Great Depression 2

1. Two European leaders who ruled under conservative authoritarianism were Catherine the great of Russia and Metternich in Austria. They tried to prevent major changes that would undermine the ex-isting order by relying on bureaucracies, police departments, and armies. Popular participation in government was forbidden or restricted to natural allies like landlords, bureaucrats, and high-church officials. Liberals, democrats, and socialists were persecuted as subversive radicals, and were jailed or exiled. However, these governments were limited in their power and in their objectives due to lack of modern technology and communications and thus not being able, or wanting, to control many aspects of their subjects’ lives. Governments were only concerned with taxes, army recruits, and passive acceptance, so people had great personal independence unless they challenged the status quo. After World War I, this kind of authoritarian government was revived, but by early 1938, only Czechoslovakia remained true to liberal political ideals. This was because the lands that had this kind of government lacked a strong tradition of self-government and its restraint and compromise. Many of these new states were torn by ethnic conflicts that threatened their existence, and dictatorship was seen as a way to repress such tensions and preserve national unity. Large landowners and the church, both powerful forces, often looked to dictators to save them from land reform or communist agrarian upheaval. Also, the Great Depression killed most of democracy. Some conservative authoritarian regimes adopted certain Hitlerian and fascist characteristics while the majority did not, as they were concerned more with maintaining the status quo than with forcing society into change or war.

2. After World War I, Béla Kun formed a Lenin-style government in Hungary, but it was crushed by for-eign troops, large landowners, and hostile peasants. A combination of large landowners instituted a semi-authoritarian regime, which had a parliament but with carefully controlled elections. Peasants could not vote, and an upper house representing the landed aristocracy was reestablished. There was no land reform or major social change. Its conservatism and nationalism was being challenged by a Nazi-like fascist movement, the Arrow Cross, which demanded radical reform and mobilization of the masses. In Poland, General Joseph Pilsudski overthrew the democratic government in 1926 and established a military dictatorship. However, Poland was divided by bitter part politics, of which Pilsudski silenced by trying to building a strong state with the support of the army, major industrial-ists, and nationalists. In Portugal, Antonio de Oliveria Salazar became dictator in 1932 and gave the Catholic church the strongest possible position in the country while controlling the press and outlaw-ing most political activity.

3. Radical dictatorships emerged in the Soviet Union, Germany, and, to a lesser extent, Italy. They re-jected parliamentary restraint and liberal values, exercised great control over the masses, and sought to mobilize them for action. The concept of totalitarianism emerged in the 1920s and 1930s, but it was often used after 1945 as a part of anti-Soviet propaganda during the Cold War. In 1924, Mussolini called his actions in Italy the fierce totalitarian will. In the 1930s, British, American, and German exiled writers described what was happening in the world, Italian and German fascism and Soviet communism, as totalitarianism. It grew out of the total war effort of World War I, as the war demanded control of all institutions and classes to the state. Thus, fascism, Nazism, and communism all favored modern war. Lenin and the Bolsheviks showed how a dedicated minority could achieve victory over a less-determined majority and how institutions and human rights might be controlled based on the needs of a single group and its leader. Totalitarian states used modern technology and communication to exercise complete political power, as well as tried to control the economic, social, intellectual, and cultural aspects of people’s lives. Totalitarianism was a revolt against conservative authoritarianism and nineteenth-century liberalism and democracy. Totalitarians believed in will-power, preached conflict, and worshipped violence. The individual was less than the state, and there were no lasting rights, only temporary rewards for loyal and effective service.

4. A totalitarian society depended on individuals committed to the political process through commit-ment to nationalism and socialism. Thus, it was built on mass movements and had great dynamism, as societies moved as a whole towards a goal and then another. Totalitarianism was a permanent and unfinished revolution. Radical, noncommunist dictatorships were called fascists, or people who do everything totally and revolutionary. However, it was seen as reactionary, decaying capitalism, and domestic class conflict. Orthodox Marxists believed that fascism was a way powerful capitalists sought to manipulate a mass movement capable of destroying the working class and then protecting the grand profits to be earned through war and territorial expansion. They also rejected totalitarian-ism. After fascism became studied more after declining in the 1950s, it was revealed that they had extreme, often expansionist nationalism, an antisocialism aimed at destroying working-class move-ments, alliances with powerful capitalists and landowners, mass parties that appealed to the middle class and the peasantry, a dynamic and violent leader, and glorification of war and the military. The concept of fascism also was seen as a product of class conflict, capitalist crisis, and postwar upheav-al.

1. After the civil war, Russia was devastated, with many farms in ruins and food supplies exhausted. In southern Russia, drought and the ravages of war produced the worst famine in generations. By 1920, 50% to 90% of the population in seventeen provinces was starving. Industrial production had stopped, as output of steel and cotton textiles in 1921 was only 4% of what it had been in 1913. Because of these situations, peasants and workers rioted, and sailors at Kronstadt openly rebelled. In March 1921, Lenin announced the New Economic Policy, which reestablished limited economic freedom to rebuild agriculture and industry. Lenin substituted a grain tax on the country’s peasant producers, who were permitted to sell their surpluses in free markets. Peasants were encouraged to buy many goods from private traders and small handicraft manufacturers. Politically, the NEP was a necessary but temporary compromise with the Soviet Union’s huge peasant majority. The peasants were strong, so Lenin compromised with them, allowing for the industrial output of 1926 to surpass the level of 1913. Urban workers had shorter hours and increased social benefit. After Lenin died in 1924, there was a battle to be the next leader between Stalin and Trotsky.

2. By 1903, Stalin had joined the Bolsheviks and engaged in many revolutionary activities in the south-ern Transcaucasian area of the multinational Russian empire, including a daring bank robbery to get money for the Bolsheviks that attracted Lenin’s attention. Stalin became leader of the Soviet Union by effectively gaining the support of the party, the only real source of power in the state. He became general secretary of the party’s Central Committee in 1922, and used his office to win friends and allies with jobs and promises. Also, Stalin appeared better able than Trotsky to relate Marxian teach-ings to Soviet realities in the 1920s. Stalin advocated socialism in one country rather than Trotsky’s permanent revolution. Stalin argued that Soviet Union had the ability to build socialism on its own, whereas Trotsky maintained that socialism in the Soviet Union could succeed only if revolution oc-curred quickly throughout Europe. Trotsky's views seemed to sell out communism and promise risky conflicts with capitalist countries. Stalin’s desire to break with the NEP and build socialism appealed to young militants in the party.

3. Stalin achieved supreme power between 1922 and 1927 by three ways. First, he allied with Trotsky’s personal enemies to crush him, who was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929 and mysteriously murdered in Mexico in 1940. Second, Stalin aligned with the moderates, who wanted to go slow at home, to suppress Trotsky’s radical followers. Third, having defeated all the radicals, he turned against his allies and destroyed them also. In the party congress of December 1927, Stalin consoli-dated his power.

4. In the first five-year plan beginning in 1927, total industrial output was to increase by 250%, heavy industry was to grow even faster, agricultural production was to rise by 150%, and one-fifth of the peasants in the Soviet Union were scheduled to give up their private plots and join socialist collective farms. Stalin and his militant supporters were strongly committed to socialism as they understood it. They feared a gradual restoration of capitalism, and they wanted to drive out the NEP’s private trad-ers, independent artisans, and property-owning peasants. Although the economy had recovered, it seemed to have stalled in 1927 and 1928, with only a new socialist offensive to cause industry and agriculture to grow rapidly. The Soviet Union also wanted to catch up with the Western nations. Sta-lin saw the peasants as the cursed problem: now that they owned land, they would become con-servative little capitalists. Other people believed that the feared and despised peasants could be kicked out to provide the huge amounts of money needed for industrialization.

5. Stalin decided to bring the peasantry under the control of the state and to make it pay the costs of the new socialist offensive in a process called collectivization, where individual peasant farms are forcibly consolidated into large, state-controlled enterprises. Beginning in 1929, peasants across the Soviet Union were ordered to give up their land and animals in this process, but they were able to live in their own homes. The kulaks, the better-off peasants, were to be exterminated by being starved or deported to forced-labor camps for reeducation. Because almost all peasants were poor, kulak came to mean any peasant who opposed the new system; sometimes whole villages were at-tacked. Large numbers of peasants killed their animals and burned their crops in protest, causing the number of horses, cattle, sheep, and goats in the Soviet Union in 1933 to fall by 50% of that in 1929. They did not produce much more food, as the output of grain barely increased between 1928 and 1938. Collectivized agriculture was supposed to pay for new factories, but the state had to invest greatly in agriculture and build thousands of tractors to replace dead draft horses. It is predicted that 10 million people, mostly women, children, and old peasants, died in the course of collectivization.

6. In Ukraine, the war on peasants came to include all Ukrainians as reactionary nationalists and ene-mies of socialism. Stalin and his associates set levels of grain deliveries for the Ukrainians in 1932 at very high levels and refused to relax them or allow food relief when it was reported that starvation was occurred. Thus, a man-made famine in Ukraine in 1932 and 1933 occurred, killing about 6 mil-lion people. In the mid-1930s, Stalin and his followers used ruthless police terror and a massive purg-ing to build socialism. Top members of Stalin’s government were purged in addition to union offi-cials, managers, intellectuals, army officers, and ordinary citizens. Stalin and the party then recruited 1.5 million new members to take the place of those purged. They were capable and managed the government and large-scale production.

7. By 1933, 60% of peasant families had been collective; by 1938, 93%. The collectivized peasants were no longer considered a political threat, as the low prices for grain assured low-cost bread for urban workers, who were more important politically than the peasants. Peasants fought back with indirect daily opposition and forced the state to make modest compromises. Peasants secured the right to limit a family’s labor on the state-run farms and to cultivate tiny family plots, which provided them with much of their food. In 1938, these plots produced 22% of all Soviet agriculture on only 4% of all cultivated land.

8. Due to the five-year plans, the output of industry doubled in the first plan and doubled again the second. Soviet industry produced four times as much in 1937 as it had in 1928. Heavy industry was the most advanced with the consumer industry growing slowly. Steel production increased 500% from 1928 to 1937. A new heavy industrial complex was built in western Siberia. More than 25 mil-lion people migrated to cities during the 1930s. The sudden creation of factories required great in-vestment, of which one-third of net income was forced to go to investment. The money was collected from the people by heavy, hidden sales taxes. Between 1930 and 1932, trade unions lost most of their power, as the government could assign workers to any job anywhere in the country and indi-viduals could not move without the permission of the police. Foreign engineers were recruited to plan and construct the factories.

9. Since consumption was reduced to pay for investment, there was no improvement in the average standard of living. The average nonfarm wage purchased about half as many goods in 1932 as in 1928. After 1932, real wages rose slowly, so that in 1937 workers could buy 60% of what they had bought in 1928 and less than in 1913. Collectivized peasants were worse off. The majority of people lived primarily on black bread and wore old clothing. There were constant shortages in the stores as well as in housing. In 1940, there were 4 people per room in every urban dwelling compared to 2.7 per room in 1926. Lucky families had one room per member with a shared kitchen and toilet with others on the floor, while less fortunate people had scrap-lumber shacks or underground dugouts. Idealism and ideology appealed to many communists, who saw themselves as pioneers in commun-ism while capitalism was crumbling the Great Depression and fascism was growing. Many disillu-sioned Westerners were also attracted to communism in the 1930s. Soviet workers received old-age pensions, free medical services, free education, and daycare centers for children. There was no un-employment and there was the possibility of personal advancement. This could be done through specialized skills and technical education. Industrialization required great numbers of trained ex-perts. The Stalinist state provided incentive to those who could serve its needs. The growing technical and managerial elite received high salaries and special privileges and created a new upper class. Thus, millions struggled for education. As for women, the Russian Revolution on 1917 gave complete equality of rights for women. In the 1920s, divorce and abortion were made easily available, and women were urged to work outside the home and have sexual freedom. After Stalin came to power, sexual and familial liberation were toned down. Millions of women worked in factories and in heavy construction, building dams, roads, and steel mills. Women also pursued education and entered higher paying jobs. Medicine practically became a woman’s profession and by 1950, 75% of all doc-tors in the Soviet Union were women. However, most women had to work outside the home, as wages were so low that it was almost impossible for a family or couple to live only on the husband’s earnings. Men still dominated the very best jobs, and rapid change and economic hardship led to many broken families and thus physical, emotional, and mental strains for women. Culture in the 1930s became politicized though constant propaganda and indoctrination. Party activists talked to workers in factories and peasants on collective farms, while newspapers, films, and radio broadcasts recounted socialist achievements and capitalist plots. Writers and artists who could combine creativ-ity and political propaganda became celebrities. Stalin appeared everywhere, in portraits, statues, books, and quotations. The state’s religion became unofficially Marxism-Leninism and the pope was Joseph Stalin.