Chapter 15 Vocabulary
Ethnic Group: group of people who share common ancestry, language, religion, customs, or combination of such characteristics.
Nationality: large, distinct ethnic groups within a country.
Sovereignty: self-rule
Czar: ruler of Russia until the 1917 revolution.
Serf: laborer obligated to remain on the land where he or she works.
Russification: in nineteenth-century Russia, a government program that required everyone in the empire to speak Russian and to become a Christian.
Socialism: political philosophy in which the government owns the means of production.
Bolshevik: a revolutionary group of Russians led by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.
Communism: society based on equality in which workers would control industrial production.
Satellite: a country controlled by another country, nobility Eastern European countries controlled by the Soviet Union by the end of World War II.
Cold War: power struggle between the Soviet Union and United States after World War II.
Perestroika: in Russia, “restructuring”; part of Gorbachev’s plans for reforming Soviet government.
Glasnost: Russian term for a new “openness,” part of Mikhail Gorbachev’s reform plans.
Atheism: the belief that there is no God.
Patriarch: the head of the Eastern Orthodox Church.
Icon: religious image, usually including a picture of Jesus, Mary, or a saint, used mainly in an Orthodox Church.
Pogrom: in czarist Russia, an attack on Jews carried out by government troops or officials.
Intelligentsia: intellectual elite.
Socialist Realism: realistic style of art and literature that glorified Soviet ideals and goals.