Many countries veered toward 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. Fascism and communism were presented as alternatives to the democratic capitalist world order, which seemed to be self-destructing during the Great Depression.
Fascism takes its name from the Italian word fascio, literally “a bundle of sticks.” It references an old symbol of many thin sticks bound together. Each individual stick was weak, but together they were resilient. Fascists presented themselves as national unifiers, creating one people under one leader. Fascists saw communism as a threat to private property and traditional social structures. So they aimed to destroy labor unions while “balancing” the classes through domination of independent big business. Thus, fascism would dub itself “national socialism” in contrast to Soviet-style “international socialism,” even as fascists themselves were hostile to the rights of workers in actual practice.
Fascism centered on the unquestioned rule by a single charismatic leader, with no opposing state institutions. A single political party overrode and dominated all social structures. Fascism embraced ultra-nationalism and glorification of the state. It glorified war as the ultimate expression of power. It rejected liberalism and democracy as weak, failed concepts.
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.
The Weimar Republic tried to reestablish Germany’s place in the international community. However, the Great 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. 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. Nazi Germany 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.
The “Taishō democracy” of the post-WWI period gave way to repression of communists and labor activists alike. The Great Depression exacerbated existing trends toward an aggressive anti-Western nationalism. A preexisting sense of Japanese racial superiority gained a militant edge. Military officers increasingly replaced civilian politicians in the highest posts of government. 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.
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 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.
The ideological attributes of Stalinist communism are:
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.