Sweden over the Aland Islands, an archipelago in the Baltic Sea between the two countries. Both Finland and Sweden claimed sovereignty; the Swedish-speaking islanders wanted union with Sweden. The League of Nations was asked to rule on the dispute, one of its earliest test cases. In 1921, the League awarded sovereignty to Finland but protected Swedish cultural rights and demilitarized the islands. Both parties accepted the ruling. The case was cited as an early success of the League, demonstrating that it could resolve disputes peacefully when great powers were not directly involved.

The programme Lenin announced on his return to Petrograd in April 1917, calling for no cooperation with the Provisional Government, an end to the war, transfer of land to the peasants, and all power to the soviets. It broke sharply with Bolsheviks who had supported the Provisional Government and reoriented the party toward seizing power.

The clause in the Treaty on European Union that lets a member state withdraw from the EU. Once triggered, it starts a two-year negotiating window for a withdrawal agreement. The UK triggered it in March 2017 and formally left the EU on 31 January 2020.

The attempted seizure of power on 19 August 1991 by senior Soviet officials including the KGB chairman, defence minister, and interior minister, who placed Gorbachev under house arrest and announced a State Committee for the State of Emergency. The coup failed within 72 hours after Boris Yeltsin rallied public opposition and military units refused orders. Its failure accelerated the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which was formally dissolved on 25 December 1991.

A system of government in which the tsar held total, unrestricted power, answerable to no parliament, constitution, or elected body. Nicholas II swore at his coronation in 1894 to preserve the principle of autocracy exactly as his father Alexander III had left it.

The withdrawal of most non-Fascist Italian parliamentary deputies from the Chamber of Deputies in June 1924, in protest at the kidnapping and murder of Socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti. Named after the ancient Roman precedent of 494 BC, when plebeians withdrew to the Aventine Hill to demand rights. The secession backfired: it left Mussolini's supporters in sole control of parliament, removed the opposition from the political arena, and relied on King Victor Emmanuel III to act against Mussolini. He did not. By early 1925, Mussolini had used the political vacuum to declare an open dictatorship.

Hitler's failed attempt to seize power in Munich on November 8-9, 1923. On the night of November 8, Hitler interrupted a meeting in the Bürgerbräukeller beer hall and declared a "national revolution." He attempted to force key Bavarian officials (State Commissioner Gustav von Kahr, General Otto von Lossow, and Colonel Hans Ritter von Seisser) to support a march on Berlin. The next day, Hitler and around 3,000 Nazis marched through Munich but were stopped by police at the Feldherrnhalle. 16 Nazis and 4 police officers were killed. Hitler was arrested, tried for treason, and sentenced to five years in prison (he served nine months in Landsberg). In prison he dictated Mein Kampf to Rudolf Hess. The failure of the Putsch convinced Hitler to pursue power through legal electoral means rather than force.

A 155-kilometre barrier built by East Germany around West Berlin from 13 August 1961, initially of barbed wire and then concrete panels. The wall was constructed to stop East Germans from escaping to the West through the open Berlin border; between 1949 and 1961, approximately 3 million had done so. At least 140 people were killed attempting to cross it between 1961 and its fall on 9 November 1989.

Italian for "Two Red Years" (1919-1920). A period of intense social conflict in Italy marked by factory occupations, agricultural strikes, and rural unrest, largely organized by socialist and anarchist workers. In September 1920, around 400,000 metalworkers occupied factories in Turin, Milan, and Genoa. The movement alarmed the Italian middle class, industrialists, and landowners, who subsequently funded Fascist squads (squadrismo) as a counterforce. Its failure to escalate into revolution also discredited the Socialist Party.

22 January 1905, when troops fired on an unarmed crowd led by Father Georgy Gapon marching peacefully to the Winter Palace to petition Nicholas II. Hundreds were killed or wounded, destroying the popular myth of the tsar as a caring father figure and triggering the 1905 Revolution.

The Bolshevik secret police, founded in December 1917 under Felix Dzerzhinsky to fight counter-revolution and sabotage. It operated outside the normal legal system, carrying out arrests, executions, and hostage-taking during the Red Terror and the Civil War.

An agricultural policy in which private farms are combined into large state-controlled or cooperative farms. In Vietnam, collectivization was imposed on the south after 1975, eliminating private land ownership and requiring farmers to work collectively under government direction.

The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, established in January 1949 to coordinate economic development within the Soviet bloc. COMECON standardised trade, technical norms, and production across member states, supplied Soviet energy to Eastern Europe at below-market prices, and integrated Eastern European economies in ways that served Soviet interests. It was dissolved in 1991.

A form of internal exile used in Fascist Italy, in which political opponents were sent to live under police supervision in remote, isolated villages, typically in southern Italy or the island of Pantelleria. Confino did not require a trial or judicial verdict; the decision was made administratively by local police authorities and later the Interior Ministry. It was less violent than imprisonment but effective in removing opponents from political life. Notable victims included the communist intellectual Carlo Levi (who wrote "Christ Stopped at Eboli" about his experience) and many trade unionists and socialists. Mussolini's regime used confino far less lethally than Hitler or Stalin used comparable measures.

A national body elected by universal suffrage in November 1917 to write Russia's constitution and settle who would govern. The Socialist Revolutionaries won the largest share of seats, but the Bolsheviks dissolved the Assembly by force after its first session in January 1918 rather than accept a result that denied them a majority.

A dispute between Italy and Greece in August-September 1923. Italian General Enrico Tellini and four members of a boundary commission were murdered on Greek territory while working on the Albanian-Greek border. Mussolini blamed Greece and issued an ultimatum. When Greece refused to comply fully, Italian forces bombarded and occupied the Greek island of Corfu. Greece appealed to the League of Nations. The League Council initially found against Italy, but pressure from France (which wanted Italian support for its Ruhr occupation policy) led the Conference of Ambassadors to issue a separate settlement requiring Greece to pay Italy 50 million lire. Italy withdrew from Corfu. The episode was seen as a League failure: a Great Power had violated the Covenant and escaped significant consequences.

An international agreement brokered by American banker Charles Dawes and accepted by Germany, France, and Britain in August 1924. It restructured Germany's reparations payments by introducing a new schedule of annual payments that began at low levels and increased gradually. More importantly, it arranged substantial American loans to Germany, which allowed the German economy to recover and pay reparations. The Dawes Plan ended the immediate Ruhr crisis and inaugurated the "Golden Twenties" of relative Weimar stability. However, it left Germany dependent on American capital, which flowed out rapidly when the Great Depression began in 1929.

The political process initiated by Khrushchev after Stalin's death in 1953, involving the release of Gulag prisoners, rehabilitation of purge victims, partial relaxation of censorship (the Thaw), and the public denunciation of Stalin's crimes in the Secret Speech of February 1956. De-Stalinization had limits: Khrushchev maintained one-party rule and crushed the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. The term describes both specific policy changes and a broader shift in Soviet political culture away from mass terror.

The Soviet state's campaign to eliminate the kulak class (wealthier peasants) as part of the collectivization drive from 1929. Officially described as "liquidation of the kulaks as a class," dekulakization involved the arrest, deportation, and execution of peasants designated as kulaks or "kulak sympathizers" (podkulachniki). In practice, the kulak category was applied broadly and inconsistently; many ordinary peasants who resisted collectivization were labeled kulaks. Between 1930 and 1933, around 1.8 million peasants were deported to special settlements in Siberia, the Urals, and Kazakhstan, where conditions were brutal and death rates extremely high. Several hundred thousand were executed outright. Dekulakization was intended both to remove the most active resisters to collectivization and to terrorize the remainder of the peasantry into compliance.

German for "stab-in-the-back legend." The myth, widely circulated among German nationalists after 1918, that the German army had not been defeated militarily in the First World War but had been "stabbed in the back" by internal enemies, particularly socialists, communists, and Jews, who had undermined the war effort from within. The legend was a fabrication: the German army had genuinely been defeated in the field by the autumn of 1918. But the myth was politically powerful and was exploited by the right, especially by Hitler, to delegitimize the Weimar Republic and blame Germany's humiliation on minority groups.

Under Soviet-backed rule, the habit of performing loyalty to the regime in public, at work, in school, at meetings, while holding different private views at home or among trusted friends. It let people survive daily life under surveillance without genuinely believing official propaganda, and it left regimes with public compliance but little real popular belief.

The arrangement after February 1917 in which the Provisional Government held formal state authority while the Petrograd Soviet controlled the loyalty of soldiers and workers through Order No. 1. Neither body could govern effectively without the other's cooperation, which produced paralysis rather than shared rule.

The elected national assembly created by Nicholas II in 1906 after the 1905 Revolution. It had limited legislative power because the tsar retained the right to veto laws, dissolve the Duma, and rule by decree, so it never became a genuine check on autocratic authority.