Lecture'–'The'Interwar'Years'

The'impact'of'the'First'World'War,'Depression,'and'Fascism'

Europe in Tatters – Major blow to European Global Power

• Why had the revolutionary pressures generated by the war

produced a new regime in Russia and nowhere else?

• Losing a major war proved fatal to every regime.

• It appears that relatively homogenous societies in industrially

advanced countries, with a tradition of democratic intuitions, such

as Britain and France, withstood the social pressures of total war

far better than less homogeneous, less industrialized, more

autocratic societies.

• Leon Trotsky wrote: “History has moved along the line of least

resistance. The revolutionary epoch has made its incursion

through the least barricaded gates.”

• One of the most important preconditions of successful revolution

was the existence of a land-hungry peasant mass.

• Where urban demonstrations coincide with a tidal wave of land

seizures of large estates, it has usually proved impossible to resist

these twin forces.

o France in 1789

o Russia in 1917

o China in 1948

o Cuba in 1958

• Lenin, who enjoyed support from socialists in Western Europe,

wanted socialists leaders to violently overthrow the existing

regimes in London, Paris, and Rome. His challenge permanently

split the Left in Europe.

• Many frightened middle-class Europeans began abandoning the

nineteenth-century liberalism of their fathers for some strong

bulwarks against revolutionary socialism. The fear of Bolshevism

provided the soil from which Fascism began to grow.