Fascism and Totalitarianism

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Account for the factors that produced fascist and totalitarian regimes after the First World War (Skill 2.B; LO H).
• Account for the consequences of Stalin's economic policies and totalitarian rule in the Soviet Union (LO I).
• Account for KC-4.2.II.A and KC-4.2.II.B: how fascist dictatorships used modern technology and propaganda to reject democratic institutions, and how Mussolini and Hitler came to power.
• Account for KC-4.2.II.C and KC-4.2.II.D: the Spanish Civil War as a testing ground for the Second World War, and the spread of authoritarian regimes across central and eastern Europe.
• Account for KC-4.2.I.D.ii and KC-4.2.I.E: Stalin's centralized program of rapid economic modernization and its severe consequences.
• Apply Skill 2.B: explain the point of view, purpose, situation, and audience of a source documenting the rise of fascist or totalitarian regimes.

Topic 8.6 covers the two principal interwar authoritarian patterns of Europe: the rise of fascist and totalitarian regimes in Italy, Germany, Spain, and across central and eastern Europe (KC-4.2.II); and the parallel Stalinist consolidation in the Soviet Union (KC-4.2.I.D.ii and KC-4.2.I.E). The two patterns developed in different ideological traditions but shared the rejection of liberal-parliamentary democracy and the use of state power for the systematic reorganization of society.

The fascist ideology and its appeal (KC-4.2.II and KC-4.2.II.A). The ideology of fascism, with roots in the pre-First-World-War era, gained popularity in an environment of postwar bitterness, the rise of communism, uncertain transitions to democracy, and economic instability. Fascism drew on multiple pre-war intellectual currents: late-nineteenth-century nationalism (covered in Topic 7.2); Social Darwinist racial doctrine (covered in Topic 7.4); the late-Romantic critique of parliamentary democracy associated with figures like Friedrich Nietzsche and Georges Sorel; the Italian futurist movement under Filippo Marinetti; and a more general European intellectual reaction against the rationalist-liberal tradition. The wartime experience of the trenches and the post-1918 conditions (the dislocation of demobilized veterans, the post-Versailles settlement's resentment in defeated and disappointed powers, the post-1919 wave of leftist insurrections) provided the conditions for the ideology to gain mass political traction. KC-4.2.II.A: fascist dictatorships used modern technology and propaganda to reject democratic institutions, promote charismatic leaders, and glorify war and nationalism. The principal fascist propaganda instruments included radio broadcasting (Joseph Goebbels's German Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda from March 1933); newsreel and film (Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, 1935); architecture (the monumental fascist public buildings of Rome, Berlin, and Nuremberg); and the systematic cult of personality around the leader.

Mussolini and Italian fascism (KC-4.2.II.B). Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) had been a prominent Italian socialist before the war; he broke with the Italian Socialist Party in 1914 over the Italian neutrality question and emerged from the war as the principal organizer of a new movement that combined anti-socialist nationalism with a populist mass-political program. The Fasci di Combattimento (Combat Squads) were founded in March 1919; the Italian Fascist Party (PNF) followed in November 1921. The early-1920s Italian political crisis (the "Red Biennium" of 1919-1920 with substantial worker and peasant occupations of factories and land; the post-war fragmentation of the Italian liberal political establishment; the post-Versailles "mutilated victory" sentiment over Fiume and the Adriatic territorial settlement) provided the conditions for the Fascist movement's growth.

The October 1922 March on Rome was the principal seizure-of-power event. Mussolini's Blackshirt squadristi converged on the capital from late October; King Victor Emmanuel III (who had constitutional authority to either resist or accommodate the threat) declined to invoke martial law and instead invited Mussolini to form a government on 28 October 1922. Mussolini was sworn in as Prime Minister on 31 October at the head of a coalition government. The transition from the 1922 coalition government to the post-1925 single-party Fascist dictatorship took several years. The principal milestones included the November 1923 Acerbo electoral law (granting the largest party two-thirds of parliamentary seats); the April 1924 election (Fascist victory under the new law); the June 1924 assassination of Socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti and the subsequent Aventine Secession of opposition deputies; Mussolini's January 1925 speech accepting political responsibility for the Matteotti murder and announcing the post-1925 dictatorial consolidation; and the November 1926 Special Laws abolishing opposition parties and the parliamentary opposition. The Lateran Accords of February 1929 normalized relations between the Italian state and the Vatican.

Hitler and German National Socialism. Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) had served as a corporal in the German army during the First World War; he joined the small German Workers' Party in Munich in September 1919 and built it (renamed the National Socialist German Workers' Party, the NSDAP, in 1920) into the principal late-Weimar political force. The 1923 Beer Hall Putsch (an attempted Munich coup on 8-9 November 1923, with the cooperation of First-World-War general Erich Ludendorff) failed and produced Hitler's brief imprisonment at Landsberg, where he wrote Mein Kampf (1925). The NSDAP was a marginal political force through the prosperous mid-1920s (12 seats in the May 1928 Reichstag).

The Depression substantially changed the NSDAP's political position. The party rose to 107 seats in the September 1930 Reichstag and to 230 seats (the largest single party) in the July 1932 Reichstag. The Weimar political establishment failed to construct a stable majority government across 1932; President Paul von Hindenburg, persuaded by former Chancellor Franz von Papen and other conservative advisers that Hitler could be controlled within a coalition, appointed Hitler Chancellor on 30 January 1933. The post-January 1933 transition to the single-party Nazi state took roughly six months. The principal milestones included the Reichstag fire of 27 February 1933 and the Reichstag Fire Decree (suspending civil liberties); the March 1933 election; the Enabling Act of 24 March 1933 (granting the cabinet legislative power for four years and providing the legal foundation for the dictatorship); the May 1933 dissolution of the trade unions; the July 1933 declaration of the NSDAP as the only legal party; the June-July 1934 Night of the Long Knives (the elimination of the SA leadership and rival political figures); and the August 1934 merger of the chancellorship and presidency on Hindenburg's death.

The Spanish Civil War (KC-4.2.II.C). Franco's alliance with the Italian and German fascists during the Spanish Civil War — in which the Western democracies did not intervene — served as a testing ground for the Second World War and produced authoritarian rule in Spain from 1936 to the mid-1970s. The Spanish Second Republic (proclaimed in April 1931 after the abdication of King Alfonso XIII) had faced sustained political polarization. The February 1936 election produced a Popular Front government (Republicans, Socialists, and Communists). On 17-18 July 1936 a coordinated military uprising began in Spanish Morocco and parts of mainland Spain under the leadership of generals including Francisco Franco (1892-1975), Emilio Mola, and Jose Sanjurjo (Sanjurjo died in a plane crash on 20 July). The uprising failed to achieve a quick victory; the resulting civil war lasted nearly three years.

The international intervention pattern shaped the conflict. Italy and Germany supplied the Nationalist forces with troops, aircraft, armor, and advisers (the Italian Corpo Truppe Volontarie; the German Condor Legion that bombed Guernica on 26 April 1937). The Soviet Union supplied the Republican forces with arms and advisers; the Comintern organized the International Brigades (volunteers from across Europe and the Americas) to fight on the Republican side. Britain and France pursued a non-intervention policy through the London Non-Intervention Committee from August 1936; the policy was widely criticized as ineffective and as effectively disadvantaging the Republic. The war ended with the Nationalist capture of Madrid on 28 March 1939 and Franco's declaration of victory on 1 April 1939. Roughly 500,000 Spaniards were killed in combat, executions, or war-related causes. The Franco regime governed Spain until Franco's death on 20 November 1975, when a transition to democracy began under King Juan Carlos I.

Authoritarian regimes across central and eastern Europe (KC-4.2.II.D). After failures to establish functioning democracies, authoritarian dictatorships took power in central and eastern Europe during the interwar period. The post-1919 successor states had been established with parliamentary-democratic constitutions; most of them had moved toward authoritarian government by the mid-1930s. The principal cases included Poland (Jozef Pilsudski's May 1926 coup and the post-Pilsudski "colonels' regime" after 1935); Hungary (Admiral Miklos Horthy's regency from March 1920); Yugoslavia (King Alexander I's January 1929 royal dictatorship); Romania (the various royal governments of King Carol II and the rise of the Iron Guard); Bulgaria (King Boris III's increasingly authoritarian rule from 1935); Greece (General Ioannis Metaxas's August 1936 dictatorship); Portugal (Antonio de Oliveira Salazar's Estado Novo from 1933); and Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia (the various post-1934 authoritarian regimes). Czechoslovakia under Tomas Masaryk and Edvard Benes was the principal central European exception until the German absorption of 1938-1939. The pattern reflected the cumulative pressure of post-Versailles minority-population disputes, the Depression's economic distress, and the contemporary appeal of fascist and authoritarian models. By 1939, parliamentary democracy survived in Europe principally in Britain, France, the Low Countries, the Scandinavian states, Switzerland, Ireland, and Czechoslovakia (until March 1939).

Stalinist economic modernization (KC-4.2.I.D.ii and KC-4.2.I.E; LO I). After Lenin's death in January 1924, Joseph Stalin (Iosif Dzhugashvili, 1878-1953) consolidated power within the Soviet Communist Party leadership across the mid-1920s. Stalin had been General Secretary of the Party since April 1922, an initially modest administrative post that he used to build a substantial political base. The succession struggle pitted Stalin against Trotsky (the principal architect of the October Revolution and the civil-war Red Army), Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, and (later) Nikolai Bukharin. Stalin's tactical alliances with shifting groups within the Politburo allowed him to defeat each of his rivals in turn between 1924 and 1929. By 1929 Stalin was the principal political authority in the Soviet state.

The principal Stalinist economic transformation was the abandonment of the New Economic Policy in favor of the centralized Five-Year Plans. The first Five-Year Plan was adopted in October 1928 and ran through 1932; the principal stated goals were the rapid expansion of heavy industry (steel, coal, electricity, machinery), the construction of large-scale industrial infrastructure, and the collectivization of agriculture. The Plan's principal industrial achievements included the construction of the Magnitogorsk steel complex in the southern Urals, the Dnieper hydroelectric dam, and the Stalingrad and Kharkov tractor plants. Soviet industrial output grew at substantial rates across the 1930s; the Soviet Union became one of the principal global industrial economies by the eve of the Second World War.

The forced collectivization of agriculture (from late 1929) was the principal social transformation of the Stalinist period. The official goal was to end the New Economic Policy's mixed-economy compromise with the peasantry by transferring agricultural production to large state-organized collective farms (kolkhozes) and state farms (sovkhozes). The principal political target of the campaign was the more prosperous peasant class (the so-called "kulaks") whose dispossession (in the campaign of "dekulakization") was central to the policy. Roughly 5 million peasants were deported, executed, or killed in the campaign. The disruption of agricultural production combined with continued state grain requisitioning produced the cumulative famines of 1932-1933, with particular severity in Ukraine, the North Caucasus, and Kazakhstan; the cumulative excess deaths reached approximately 5-7 million.

The political consequences of Stalin's modernization were severe. The Soviet political purges of 1936-1938 (the Yezhovshchina, named for NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov) eliminated much of the surviving Old Bolshevik leadership and substantial portions of the Soviet officer corps, civil service, and intelligentsia through show trials and administrative deportations. The principal show trials (the Moscow Trials of August 1936, January 1937, and March 1938) produced the public execution of Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, and other former Stalin rivals. Roughly 750,000 individuals were executed and approximately 1.5 million more were sent to the Soviet labor-camp system (the Gulag) during the 1937-1938 peak; cumulative Gulag camp populations reached approximately 1.8 million by the eve of the Second World War. The cumulative effect was the consolidation of Stalin's personal authority and the elimination of organized political opposition within the Soviet system.

The Skill 2.B argument. Topic 8.6's suggested skill is 2.B (Sourcing and Situation: explain the point of view, purpose, situation, or audience of a source). The interwar fascist and totalitarian regimes generated an unusually large body of state-sponsored propaganda, official documents, and oppositional writings; reading any of these requires careful attention to the source's framing. Mussolini's Doctrine of Fascism (drafted with the philosopher Giovanni Gentile and published in 1932) was an attempt to articulate a coherent theoretical doctrine for a movement that had taken power without one. The German Enabling Act of March 1933 was a constitutional document that the Nazi government would use to dismantle the Weimar constitutional order. Bukharin's late-1920s opposition writings against the abandonment of the New Economic Policy were the testimony of a defeated rival of Stalin within the Soviet political system. Each source's claims must be read with explicit attention to the political context, intended audience, and the rhetorical or political function the document was designed to serve.

Three sources framing the period: Mussolini's articulation of fascist doctrine, the German Enabling Act, and a contemporary critic of Soviet collectivization.

1. (Causation, Skill 2.B) Account for KC-4.2.II: how did postwar bitterness, the rise of communism, uncertain transitions to democracy, and economic instability produce the conditions for the rise of fascist regimes?
2. (Skill 2.B) Apply Skill 2.B to the Mussolini/Gentile Doctrine of Fascism: how do the source's perspective, purpose, and audience shape its claims? What does the source NOT tell you about how the Fascist regime actually operated?
3. (Causation) Account for KC-4.2.II.B: how did Mussolini and Hitler use propaganda, terror, and the manipulation of fragile democracies to come to power? Compare the October 1922 March on Rome with the January 1933 appointment as Chancellor.
4. (Causation) Account for KC-4.2.II.C and KC-4.2.II.D: the Spanish Civil War as a testing ground for the Second World War, and the spread of authoritarian regimes across central and eastern Europe. Cite specific cases.
5. (Causation) Account for KC-4.2.I.D.ii and KC-4.2.I.E: how did Stalin's centralized economic modernization combine industrialization, forced collectivization, and political repression? What were the principal social and demographic consequences?

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP European History codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, V.1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.