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Western Civilizations, 3rd Brief Edition: A W. W. Norton StudySpace
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In This Chapter
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Chapter 25
Turmoil Between The Wars
Chapter Study Outline
Introduction
The legacy of the Great War
Near-collapse of democracy
The rise of authoritarian dictatorships
The Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin
The Russian Civil War
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk polarized Russian society
The Whites
Loose group united by the desire to remove the Reds from power
Supporters of the old regime
Reds (Bolsheviks) faced strong nationalist movements
Ukraine, Georgia, and north Caucasus
United States, Britain, and Japan intervene on the periphery of the old empire
Solidified Bolshevik mistrust of capitalist world powers
Bolshevik victory
Gained greater support from the majority of the population
Better organization
Leon Trotsky as new commissar of war
Consequences
One million combat casualties
Several million dead from hunger and disease
Total of one hundred thousand to three hundred thousand executed (on both sides)
Created permanent hatreds
War communism
Government control of industry
Government requisitioned grain from the peasantry
Outlawed private trade in consumer goods
Militarized production facilities and abolished money
Consequences
Devastated Russian industry and emptied major cities
Industrial output in 1920 fell to only 20 percent of prewar levels
Large-scale famine (1921)
Large-scale strikes
The NEP period (New Economic Policy)
Abandoning war communism
Reversion to state capitalism
State owned all major industry
Individuals could own private property
Trading freely within limits
Farming land for the benefit of the peasants
Grain requisitioning replaced by fixed taxes on the peasantry
Nikolai Bukharin (1888-1938)
Peasants should "enrich" themselves
Taxes would support urban industrialization and working classes
The "golden age of the Russian peasantry"
Divided up noble lands to level wealth disparities
Reintroduced traditional social structure (peasant communes)
Produced enough grain to feed the country
Failure
Peasants refused to participate in markets to benefit urban areas
Kept excess grain for themselves
Cities experienced grain shortages
Stalin and the "Revolution from Above"
Stalin the man
Born in Georgia as Iosip Jughashvili (1879-1953)
Exiled to Siberia for revolutionary activity
Lenin's death (1924: Stalin or Trotsky)
Stalin the strategist
Isolated all opposition
Used the left to isolate the right, used the right to isolate the left
By 1929, Trotsky and Bukharin were removed from positions of power
Abandoned NEP
Increased tempo of industrialization
Forced industrialization and the total collectivization of agriculture
Collectivization
Local party and police officials forced peasants to join collective farms
Peasant resistance: sixteen hundred large-scale rebellions between 1929 and 1933
Peasants slaughtered livestock rather than turn it over to farms
The "liquidation of the kulaks as a class"
The famine (1932-1933)
The human cost was 3-5 million lives
The Bolsheviks retained grain reserves in other parts of the country
Grain reserves sold overseas for currency and stockpiled in the event of war
The Five-Year Plans
Campaign of forced industrialization
First Five-Year Plan (1928-1932)
Most stunning period of economic growth
Industrial output increased 50 percent in five years
Built new industries in new cities
Magnitogorsk
Urban population more than doubled (26 to 56 million) between 1924 and 1939
The human cost
Large-scale projects carried out with prison labor
The Gulag system
By 1940, 3.6 million people were incarcerated by the regime
Structural problems
The command economy: production levels planned from Moscow in advance
Heavy industry favored over light industry
Emphasis on quantity over quality
Cultural and economic changes
Soviet cities
Women entered the workforce
The conservative shift
Divorce was difficult to obtain
Abortion made illegal except in emergency situations
Homosexuality declared a criminal offense
The Great Terror (1937-1938)
One million dead1.5 million to the Gulag
The elimination of Stalin's enemies, real or imagined
Mass repression of internal enemies from the top to the very bottom
Purged the old Bolsheviks
Staged show trials
Industrial managers, intellectuals, and the military
Targeted ethnic groups (Poles, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Latvians, and Koreans)
Stalin and total control
Social advances
Illiteracy reduced
Higher education made available to more people
Government assistance for working mothers
Free hospitalization
The Emergence of Fascism in Italy
In the aftermath of war
A democracy in distress
Seven hundred thousand dead, $15 billion debt
Territorial disputes
Militant nationalists seized Fiume
Problems
Split between the industrial north and agrarian south
Conflict over land, wages, and local power
Government corruption and indecision
Inflation, unemployment, and strikes
Demands for radical reform
The rise of Mussolini (1883-1945)
Editor of Avantia (leading socialist daily)
Lost editorship when he urged Italy to side with the Allies during World War I
Founded Il Popolo d'Italia
The Fasci
Organized to drum up support for the war
Attracted young, idealist, fanatical nationalists
The Fascist platform (1919): universal suffrage, the eight-hour day, and tax on inheritance
Fascist support
Gained respect of middle classes and landowners
Repressed radical movements of workers and peasants
Attacked socialists
Fifty thousand fascist militia marched on Rome on October 28, 1922
The black shirts
Victor Emmanuel III invited Mussolini to form a cabinet
Italy under Mussolini
One-party dictatorship
Statism"nothing above, outside, or against the state"
Nationalismthe "highest form of society"
Militarismthe "ennoblement" of man in war
Changed the electoral laws
Abolished cabinet system
Mussolini assumed role of prime minister and party leader (Il Duce)
Repression and censorship
Ending class conflict
A managed economy
A corporate state
Granted independence to papal residence in the Vatican City
Roman Catholicism established as the state religion
Maintaining the status quo and "making the trains run on time"
Weimar Germany
November 9, 1918: Revolution
Bloodless overthrow of the imperial government
Social Democratic Party (SPD) announced a new German republic
The kaiser abdicated
Socialists wanted democratic reforms within existing imperial bureaucracy
Problems
Elections not held until January 1919
Communists and independent socialists staged armed uprisings in Berlin
Social Democrats tried to crush the uprisings
The martyrdom of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht
The Freikorps
Former army officers fighting Bolsheviks, Poles, and communists
Called themselves Spartacists
Fiercely right-wing anti-Marxist, anti-Semitic, and antiliberal
The Weimar coalition
Socialists, Catholic centrists, and liberal democrats
Parliamentary liberalism
Pluralistic framework
Universal suffrage for men and women
Bill of rights
The failure of Weimar
Social, political, and economic crisis
The humiliation of World War I
Germany "stabbed in the back" by socialists and Jews
What was needed was authoritarian leadership
Versailles and reparations
$33 billion debt
The Dawes Plan (1924), a new schedule of payments
The government continued to print money
By October 1923, a pound of potatoes cost 40 million marks
Middle-class employees, farmers, and workers hit hardest by inflation
Economic recovery (1925)
Scaled-down reparation payments
Government-sponsored building projects
Large infusion of capital from the United States
Further problems
United States stock market crash
Unemployment
Production dropped by 44 percent
Peasants staged mass demonstrations
Government cut welfare benefits
Left the door open for the opponents of Weimar
Hitler and the National Socialists
Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)
Born in Austria, aspired to be an artist
Spent his youth as a tramp in Vienna
Anti-Semitism, anti-Marxism, and pan-Slavism
The outbreak of World War I as his liberation
After the war, he joined the German Workers' Party
1920: became the National Socialist Workers' Party (Nazi)
Refused to accept the November (1918) Resolution
Hitler and the Nazis
November 1923: Munich putsch
Hitler imprisoned
Dictated Mein Kampf
Portrayed himself as the savior of the German people
Nazi elections
1924: Nazis polled 6.6 percent of the vote
1928: Politics polarized between left and right
The impossibility of a coalition
People abandoned traditional political parties
Joseph Goebbels and propaganda
Nazi supporters
Small-property holders and rural middle classes
Elitist civil servants
1930 election
Nazis won 107 of 577 seats in the Reichstag
No party gained a majority
Nazis supported no coalition government not headed by Hitler
Hitler as chancellor
January 1933: Hindenberg appointed Hitler chancellor
February 27, 1933: Reichstag set on fire by Dutch anarchist
Hitler suspended civil rights
March 5, 1933: New elections
Hitler granted unlimited power for four years
Hitler proclaimed the Third Reich
Nazi Germany
A one-party state
Gauleitersregional directors of the nation
Propaganda
Opposition
Storm troopers (SA)used to maintain party discipline
June 30, 1934: Night of the Long Knives
Schutzstaffel (SS)
Most dreaded arm of Nazi terror
Organized by Heinrich Himmler
Fighting political and racial enemies
Support
Played off fears of communism
Spoke a language of national pride
Hitler as the symbol of a strong, revitalized Germany (the Führer cult)
Charismatic leader
Gave people what they wanted
The recovery of German national glory
National recovery
Sealed Germany off from the rest of the world
Unemployment dropped from 6 million to two hundred thousand
Outlawed trade unions and strikes, froze wages
Organized workers into the National Labor Front
Popular organizations cut across class lines
The Hitler Youth
The National Labor Service
Nazi racism
Nazi racism inherited from nineteenth-century opinions
Anti-Semitism
Joined by nationalist anti-Jewish theory
The Jew as outsider
Dreyfus Affair
A wave of late-nineteenth-century pogroms
An "international Jewish conspiracy"
April 1933: New racial laws excluded Jews from public office
1935 Nuremberg Decrees
Deprived Jews of citizenship (determined by bloodline)
November 1938: Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass)
National socialism and fascism
Both arose in the interwar period as responses to war and revolution
Intensely nationalistic
Opposed parliamentary government and democracy
Favored mass-based authoritarian regimes
The Great Depression in the Democracies
Western democracies
France
Continued to fear Germany
Policy of deflation
Class conflict and labor troubles
Britain
Policy of deflation
Reduction in wages and decline in the standard of living
The Labour Party (1924 and 1929)
Increasing trade union militancy
United States
Bastion of conservatism
Presidents and the Supreme Court
The origins of the Great Depression
Causes
Instability of national currencies
Interdependence of national economies
Widespread drop in industrial productivity
Restrictions of free trade
October 1929: Collapse of the New York Stock Exchange
United States as world's creditor nation
Immediate and disastrous consequences for European economy
Banking houses closed, manufacturers laid off entire workforces
Government response
Britain
Abandoned gold standard and free trade
Cautious relief efforts
France
The Popular Front under Léon Blum
Nationalized munitions industry
Forty-hour week
Fixed the price and regulated the distribution of grain
United States
The New Deal and FDR
Recovery without destroying capitalism
Managing the economy and public-works projects
John Maynard Keynes
Interwar Culture: Artists and Intellectuals
The rejection of tradition and the experiment with new forms of expression
Interwar intellectuals
Disillusionment with war and the failure of victory
Frustration, cynicism, and disenchantment
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961): The Sun Also Rises (1926), the "lost generation"
T. S. Eliot (1888-1965): The Waste Land (1922), life is a living death
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939): deplored the superficiality of modern life
Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956): the pointlessness of war, high culture, and middle-class values
James Joyce (1882-1941): Ulysses (1922), "stream of consciousness"
The politicization of literature
Interwar artists
Developments paralleled those in literature
The dominance of the avant-garde
Subjective experience
Multiplicity of meanings
Personal expression
The rejection of traditional forms and values
Pushing the boundaries of aesthetics
Expressionismpaintings need not have subjects at all
Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944)
His "improvisations" meant nothing
George Grosz (1893-1959)
Attacked the greed and decadence of postwar Europe
The Dadaists
Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), Max Ernst (1891-1976), and Hans Arp (1886-1966)
Rejected all forms of artistic conventions
Haphazard "fabrications"
Meaningful and playful works or expressions of the unconscious mind?
Surrealism
Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) and Salvador Dali (1904-1989)
The interior of the mind
Political undertones
Art for a mass audience
Diego Rivera (1886-l957) and José Clemente Orozco (1883-1949)
Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) and Reginald Marsh (1898-1954)
Depicting social conditions of the modern world
The hopes and struggles of ordinary people
Architecture
Functionalism
Otto Wagner (1841-1918) and Le Corbusier (1887- 1965)
Louis Sullivan (1856-1924) and Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959)
"Form ever follows function" (Sullivan)
Ornamentation to reflect an age of science and machines
Walter Gropius (1883-1969) and Bauhaus
An international style
Interwar scientific developments
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Revolutionized modern physics
Challenged our beliefs about the universe
New ways of thinking about space, matter, time, and gravity
Time, the fourth dimension
The theory of relativity
James Chadwick (1891-1974)
Discovery of the neutron (1932)
Otto Hahn (1879-1968) and Fritz Strassman (1902-1980)
Split atoms of uranium (1939)
Chain reaction
Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976) and the uncertainty principle (1927)
Relativity and uncertainty as metaphors for the ambiguity of modern life
Mass culture and its possibilities
Explosive rise of mass mediamedia for the masses
Mass politics as a fact of life
Cut across class lines, ethnicity, and nationality
Democratic and authoritarian possibilities
The radio
Europe: broadcasting rights owned by the government
United States: broadcasting managed by corporations
National soapbox for politicians
FDR's fireside chats
Nazi propaganda
The new ritual of political life communication and persuasion
Advertising
Visual images replaced older ads
Efficient communication, streamlined and standardized
Drew on modern psychology
Film
France and Italy had strong film industries
1927: Sound added to films
United States gained a competitive edge in Europe
Size of home market
Huge investments in equipment and distribution
The Hollywood "star system"
Germany had the best-equipped studios in Europe
Universum Film AG
Fritz Murnau (1888-1931): Der letzte mann (1924)
Fritz Lang (1890-1976): Metropolis (1926) and M (1931)
The "Americanization" of culture
A threat to European culture?
Introduced Europe to new ways of life
Stalin and socialist realism
Mussolini and classical kitsch
Hitler despised modern art as decadent
The Nazis and propaganda
Used film as a means of indoctrination and control
"Spectacular politics"
Glorifying the Reich
Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003): Triumph of the Will (1934)
Tried to limit influence of American popular culture
Dance and jazz
Anti-Semitic films
The Eternal Jew (1940) and Jew Suss (1940)
Conclusion
The strains of World War I
The Great Depression
International tensions