Quick questions on Rise of fascism, Nazism and communism in interwar Europe: VCE Modern History Unit 3

(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.

WWI ended four monarchies and produced new parliamentary republics across Central and Eastern Europe. By 1939, most had collapsed into authoritarianism or fascism. Of the 28 European states with parliamentary regimes in 1920, only about 11 remained democracies by 1939 (Britain, France, the Low Countries, Scandinavia, Czechoslovakia, Ireland, Switzerland).

Communism in the interwar period meant Marxism-Leninism as codified by Lenin (1870-1924) and developed by Stalin (1879-1953).

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.

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).

Across all three ideologies, authoritarianism offered four things liberal democracy struggled to provide.

Robert Paxton (The Anatomy of Fascism, 2004) treats fascism as a "process" through five stages, from creation through consolidation to radicalisation, rather than as a fixed doctrine.

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.

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.

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).

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.

Mussolini's Italy was not initially racially antisemitic; the Manifesto of Race appeared only in July 1938, partly under German pressure. Nazism's racial doctrine is distinctive.

The Comintern policy shifted significantly: ultra-left Class Against Class (1928-1934), then the Popular Front against fascism (1934-1939), then the Nazi-Soviet Pact (23 August 1939). Foreign communist parties followed Moscow's line.

It was not. Liberal democracy survived in Britain, France, the United States, the Low Countries, Scandinavia, and Czechoslovakia. Pin causation to the specific failures of each case.

The first is Italian and corporatist, ghost-written by Gentile. The second is German and racial, written in prison after the Munich Putsch.