History 102-03

FINAL EXAM

This is the preparation only.

The exam was written, on paper provided, during class.
Note cards were allowed; they are attached at the end.

By

Melinda S. Wrocklage

University of Louisville

May 5, 2004
The two main European alliances, the Triple Alliance—between Germany,
Austro-Hungary (created by the union between Austria and Hungary in
1867), and Italy—and Triple Entente—between England, France, and
Russia—competed for colonial strength, which resulted in a cold war
between them. Russia, Austro-Hungary, and Italy held an interest in the
Balkan Peninsula; when the revolutionary Balkan nations won their
independence from Turkey with the First Balkan War, their leaders were
called to the Treaty of London by the European powers of both alliances
and their newly-won independence was stolen from them. Serbia’s
seaport was also taken in order to weaken their economic strength; in
retaliation, the Serbs allied with Greece, defeated the Bulgarians with the
Second Balkan War, and regained their seaport with the Treaty of
Bucharest. This would turn out to be a temporary resolution; while
traveling through Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina,
Austro-Hungarian Archduke Francis Ferdinand, the grandnephew of
Emperor Franz Joseph, was assassinated by the Serbian terrorist Gavrilo
Princip; when Serbia refused to accept the responding humiliating 10
Principles, Austro-Hungary declared war. Russia prepared for an
intervention war; Germany had been preparing for an imperial war;
France had also been preparing for war for a chance to regain Alsace and
Lorraine from Germany; World War I resultantly broke out between the
alliances. This war included the newly-developed trench warfare—in
which front-lines of hand-dug trenches were used to press forward, while
machine guns and the newly-created poisonous gases, like the Mustard
Gas which had damaged the German Corporal Adolf Hitler’s lungs, were
used in an effort to halt their progress.

Germany had built a railroad from Berlin to Baghdad to be an internal

supply route during the war; the railroad was sabotaged by its Christian
Armenians builders, trying to impair the Muslim Turk’s economy.
Germany put into effect the Schlieffen Plan, utilizing their newly-invented
motorized troop carriers to quickly mobilize their troops through Belgium
into France; the Plan ultimately failed because French intelligence had
found out, so the military had gathered all available public and private
automobiles to rapidly mobilize their troops into defensive positions
along this Western Front holding back German progress. Germany
turned her attention to the Eastern Front in Russia. Here, two
devastating battles—the Battle of Tannenberg and the Battle of Masurian
Lakes—would produce the largest death toll of the war, with 500,000
Russian fatalities; this would result in Russia essentially dropping out of
the war. Italy negotiated with the Entente for control over the Balkan
nations and then lackadaisically joined the war against her previous
Alliance partners, Germany and Austria. At the Bulgarian Front,
Australian, New Zealand, Irish, French and English forces were unable to
take the hill held by the Turkish forces in the Battle of Gallipoli. Back on
the Western Front, Germany pushed towards Paris, launching shells into
the city with their newly developed Big Bertha cannon; England answered
with Churchill’s commissioned land-ship, the modern tank. The U.S.,
who had not planned to enter the war until it became known that
German Ambassador Zimmerman had negotiated with Mexico to open
hostilities if the U.S. fought against Germany and Austria, arrived with
millions of solders to strengthen the French line of defense in the
Emperor’s Battle. With this addition of tanks and American troops,
Germany was defeated and, after unconditionally surrendering, forced to
negotiate for peace.

The Paris Peace Conference was held and treaties were formed between
the Big Four—Woodrow Wilson for the U.S., David Lloyd-George for
Britain, Georges Clemenceau for France, and Vittorio Orlando for Italy—
and the Central Powers—Franz Joseph for Austro-Hungary and William II
for Germany; specifically, the Treaty of Versailles dealt with Germany and
the Treaty of St. Germaine dealt with Austro-Hungary. Providing the
soldiers that overturned the war, Woodrow Wilson found himself in a
leadership position which enabled him to enforce his ideas of the 14
Points and the League of Nations. His 14 Points changed the map of
Europe by redistributing large areas of the losing countries—90 %
Austro-Hungary and 13 % of Germany—into smaller countries for
separate native language groups. His League of Nations, a forefather of
the United Nations, established a world court, with delegates from each
nation-member, to sit above individual national interests and to ensure
international well-being.

The strain of the war on Italy’s precarious economy, along with the
frustration of not being given the promised Balkan lands, caused a
growing discontent throughout the country that the series of
unsuccessful governments could not satisfy. Italy wanted to become a
strong imperial nation, having recently unified in the 1850’s; but
individual Italian city-states, who had previously enjoyed their autonomy
up until this unification, still tended to act independently, outside of
national interest. Throughout their history, private armies were raised
for different reasons; Machiavellian thinking, along with military strength
and violence, was remained a significant way of life. Gabriel d’Annunzio
—an Italian poet, novelist, and dramatist—raised one such private army
and militarily took over Fiume in the Balkans; the other members of the
Big Four negotiated a few smaller islands to regain control of Fiume.

Benito Mussolini was born in Predappio, Romanga, where he learned the

radical rejection of any established order. His father, Alessandro
Mussolini—who even named Benito after a bandit terrorist who protested
the U.S. taking Texas from Mexico—was a prominent Marxist in his area,
writing socialist articles and manifestos, and starting a local branch of
the Second International of Social Democratic Parties. Within the often-
times violent Italian culture, Mussolini was raised to believe in necessary
violence as a means of achieving Marxist Social Democracy; he later
became a leader of the Social Democratic Party, but did not agree with
their anti-war protests in wanting to protect the workers of all countries.
After the war ended, his sense of national pride drove him to feel
resentfully angry towards the other countries in the Big Four for breaking
their promise to Italy; he wanted Italy to become an Imperial Powerhouse
in Europe.

Italy, as a late nation-builder that was still segmented into separate

entities which had their own political agendas, found that a Pluralist
system was the most logical way to give the many standard and
splintered political parties a voice in government; a Pluralist party would
never have more than 50% of the legislative vote. Mussolini’s political
party, the Fascist Party, was elected into power by 38% of the Italian
Parliament vote winning 35 seats; the Fascists had a military wing,
called the Black Shirts, who provided party protection and opponent
coercion. However, he always acted well within the legal, political, and
social restrictions of his time, even befriending both King Victor Emanuel
III and Pope Benedict XV. Once in office, Mussolini put forward a bill
which would give any leading Pluralist party 3/4ths of the parliamentary
vote; his Black Shirts intimidated the Social Democrats and the Catholic
Party, who finally yielded and allowed the Acerbo Law to pass. With this
law, the Fascists now had the ability to pass whatever they desired into
law; their first step was to suppress all other political parties.
Opponents of the regime were ruthlessly exiled or murdered; for example,
Socialist leaders Giacomo Matteotti and Giovanni Amendola were beaten
to death by the Fascists for voicing their opposing opinions. When he felt
secure in power, the violence was greatly reduced. He adopted the
dictatorship title Il Duce, or the leader, over what developed to be a
Totalitarian system of government, in which the ruling regime upheld the
interests of the state over the interests of individuals, through control
and organization. A strict censorship of the press, radio, films and
theatre was enforced; schools and universities were also closely
supervised. Mussolini remained in effective power until July 1943.

With his government subsidies, Mussolini vastly improved iron, steel,

and artificial silk production; with his encouragement for farmers to
concentrate on wheat production, wheat imports were vastly reduced.
He started a Land Reclamation program, in which the Pontine Marshes
around Rome were drained and reclaimed; and in an effort to reduce
unemployment, he designed the Public Works Program, which included
the building of motorways, bridges, blocks of flats, railway stations,
sports stadiums, schools and new towns on the newly reclaimed land.
One of his greatest contributions, however, was the ending of the long-
lasting breech between the Roman Catholic Church and Italian
government; his Lateran Treaty gave Pope Gasparri 750 million lire in
compensation for the land taken when Italy was united and made the
Vatican City an independent state with its own army, police force, law
courts, and post office.

During the Paris Peace Conference, France made sure that Germany
would be given all of the blame for the war and immediately charged 5
billion gold marks in war penalties; Wilson successfully dissuaded
Clemenceau from his attempt to completely eradicate Germany from the
European map. The Treaty of Versailles limited the German army to
100,000 men and the German navy to 12 ships, each smaller than
10,000 tons, ending the naval race between German submarines and
English warships; furthermore, German naval yards were responsible to
build 100,000 tons of warships each year for England and France over
the next 5 years. After the war, Germany established the Weimar
Republic, named for the town where the National Constituent Assembly
met; under this purely Democratic Republic, Germany was free from
monarchial rule. A large minority of Germans, mainly aristocrats and
upper-middle-classmen, wished to return the Hohenzollerns to the
throne with a Constitutional Monarchy; but the leading political parties—
such as the Marxist Party, the Democratic Party, and the Catholic Party
—insisted that the monarchy remain abolished. Hitler, as a leader of the
small Bavarian political party, the German Workers Party—which later
changed its name to the National Socialist German Workers Party, or the
NSDAP, and known as the Nazi Party—was included in this minority; he
would most likely have remained in obscurity if a three-fold economic
breakdown had not changed the German perspective.

The first part of this economic breakdown was the devastating effect of
the Versailles Treaty on Germany. The second was the German Inflation
of 1923, brought on by the harsh conditions of the Treaty and
deteriorated under the leadership of Prime Minister Heinrich Cuno; his
vengeful riots and strikes reduced the mark to the point of obscurity,
with 4.2 trillion Reichsmark worth one U.S. dollar. The third was the
Depression of 1929 which hit the western world. Prime Minister Gustav
Streseman had put aside his own private wishes to reinstate the
monarchy and had instead concentrated on trying to pull Germany out of
this economic crisis; basically he mortgaged Germany to the Big Four—
who could now sit on the boards of German businesses in order to
ensure their interests were followed—in exchange for 100 million dollars
worth of loans. With these loans—as well as renegotiating the terms of
the Treaty to lower reparation payments and to include Germany in the
League of Nations—Streseman was able to stabilize the German economy,
bringing the Reichsmark back to prewar value of four Reichsmark worth
one U.S. Dollar. German economic health had almost been completely
restored before the Depression hit; unfortunately Streseman had died the
same year as the Depression; if he had lived, he might have been able to
prevent the renewed economic crisis which virtually invited Hitler to
power.

Prime Minister Heinrich Bruning—a member of the Catholic Party, which

had become more conservative since the war—included Paragraph 48
into the Weimar Constitution, basically reestablishing Frederick William
IV’s Senior Partner Clause; Paul von Hindenburg, President of the Weimar
Republic, used this to disband Parliament. Hitler preached the rejection
of the Treaty, especially since Germany did not have the money to pay
their war debt; he approached Hindenburg requesting permission to form
a national socialistic coalition government. Using intimidation tactics by
his private army—which was called Sturm Abteilung, or Storm Section,
also known as storm troopers or brown shirts—Hitler’s Nazi Party received
the largest Plurality vote of 33%, voted by 230 delegates of the Reichstag,
or German Parliament; and Hindenburg was forced to invite Hitler, whom
he called the Little Corporal, to start his government.

After his election, the Reichstag building was burned down by the Dutch
Communist Martin van der Lubbe; Hitler used this to convince
Hindenburg to sign the Reichstag Fire Decree; supposedly for the defense
of German people and state, but in reality, for Hitler, as the Reich
Chancellor, to gain almost unrestricted powers to imprison any political
opponent, disband Parliament and take full control of Germany. He also
used the Reichstag Fire Decree to have communists arrested and forced
out of the elections, and to later legitimize the arrests by the Geheime
Staatspolizei—the German Secret State Police, called the Gestapo—and
the use of concentration camps. Anti-Semitism had become more
prominent after the war due to the depression; he passed the Nuremberg
Laws, which took away Jewish citizenship and banned Jews from
intermarrying with other German ethnic groups, especially Aryans.
Following Social Darwinism at its worst, he began euthanizing the
mentally and physically handicapped, damaging his standing with
German Christian churches. While in power, Hitler did succeed in
bringing employment back the German people, mainly in the war
industry.

Marxists had handed out propagandist pamphlets to the Russian troops

retreating from the wreckage of the Eastern Front; the Russian March
Revolution happened soon afterwards and Tsar Nicholas and his family
were executed. A Provisional Government was set up by the leading
members of the Duma under the leadership of Prince Georgi Lvov, who
supported the Allied side of the war against Germany; this government
included a single socialist, Alexander Kerensky. After prolonged
negotiations with the German government, Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, who
would keep Russia out of the war, and 30 other Bolshevik political party
members were put in a sealed railway car and secretly shipped into
Russia through Germany, Sweden, and Finland. Vladimir Ulyanov had
previously adopted the pseudonym Lenin to avoid the Tsar’s secret police;
once in Russia, he immediately began the November Revolution which
overthrew the Provisional Government, set up a Socialist State, the
Soviet Union, and then reestablished the parliamentary Duma under
Bolshevik rule. Discussions between Germany and Russia led to the
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which took Russia officially out of the war in
exchange for the German control of 100,000 miles of Russian territory.
A democratic election of the Constituent Assembly was held, but the
elected Assembly was dissolved and a State of Emergency was declared,
in which Lenin solidified Bolshevik power. The Soviet Union had become
a Communist Dictatorship; although Lenin maintained that it remained
a Social Democracy, the elections that were allowed always had
predetermined results. He began his New Economic Policy, allowing
foreign companies to set up in Russia in order to improve the economy.

Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili, who had previously changed his

name to Stalin, meaning man of steel, was born to peasant parents in
Gori, Georgia; Georgia had been conquered by the Tsar just before
Stalin’s birth, and its residents were deeply nationalistic. His father had
been a shoemaker who later worked in a shoe factory; he had died in a
drunken brawl when Stalin was around 11 years old. His highly-devoted
mother, after witnessing him distinguish himself as an outstanding
student at the Orthodox school in Gori by graduating top of his class,
pushed him towards the priesthood; Stalin was even accepted, expenses
paid, at the Tiflis Orthodox Theological Seminary where he was forbidden
from reading or speaking in his native Georgian language. Before being
expelled, Stalin became a leader of an underground Marxist study group;
afterwards, he spent half of his time in prisons or exiled due to his
Marxist activities. After the March Revolution, he returned from yet
another exile to become the leader of the Bolshevik political party.

Lenin’s death brought a power struggle between Stalin, and Leon

Trotsky, head of the military; Stalin was the clear popular victor. Once
in power, Stalin followed his National Socialist ideas, persecuting both
Jews and other smaller Soviet nationalities. He ended the Lenin-
established mixed-economy, forced out foreign companies, and made
Russia a self-sustaining Autarchy by ending all foreign trade. He drew
up two 5-year plans to make the Soviet Union completely Communist.
The first plan, which was achieved in only four years, involved the
seizure of all privately-owned industrial and urban land, which then
became Property of the State. The second plan involved the seizure of all
privately-owned agricultural land, which then became Property of the
State. This second plan also involved the evacuation, and eventual
extinction, of the 6 million Kulaks who were previous agricultural
landowners.

Stalin established the most detailed Democratic Constitution in history;

but he pre-empted it by giving himself, as head of the Bolsheviks,
continued absolute power, supposedly for the good of the Soviet nation.
His constitution was the first in western history to give women equal pay
to men. Dissenters were legally killed within the Stalin Purge Trials,
which were the first to use the charge of Thought Crime to convict
nonconformists; this came from the Chinese idea of a Censorate, which
Stalin distorted to suit his ulterior purpose. He was the first western
leader to utilize brainwashing as a means of mentally controlling
dissenters.

Before World War I, China was economically exploited by every major

western country; even the Boxer Rebellion which was begun by a secret
society of peasants called the Yihequan, or Society of the Righteous and
Harmonious Fists, was quelled by outside western armies. Other Asian
countries also exploited China; Japan had won the Chinese territory of
Korea in the Russo-Japanese War. Chinese resentment and anger slowly
built against these western countries, these other Asian countries, and
the Mongols; China desperately wanted autonomy from these foreign
invaders. Mao Tsetung was born in the village of Shao Shan in the
Hunan province; his father, a poor peasant forced to join the army who
later earned enough money to reclaim his land, had arranged a marriage
for him when he was thirteen years old, but was forced to give up the
idea when Mao ran away. This was during the reign of the Mongol Ching
Dynasty where he was treated as a 2nd class citizen, even forced to wear
the Mongal queue hairstyle; the Hunan province was more radically
rebellious and assertive against the Mongols than other provinces. Dr.
Sun Yat-Sen, previously educated in Social Democracy on the island of
Hawaii, led a Nationalist Marxist group, the Tong Menghui, or
Revolutionary Alliance, to overthrow the Mongols, and was temporarily
made Provisional President of the established republic. Marx believed in
Dialectical Materialism, in which a synthesis occurred when newly-created
ideas, the antithesis, are incorporated within the parameters of
traditional thinking, the thesis; this theory of historical change had
attracted Sun to Marxism. Sun founded a political party, the Social
Democratic National People’s Party—called the Kuomintang, or KMT—
which became the leading party in the new parliament. Sun set up the 5
Pillars of China—Legislative, Supreme Court, Executive, Civil Service, and
Censorate—separate branches of government. Civil Service stressed the
same bureaucracy and fairness found in the western world; while the
Censorate followed Chinese tradition in ensuring social values would be
closely followed.

At his high-school, the Xinjiang Institute, Mao had studied Chinese

history as well as Sun’s interpretation of Social Democracy, which differs
from the western idea; Mao learned of Shih Nai-An, who had defeated the
Khans and had reestablished Chinese culture and tradition. Shih had
stressed the rudimentary idea of the I Ching, or Book of Changes
believing that change is inevitable, reoccurring in 12-year cycles that are
inside of 60-year cycles that are inside of 300-year cycles; Mao agreed
with this way of thinking. He later spent a short time in the new
republican army and then began studying at the Normal School in the
Hunan capital of Changsta, where he founded the New Citizens Society,
and published articles against the traditional mistreatment of Chinese
women. He soon switched from the KMT, to the newly-organized Chinese
Communist Party, the CCP. In order to complete the revolution started in
1911, Sun had made a deal with Yuan Shikan, leader of the Mongols;
Yuan peacefully gave up Mongol rule in exchange to be made president of
the republic. Once this happened, he immediately undermined the
republic, making himself President for Life; and the Chinese people
returned to the revolution. What resulted was the Warlord Period, during
which every province was ruled by a dictator, but none were powerful
enough to unify China; Mao rose in power to lead the CCP at this time.
Throughout his early youth, he had preferred to read the I Ching and the
Water Margin, but later included works by Adam Smith, Darwin, John
Stuart Mill, Rousseau, Kant, Goethe, Karl Marx and Engels, Spinoza,
Paulsen, Karl Kautsky, Kirkup, Tolstoy, Kropotkin, and Bakunin.

Stalin promised Sun support and military training in exchange for an

alliance between the KMT and the CCP; Sun planned a National
Assembly election but died of cancer before it could be held. His son-in-
law, General Ching Kai-Shek, took over the KMT, made deals with the
western countries, and killed almost all of the CCP, along with hundreds
of thousands of Chinese peasants. Mao and the other survivors began a
Guerrilla War, during which the KMT killed his sister and second wife; he
then led his people to the mountains in the Yenan Province, acquiring
support and additional members along the way by not forcibly taking
food and supplies from the Chinese peasants. At Yenan, Mao made
financial, agricultural, industrial, and educational improvements by
shaping a democracy based on the Chinese tradition of extended family;
following Hung Wu’s example, he created a Democratic Centralism, in
which a lateral authority allowed local areas to govern themselves with
individual judicial systems using the Pavilion of Shame and the Pavilion
of Award, freeing these local areas from a heavy tax burden and from
interference by the central government.

During World War I, Japan, as a silent partner of the Big Four, went into
Shandong in northern China, attacked a small German army stationed
there, and took control of the city; China, also against Germany in the
war, had expected to regain the city but was disappointed by the Treaty
of Versailles. After the war, Japan decided to further their conquest of
China; the Japanese Invasion brought a temporary truce between the
CCP and the KMT; this cooperation lasted throughout World War II, after
which their civil war was renewed. In 1949, the CCP finally succeeded in
defeating Chaing Kai-Shek and set up the People’s Republic of China;
Chaing and 2 million KMT members fled to Taiwan, and established a
Nationalist Chinese state on the island. The first law passed in the
People’s Republic was the Land Law, giving women equal rights to hold
land, and was closely followed by the Marriage Law, protecting the rights
of young women in marriage and divorce. Stalin may not have supported
Mao’s ideas but he offered Soviet technological and financial aid to the
newly formed People’s Republic.

The peace treaty after World War II had resulted in the division of Korea;
the Korean War had begun when China and the Communist North Korea
attacked the Democratic South Korea and had ended with no
geographical changes. After this war, Mao successfully implemented his
5-year plan to bring a more complete Communism to China by gathering
all private property and land and making it property of the state, and
setting up communes in which peasants gathered in independent
collective farms, sharing both work and profit. He changed the Soviet
interpretation of communism to reflect Chinese traditions by allowing
individuals to have small private plots of land and water sources for
market gardens; this idea would continue beyond his time, appearing in
the Chinese Constitution after his death. He made further changes in
both industry and education with the Great Leap Forward. The
production of high-quality steel was needed in order to compete with
other nations; but Mao wanted to keep agriculture predominant in
China, so he created small smelting plants on certain communes,
bringing in used steel from outside sources; when this idea failed, he
created huge industrial cities throughout Western China. Millions of
young Chinese participated in the Mao-encouraged Cultural Revolution,
expressing their complaints aloud and with Dazibaos, or hand-written
posters; the results of this revolution brought improvements to
industries, universities, and even isolated villages. Mao retired when he
felt satisfied with his accomplishments, eventually dying at 83 years of
age; after his death, the 1978 Constitution allowed a government-
regulated capitalism to enter the economy, but its preamble stated that
the Chinese Communist Party remains the protector of the Chinese
people.