World War I and Its Legacies PDF

PART 6 THE GLOBAL WEB SINCE 1870 Arab Spring With flags upraised, Egyptians rejoice in Tahrir Square following the 2011 resignation of President Hosni Mubarak. Between 2010 and 2012, a series of protests in Arab countries brought about changes in government. The web of connections among societies that helped bring about the revolutions and rebellions discussed in Part 5, grew tighter after 1870. The main engine behind this process was continuing technological change, which sped up and cheapened communication and transport. But several other trends contributed to the growth of the Global web after 1870, such as ideologies that claimed global relevance, the alliance systems of international politics, and the steady march of the English language to its current status as a common world language. All these processes, and others as well, made the contemporary world more interactive than ever before— but in fits and starts rather than at a regular pace. THE PACE OF GLOBAL INTEGRATION The irregular pace of modern globalization consisted broadly of three phases. The first, from 1870 to 1914, saw rapid extension of links driven above all by new technologies such as railroads, steamships, and telegraphs. The second phase, from 1914 to 1945, showed a mixed record. New technologies such as radio and air travel emerged, speeding flows of information and people. But two world wars and a worldwide economic depression drove several societies to turn inward, fall back on their own resources, and try to be self-sufficient. In economic terms, global integration retreated as flows of international trade and finance slowed. In political and cultural terms, however, there was no retreat. Societies took one another increasingly into account in shaping their own policies and preferences, whether in military matters or music. The third phase, from 1945 to the present, again saw an intensification of the process of globalization, with louder objections to it than ever before. The pace, scale, and scope of international interactions came to exceed those of any previous era especially after about 1980, when computerization and digitization began to take hold. KEY THEMES The next four chapters—Part 6 of the book looks closely at three main themes. First is the prominence of international politics and war. Ordinary people increasingly could not escape involvement in the affairs of states, especially the many states that took part in major wars. These chapters explore World Wars I and II, and the Cold War, the primary conflicts that re- fashioned political, social, and economic life after 1914. Second is a shift in world power away from Europe. Beginning in the 1490s, Atlantic Europe had slowly attained unusual wealth and power by global standards. With industrialization in the nineteenth century, Europe, North America, and Japan had rapidly attained still greater power expressed in overseas empires. Between 1945 and 1991, the empires of Japan and the European states—including the USSR—crumbled sooner and faster than almost anyone expected. A general re-balancing of world wealth and power took place, and indeed is still in motion. The formerly colonized peoples of Africa and Asia won their independence, and those in several Asian countries—first Japan, but then South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and to some extent China—became rich almost overnight. This rise of East Asia is the fastest and most dramatic re-arrangement of the global economy in world history. The third general theme is the recurrent backlash against global integration. Immediately after World War I, political and ideological movements— fascism and Soviet communism—arose that intensified nationalism and encouraged economies built on self-sufficiency rather than international trade. The global economy became still more protectionist and fragmented during the Great Depression of the 1930s. While international linkages were repaired after World War II, and economic and cultural globalization galloped ahead in the following decades, once again it produced discontent. Politics based on sectarian religion made a comeback, for example, and after about 2010 xenophobic nationalism did too. Many millions also blamed economic globalization for rising inequalities in wealth and income. Chapter 26 takes up international politics, specifically World War I and its aftermath. It emphasizes not only the war itself, but also some of the political and ideological movements created or advanced by revulsion at the war and its peace settlements: fascism, communism, and anti-colonialism. The chapter also presents suffragism, the campaign to win the vote for women, in the general context of World War I. Chapter 27 continues with the broad political patterns formed during World War II (1937–1945) and the Cold War (1945–1991), explaining the origins, course, and results of both. Chapter 28 focuses on decolonization between 1945 and 1980, and on the extraordinary economic rise of East Asia from about 1950 to the present. These twin developments amount to another basic shift in the geography of power in the global system. Chapter 29 considers the—equally extraordinary—acceleration of almost every form of globalization since 1980, including international migrations and financial flows. It emphasizes the economy, environment, popular culture, and health and disease, and shows some of the political backlash against globalization. The chapter also explores some unintentional effects of the tight Global web, such as the faster spread of emerging diseases including HIV/AIDS, Ebola, SARS, and COVID-19. 26 International Politics WAR, PEACE, AND IDEOLOGIES 1870 to 1940 The Western Front New technologies intensified the brutality of warfare. The American painter John Singer Sargent painted Gassed in 1919, after spending several months embedded with British and American troops in France. A line of wounded soldiers, blinded by mustard gas, gropes in search of medical treatment while casualties lie piled around them. CHRONOLOGY 1869 The Subjection of Women is published; Wyoming allows women to vote 1893New Zealand allows women to vote in national elections June 28, 1914Gavrilo Princip kills Austrian archduke July 1914Start of World War I 1915Italy enters World War I; Japan issues The Twenty-one Demands 1915–1916Gallipoli campaign Feb.–Dec. 1916Battle of Verdun July 1916Battle of the Somme Mar. 1917Tsar Nicholas II abdicates Apr. 1917United States enters World War I Nov. 7–8, 1917Bolshevik Revolution 1918–1919Global influenza pandemic 1918–1921Russian Civil War Mar. 1918Treaty of Brest-Litovsk Nov. 1918World War I ends 1919Treaty of Versailles is signed; Weimar Republic is established Apr. 1919Amritsar massacre May 1919May Fourth Movement 1920League of Nations opens 1921Kronstadt rebellion; Hitler becomes head of Nazi Party; formation of Chinese Communist party 1922Start of Mussolini’s rule 1927–1928Stalin consolidates power 1929Start of Great Depression 1930Gandhi leads salt march 1933Hitler becomes chancellor of Germany 1935Hitler introduces Nuremberg Laws 1939Germany attacks Poland If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,— My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori. Wilfred Owen wrote the poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” during the last months of World War I. An infantry officer in the British Army, Owen had witnessed up close the final agonies of soldiers dying from poison gas attacks. Twice wounded and decorated for valor, Owen was killed in action one week before an armistice ended the war in November 1918. In quoting Horace, an ancient Roman poet, whose message he calls “The old Lie,” Owen expresses his disillusionment with the war and his resentment of its proponents. “Pro Patria Mori” was inscribed on the chapel wall of Sandhurst, Britain’s foremost military academy, and familiar to Britain’s educated classes. The quotation translates as: “How sweet and suitable it is to die for one’s country.” Among the many strands of global politics in modern times, one that stands out is the extreme violence of modern war. The warfare that characterized both world wars (I: 1914–1918, and II: 1937–1945) involved complete mobilizations of the resources and populations of the combatant countries, as well as deadly new technologies, including poison gas in World War I and the atomic bomb in World War II. The thorough destruction and mobilization brought by these wars is sometimes called total war. A second strand is the global scale of politics. The ancient Romans, Mauryans, or Olmecs never worried about peoples on the other side of the world. For them, all politics was local or regional. By the early twentieth century, however, policy makers took into account circumstances and events on distant continents as a matter of course. The interconnectedness of the Global web had reached a point at which decisions made in Paris could quickly trigger uprisings in China. A third is the increased impact of international politics on ordinary people. Centuries ago, millions of people lived beyond the reach of tax collectors and military recruiters, and they had few dealings with any state. No longer. Since 1914, almost no one has lived free from the demands of states. If your country got into a big war, your life would change, whether you served on the front lines or remained on a family farm. Total war was not the sport of kings, but the concern of all. A fourth strand is the rise of mass ideological and political movements, including those considered here: fascism, communism, anti-colonialism, and suffragism—the effort to secure voting rights for women. Such movements were not strictly new in the twentieth century, but they became much more common than before. This was the result partly of disillusionment with established authorities brought on by World War I, partly of new media such as radio that connected audiences with charismatic politicians as never before, and partly of longer-term trends in urbanization and globalization that reached new heights in the twentieth century. Monarchies and empires fell; traditions and certainties melted into air. People everywhere, whether frightened or inspired by the crumbling of old regimes, searched for a new basis for politics. World War I and the peace settlement that followed shaped all of these developments, so that’s where this chapter will begin. FOCUS QUESTIONS 1. In what ways was World War I a global event? 2. How did fascism and communism advance in the 1920s and 1930s? 3. Why did anti-colonial movements gain strength after World War I? Glossary World War I (1914–1918) A conflict between the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire) and the Entente or Allied Powers (France, Russia, Britain, Italy) fought mainly in Europe. Many smaller European nations joined in, as well as ultimately the United States. The war required mass mobilization of populations and resources and led to unprecedented violence and destruction. WORLD WAR I AND ITS LEGACIES World War I, despite its name, was mainly a European war, but its repercussions reached every continent. Its unprecedented butchery and unsatisfactory peace settlement gave rise to resentments and ambitions that shaped life for decades—indeed, to this day. THE GREAT POWERS, 1870–1914 Great powers are great because they have more people, money, military force, and unity of purpose than lesser powers. In the nineteenth century, industrialization and the emergence of nationalism created a handful of new great powers, several of them mid-sized European states such as Germany, France, and Britain. They joined multicultural empires such as the Ottoman, Russian, and Habsburg —longstanding great powers—atop the greasy pole of international politics. In the years 1914–1918, these powers went to war with one another. Before wading into World War I, let’s look briefly at the major participants. In 1914, the most powerful polity on Earth was the British Empire, thanks to its industry and its navy. Britain’s industrial production stood third in the world behind that of the United States and Germany; but counting the industry of the empire—Canada, India, South Africa, Australia—it easily surpassed Germany. Britain’s army was tiny, but the British navy was the largest and probably most effective in the world. The British Isles in 1914 had 42 million people, and with the dominions of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, the empire included 57 million more—most of them British immigrants or their descendants. To some extent, Britain could also rely on the manpower of British India, another 252 million people. Britain’s population was, by and large, reliably patriotic, although in the Empire many resented British rule. By 1914, the United States had the potential to become the world’s second most powerful state. Its population of some 100 million was growing fast—by about 2 percent per year. Although about one in every six Americans in 1914 had been born overseas, their loyalty to the state proved reliable when war came. The country produced two-thirds of the world’s oil and led the world in coal, iron, and steel production. It had a tiny overseas empire consisting mainly of the Philippines, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico, as well as a small and inexperienced army, but a sizeable and growing navy. Its political elites generally did not like to think of the United States as a great power but rather as a hemispheric power in the Americas. So the United States had the capacity but not the will to function as a great power in 1914. If the United States was not the second most powerful state in 1914, then Germany was. Its population of about 67 million was growing by 1.2 percent annually. The majority were enthusiastically patriotic. The sharp divisions between Protestants and Catholics, or among social classes, did not appreciably weaken loyalties to the German fatherland. Its coal, iron, and steel output trailed only that of the United States. Its technological and scientific sophistication was second to none. It had an overseas empire, in Africa and the Pacific, but that added next to nothing to German power. Germany’s army and navy were large, well trained, and well equipped, probably the best and second best, respectively, in the world. British Imperial Might A fleet of British battleships maneuvers through the Atlantic in 1914. A new class of battleships called dreadnoughts constituted perhaps the strongest weapon in the British Empire’s arsenal, contributing to its status as the world’s greatest power at the start of World War I. A notch below these three, in terms of strength in international politics, stood France and Russia. France had 40 million people and a bit more manpower and resources available in its overseas empire. Its industrial production and its navy came well behind Britain’s or Germany’s. Russia’s strength lay mainly in its size. It had 175 million people and the resources of a giant territory. Its industrial production was growing rapidly, and the recently completed Trans-Siberian Railway gave access to some of the vast mineral supplies of Siberia. But the loyalty of its minority populations was shaky. Russia’s Poles, for example, still prized their Polish identity long after the eighteenth-century partitions of their country placed them inside the Russian Empire. Russia’s army was big but poorly trained and equipped. Its navy was no better. A notch below France and Russia stood Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. Austria-Hungary, as the Habsburg Empire was generally known after 1867, had 48 million people in 1914, but many of them belonged to ethnic or religious minorities and their allegiance to the state was tempered. The table below gives some idea of the ethnic diversity of Austria-Hungary’s army. Industrial production was modest—lots of textiles, but not much iron and steel. Austria-Hungary had no overseas empire and virtually no navy, but an effective army despite its mix of languages. The Ottoman Empire in 1914 had recently lost a lot of territory in little wars in the Balkans and North Africa. It had about 19 million people, some 4 million of whom were ethno-religious minorities—mainly Armenians, Arabs, and Greeks, whose loyalty Ottoman elites often rightly distrusted. Ottoman industry produced little military materiel. The army, however, was substantial and partly trained by German officers. LANGUAGES OF THE ARMY IN AUSTRIA-HUNGARY, 1914 German 25% Hungarian 18% Czech 13% Serbian and Croatian 11% Polish 9% Ukrainian 6% Romanian 6% Slovak 4% Slovenian 2% Italian 2% Note: Another 4 percent of army recruits spoke other languages. Source: David Reynolds, The Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century (2015), 7. ORIGINS OF THE WAR For more than a century, the question of the origins of World War I has fascinated historians, who still don’t agree on an answer. The controversies swirl around the whys of the war, and less around what happened. For the sequence of events to make sense, we have to understand that by 1914 Europe’s international system, long in flux, was divided into two big alliance networks. One, the Triple Alliance anchored by Germany, included Austria-Hungary and Italy. The other, the Triple Entente, enrolled France, Russia, and Great Britain. The purpose of these alliance networks was to extend Europe’s long peace, concluded in 1815 in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. Instead, the alliances drew states into a long, devastating war. On June 28, 1914, a 20-year-old Serbian nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, shot and killed an Austrian archduke on the streets of Sarajevo. Princip was a member of underground Serbian nationalist organizations eager to liberate Serbs (and other “south Slavs,” or “Yugoslavs”) from Austro- Hungarian rule. The assassination led to an ultimatum from Austria-Hungary: Serbia must surrender much of its independence or face war. Confident of support from Russia—fellow Slavs who had championed Serbia before—the Serbian government chose war. In preparing to fight on Serbia’s behalf at the end of July 1914, Russia mobilized its vast army against both Austria-Hungary and Germany. Germany, in keeping with its war plans, mobilized its army to attack both Russia to the east and France to the west. When Germany did attack, Great Britain joined the war. By August 4, the two alliance systems—minus Italy, which at first kept out—were at war. In late 1914, the Ottoman Empire joined on the German side; and in 1915, Italy entered the war against Germany and Austria-Hungary despite its treaty commitments to those powers. As wartime coalitions, these two blocs became known as the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire) and the Entente or Allied Powers (France, Russia, Britain, Italy). Many smaller nations in Europe joined in too. So why did the conflict between Serbia and Austria-Hungary bring on a general European war? A short answer includes the cultural climate of nationalism, the political influence of armies in most of the great powers, the rigidity of war plans, and the alliances that bound countries to go to war on one another’s behalf. It would also include, more specifically, some key decisions—two above all. First was the choice made by German diplomats to support whatever Austria-Hungary elected to do against Serbia. That made Austria-Hungary’s leaders more willing to accept the risk of war with Russia, which they knew might result if they attacked Serbia. Second was Russia’s choice to mobilize its army in support of Serbia, which was not a treaty obligation, and, as part of that strategy, to mobilize against Germany and Austria-Hungary. Russian war plans called for such a broad mobilization, but they might have been overridden by a more forceful, attentive, and imaginative tsar. (Nicholas II once described himself as “without will and without character.”) These and other fateful decisions might well have been made differently if diplomats and emperors had understood that in the circumstances of 1914, war would bring little glory and much gore. European Alliance Systems and the Ottoman Empire, 1914 Before World War I, the great powers of Europe organized two major alliance systems. One included France, Britain, and Russia. The other enrolled Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy. The Ottoman Empire, which lost most of its territories in southeastern Europe between 1830 and 1913, was neutral. When the war began in August 1914, Italy proclaimed neutrality despite its alliances. And by November, the Ottoman Empire, despite its former neutrality, joined with Germany and Austria-Hungary, forming the Central Powers. In 1915, Italy would join the Allies. THE COURSE OF THE WAR Fighting began in August 1914 and continued until November 1918, and in a few places beyond that. Declarations of war were welcomed in some cities by cheering crowds and provoked mass enlistments in most of the countries involved. But joy evaporated fast. In the first months of the war, armies sprinted after one another. Where they met, they discovered the pitiless violence of modern combat. The effect of machine guns on infantry became evident on August 22, 1914, when a French attack against German positions led to the deaths of 27,000 Frenchmen in a matter of hours. By early 1915, the armies on the western front had settled into lines of trenches. Occasional offensives required men to run across no-man’s-land toward enemy trenches amid a hail of bullets and, if all went well, fall upon the enemy. More often, they fell in no-man’s-land. On the eastern front, attacks sometimes won a little more ground; but nonetheless the war became one of stalemate and attrition, in which both sides were losing soldiers faster than they could recruit new ones. Weaponry as well as soldiers soon ran short. Of the combatants in 1914, only Germany, Britain, and France had military-industrial complexes equal to the situation. Mines and munition factories everywhere hummed around the clock to meet the demand for weapons and explosives. Labor supply became a bottleneck. With millions of men in the armed forces, women filled the munitions factories. Germany’s Krupp armaments factories employed almost no women in 1914, but by 1917 nearly 30 percent of its workforce of 175,000 was female. The enormous industrial capacity of the United States, despite its official neutrality until 1917, helped ease the situation for the Allies. In general, the Allies had a strong advantage in industrial production, food production, and military manpower. Trench Warfare In a 1916 photograph, British Army soldiers hole up in captured German dugouts to shelter from the fighting of the Somme offensive. Trench warfare became characteristic across Europe during World War I. World War I’s chief theaters were in Europe; but from the start, small-scale campaigns took place in Africa among rival colonies. British forces launched bigger campaigns against Ottoman armies in Palestine and Mesopotamia, using mainly Indian troops. Naval actions occurred in the Pacific and off of Argentina, as well as in European waters. For four years, all efforts to break the stalemate failed. In 1915, the Allies tried to knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war with an attack in Turkey, at Gallipoli, but they succeeded only in opening a new stalemated front. The Allies abandoned the front within a year—a major setback. In 1916, the Germans decided to “bleed France white” with a sustained offensive at Verdun in eastern France. It gained nothing of note and cost both countries rivers of blood. To relieve the pressure at Verdun, the British and French launched an offensive along the Somme River in northern France in July 1916. It cost Britain 20,000 dead on the first day—more Britons than had died in 15 years of wars against Bonaparte. Munitions Factories A photograph of the factory floor at the German Krupp factory in 1917 shows many women workers. Women even operate heavy machinery, which would have been unusual before the war. By 1917, the gambles grew more desperate. Naval power enabled the Allies to blockade the Central Powers. All could see that Germany and Austria-Hungary would slowly starve, because they did not grow enough food—Germany had imported about one-quarter of its calories before 1914. Meanwhile, Britain, which produced only one-third of its food, relied on supplies from the United States, Canada, and Argentina. This situation led the German High Command to open unrestricted submarine warfare everywhere in the Atlantic, attacking neutral shipping in order to starve Britain. Sustained submarine warfare, new with World War I, sank nearly 4 million tons of merchant shipping within six months, from February through July 1917. German leaders understood that submarine attacks would bring the Americans, with all their men and industrial capacity, into the war against them; but they hoped the attacks would weaken Britain fast enough that the Central Powers could win before American forces tipped the balance. But the gamble failed: the attacks drove the United States into the war against the Central Powers in April 1917. The Russian Revolution of 1917 (see below) gave Germans new reason to hope. By the fall of that year, Russia had stopped fighting. In March 1918, Russia agreed to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, surrendering to the Central Powers its 16 westernmost provinces, including 34 percent of its population, half its industry, and 89 percent of its coal mines. The German army now moved 50 divisions to the western front and used its numerical superiority to mount one more gigantic offensive. It almost worked—Britain and France were tottering. But they drew strength from the American forces pouring into Europe in early 1918. The prospect of far more Americans yet to come sapped German morale, as did the Allies’ blockade: by 1918, German city-dwellers were living on 1,000 calories a day, half of what an adult body needs to maintain itself. Talk of revolution swirled in the cafés, classrooms, and factory floors of Berlin and Vienna. Strikes broke out. In November, the German top military leadership, aware of the worsening odds against them, decided to quit and negotiated an armistice, ending the war. World War I, 1914–1918 World War I was fought mainly in Europe and Ottoman lands in the Middle East, with smaller campaigns on the high seas and in German overseas holdings in Africa, New Guinea, and China. The western front stretched between Switzerland and the shore of the North Sea. The eastern front extended from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. Fighting also took place along the Caucasus front, in Ottoman Mesopotamia and Palestine, and in the Balkans. The Allied blockade of the Central Powers, and the German U-boat (submarine) campaigns against Allied and neutral shipping, led to food shortages for civilians behind the lines. WAR CASUALTIES, 1914–1918 CASUALTIES TOTAL PRISONERS TOTAL AS COUNTRY MOBILIZED KILLED WOUNDED AND CASUALTIES PERCENTAGE FORCES MISSING OF FORCES ALLIED AND ASSOCIATED POWERS CASUALTIES TOTAL PRISONERS TOTAL AS COUNTRY MOBILIZED KILLED WOUNDED AND CASUALTIES PERCENTAGE FORCES MISSING OF FORCES Russia 12,000,000 1,700,000 4,950,000 2,500,000 9,150,000 76.3 British 8,904,467 908,371 2,090,212 191,652 3,190,235 35.8 Empire France 8,410,000 1,357,800 4,266,000 537,000 6,160,800 73.3 Italy 5,615,000 650,000 947,000 600,000 2,197,000 39.1 United 4,355,000 116,516 204,002 4,500 325,018 7.1 States CENTRAL POWERS Germany 11,000,000 1,773,700 4,216,058 1,152,800 7,142,558 64.9 Austria- 7,800,000 1,200,000 3,620,000 2,200,000 7,020,000 90.0 Hungary Ottoman 2,850,000 325,000 400,000 250,000 975,000 34.2 Turkey Source: https://www.pbs.org/greatwar/resources/casdeath_pop.xhtml THE HUMAN COST In 51 months of war, the combatants lost about 10 million dead and 21 million wounded, of whom 7 million were maimed for life. On average, about 6,000 men were killed per day. Half of France’s male population age 18 to 40 was either killed or wounded. In Austria-Hungary, 90 percent of those mobilized were either killed or wounded. The United States lost 53,000 killed in battle and another 63,000 to disease—some 0.4 percent of males of military age. Canada lost 54,000 killed in combat and a few thousand more to disease—roughly 3 percent of males 18 to 40 years old. The table shows the human cost to the major combatants. Most World War I armies included units drawn from specific regions, so villages and counties could lose almost all their young men in one bloodbath. The Royal Newfoundland Regiment, for example, lost 90 percent of its men (killed or wounded) in a matter of minutes in the Battle of the Somme. The slaughter broke the morale of the best-trained armies in the world. All except Germany’s army mutinied within 35 months. (The American army experienced only six months of combat and did not mutiny.) French soldiers in 1917 baa-ed like sheep going to the slaughter when ordered into an attack. Millions of soldiers suffered mental breakdowns. Few could keep their composure after years living for weeks on end among rats, lice, and mud, regularly enduring artillery bombardments, and, most terrifying of all, occasionally going “over-the-top” into a fusillade of bullets. Since armies were among the most revered institutions in Europe in 1914, the evaporation of military discipline left many soldiers and civilians feeling unmoored. A cruel irony maximized the carnage. In prior wars, infectious disease had prevented soldiers from massing in their millions long enough to butcher one another on such a scale. By 1914, advances in military medicine enabled armies to stay healthy enough for long enough to kill one another wholesale. In another cruel irony, a global influenza pandemic broke out at the war’s end, killing some 50 million people in the years 1918–1919. The horrors of war extended to civilian populations. In Lebanon, dependent on food imports, one- third of the population starved to death in 1915 when the war interrupted shipping. The Ottoman Turks, suspicious of Armenian loyalties, starved, shot, or bayoneted 1 to 2 million Armenians in 1915–1916 in a genocidal campaign. In German East Africa (today’s Tanzania), the war reduced population by 20 percent, mainly through starvation and disease. Atrocities on scales large and small occurred wherever armies occupied enemy territory, as in eastern France or western Russia. Armenian Genocide Armenian refugees—including several children—flee Ottoman persecution around 1916. The Ottoman state systematically starved or murdered about 1.5 million Armenians during World War I. Life on the home fronts grew ever grimmer as the war dragged on. Food ran short in Russia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary in particular. Civilians had to work long hours in mines, factories, fields, offices, and hospitals. In many countries, currency inflation ate into workers’ wages, leading to hardship and strikes. Women did the work of men in addition to their own. In Britain, 1.4 million women joined the paid labor force between 1914 and 1917. In Austria-Hungary by 1918, 1 million women had done so. Most of the women laboring in armaments and heavy industry during the war had already been workers before 1914, but now they shifted from textile mills to munitions plants. This was especially true in France and Germany, where total female employment climbed the least during the period 1914–1918. Most of the extra work that women shouldered was on farms. Some armies let some soldiers go on leave during harvest season. But in Germany, France, Austria-Hungary, Serbia, and other countries where almost all able-bodied men and horses were at war, women, children, and the elderly had to assume even the heaviest farm work. Hundreds of thousands of women volunteered as nurses—some 120,000 in France and 92,000 in Germany. In the United States, about 22,000 did; and 3,000 in Canada. Vera Brittain, a middle-class Englishwoman, put her Oxford education on hold at age 21 to serve as a nurse. Before she returned to her studies, she had spent three hard years amid splintered bodies and shattered minds. She lost her only brother, her fiancé, and her two closest male friends to the war. German, Austro-Hungarian, and French armies recruited thousands of female prostitutes for regulated army brothels. Unregulated brothels and the demand for prostitutes in general flourished during the war, as millions of men and women were away from the constraints of family and village. On a small scale, women also served in combat. Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, and Russia allowed women soldiers to fight. Milunka Savić, who took her brother’s place in the Serbian Army, was wounded several times, won a handful of decorations for valor, and on one occasion captured 23 Bulgarian soldiers by herself. In Russia in the summer of 1917, a call for volunteers resulted in 5,000 women joining special battalions, the original purpose of which was to try to shame male soldiers into fighting harder. But two of the women’s battalions took part in an offensive in July 1917; and one, the so-called Women’s Battalion of Death, led by Maria Bochkareva, a 27-year-old of peasant origins, stormed a German trench line successfully. The mobilization of women for war work was controversial everywhere. It ran counter to prevailing notions of femininity. Skeptics feared that driving ambulances, doing police work, selling train tickets, or building tanks alongside men would corrupt women’s morals. After the war, most of the women who had taken on men’s roles left their wartime jobs to return to their former lives. Women at War Maria Bochkareva, posing with medals she earned for bravery in combat in the Russian army. She was wounded several times but survived the war. THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION OF 1917 In addition to the human casualties, World War I destroyed most of the political structures of Europe and the Middle East. The defeated Central Powers—Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire—all crumbled. So did one of the Allies, Russia. The experience of war stoked Europe’s nationalisms and made these multicultural and multinational empires less popular than ever. The experience of defeat—which Russia shared with the Central Powers—destroyed them. The Russian Revolution of 1917 stands among the largest political legacies of World War I, partly because Russia was a big country but mainly because it featured an ideology that inspired imitation far and wide. Although it was triggered by World War I, and probably would not have happened without it, the Russian Revolution, like those in China and Mexico discussed in the previous chapter, had deep roots. GRIEVANCES AND REFORMS After the abolition of serfdom in 1861, Russia remained an agrarian country of 75 million. By 1914, its population had grown to 175 million. For the peasantry, freedom from serfdom did not bring freedom from hunger and hard work. For many educated Russians, the conspicuous strengthening of Britain, France, and Germany as industrial and imperial states led, around the period 1860–1900, to worries that their country was falling behind. What to do? The answers came down to two broad choices. One, that of the conservatives called Slavophiles, was to return to true Russian ways and shun innovations and reforms. Novelties such as representative government and factories were not suited to Russia, they thought, and would corrode the social cement of Russian Orthodoxy, faith in tsars, and village solidarity. According to others, often called Westernizers, autocracy and the power of the Orthodox Church held Russia back. These debates grew more urgent in 1881 when a group that called itself The People’s Will assassinated Tsar Alexander II. They were one of several tiny groups who sought solutions to Russia’s ills through revolution, spurning the path of reform. After his father’s assassination, Tsar Alexander III outlawed public discussion of many political topics and drove the revolutionaries underground. Russia’s revolutionaries, although few in number and divided among themselves, figured time was on their side. Some put their faith in the peasantry, noting the egalitarian custom in many Russian villages of periodically re-distributing land, animals, and tools according to every family’s needs. Others, under the influence of the ideas of Karl Marx, thought that real revolution could only come from the industrial working class—or as Marxists put it, the proletariat. The hour seemed to strike in 1905. The government, now headed by Tsar Nicholas II, unleashed the army on unarmed demonstrators in the capital of St. Petersburg, killing more than 100. Instead of being intimidated, workers, peasants, and dissident middle-class groups known as the intelligentsia became more vocal. Demands rang out for more schools, legislative assemblies, and land for peasants. Peasants themselves wanted reduced rents or ownership of the land they worked. Workers wanted better wages and a voice in factory management. Urban workers invented new, city-wide workers’ councils, called soviets. These events, sometimes called the 1905 Revolution, led Nicholas—reluctantly—to make concessions, including an empire-wide legislative assembly, called the Duma, whose members would be elected. The first Duma met in 1906 and called for a radical land reform. To the tsar and his aristocratic landowning counselors, land redistribution seemed to strike at the heart of Russia’s political system. The tsar called upon a brilliant bureaucrat, aristocrat, and scholar of agriculture, Pyotr Stolypin, to manage the Duma’s demands. Stolypin tried to stave off peasant resentment with, as he put it, the “wager on the strong.” His reforms favored richer peasants, easing their route to greater prosperity and property ownership. He wanted to establish a peasant bulwark against revolution. But a young revolutionary who also worked for the secret police assassinated him in 1911, leaving Russia in less capable hands. Even the most capable hands would have been full, given the pressures facing Russia after the outbreak of World War I. WAR, DEFEAT, AND REVOLUTION From the start of the war in 1914, Germany hammered the Russian army. Russia’s economy proved unable to produce enough ammunition, artillery, locomotives—even shoes—for the war effort. Russia’s soldiers, justifiably, began to think their government was failing them, treating them as mere cannon fodder, while profiteers grew fat from government contracts. Russia mobilized 12 million men, of whom 1.7 million were killed, 5 million wounded, and 2.5 million missing or captured. Only Austria-Hungary’s casualty rate was worse. Bolshevik Revolution Russian soldiers rebelling against the tsar’s authority in early 1917 march through the streets of St. Petersburg, carrying a banner that reads “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” in homage to the French revolutionary slogan. In this time of crisis, Tsar Nicholas II showed all his many weaknesses. He could not control bickering generals. In late 1915, the tsar went to the front to supervise the conduct of the war personally. That invited Russians to hold him directly responsible for military misfortunes. He ignored mounting economic problems on the home front—notably, inflation of food and fuel prices. The tsar’s authority melted away. Mass demonstrations took place in March 1917 (February by the calendar then in use in Russia). Troops called out to tame the riotous crowds refused to fire. Generals and Duma politicians, agreeing that the tsar had become a liability, forced him to abdicate in favor of his brother, who refused the throne. Russia now had no tsar. The Romanov dynasty, in power for 300 years, was no more. A handful of Duma politicians now formed a Provisional Government that represented mainly the privileged segments of Russian society. In the capital, now called Petrograd, workers and revolutionaries organized into a soviet and claimed authority. Russia had, in effect, two governments, and thus no government. Through the spring and summer of 1917, the Provisional Government, headed by the moderate socialist lawyer Alexander Kerensky, made two big mistakes. First, it chose to continue fighting, even ordering an offensive in June that became another retreat by July. Second, it postponed land reform. Millions of peasants took matters into their own hands, seizing control of estates, ousting and sometimes killing landlords. Soldiers from peasant families deserted the battlefront in droves so as not to miss re-distributions of land. Critics of the Provisional Government promised peace, land, and bread—none of which Kerensky could provide. LENIN Into this chaotic situation came Vladimir Lenin. Born in 1870 to a prosperous provincial family, Lenin became a dedicated revolutionary in his teens after the shock of seeing his brother hanged for trying to build an assassin’s bomb. An excellent student interested in physics and math, and a fine chess player, Lenin studied law at university but was expelled for taking part in a demonstration. He responded by studying revolutionary writers, especially Marx, on his own. Thanks to his mother’s intervention, he was allowed to take university examinations in 1890, despite not having been a student for years. He passed brilliantly and became a provincial lawyer, while devoting every spare minute to preparing for revolution. His activities earned him banishment to Siberia in 1897 and then exile, where he wrote political treatises. He was in Switzerland in early 1917 when the High Command of the German Army decided to provide him with a special train to neutral Finland. From there, he could take his revolutionary skills to Petrograd and undermine the teetering Russian war effort. Lenin in 1917 was a middle-aged man in a hurry. He belonged to a minority faction of a Marxist party called the Bolsheviks, and because of his theoretical writings and his forceful personality he stood high among them. Most Bolsheviks hoped to take power soon, some of them optimistic it could happen through elections. Lenin wanted revolution now, by whatever means necessary, using the slogan “all power to the soviets.” Within those soviets, the Bolshevik faction prevailed, thanks to tight organization and the fervor of its members. THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION AND EARLY BOLSHEVIK RULE Lenin ordered an armed insurrection. The Bolshevik Revolution was a coup d’état on November 7–8, 1917 (but sometimes called the October Revolution because of the different Russian calendar). Within 10 days, the Bolsheviks controlled Petrograd and Moscow and had begun to squeeze out other revolutionary factions. Within three months, they were governing alone and had set up a secret police and revolutionary courts to identify, and then imprison or murder, those insufficiently loyal to their party. Their policies, however, won them the loyalty of many Russians. The Bolsheviks made peace with the Central Powers early in 1918. They ratified the peasants’ seizures of land. They stripped away the civil rights of priests, landlords, bankers, and others whom they deemed exploiters. Lenin and many Bolsheviks believed that the Duma, and all democracy, was a sham. The appropriate government for Russia was what they called the dictatorship of the proletariat. In practice, that meant a one-party state led not by proletarian workers but by people like Lenin: long-time professional revolutionaries, some of them brilliant intellectuals, well schooled—if self-educated—in German philosophy, British political economy, and the history of the French Revolution. They saw themselves as “the vanguard of the proletariat” and were so convinced of their historical mission that at times they used armed force against workers and peasants in whose name they claimed to rule. They thought they were “building communism,” a social and political system first outlined by Marx that, in theory, was without private property, without exploitation, and in some versions (not Lenin’s) without a state. It took four difficult years for Lenin to consolidate power. In the Russian Civil War (1918–1921), the Bolsheviks—officially called communists by March 1918—created an improvised army to fight opponents of their revolution. Lenin assigned this task to Leon Trotsky, who had planned the coup of 1917. Despite having no military experience, Trotsky built an effective military in the terrible conditions of 1918. He imposed conscription on a war-weary population and hired officers from the old tsarist army against the wishes of almost every Bolshevik. His Red Army prevailed against a loose coalition of counter-revolutionaries backed by foreign powers, including troops from France, Britain, the United States, and—by far the largest contingent—Japan. Vladimir Lenin Speaking in Moscow in 1920, Lenin addresses a crowd of Red Army soldiers about to go to war against counter-revolutionaries in Poland. By early 1921, Lenin and the Bolsheviks ruled a shattered, bankrupt, and impoverished country now called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Some 8 to 13 million people had died of violence or disease in the turmoil of the years 1917–1921. Another 2 million emigrated. Industrial production stood at 20 percent of 1914 levels. Hunger stalked the streets. The Bolsheviks concluded that they could not let workers run the factories after all, so they imposed hierarchical management. They requisitioned all the grain they could from the peasantry, who responded with strikes. In March 1921, sailors at a naval base, Kronstadt, renowned for its revolutionary ardor against the tsars, rebelled against Bolshevik rule. The Red Army crushed them at the cost of many thousand lives, demonstrating—for those who needed convincing—that the Bolsheviks would brook no dissent. In the years to come, they would try to destroy the surviving elites of pre-revolutionary Russia, spread their ideology abroad, and make the USSR a powerhouse in world politics. VERSAILLES AND POST-WAR PARTITIONS In 1919, representatives of the victorious powers gathered at Versailles outside Paris to hammer out a set of peace treaties. The Allies excluded the defeated Central Powers and communist Russia, which had announced it would not pay the tsars’ debts. Edith Wilson, the wife of the American president, Woodrow Wilson, told her husband that the assembled diplomats poring over their maps looked like so many little boys playing a game. The president assured her theirs was a serious business. They were re-drawing the map of east-central Europe and Southwest Asia, dividing up territories, creating countries, marking borders, and defining peoples. In short, they were doing roughly what an earlier generation of European diplomats had done to Africa at the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885. A New Political Geography: Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, 1922 The treaties signed in 1919 and 1920 concluding World War I re-drew the boundaries of Europe, European colonies, and the Ottoman Middle East. New countries arose in east-central Europe and in former Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and German territories. New de facto colonies, as well as the new country of Turkey, were created in former Ottoman lands in the Middle East. The Allied powers devising this new political geography tried to respect ethnic identities in Europe, but not in the Middle East or Africa. RE-MAKING EUROPE The European powers had carried out the partition of Africa in ignorance, but they undertook the partition of the territories of the Central Powers in a mood of vengeance. French diplomats especially wanted to cripple Germany. The deal imposed on Germany, the Treaty of Versailles, explicitly blamed Germany for the outbreak of the war, required Germany to pay huge sums (called reparations) to the victors, and turned some 13 percent of German territory over to either France or newly re-created Poland. It put strict limits on the size of Germany’s armed forces. Other treaties, equally vengeful, were signed with Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire. The treaties reflected two other ambitions aside from vengeance. The first was self-determination, to use Wilson’s preferred phrase. The American president thought that each European nationality ought to rule itself. This would, he hoped, remove an important cause of discontent, helping to ensure future peace. Wilson did not consider Africans and Asians capable of self-rule. Racism of this sort was commonplace in 1919. The second ambition behind the treaties was, in Wilson’s phrase, collective security. He hoped that international institutions might restrain the militarism and nationalism that underlay World War I. So the Allies designed an international body, the League of Nations, to prevent war through arbitration. Based in Geneva, Switzerland, the League opened for business in 1920 and enjoyed modest success in settling international disputes during the 1920s. But in the 1930s it proved helpless in the face of renewed militarism—as we shall see. In a bitter rebuke to Wilson, the U.S. Senate refused to ratify U.S. membership in the League. World War I and its peace treaties left legacies more durable than the League of Nations. The Romanovs in Russia were not the only longstanding dynasty destroyed. In Germany, when the emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, fled the country late in 1918, it ended the reign of the House of Hohenzollern, emperors of Germany since 1871 and kings of Prussia since 1701. In the absence of the monarchy, political factions battled in the streets. In Berlin, a communist uprising was crushed. In Munich, a Soviet-style government briefly came to power. In August 1919, after nine months’ painful gestation, Germany brought forth a republic, soon called the Weimar Republic after the town where its first constitutional assembly took place. It struggled to gain legitimacy among Germans. The economy careened from hyperinflation of the currency in 1923 and 1924 to economic depression in 1931. The rise of Adolf Hitler to power in Germany, in 1933, described below, reflected the inadequacies of the Weimar Republic and stands as one of the legacies of World War I. In Austria-Hungary, the House of Habsburg also lost its throne after 400 years as a major force in Europe. As in Germany, revolution followed defeat in 1918. Reorganization followed along lines set forth in the treaties negotiated in Paris in 1919, which created a series of new countries in place of the multinational Habsburg state. Austria and Hungary became independent countries. Poland was re- created from Habsburg, German, and Russian territory. Another republic, Czechoslovakia, was cobbled together from Habsburg provinces. The southern Slavs were gathered into a new kingdom, Yugoslavia, ruled by a Serbian dynasty. All of these countries were small and comparatively weak. Their borders did not perfectly match ethnic geography—no borders could. Most of them soon became nationalist and authoritarian in character. RE-MAKING THE MIDDLE EAST After 600 years as the ruling family of the Ottoman Empire, the House of Osman also lost its empire as a result of World War I. The result was a dramatic transformation of the Middle East—a term that came into occasional use in the late nineteenth century and became common after 1918. Its precise meaning varies, but in this book it refers to Southwest Asia and Egypt. After weathering all manner of challenges for centuries, the Ottoman state proved unequal to the demands of industrial warfare in the years 1914–1918. The treaty its representatives signed with the Allies in 1919 amounted to the partition of most of the empire among Britain, France, Italy, and Greece. This outraged many Turks, sparking a nationalist revolution led by an army hero, Mustafa Kemal, who as we’ve seen had played a role in the Young Turk Revolution of 1908. Between 1919 and 1924, Kemal’s forces defeated all rivals, repelled a Greek invasion, expelled millions of non- Turks from Anatolia, replaced the Ottoman state with a new Turkish republic, and, most radical of all, abolished the Islamic caliphate. For more than 1,200 years, caliphs, the earthly leaders of the Islamic faith and the official successors of Muhammad, had guided Muslims. Since 1517, every Ottoman sultan had claimed the mantle of caliph; and for most Sunni Muslims, and therefore most Muslims, the Ottoman claim was legitimate. So it came as a great shock when Kemal’s government eliminated the caliphate in 1924. Kemal and his followers drew the lesson from defeat in World War I that the Ottoman Empire had been backward and inefficient, held down by an antiquated culture steeped in Islamic tradition. So he pushed through reforms in education and law that secularized Turkey, closing Islamic schools and courts. Religious symbols and garb were banned in public. Sisters’ inheritances now equaled their brothers’, contrary to normal practice under Islamic law. Women acquired more legal rights as individuals rather than as wards of their fathers or husbands. Polygamy was banned and women could initiate divorce. From 1930, women could vote and hold office. The Latin alphabet replaced the Arabic. This package, often known as the Atatürk Reforms after Kemal’s adopted name of Atatürk (“father of the Turks”), was part of a century-long process of reform in Ottoman lands. It was also a legacy of World War I. Kemal’s main motivation was to strengthen Turkey as the Meiji reformers had done in Japan. To achieve this, he drew upon the law, culture, and technology of the most formidable states of the day—those of western Europe. Kemal’s military record and his success in rallying Turks against foreign invasion gave him the prestige and power to enact far-reaching reforms and harness the nationalism of ethnic Turks. Secularized Turkey A photograph of a Turkish classroom dated to around 1930 shows women students being taught to read and write in the Latin alphabet. Most of the women wear Western dress, and many have their hair uncovered: characteristic signs of Atatürk’s program of reform. The territory of the Turkish republic was a mere remnant of the Ottoman Empire. The mainly Arab provinces of the defunct empire, now officially called Mandated Territories of the League of Nations, became de facto colonies of Britain and France. The French got Syria and Lebanon; the British took Palestine, Jordan, and Iraq. That arrangement stored up trouble for the future. During the war, the British government had promised unspecified land in Ottoman Palestine to Zionist Jews, persuaded by Chaim Weizmann, a Russian immigrant and Zionist leader. A nationalist movement of the Jewish people, Zionism grew up partly in response to anti-Semitism in Europe in the late nineteenth century. Another early organizer, Theodor Herzl, a journalist from Budapest, gave the movement its ideological foundation. The Zionist movement aimed to create a Jewish homeland centered on Jerusalem, despite the presence of tens of thousands of Muslim and Christian Arabs who themselves considered Palestine home. British diplomats had also promised independence to Arabs if they rebelled against the Ottomans. And other British diplomats cut a deal with France, promising to divide the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire between them. So when the peacemakers in Paris in 1919 re-drew the map of the Middle East, just about everyone felt betrayed. Their descendants often still do. The diplomats in Paris re-arranged the political geography of Africa and the Pacific as well as the Middle East. Germany’s former African colonies, such as Tanganyika, Togo, Southwest Africa, and others, became League of Nations Mandated Territories administered by Britain, France, Belgium, or South Africa. In the Pacific, former German colonies went to Japan, Britain, Australia, or New Zealand. The local populations in Samoa or New Guinea or Togo were not consulted. SUFFRAGISM TO 1939 While the peacemakers at Versailles were discussing the fine points of the right of self-determination of peoples, women reminded them that the female half of humankind did not enjoy that right. As we’ve seen, Olympe de Gouges, Abigail Adams, and others had advocated women’s political rights in the late eighteenth century with little success. Winning the vote—the goal of suffragism—and taking part in the direction of one’s country was an essential step in women’s quest for political equality. It happened in a rush, like the abolitions of slavery, and World War I provided a big push. PRE-WAR SUFFRAGE MOVEMENTS As of 1850, voting was a male preserve in the few countries that permitted it at all. Many voices challenged this arrangement. Their arguments included the notion that denying women the vote was inherently unjust; that women’s influence in politics would reduce corruption and war; and, in some cases such as the United States, that woman suffrage, if confined to a preferred class or race, would reduce the influence of poor people, immigrants, or racial minorities who, if they did not already vote, might do so one day. Women’s Suffrage On May 21, 1914, British suffrage activist Emmeline Pankhurst was arrested outside Buckingham Palace in London, England. During the nineteenth century, women in the United Kingdom and the United States built social movements aimed at winning the vote, often allied with supporters of moral causes such as banning prostitution or alcohol. Women in other countries took note: suffragism, like abolitionism, was an international movement, coursing through the Global web. Many who took up the suffragist cause in the United States were abolitionists or Quakers—including Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who in 1848 organized a women’s rights gathering in upstate New York, the Seneca Falls Convention. Stanton held that only the vote would make woman “free as man is free.” The convention concluded by issuing a Declaration of Sentiments modeled on the Declaration of Independence. The most influential suffragist publication was John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1869), likely written with substantial input from his wife, Harriet Taylor Mill, who had published on suffragism in 1851. The book was translated into dozens of languages and read by suffragists all over the world. By 1890, suffragists and other reformers in a few countries had achieved some important goals such as limits on working hours or the sale of alcohol, improved city lighting or sanitation, more girls’ schools, and a woman’s right to own property in her own name. But, despite sustained effort and support from many male politicians, they were not significantly closer to securing women’s right to vote in national elections. In Britain, the movement took on an especially militant character between 1909 and 1914. Suffragists, frustrated with 70 years of meager results, tried mass demonstrations, hunger strikes, and sabotage. They even exploded a bomb at a prime minister’s residence. These efforts, organized by a minority wing of British suffragists led by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters, failed in their purpose as of 1914. EARLY SUFFRAGE When World War I began, about 2 million of the world’s roughly 400 million voting-age women could vote, all of them in four small countries. Not counting places such as the state of New Jersey that had provided women the vote and then quickly took it away, the first jurisdiction in the world where women could vote was Wyoming. It was a U.S. territory with only 8,000 people in 1869 when one activist—Esther Hobart Morris—convinced the legislature that women would exert a civilizing influence upon the politics of a wild west territory. Utah followed suit in 1870 when the federal government threatened to ban polygamy, a common practice in the Mormon-dominated territory. Utah’s polygamous men granted women the vote to show that the women of Utah were not oppressed. By 1914, women had won the right to vote in state elections in most other western U.S. states. New Zealand was the first country to pass nationwide legislation enfranchising women. The foremost leader of the suffrage movement in New Zealand was Kate Sheppard, a Scottish immigrant, wife, mother, and formidable organizer in anti-alcohol campaigns. She published persuasive arguments in the same vein as Taylor and Mill, adding the idea that expanding the electorate would reduce vote buying and other forms of corruption. Sheppard presented New Zealand legislators with a petition in favor of enfranchising women signed by a goodly share of the country’s adult population. She and her allies, who included several of New Zealand’s leading politicians, prevailed in 1893. By 1902, Australia had followed suit. Both New Zealand and Australia were composed substantially of immigrants, with men handily outnumbering women. This made woman suffrage less threatening to them than it did in most other countries. And, as in Wyoming, many men thought women voters might raise the moral tone of public life. Kate Sheppard The influential New Zealand women’s suffrage activist posed for this portrait around 1910. Finland in 1906 and Norway in 1913 allowed women to vote as a result of nationalist campaigns. Finland, part of the Russian Empire since 1815, won substantial autonomy in 1906, including a legislature. To maximize the Finnish voice within what remained a Russian territory, Finnish men agreed that Finnish women should vote. In Norway, the nationalist quest was for independence from Sweden, and once again women’s votes seemed politically useful to men hoping to strengthen Norway’s claims for independence. These four countries, all small in population, overwhelmingly rural, and far from the centers of world power and intellectual ferment, were the only ones anywhere that allowed women to vote in national elections before World War I. Elsewhere, resistance to suffragism was too strong. In Catholic countries of southern Europe, for example, and in Islamic countries such as Iran or those of the Ottoman Empire (where few men could vote), the dominant culture led people to suppose that the position of women in society was divinely ordained rather than politically negotiable. Resistance was also entrenched where men—some men, at least—had long ago won voting rights, as in France, the Netherlands, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Political participation had become a ritual of manhood, one that most men felt would undermine feminine virtues if shared with women. In Britain, one of the most active and effective opponents was Mary Augusta Ward, founder in 1908 of the Anti-Suffrage Society. Mrs Humphry Ward, as she preferred to be known, showed astute political skills while arguing— paradoxically—that women were unfit for politics. SUFFRAGE AND THE WORLD WAR In the end, it required major social upheavals—war, invasion, revolution—to splinter the opposition to enfranchising women. World War I provided an opening for suffragist movements, one they were by 1914 fully capable of exploiting. Between 1914 and 1920, women won the vote in 19 countries, including big and populous ones such as Russia, Poland, Germany, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States. Some restrictions applied—so, for example, in the United Kingdom only women over age 30 could vote until 1928, and in the United States the southern states quickly found ways to disenfranchise black women. In Russia, now becoming the communist USSR, women from privileged backgrounds were denied the vote. In Canada, women of Asian or Amerindian (First Nations) background could not vote. But, taken together, more than 100 million women acquired the vote in these seven years. The following table shows the significance of the era of World War I in the history of women’s suffrage up to 1940. In some countries, including the United Kingdom and the United States, the political winds shifted because women’s patriotism and sacrifices for the war effort won them enough goodwill—and undermined notions of their unfitness for public life—to get enfranchisement bills over the top in all- male legislatures. In others, such as Germany, Austria, and Russia, when the collapse of autocracy in the years 1917–1918 opened the way to a democratization of politics in general, opposition to women’s voting—never organized—quickly crumbled. In all combatant countries, where almost all young men were away from wives and families for months or years, moral reformers hoped that enfranchising women would check the spread of drunkenness and prostitution. In Canada in 1917, a prime minister trying to build support for military conscription pushed through a law allowing the vote to women who were wives, mothers, daughters, or sisters of men in uniform. His reasoning, which proved correct, was that they would favor conscription of other men to join their relatives in the Canadian Army in the trenches of France and Belgium. WHEN WOMEN WON THE VOTE (NATIONAL ELECTIONS) 1893 New Zealand 1902 Australia 1906 Finland 1913 Norway 1915 Denmark, Iceland 1917 Russia Austria, Canada, Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, United 1918 Kingdom Belgium, Luxembourg, Netherlands (and white women in colonial Kenya, 1919 Rhodesia) 1920 Albania, Czechoslovakia, United States 1921 Sweden 1922 Ireland 1923 Burma 1924 Mongolia 1928 Guiana 1929 Ecuador 1930 South Africa (white women only) 1931 Spain (revoked 1939) 1932 Brazil, Uruguay, Thailand 1934 Cuba, Turkey 1937 Philippines (U.S. territory) 1938 Bolivia 1939 El Salvador Source: Jad Adams, Women and the Vote (2014), 437–38. So among the legacies of World War I was a giant stride toward the political emancipation of women. By 1920, of countries with constitutional government that allowed regular elections, only France and Italy denied the vote to women. (These countries granted women full suffrage in the 1940s.) Overall, suffragism in the era of World War I was a success. In the coming decades, it would prevail almost everywhere. Arguments for Suffrage A California poster in support of women’s suffrage from around 1910 suggests that women should be given the vote because they are ready to “clean up” politics by combating bribery, corruption, and social problems. THE RISE OF THE UNITED STATES In addition to sparking revolutions, shattering empires, and accelerating social and political movements, World War I permanently shifted the global balance of power. In broad terms, it weakened Europe and bolstered the United States. This shift showed up in many spheres, from the size of navies to the pace of industrial innovation. It was most obvious in finance. Britain and France had borrowed heavily from New York bankers and the U.S. government. Anyone seeking big loans in the 1920s now first thought of New York rather than London, Amsterdam, Paris, or Berlin. As the American theologian Reinhold Neibuhr put it in 1930, “We are the first empire of the world to establish our sway without legions. Our legions are dollars.” Bankers aside, Americans proved reluctant to take on the role of the world’s leading power. The United States retreated into isolationism in the 1920s, refusing to join the League of Nations, for example. It remained active in the American hemisphere, using its military power freely to intervene in Haiti, Nicaragua, and elsewhere. It kept a world-class navy, equal in size to Britain’s. But most Americans preferred to stay out of the world’s trouble spots and rely upon broad oceans for U.S. security. American power—or more precisely, potential power—rested in part on the fact that the United States pumped two-thirds of the world’s oil. The centrality of oil to world politics was another legacy of World War I. By the end of the war, trucks, tanks, aircraft, and submarines had become important instruments of military power, and all used oil derivatives as fuel. So did an increasing proportion of surface ships. At the war’s end, Lord Curzon, a prominent member of Britain’s War Cabinet, said the “Allies floated to victory on a wave of oil.” Oil had become essential to modern warfare and a strategic good of the utmost importance—as it remains today. A further political legacy of World War I was the changed relationship between governments and the governed in many societies. The war dealt a setback to the ideal of restrained government. None of the combatant states trusted the market to provide enough war materiel. All of them relied on government to organize war production to some extent. The German war economy, entirely improvised but carefully controlled by the military, worked miracles in munitions factories, even if it could not adequately feed the civilian population. It made such a favorable impression on Lenin that he used it as his model for Russia once he took power. The combatants only partly demobilized their economies after 1918, keeping government regulation of markets in effect in different ways. World War I advanced a long-term trend, one with several subsequent ebbs and flows, toward bigger government. American Industry A 1912 photograph of an oil refinery in Richmond, California, the largest in the United States at the time. The refinery belonged to John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company. THE GREAT DEPRESSION Government direction of economic life surged again in response to the Great Depression of the 1930s, which in some ways was also a legacy of World War I. The Depression began in 1929 with a stock market collapse in the United States. It spread quickly, faster than any previous economic downturn, because of the speed with which information and money now flowed. People tried to pull their money out of banks, many of which failed. Global economic output fell by 15 percent from 1929 to 1932. Agricultural prices fell by as much as 60 percent, and international trade shrank by half. It was the worst economic contraction in twentieth-century world history, by a large margin. Countries deeply tied into international circuits of finance or dependent on exports were especially hard hit. Unemployment in Germany, which owed large sums in reparations from World War I, reached between 30 and 33 percent; and in the United States and Canada, about 25 percent. Australia and New Zealand, dependent on farm exports, suffered heavily. So did countries relying on mining exports, such as South Africa, Peru, Bolivia, and above all Chile, where total economic output fell by half. In contrast, countries less tied in to the international circuits and more structured around peasant food production felt far less distress. China, India, and Japan weathered the crisis comparatively well outside of small export sectors. Japan’s economic contraction was about 8 percent, India’s less, and China’s less still. The USSR scarcely took part in international trade or financial flows and thus was unscathed by the Great Depression, although, as we’ll see below, it underwent its own homemade economic crisis in the early 1930s—collectivization. In the hard-hit countries, families were thrown back on their own resources. Farm families could at least feed themselves. Urban families whose breadwinner lost a job struggled more, selling what they had, scratching out livings as day laborers, peddlers, beggars, or thieves. Families also cut back on reproduction: the global birth rate fell by 5 to 10 percent between 1930 and 1935. Governments did not know what to do to ease the crisis. The record of successful economic management during World War I made it impossible for them to do nothing, as had been normal in previous—much smaller—global depressions of 1893 or 1873. Some tried to boost their own economies by imposing tariffs on imported goods, which, when many countries did it, only deepened the Depression. Some tried rigorously to balance budgets in hopes of winning reputations for responsible public finance and inspiring investors. The most effective response was increasing public spending, even if it deepened national debt and ran counter to the wisdom of most 1930s economists. At the center of this response was re-armament. Germany and Italy pioneered this path, under leaders who looked forward to a new war that would undo the result of World War I. Great Depression Unemployed men wait for a hot meal outside a Chicago soup kitchen. In the United States, unemployment during the Depression reached about 25 percent. Glossary alliance networks Two groups into which the great European powers were divided in order to uphold peace in Europe after the Napoleonic Wars. In 1914, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy belonged to the Triple Alliance; and France, Russia, and Great Britain belonged to the Triple Entente. Russian Revolution of 1917 The overturning of imperial rule in Russia that started with a coup d’état led by the Bolsheviks, a minority Marxist faction. They eventually seized control of the government and set out to reform Russia based on the ideology of communism. Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) A Russian-born revolutionary and influential member of the Bolsheviks. He consolidated power by 1921 and was the first leader of the USSR. Treaty of Versailles [vehr-SEYE] (1919) A peace treaty written by the victorious Allies that imposed strict and punitive policies on Germany in the aftermath of World War I. The treaty provoked outrage in Germany due to its reparations and war guilt clauses, as well as among Chinese because it gave German concessions in China to Japan. self-determination U.S. president Woodrow Wilson’s idea that every European nationality had the right to its own, self-ruled nation. This concept was an important feature of the post–World War I peace treaties and an inspiration for anti-colonialists. Mustafa Kemal [MUHS-tah-fah kuh-MAHL] (1881–1938) Leader of Turkey’s nationalist revolution and its first president. Also known as Atatürk, he introduced a set of educational and legal policies, the Atatürk Reforms, aimed at strengthening and secularizing Turkey. suffragism A mass political and ideological movement that sought to give women the right to vote. It originated in the nineteenth century, and World War I greatly facilitated its progress and success. FASCISM AND COMMUNISM, 1919–1939 The return to peacetime conditions did not mean the end of turmoil around the world. In 1919, political chaos boiled over in cities throughout Europe and from Winnipeg to Sydney, Buenos Aires to Beijing. New ideologies simmered almost everywhere, with fascism, communism, and anti- colonialism the most important. All were radical in the sense that their followers wished to see thorough changes in the political order. All thrived upon either disgust at the mass butchery of war or the sordid compromises of the 1919 peace—or both. FASCISM TO 1939 Fascism was born in Italy during World War I. Italy had joined the war in 1915 on what became the winning side, lured by promises of territory. But in the peace settlement, Italy got precious little and lost some of what was promised by treaty to Kemal’s nationalist revolution in Turkey. To many Italians, this outcome was an outrageous betrayal of the more than 2 million killed, wounded, or missing in the war. They blamed, among others, a weak government, parliamentary institutions, and cultural and business elites. They wanted an Italian state that would be more forceful, nationalistic, imperialistic, and unified—and less hobbled by debate, division, and deliberation. They wanted action, not words. People who saw matters this way found the fascist movement to their taste. Fascism, whether in Italy or elsewhere, had certain distinctive features. First among them was militant nationalism. Fascists idolized vigor, power, ruthlessness, and war. Their nationalism included a call for regeneration and purification of the nation. Many fascists felt only violence could cleanse their nation of impure elements, which usually included ethnic minorities and immigrants. Fascism also emphasized the cult of the dynamic leader, the man (never a woman) who took bold action and rejected political bickering and backroom deals. Fascists scorned multi-party politics and preferred a one- party state—like Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Fascist movements tried to make a display of national solidarity and strength through theatrical marches and rallies. They adopted uniforms for party members: blackshirts in Italy, blueshirts in Ireland, brownshirts in Germany. Fascists had their own salutes and catch phrases. Their rallies, often dramatic, emotional affairs, extolled strength and exuded menace toward people judged not genuinely part of the nation. The parties always included youth movements, because the cult of action, vigor, and renewal required young faces. On the home front, fascists wanted men to wield authority in families and women to keep house and raise strong children. The growing independence of women under wartime conditions often annoyed men—and many women too—who preferred that families live under the authority of an adult male. Fascists wanted men to re-assert that domestic authority. Fascist gender politics was an extreme version of a commonplace outlook around the world in the early twentieth century. Fascists usually offered an economic program that was critical of both capitalism and communism, proclaiming a third way, sometimes called corporatism, involving substantial state direction but mainly private ownership of property. In any case, they claimed to provide an economy that served all the people, not just bosses or workers. Religious policy differed greatly among fascists. Some were scornful of organized religion. Others allied themselves with the Catholic or Orthodox Church. Fascism never amounted to much outside of Christendom, although Chinese nationalists borrowed some of its elements. ITALIAN FASCISM AND MUSSOLINI The mainspring behind Italian fascism was Benito Mussolini, born in 1883 in a provincial town. His father was a blacksmith with socialist politics, his mother a pious Catholic and former schoolteacher. Benito did well in school and was certified as an elementary school teacher. But in 1902 he left Italy for Switzerland to avoid army service. He read widely, especially in political philosophy, took part in socialist organizations and strikes, and was arrested now and again in both Switzerland and Italy. He thought of himself as an intellectual, and as of age 30 there was nothing about him to suggest he would become Italy’s dictator. Then came World War I. Unlike most socialists, Mussolini eventually argued for Italy’s entry into the bloodbath. He decided that national identity was more important, more natural, than class identity. He volunteered for the army and spent nine months near the trenches, where an accidental explosion left shrapnel in his body. The war years gave Mussolini credentials for political leadership and an audience he otherwise could not have had. In 1919, he formed a paramilitary group in the northern city of Milan that embraced the term fascist. Italy in 1919 was in disarray. Class conflict boiled over into violence between workers and bosses—or thugs hired by bosses—and between peasants and landlords. Fascists claimed to offer a solution, one based on national unity, discipline, and authority. They denounced deliberation and compromise as weakness. In practice they advocated suppressing communists, building up the military, entrusting power to a fascist party elite, and grabbing territory from supposed racial inferiors, specifically Slavs in what is now Slovenia and Croatia, and Africans. In 1922, some 30,000 fascists marched on Rome threatening a coup d’état. The king, afraid of civil war, asked Mussolini to form a government. Mussolini The Italian fascist leader addresses an enormous crowd in May 1936, delivering a speech in which he proclaims a new Italian empire following Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia. Mussolini ruled Italy for more than 20 years in an increasingly authoritarian fashion. He excelled at manipulating mass media, including print journalism, his former profession, but also radio and film. He appealed to all those worried about communism, which included most employers. In this respect, the Bolshevik Revolution was indispensable to the rise of Mussolini. He made an effort to appeal to the church and Catholics, and to those upset by women’s autonomy—he presented the memory of his pious mother as the ideal for Italian womanhood. Above all, he appealed to the sentiment of Italian nationalism. After 1922, he squashed or co-opted all opposition and increasingly ruled as dictator, through the Fascist Party. The anxieties that made Mussolini and fascism attractive to millions of Italians existed elsewhere too. Italy’s example—a purposeful government that promoted deeds, not bickering—appealed broadly. Mussolini’s propagandists did their best to bolster that appeal, trumpeting decisive actions such as draining marshes or building highways and dams. By 1933, fascist movements had arisen in a dozen or more countries, mainly in Europe. Even countries with longstanding traditions of representative government, such as France and Britain, had fascist movements. The British Union of Fascists claimed tens of thousands of members in the early 1930s, although it never did well in elections. Nor did fascist groups in France. Fascists came to power in Hungary in 1932 and Spain (after winning a bloody civil war) in 1939. Movements that, while not genuinely fascist, found inspiration in Mussolini’s Italy took power in Romania, Poland, Greece, and Portugal. Small fascist movements took shape in some Latin American countries such as Chile and Brazil. GERMAN FASCISM AND HITLER By far the most important case was Germany, where a fascist party emerged in the 1920s and took power in 1933. They were called National Socialists, or Nazis for short. The Nazi Party emerged from the chaotic and violent world of post-war Germany. The Versailles treaty, particularly its war guilt clause and reparations, seemed deeply unjust to most Germans, who felt they had neither caused nor lost World War I. Many found it comforting to believe in the “stab in the back,” the idea that traitorous politicians working for Jews or communists or both had sacrificed Germany. One who admired such thinking was the Austrian Adolf Hitler. Hitler was born in 1889 to a modest family—one of six children, three of whom died in infancy. His father was a customs inspector and beekeeper in various small towns along the border between Austria-Hungary and Germany. Hitler’s younger brother died in 1900, leaving Hitler sullen and uncooperative, a reaction not so different from Lenin’s to the death of his older brother. He quit school at age 16 and went to Vienna, where he was twice rejected for art school. For the next seven years, he eked out a living selling watercolor paintings and sleeping in homeless shelters. In 1913, he moved to Munich in Germany. When World War I began, he volunteered for the German army and served with distinction, chiefly as a messenger, winning an Iron Cross, for which a Jewish officer recommended him. He was wounded in 1916 and temporarily blinded by mustard gas late in 1918. Hitler loved the camaraderie and commitment, and the acceptance, he found in the army. Adolf Hitler Hitler giving a campaign speech in a beer garden tent in Munich. The banner urges voters to elect Hitler and the National Socialists, or Nazis, whose party headquarters were in Munich. Outraged by the Versailles treaty, Hitler drifted into politics in 1919 in Munich. He joined a fringe group, the National Socialist Party, one of many hyper-nationalist organizations in Germany. By 1921 he was its leader. He honed a gift for oratory, practicing poses and turns of phrase in front of a mirror. He encouraged the anger and resentment of common people, especially those who felt Germany had been wronged at Versailles. Hitler urged them to believe that Germany’s future depended on ridding the country of Jews and communists, and that he alone embodied the will of the people. He promised action, not words—a renewal of German greatness, rather than the squabbling of democracy. He had a strange charisma, with his frenzied gestures, theatrical poses, and absurd hyperbole. He was a peculiar politician, living simply, avoiding tobacco, alcohol, meat, and the pleasures of the flesh. He was lazy and undisciplined in his work habits, although he went to lengths to project an image of vigor and stamina. For millions of struggling Germans, he seemed like the savior they needed. His early efforts to seize power landed him in jail, and for most of the 1920s he remained a marginal figure in German politics. Hitler rode to power on a wave of anxiety and anger that grew with Germany’s economic setbacks. Hyper-inflation wiped out the value of the currency in the years 1923–1924, so that one needed a wheelbarrow full of banknotes to buy a loaf of bread. Then in 1931 the global depression hit Germany hard. The Nazi Party started doing well, winning 18 percent of the vote in 1930 and 37 percent in early 1932. Germany’s veteran politicians, mainly educated men often from aristocratic backgrounds, thought little of Hitler, a mere Austrian corporal and school dropout. They calculated that they could control him if he became chancellor (more or less prime minister). In early 1933 he took power—because it was offered to him. In the next few years, he outmaneuvered both the old politicians and all rivals within his party. He co-opted the military, which shared Hitler’s contempt for the Versailles treaty restrictions. He gradually purged all institutions of people with insufficient loyalty to himself. He installed Nazis atop all universities, professional societies, and courts, while banning labor unions and political parties other than his own. He was building a totalitarian state—one in which all aspects of life were politicized and displays of loyalty to a dictator and his party were required. It was similar in some respects to what Lenin and his successors had done after the Bolshevik Revolution. But Hitler’s consolidation of power was a means to a set of ends very different from Lenin’s. Hyper-Inflation Amid the hyper-inflation crisis that hit the Weimar Republic in 1923 and 1924, banknotes became so worthless that children used bundles of them as building blocks. Hitler wanted absolute power in order to return Germany and Germans to great power status. As a first step, that required unshackling the German military from the terms of the Versailles treaty, and Hitler moved to covertly expand the army and create an air force. It also meant gathering into a larger Germany all of the German-speaking peoples, whether they lived in Austria, the Sudetenland (part of Czechoslovakia), or East Prussia (mostly Lithuania at the time). Hitler wanted to purify what he imagined as the German race, which meant killing or exiling those who in German were called untermenschen—people he considered lower racial types, such as Jews, Slavs, and Roma (Gypsies). Last, he wanted to smash Bolshevism, which he connected with Jews. He hoped for another great war, one that Germany would win and set terms for the rest of the world. Like most fringe ideologues, he nurtured revenge fantasies. None of these ambitions were original with Hitler. Most of them were in circulation in Munich, where he settled in 1919, and some of them in the Vienna of his youth. But Hitler gave them both a modest coherence as a political program and an extreme, toxic, and murderous character. In the early and mid-1920s, his views struck most Germans as too crazy for consideration. But by 1932, as we’ve seen, 37 percent of German voters supported him. After Hitler became chancellor in 1933, his popular support strengthened. He undertook a large-scale public works and re-armament campaign, which boosted the economy quickly. Workers found jobs more easily— unemployment was eliminated by 1938—and businessmen made bigger profits. Given the frequent hardship Germans had experienced since 1914, Hitler’s economic successes won over millions. Most Germans preferred greater prosperity and renewed national pride to the political liberties Hitler took from them. The segments of society that lent him the strongest support were small farmers, artisans, shopkeepers, university students, and youth in general. As long as the economy flourished, most Germans were content with Hitler, and many of them were enraptured by his charisma, accepting his claim to be the authentic voice of the German people. The business elite adjusted quickly to Hitler and Nazism. Many large industrial firms, such as Krupp and I. G. Farben, looked forward to re- armament or massive public works projects, and donated generously to the Nazi Party. Most employers welcomed Nazi destruction of labor unions. Even some of the refined cultural elite embraced Hitler after he became chancellor. Germany’s most distinguished philosopher, Martin Heidegger, joined the Nazi Party in 1933, and as rector (more or less president) of Freiburg University he lavished praise on Hitler. A famous dancer and film star, Leni Riefenstahl, also gushed about Hitler’s greatness and made skillful propaganda movies for the Nazi Party. Despite his genuine popularity among Germans, Hitler and the Nazi Party had plenty of detractors. Most of the political left—socialists and communists —despised him. Many of the more religious Germans, Catholics and Protestants alike, found him too unchristian in his conduct. Some of the old elites regarded him as an uncouth, uneducated upstart who was unfit for the chancellor’s office. Hitler ruthlessly repressed his opponents, some of whom were murdered and many more imprisoned. Hitler ruled for six and a half years before unleashing World War II in Europe. His social program, extremely important to him, included building a classless national German community. He thought it had to be purely German to be strong, which meant purging those deemed un-German. This view lay behind various racial purification efforts such as the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which deprived German Jews of citizenship and political rights, banned marriage—and sex—between Jews and Germans, and defined Jewish identity as a matter of ancestry, not religion. Hitler also felt strongly that women ought not to compete with men for jobs but should focus on homemaking and child rearing. His laws limited women to 10 percent of the places in universities and offered incentives to marriage and motherhood for women considered truly German. Every marrying couple received as a gift a copy of Hitler’s political and philosophical ramblings, dictated from prison in the 1920s and published as Mein Kampf (My Struggle). Nonetheless, many young women found a career and an escape from humdrum village life by joining the Nazi Party and training as a secretary or a nurse. German Fascism The filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl played a pivotal role in constructing the iconography of Nazism. Her 1935 propaganda film Triumph of the Will featured speeches by Hitler and other Nazi leaders and aerial photography of mass rallies. In his first six years in power, Hitler delivered on many of his economic promises. He failed, however, in his ambition to make Germany self- sufficient in food and fuel, which contributed to his decision to seek more lebensraum (“living space”) for Germans in 1939—by launching an expansionist war. COMMUNISM TO 1939 Communists took their cues from Marx and his most influential follower, Lenin. They wanted a political order without private property or capitalism. They entrusted their hopes to hierarchical, disciplined parties that promised revolution and a bright future of equality, harmony, and prosperity. Marx and Lenin touted imagined laws of history assuring the inevitability of such a future. For people raised to believe in a second coming and the arrival of the kingdom of heaven on Earth, communism had some familiar features. As we’ve seen, Lenin and the Bolsheviks took over Russia during the period 1917–1921, which inspired some people and frightened others around the world. Once the Bolsheviks had consolidated their hold on Russia, they set about spreading communist revolution to other countries, actively supporting tiny communist parties in Europe, China, British India, the United States, and elsewhere. They financed and dominated the Comintern, an international union of communist parties. Thanks in large part to economic downturns, communists in Italy, Germany, Hungary, and elsewhere in Europe attracted followings in the 1920s and 1930s, arousing fears that fed fascism. And to a lesser extent, the success of fascism in Italy, Germany, and elsewhere fed fears that inspired people to join communist parties. Both movements, although enemies, benefited from the other’s existence. Communist and fascist movements typically shared certain elements: a militant and hierarchical party organization, a cult of the leader, a willingness to use violence in politics, an emphasis on youth and the future, for example. Most ominous, both shared the commitment that life would be permanently improved if certain class enemies or national enemies were destroyed. They differed in important respects too. Communists typically proclaimed equality of the sexes, even if practice was another thing altogether, while fascists claimed either nature or God had subordinated women to men. Fascists could coexist cheerfully with capitalist business and private property, which communists reviled as the root of all evil. Fascism extolled the virtues of war and the solidarity of the nation, whereas communism extolled the virtues of class struggle—specifically of workers against owners and bosses —and the solidarity of the international working class. Fascism found it possible to co-opt churches and coexist with organized religion, whereas communists normally treated religion as an enemy. Their fortunes differed too. Fascism was an important political movement for a little more than two decades, mainly in Europe. Communism held wider appeal and for a longer period. For 70 years after the Russian Revolution, communism remained an occasional political force in many countries and enjoyed a monopoly on power in a few, the most important of which was the USSR. SOVIET COMMUNISM AND STALIN In the USSR, the revolutionary regime at first wobbled from crisis to crisis. A power struggle followed Lenin’s death in 1924, won by Josef Stalin (1878–1953). He was a Georgian from the Caucasus, the son of a hard-drinking cobbler father and a deeply religious mother. A fine student at seminary school, he dropped out and took up radical politics as a teenager. He played small roles in the 1917 revolution. But he caught Lenin’s eye as a useful, unflinchingly loyal communist, willing to take on any task. He also had real administrative and organizational gifts. Unlike Hitler and Mussolini, Stalin was hardworking and self-disciplined. Upon consolidating power in the years 1927–1928 (which involved exiling or murdering senior Bolsheviks), Stalin set to transforming the USSR. He intended to make it—as all communists wanted—a more industrialized country. He wanted a workers’ paradise but also a militarily formidable state. Neither goal was easy to attain. To advance these priorities, he put Soviet support for revolution abroad on the back burner. He promoted a “socialism in one country” policy that sat uneasily with the Marxist theory he and all communists had studied. His most revolutionary act came in agriculture. Soviet Reforms A 1921 Soviet propaganda poster uses a quotation from the Russian poet Pushkin—“Long live the sun!”—to celebrate the expanded education system bringing knowledge and social mobility to people from peasant backgrounds across the Soviet Union. To squeeze out the investment funds for industrialization, Stalin pushed through collectivization of agriculture from 1929. His agents forcibly gathered private landholdings into huge farms, run either as collectives or as state farms. The collectives had to turn over quotas of food to the state, which sold it cheaply to industrial workers. Collectivization amounted to taking peasants’ land, forcing them into collectives, and seizing much of their grain. Peasants resisted by eating their livestock, destroying machinery, and hiding grain. Stalin’s innovations were more revolutionary than the Russian Revolution of 1917. Let’s look first at two areas beyond agriculture: the industrial economy and education. Stalin instituted formal planning of the national economy in 1928. Millions of peasants migrated, some involuntarily, to

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