The Russian Revolution occurred in 1917 and saw Russia pulled out of the First World War. The monarchy was replaced by a communist government run by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks differed from the Mensheviks in that they favored an immediate and artificial revolution.

Kulaks were wealthy Russian peasants who emerged as significant landowners in the first decade of the twentieth century. They were branded as enemies of the state and of the communist ideal by Lenin and Stalin and persecuted in the years following the First World War.

During World War One the Russians, like many European nations, suffered catastrophic and unprecedented losses of military personnel. Millions of Russians died on the frontline and millions more starved in the interior of the country itself. This provided the impetus for the Russian Revolution when the tsarist monarchy was overthrown and replaced with Communism led by the Bolsheviks and Vladimir Lenin. Lenin withdrew Russia from the First World War.

The Munich Agreement was signed by various major European powers in 1938. It allowed the Nazi government of Germany to annex territory (the Sudetenland) in Czechoslovakia. The European powers conceded this because they feared Hitler's aggressive ambitions and sought to placate him with the policy of appeasement.

Benito Mussolini was the ruler of fascist Italy; Winston Churchill the Prime Minister of imperial Britain; and Josef Stalin the leader of the communist USSR. Harry Truman became President of the United States in the waning months of the war following the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Douglas MacArthur, however, was an American general who led a large number of forces in the Pacific theatre of the war.

The Atlantic Charter was an agreement signed by the leaders of the United States and the United Kingdom in 1941 prior to America's entrance into the Second World War. The purpose of this charter was to establish the post-war goals of the Allied powers. Namely, it specified that neither power would seek to make territorial gains and that in the post-war era both powers would seek to promote economic prosperity, social equality, and national autonomy around the world. All of these answer choices were part of the charter except the disarmament of nuclear weapons. The atomic bomb was not invented for another few years.

The Treaty of Versailles ended World War One, but it imposed a series of strict regulations on German recovery and encumbered the already-struggling German nation with an almost unpayable debt. This caused Germany to feel as if the terms were too harsh and to resent them, and contributed to the rise of Hitler and Nazism.

The various options given that were battles or attacks (Iwo Jima, Pearl Harbor, and Midway) cannot possibly have occurred after the war was over, so they can be ruled out. V-E Day is the day when victory was secured for the allied forces in Europe. This came a couple of months before V-J Day—"Victory over Japan" Day. V-J Day was August 15th, 1945.

In World War Two, the Allied Powers were Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States. Opposing them were the Axis Powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan. 

Benito Mussolini and his Fascist party came to power in the 1920s and promptly suspended several freedoms in the Italian state. In 1935 Italy invaded and occupied Ethiopia. The move was widely condemned by the League of Nations and helped further allign Italy with Nazi Germany against much of the rest of Europe.