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HIS173C Final Fall23
History of the USSR Identification Terms Final
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Kolya | Sofia Petrovna's son in the novel by Lydia Chukovskaya. He is an active member of the Komosol and ends up inventing a successful engineering project in a factory, but is arrested despite his success because of an untrue tip from his old classmate. |
| Anna Politkovskaya | A Russian journalist and activist most active during the Second Chechen War. |
| Virgin Lands Campaign | Khrushchev paid people to move to the virgin lands of the east and make communal farms. It worked at first and they had a successful harvest but the next years yielded low crops and most people were isolated with hard lives and unmaintained equipment. |
| Viktor Yushchenko | Ukranian president from 2005-2010. Primarily oriented Ukraine towards the west and NATO. |
| Transnistria | Unrecognized country, officially considered a part of Moldova. Declared independence after dissolution of Soviet Union. |
| Winter War | Soviet Invasion of Finland in 1939 at the beginning of WWII. Ended with Moscow Peace Treaty of 1940 with Finland's victory. |
| The Doctors' Plot | Stalin thought that Jewish doctors were actually spies that were conspiring against him to kill his top ranking officers. He had most of Moscow's best doctors executed or sent to the gulag. This ultimately led to his demise. |
| "Shock Therapy" | Yeltsin's transition to democracy and capitalism which led to steep economic decline. Parliament was poorly organized and policies were slowly implemented and incomplete. |
| The "Second Economy" | The Black Market in the 1970s and 80s that consisted of tradesmen working after hours to provide quality services for higher prices and people hoarding and smuggling rare goods to keep and sell at high prices. |
| Baikonur Disaster | Launch pad accident in Soviet Kazakhstan (Space Race, 1960). Killed dozens. |
| Détente | A relaxation of strained political relations through verbal communication. Example: Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty after Cuban Missile Crisis. |
| The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism | Hitler thought that all Jews were Bolsheviks/Communists and all Communists were Jews that were conspiring against the rest of the world. |
| Tiurin | Character in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. He was dishonorably discharged from the army in 1930 for being the son of a kulak, and ended up in a prison camp after trying to flee. Shows how Russians of all backgrounds were subject to the Terror. |
| Yegor Ligachev | High ranking official in the Communist Party that was a friend and then competitor of Gorbachev. He led a group of conservatives within the Party who thought Gorbachev's reforms went too far. |
| Dmitry Medvevev | President of Russia from 2008-2012. Prime Minister 2012-2020. Essentially powerless against Putin once he took power and was removed when Putin won the presidency for good in 2020. |
| "Night Witches" | A women's aerial unit of bombers that were said to have been 100% successful in all of their air raids of German territory during WW2. They were known for idling their engines long enough to glide over areas silently before dropping their bombs. |
| Jeltoqsan | 1986 Protests in Kazakh in response to Gorbachev's dismissal of Kazakhstan's Communist Party Leader and replacement with an ethnic Russian. Protestors were met with armed troops and violence spread throughout the entire city. |
| Secret Protocol | Also known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939. Divided Eastern Europe into Nazi and Soviet spheres. Countries agreed that they would not attack each other (Hitler lied and invaded Poland shortly after). |
| Trofim Lysenko | The worst genetic/agricultural scientist ever. Infamously suggested planting seeds closer together which ruined an entire harvest and cost lives. He was favored by Stalin because of his ideology, not his expertise. |
| Deportation of Chechens | Soviets deported thousands to central Asia (mostly Kazakhstan and Kyrgystan) under the false pretenses that they were Nazi collaborators in 1944. |
| Matthias Rust Flight | An American fighter pilot crashed over Russian territory which led to sacking of high ranking military officials due to their negligence. |
| The Helsinki Accords | Document signed to closed CSCE in an attempt to approve the detente between countries during the Cold War. Was not parliamentary binding. |
| Shukhov | Poor and uneducated protagonist in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. |
| Alexei Navalny | Russian legal activist. Poisoned with Novichok in England. Survived but decided to return to Russia because he believed it would send a better message than hiding out in foreign exile. He was arrested and continues to be charged to lengthen his sentence. |
| Budapest Memorendarum | Ideological agreements signed Dec 1994 by Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan that stated they could and would not hold nuclear arms anymore. |
| Post-Totalitarianism | The stagnation period after a totalitarian leader where ideology is shown and not practiced; going through the motions. |
| Samizdat | During extreme censorship, people would reproduce and uncensor censored or banned documents and redistribute them to continue artistic expression. |
| Ruscism | Russian superiority complex introduced and prevalent in the Putin era. |
| Boris Pasternak | Russian poet, novelist, and composer. Author of Doctor Zhivago, which was rejected for publication in the USSR because it was "anti-communist" but published in the west and received Nobel Prize. USSR forced him to decline. |
| Tsezar | Shukov's friend who can get things in A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. |
| Siloviki | Anyone who works for the Russian state that is authorized to use force against others. |
| Brezhnev Doctrine | Soviet foreign policy that any threat to socialist rule in the Soviet Union or Bloc was a threat to all of them and therefore justified the intervention of any other socialist states. |
| Battle of Kursk | Last major German offensive. Largest recorded tank battle. Important Red Army success, turned priorities to relieving siege of Leningrad. After this, western powers paid more attention to Soviets as a formidable power. |
| Laverenty Beria | Khrushchev's political opponent in the race for power after Stalin's death. He was the final public political execution (on bogus accusations of being a British spy), ending the Terror. |
| Tsar Bomba | 57 megaton hydrogen bomb test Oct. 1961 which left a 40 mi. high mushroom cloud visible from 100 mi. away. Scared the US, which openly declared support for West Germany (Cold War). |
| Euromaidan | In Kyiv, a weeks-long series of mass protests against surprise reverse on Ukrainian foreign policy (in favor of Russia and against Ukrainian nationalism). Protestors pointed out govt. corruption. Armed forces killed many (Revolution of Dignity). |
| Natasha Frolenko | Sofia Petrovna's work friend. She has a "high class" background and therefore has been barred from joining the Party. She made a minor spelling mistake in her typing job and got fired and blacklisted for embarrassing the Party. |
| Nomenklatura | Communist Party's governance to make appointments to key positions throughout the central govt., and the hierarchy within the Party as a whole. |
| Sumgait Pogrom | Catalyst for the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict where ethnic Azerbaijanis targeted ethnic Armenians living in the region (1988). |
| Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) | Reagan's space defense program against the Russians during the Cold War, nicknamed "Star Wars" by the skeptical American public. |
| Alexander Lukashenko | President of Belarus, known as the "last European dictator." Removed communism from Belarus and separated it from the Soviet Union. |
| Saparmurat Niyazov | (Currently former) President of Turkmenistan. First secretary of the Turkmen Communist Party 1985-1991 and supported the dissolution of the Soviet Union. |
Created by:
fdonalds
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