| Term | Definition |
|---|
| (Commodore) Matthew Perry | naval officer who sailed out 4 "black ships" into Edo Bay in 1853, opening Japanese ports to foreign trade, aying the ground for the great reforms of the Meiji Restoration |
| (General) Douglas MacArthur | Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP), in charge of the occupation of Japan, where he was powerful and supervised the writing of the new constitution |
| Alexander Lebed | popular general who was fired by Yeltsin after settling the war in Chechnya, and was elected governor of the Krasnoyarsk region of Siberia |
| Alexander Rutskoi | general during the Soviet war in Afghanistan, Yeltsin's VP from 1991 to 1993, he supported Gorbachev's conception of "socialist reform" but broke with Yeltsin when he tried to introduce capitalism and was leader of the opposition soon after |
| amakudari | (= descent from heaven) common practice whereby retiring civil servants take positions in Japanese corporations and public interest bodies |
| Article 9 (of the Japanese constitution) | states that "the Japanese people forever renounce war as a soverieng right of the nation and the threat to use force as a means of settling international disputes", and has been the basis for Japan's pacifist foreing policy, even if Japanese forces have been involved in UN peacekeeping operations |
| Berlin | capital city of the kingdom of Prussia, the Second Empire, Weimar Germany, Third Reich, and Germany since reunification in 1990 |
| Boris Yeltsin | first elected President of Russia, who organized the movement to declare the Russian Federation and destroy the USSR, and then disbanded the Russian Congress of People's Deputies to introduce the new constitution |
| Bundeskanzler | head of German government, usually head of the governing party, selected by the Bundestag, 5-year term |
| Bundesprasident | head of German state with largely ceremonial authority |
| Bundesrat | secondary or upper house of German Parliament, consisting of 69 members representing all 16 German states |
| Bundestag | primary or lower house of German Parliament, consisting of 603 delegates elected by the people |
| Chechnya | ethnic republic that declared its independence in September 1991, against which Yeltsin launched a disastrous full-scale military attack in 1994 which led to the death of thousands of civilians |
| Christian Democrats | political alliance of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Christian Social Union (CSU) in Bavaria |
| collectivization | Stalin's policy of creating kolkhozy and sovkhozy throughout the Soviet countryside, to build socialist agriculture, which led to the dath of millions through political violence and famine and created an unstable agricultural system |
| Commonwealth of Independent States (ICS) | loose association of former Soviet republics replacing the USSR in 1991, which has been largely ineffective since the fall of the USSR |
| Congress of Vienna | 1815 conference "great-powers" conference held after the defeat of Napoleon-Bonaparte, gave Prussia control over the Rhine territories |
| constructive vote of no confidence | to strengthen the power of the chancellor, requirement that to dismiss the chancellor, the Bundestag must already have a replacement for the Bundeskanzler |
| daimyo | were the lords of Japan's 260 feudal fiefdoms, who were forced after the Tokugawa clan's military victory to pay tribute to the Tokugawa central government |
| democratic centralism | central institutionnal principle of Leninist organization, according to which "democratic" debates are allowed only until a decision is reached by the authority in powers, which is then to be followed blindly |
| Diet | German synonym of Parliament, Japan's was created in the 1890s and was greatly strengthened under the 1946 constitution |
| Federal Council | upper house of the Federal Assembly, which has 178 members appointed by governors or elected by Russia's 89 federal regions and republics |
| Federal Republic of Germany | current unified German state, founded in 1949, acquired the states of the German Democratic Republic in 1990 |
| five-year plan | basic organizing framework of Stalinist economic institutions, of which the first was from 1928-32, and regulated industrial and agricultural production yearly and monthly to give targets to managers and workers |
| Frankfurt Parliament | all-German Parliament that attempted to unify and reform the German states along liberal and democratic principles in 1848 |
| Friedrich Elbert | leader of the Social Democrats that announced the establishment of the Weimar Republic in 1918 |
| fukoku kyohei | (= rich nation, strong army) phrase symbolizing Japan's desire to catch up economically and militarily with the West |
| Gastarbeiter | temporary immigrant workers in Germany |
| Gennady Zyuganov | leader of the Comm. Party the Russian Federation, arguing for the restoration of Soviet power including the reconstitution of the USSR |
| genro | oligarchs who advised the emperor and ran the country under the Meiji era |
| German Democratic Republic | German state based on the Soviet zone of education from 1949 to 1990 |
| glasnost | policy of maximal publicity, openness, and transparency in the activities of all government institutions in the Soviet Union, together with freedom of information, introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev in the second half of 1980s |
| Grigory Yavlinsky | leader of the "Yabloko" movement, arguing that capitalism in Russia must be implemented by means of democratic and uncorrupted state institutions and not by shock therapy |
| Grundgesetz | 1949 foundation for the Federal Republic of Germany |
| gulag | Russian abbreviation for "state camp", were a vast network of camps set up by Lenin and used by Stalin to imprison millions of people who were suspected of opposing the Comm. Party |
| gyosei shido | (= administrative guidance) phrase symbolizing the power of Japan's bureaucracy and its influence on Japan's economy |
| Holocaust | Nazi attempt to kill all Jews during World War II |
| Japan Socialist Party (JSP) | largest opposition party in postwar Japan until 1995 |
| Joseph Stalin | leader of the Comm. Party and USSR from 1928 to 1953 after a rise to power against Trotsky, Bukharin and Zinoviev, who implemented a policy of rapid industrialization and mass terror to build socialism quickly |
| Junkers | landed nobility of Eastern Prussia, whose vast estates produced grain for the world market by employing workers in near slavery |
| Karl Marx | founding thinker of modern socialism and communism, involved in amny German and French radical groups during the 1830s and 40s |
| keiretsu | in Japan, economic conglomerates that are prevalent, of which there are 6, e.g. Mitsubishi |
| Kulturkampf | German state's oppression of the Catholic Chrch in the 1870s, by means of legislation, regulation and harassment, which which led to the apparition of political Catholicism |
| Leonid Brezhnev | leader of the Comm. Party and the USSR from 1964 to 1982, presiding over an "orthodox" Marxist-Leninist regime that gradually became more corrupt and economically stagnant |
| Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) | Japanese conservative party, which governed alone from 1955 to its defeat in 1993, and since 1994 as part of coalitions |
| Meiji Restoration | 1868 revolt that led to the downfall of the Tokugawa clan, the revival of the position of the emperor, and the crash course modernization of Japan |
| Mikhail Gorbachev | leader of the Comm. Party and USSR from 1985 to 1991, who tried to reverse the stagnation of the Brezhnev era by lauching the perestroika that called for open criticism, and a renewal of foreign policy |
| Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) | ministry in charge of the economic development of Japan |
| Nazi Party | Hitler's fascist party from 1921, largest party in the Weimar Republic in the early 1930s with Hitler as Bundeskanzler starting in 1933 |
| New Economic Policy (NEP) | economic program adopted by Lenin in 1921 that allowed reestablishment of markets for agricultural products and legalized small-scale trade, but retained state control over major industries and strengthened one-party rule |
| Nikita Khrushchev | leader of the Comm. Party and USSR from 1953 to 1964, who reinvigorated Soviet socialism relying on "revolutionary" economic campaigns in industry and agriculture with chaotic results |
| Oder-Neisse line | contemporary eastern border of Germany with Poland along these two rivers |
| oligarchs | dozen or so individuals who took advantage of the rapid privatization of Soviet property to amass huge personal fortunes thus controlling most of Russia's medias, banks, and raw-material companies and being targeted by Putin when they opposed him |
| Otto von Hindenburg | a Junker, former army officer, the 2nd President of the Weimar Republic, appointed Hitler as Chancellor in 1933 |
| perestroika | political and economic reforms introduced in June 1987 by the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev |
| provisional government | temporary government of former parliamentarians that ruled Russia after the fall of the tsarist empire in February 1917, and were unable to stabilize the revolutionary system and was overthrown 8 months later |
| Prussia | North German state, with Berlin for capital, that gained control of most of today's Germany during the 18th and 19th centuries, and subsequently formed the core of the 2nd Empire in 1871 |
| reverse course | a shift in the emphasis of US occupation policies in Japan after the onset of the Cold War, from demilitarization and democratization to limited rearming and economic recovery |
| Shigeru Yoshida | Japanese PM from in the 1940s and 50s, who chose to focus on economic development and rely on the US for foreign security, a doctrine known as the Yoshida Doctrine that is the LDP's founding doctrine |
| shock therapy | rapid transition to capitalism adopted by Yeltsin in 1992, which was supposed to involve liberalization of prices, privatization of state property, and stabilization of the Russian currency that had disastrous economic and social results |
| shogun | military leaders and members of the Tokugawa clan that ruled Japan from 1603 to 1868 |
| Showa era | reign of the emperor Hirohito (1926-1989), a tumultuous period |
| Social Democratic Party | left-wing German political party, identifies as a working-class protest party, was in power in West Germany from 1966 to 1982, its program based on social market economy, social partnership between business and labor, political and economic division of power at alllevels in order to cushion change |
| soviets | (= councils) spontaneous groups that formed in the chaotic situation under the temporary government, which Lenin saw as seeds for the future communist society, but remained politically powerless and subordinate to the party |
| State Duma | lower house of the Russian Federal Assembly, created in the constitution of 1993, has 450 members, half of whom are elected by PR, the other half elected in single-member districts (after 2007, only PR) |
| Taisho democracy | brief period from 1918 to 1932 when parties gained more influence as the Japanese system bcame temporarily more pluralist |
| two-vote ballot procedure | voting method to elect the Bundestag, consisting of two votes per person, one for a local candidate, the second for an overall party |
| Viktor Chernomyrdin | PM of the Russian Federation from 1992 to 1998, who became leader of the pro-regime "Our Home Is Russia" Party |
| Vladimir Lenin | Russian military who insisted on strict "professional revolutionary" and led the 1917 October Revolution which led to the foundation of the Soviet regime in Russia |
| Vladimir Putin | Yeltsin's PM in 1999, then RUssia's president from 2000 to 2008, Putin gained popularity by prosecuting Yeltsin's war on Chechnya, restoring economic and social stability and the power of the Russian state |
| Vladimir Zhirinovsky | leader of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, arguing for ultranationalist solutions to face postcommunist problems, envisioning the expansion of Russia to the Indian Ocean |
| Weimar Republic | German state and democratic regime that lasted from 1919 to 1933, weakened by polarized partisan competition from extreme left to extreme right making it ungovernable by center parties in power |
| Yevgeny Primakov | former academic advisor to Gorbachev and later foreign minister, and even PM in 1998-1999 |
| Yuri Luzhkov | mayor of Moscow, leader of the Fatherland Party which merged with Putin's Unity Party to form the pro-Kremlin party, he built a mini-empire within Moscow and became one of Russia's most influential politicians |
| zaibatsu | large family-owned conglomerates of the pre-World War II era |
| Zentrumspartei | (= Center Party) political party that defended the interests of the Catholics, that emerged in the 1870s. Was 2nd largest party under the Weimar Republic |
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