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VICModern HistoryQuick questions
Unit 1: Change and conflict (1918 to 1939)
Quick questions on Rise of fascism, Nazism and communism in interwar Europe: VCE Modern History Unit 1
11short Q&A pairs drawn directly from our worked dot-point answer. For full context and worked exam questions, read the parent dot-point page.
What Is To Be Done?Show answer
(1902) called for a disciplined vanguard party. State and Revolution (1917) argued the proletariat must smash the bourgeois state and replace it with a dictatorship of the proletariat. The Bolshevik seizure of power on 25 October 1917 (Old Style) put theory into practice.
What is communism?Show answer
Communism in the interwar period meant Marxism-Leninism as codified by Lenin (1870-1924) and developed by Stalin (1879-1953).
What is fascism?Show answer
Fascism originated in Italy. Mussolini founded the Fasci di Combattimento in Milan on 23 March 1919, drawing on his pre-war revolutionary syndicalism and on the trench-veteran experience of WWI.
What is nazism?Show answer
Nazism (National Socialism) is best treated as a German variant of fascism with three distinctive doctrines: extreme antisemitism, biological racism, and Lebensraum (territorial expansion eastward).
What is decisive action?Show answer
A single party and a single leader could pass laws, ban opposition, and direct the economy without parliamentary obstruction. Mussolini's "totalitarian state," Stalin's Five-Year Plans, and Hitler's Reichstag Fire Decree (28 February 1933) and Enabling Act (24 March 1933) all promised speed.
What is identity and meaning?Show answer
Mass rallies (Nuremberg 1933 onwards), youth organisations (Hitler Youth founded 1926, Komsomol 1918, Italian Balilla 1926), and uniform politics offered belonging in societies fractured by class, region, and war loss.
What is economic security?Show answer
German unemployment fell from six million in 1933 to under one million by 1937 through public works, rearmament, and the suppression of free trade unions. Soviet industrial output grew at over 10 per cent a year through the First Five-Year Plan (1928-1932).
What is a clear enemy?Show answer
Fascism named communists and the Jews; Nazism named the Jews above all others; communism named the bourgeoisie and the kulaks. Enemy-naming let regimes blame failure on sabotage and conspiracy rather than on policy.
What is q1?Show answer
"The failures of liberal democracy explain the appeal of fascism and Nazism." To what extent do you agree? [10 marks]
What is q2?Show answer
Explain why authoritarianism appealed across the three ideologies. [6 marks]
What is q3?Show answer
Distinguish Nazism from Italian fascism as ideologies. [4 marks]