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38th Parallel
Line dividing North and South Korea after 1945, becoming the frontline of political tension.
Armistice
A formal agreement between warring parties to stop fighting, often to create a temporary truce while a peace treaty is negotiated.
Collectivisation
The policy of consolidating individual landholdings and labour into collective farms, implemented most notably by Stalin in the Soviet Union from 1929, often through coercion and force.
Cominform
The Communist Information Bureau, established in September 1947 to coordinate communist parties across Europe and enforce ideological loyalty to Moscow. It was used by Stalin to punish deviation, most notably expelling Yugoslavia in 1948.
Cominform
The Communist Information Bureau, established in 1947 by the Soviet Union to coordinate and control communist parties across Europe. It enforced ideological conformity and was used to expel Yugoslavia in 1948 after Tito's break with Stalin.
Communism
Political system where the state controls the economy and promotes equality.
Containment
The strategy of stopping communist expansion through alliances, aid, and limited military action.
Gulag
The Main Administration of Camps, a vast Soviet network of forced labor camps where millions of political prisoners, criminals, and perceived enemies of the state were imprisoned. The Gulag served both as a tool of political repression and as a source of forced labor for economic projects.
Lysenkoism
A pseudoscientific agricultural theory promoted by Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko, rejecting genetics in favour of environmental conditioning of crops, adopted in Maoist China with disastrous consequences for food production.
Marshall Plan
The Marshall Plan (1947) was a US programme that provided economic aid to help rebuild war-torn European countries after World War II.
It aimed to strengthen capitalism, promote political stability, and reduce the appeal of communism in Western Europe.
Nuclear parity
A situation in which two rival powers possess roughly equal nuclear arsenals in terms of quantity and destructive capability, meaning neither side holds a decisive strategic advantage.
Politburo
Politburo was the highest policy-making body of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, responsible for all major political and economic decisions. Its members were the most powerful figures in the USSR.
Salami tactics
Salami tactics refers to the strategy used by communist parties in Eastern Europe (1945-1948) to eliminate opposition by slicing away rival parties one by one, first forming coalitions, then marginalising partners, and finally establishing single-party rule. The term was coined by Hungarian communist leader Matyas Rakosi.