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Following the war, Europe witnessed a period of inflation, unemployment and minor revolutionary activity, although the population was generally too tired to support any major uprising. The European economy gradually recovered through consumer demand that grew rapidly after the deprivations of the war. Despite this, there was an undercurrent of fear in the business community that the communists might prey on unrest and come to power, seizing business assets in the process.
In Italy, wealthy capitalists financed groups of thugs to terrorise communists and socialists who had instigated a wave of strikes. A new anti-democratic fascist movement gained momentum, recommending the use of harsh measures to solve the country’s problems. Such was the support the fascists enjoyed, that they managed to gain power under their leader, Benito Mussolini, a former school-teacher and journalist who gradually imposed a dictatorship on the country.
In Germany the Kaiser had abdicated after the war. The Weimar Republic that succeeded him attempted to print its way out of its war debts, only to unleash spectacular hyperinflation which caused the financial ruin of millions of Germans. As a result, anyone who promised order received a warm welcome.
One of these individuals was Adolf Hitler, an Austrian who had served in the First World War. He launched a virtual one-man campaign for Germany to reject the Treaty of Versailles, the harsh terms of which had incensed him and many Germans. In 1923, he proclaimed a revolution and attempted to take over the Bavarian government in Munich with his army of followers – known as the Beer Hall Putsch – a failed uprising for which he received a five-year jail term of which he only served nine months.
It was in jail that he wrote ‘Mein Kampf’: the Jews were responsible for all the problems in the world, he wrote, particularly communism and Germany’s defeat in the war. Left to their own devices, they would bastardise the pure German race, as would the Slavs for that matter; they therefore needed to be eliminated. Germany also needed living space, or Lebensraum, and he suggested it would find this by conquering Russia and the Slavic countries. Signatories of the Treaty of Versailles were traitors who had stabbed Germany in the back, and therefore needed to go. Given the economic strife and hyperinflation in Germany, Hitler’s thoughts met a ready audience, with the book selling five million copies before the beginning of the Second World War. Major industrialists, unsupportive of the government and concerned about the communist threat, bankrolled Hitler, erroneously assuming that they could control him.
In Russia, the plight of the Russians went from bad to worse throughout the twenties and thirties. Before his death Lenin had expressed misgivings about being succeeded by his Georgian colleague and General Secretary of the Communist Party, Joseph Stalin. Nevertheless, Stalin soon out-manoeuvred his rivals to lead the Soviet Union until his death in 1954. Trotsky was declared an enemy of the State, stripped of all authority and forced into exile. Many of the original revolutionaries who resisted Stalin in any way were executed or sentenced to imprisonment in an enormous system of slave-labour camps called gulags.
As Stalin consolidated his power, he embarked on a parallel course to catch up economically and industrially with the West. In 1928, he launched the first of his five-year plans which involved the full-scale nationalisation of industry and the collectivisation of agriculture. At the time, the Soviet Union was underdeveloped and primarily agricultural with very little industry. A world war, a civil war and a revolution – all in the space of five years – had certainly not helped. Stalin saw that the Soviet Union was 50 to 100 years behind the advanced industrialised countries; if it did not catch up within ten years, he stated, the country would be crushed. He therefore aimed to transform the country into an industrialised state as quickly as possible.
However, the huge number of workers that such a goal would require needed feeding and the countryside struggled to provide enough food. Stalin and his cronies thought they understood why: lots of small, inefficient farms, with limited machinery could only produce so much. If all the little farms could be incorporated into huge communist farms, they reasoned, then the benefits would be many. The farms would become more efficient, thereby improving agricultural activity, more grain would be provided to the cities, labour would be freed up to work in the factories, and the extra grain produced could be sold internationally to fund more machinery. Most importantly, it would help the communists extend their power over the conservative and religious peasants who were proving difficult to manage.
The main problem was that Stalin insisted on unrealistic production targets, with the peasants only receiving what remained, if anything. As the targets were set progressively higher, the peasants often received nothing and they starved. Understandably, this was not a good stimulus for them to grow crops. What’s more, the peasants had only just received land as a result of the revolution and were understandably reluctant to give it back. They also had no desire to leave their family homes where they had been raised. Those who owned land were called ‘kulaks’ and denounced as enemies of the state.
When the Red Army was sent in to appropriate grain, wide-scale rebellion ensued, with people burning their crops and killing their livestock rather than handing it over to the regime. Those who opposed collectivisation were either arrested, sent to forced labour camps (gulags) or shot, and agricultural production was severely damaged as a result. The Ukraine suffered worst of all; at least four million people died between 1932 and 1933 in a period that they commemorate under the name ‘Holodomor’ – their own version of the Holocaust.
In purely economic terms, Stalin’s industrialisation was successful, with a 50 percent growth in industrial output during the course of the first five-year plan that included hydro-electric dams, railways and canals. While some argue that Stalin’s plans succeeded in providing the Soviet Union with a war machine capable of withstanding Hitler’s onslaught a decade or so later, others understandably argue that the ends could not possibly justify the means.