Many countries veered towards increased state power and authoritarian regimes in the 1930s, but a few countries had a large impact on the rest of the world. These large, powerful countries took totalitarian doctrines of state control to the furthest extremes. Their ideological need to expand, conquer and control caused growing tensions with the existing Versailles world order, dominated by the imperial economics and diplomacy of Britain, France, and the United States.
By 1921, the success of Marxist revolution in Russia led to a growing fear of communism in other nations, especially those that had been destabilized by the war. It was in Italy that the first fully organized reactionary and anti-democratic movement emerged. A small group of men led by Benito Mussolini marched on Rome in 1922, demanding to form a government. The king consented, and Italy was soon dominated by Mussolini and his Fascists. Mussolini became the prototypical modern dictator as he accumulated more and more power. By the 1930s, his rule was unquestioned. In light of the tenuous status of the League of Nations, Italy was able to brutally invade Ethiopia in 1935, conquering one of Africa’s only independent states.
After the war, Germany rebuilt its government as a parliamentary democracy. Burdened with war debts and rampant inflation, the new government tried to reestablish Germany’s place in the international community. However, the 1930s Depression, with the withdrawal of American credit, caused a collapse of the economy and rising popularity for German Communists.
Opposing the Communists with street fighting and uniformed gangs was the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, also known as the Nazi Party. Its charismatic leader Adolf Hitler railed against Communism and used traditional anti-Semitism to suggest that Communism was really a global conspiracy organized by the Jewish people. In fact, all of Germany’s economic, diplomatic, and social problems were blamed on the nation’s Jewish population. Hitler preached ultra-nationalism and the promise of a greater Germany, much as Mussolini had done in Italy—but Nazism’s greatest difference from Fascism, on which it was based, was this addition of racial hatred and the promotion of “Aryan” (Germanic) racial superiority.
In 1933, with a close election victory, Hitler was appointed chancellor. He became dictator, or führer, within months by eliminating his political opponents through terror, intimidation, and forced labor camps. Jews were increasingly persecuted and driven from public life. The Nazi party and its propaganda of German revival and expansion dominated most areas of national life. Germany under the Nazis pushed to annul the Versailles treaty’s restrictions on German power and to weaken the Western-led alliances among its neighbors. By 1936 the German army moved to reoccupy the demilitarized Rhineland on the French border.
In 1930s Japan, the global depression exacerbated existing trends towards an aggressive anti-Western nationalism. A militant kind of racial superiority became the national ideology, with clear links to Fascism’s methods and message. Military officers increasingly replaced civilian politicians in the highest posts of government, and liberal institutions were restricted. One feature of Japanese authoritarianism was an emphasis on collective rule in the name of the divine Emperor; Japan was never ruled by a glorified dictator.
Japan's goal of economic self-sufficiency necessitated an imperial foreign policy, as the country had few natural resources of its own. Japan had already seized Taiwan and Korea in a growing overseas empire, but it now fixed its eye on the rich resources of Northeast China. Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931 led to protests in the League of Nations but no effective action, so the Japanese kept their new territory and withdrew from the League.
At the same time that Mussolini was consolidating his power in Italy and Hitler was beginning his rise, there was a transfer of power in Moscow. Lenin, the architect of the Bolshevik Revolution, died of a stroke seven years after the revolution. The resulting power struggle within the ruling Bolshevik party ended when Joseph Stalin took control in 1927.
Marx’s original communism had promoted the idea of a collective leadership, effecting a “dictatorship of the people.” Stalin, following Lenin’s example but also in line with Russia’s tradition of absolute Czarist rule, ruthlessly eliminated his colleagues and twisted communism into a one-man dictatorship. His method of rule became associated with modern Soviet-style communism, but it is also referred to as Stalinism.
Drawing from lessons learned during the waging of total war from 1914 to 1918, Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini represented a new form of political leadership in the twentieth century. Along with the rule of Japan’s generals, their dictatorships demonstrated that political ideology, right or left, communist or anti-communist, was in some ways less important than the methods and goals used to mobilize society. Whether in Berlin or Moscow, modern totalitarianism displayed certain distinct features.