Buy this book on Amazon: A Short History of the World
In October 1929 the roaring twenties came to an abrupt end when the New York Stock Market crashed. The economic depression that resulted dominated the 1930s. As stock values crashed and banks failed, Americans who had been investing and lending heavily in Europe called back their loans. This caused a ripple of bank failures around the world and reduced the availability of cash for investment in businesses. As demand fell over the coming years, so did industrial production and this, in turn, caused huge unemployment. As times grew tougher, people became ever readier to listen to anyone who could promise them a solution to the problems they faced. To the socialists and communists, it looked as though the end of capitalism was nigh; to Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party, it was the opportunity of a lifetime to get into power.
As if the Soviet people had not suffered enough, Stalin’s paranoia caused him to instigate a series of purges between 1934 and 1939, during which millions of Soviet citizens were either executed or sent to forced labour camps for being ‘enemies of the people’. The purges were indiscriminate and included anybody who could challenge Stalin’s power. Several top party officials and ‘Old Bolsheviks’ were arrested and forced to confess to crimes against the state in a series of public show trials in Moscow, often after having endured extended brutal torture. The Purges hit the educated and professional classes, scientists, intelligentsia, most of the country’s top generals and the largest part of the Soviet officer corps.104 The staggering number of military deaths was given as a contributing factor to Hitler’s early successes against the Soviet Union in the Second World War. Characteristically insensitive, Stalin merely commented, ‘One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is simply a statistic.’