StudySpace: Western Civilizations, 16 e.

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1. Introduction
1. The legacy of the Great War
2. Near collapse of democracy
3. The rise of authoritarian dictatorships
2. The Soviet Union Under Lenin and Stalin
1. The Russian Civil War
1. Treaty of Brest-Litovsk polarized Russian society
2. The "Whites
1. Loose group united by the desire to remove the "Reds" from power
2. Supporters of the old regime
3. "Reds" (Bolsheviks) faced strong nationalist movements
1. Ukraine, Georgia, and north Caucasus
4. U.S., Britain, and Japan intervene on the periphery of the old empire
1. Solidified Bolshevik mistrust of capitalist world powers
5. Bolshevik victory
1. Gained greater support from the majority of the population
2. Better organization
3. Leon Trotsky as new commissar of war
6. Consequences
1. One million combat casualties
2. Several million dead from hunger and disease
3. 100-300,000 executed (on both sides)
4. Created permanent hatreds
2. War communism
1. Government control of industry
2. Government requisitioned grain from the peasantry
3. Outlawed private trade in consumer goods
4. Militarized production facilities and abolished money
5. Consequences
1. Devastated Russian industry and emptied major cities
2. Industrial output in 1920 fell to only 20% of prewar levels
3. Large-scale famine (1921)
4. Large-scale strikes
3. The NEP period (New Economic Policy)
1. Abandoning war communism
2. Reversion to state capitalism
1. State owned all major industry
2. Individuals could own private property
3. Trading freely within limits
4. Farming land for the benefit of the peasants
3. Grain requisitioning replaced by fixed taxes on the peasantry
4. Nikolai Bukharin (1888-1938)
5. Peasants should "enrich" themselves
1. Taxes would support urban industrialization and working classes
6. The "golden age of the Russian peasantry"
1. Divided up noble lands to level wealth disparities
2. Reintroduced traditional social structure (peasant communes)
3. Produced enough grain to feed the country
7. Failure
1. Peasants refused to participate in markets to benefit urban areas
2. Kept excess grain for themselves
3. Cities experience grain shortages
4. Stalin and the "Revolution From Above"
1. Stalin the man
1. Born in Georgia as Iosip Jughashvili (1879-1953)
2. Exiled to Siberia for revolutionary activity
3. Lenin's death (1924: Stalin or Trotsky
2. Stalin the strategist
1. Isolate all opposition
2. Used the left to isolate the right, used the right to isolation the left
3. By 1929, Trotsky and Bukharin are removed from positions of power
4. Abandons NEP
5. Increases tempo of industrialization
3. Forced industrialization and the total collectivization of agriculture
5. Collectivization
1. Local party and police officials force peasants to join collective farms
2. Peasant resistance: 1600 large-scale rebellions (1929-1933)
3. Peasants slaughter livestock rather than turn it over to farms
4. The "liquidation of the kulaks as a class"
5. The famine (1932-1933)
1. The human cost was 3-5 million lives
2. The Bolsheviks retained grain reserves in other parts of the country
3. Grain reserves sold overseas for currency and stockpiled in the event of war
6. The Five-Year Plans
1. Campaign of forced industrialization
2. First Five Year Plan (1928-1932)
1. Most stunning period of economic growth
2. Industrial output increased 50% in five years
3. Built new industries in new cities
1. Magnitogorsk
4. Urban population more than doubled (26 to 56 million) between 1924 and 1939
3. The human cost
1. Large-scale projects carried out with prison labor
2. The Gulag system
1. By 1940, 3.6 million people are incarcerated by the regime
4. Structural problems
1. The "command" economy: production levels planned from Moscow in advance
2. Heavy industry favored over light industry
3. Emphasis on quantity over quality
5. Cultural and economic changes
1. Soviet cities
2. Women entered the workforce
3. The conservative shift
1. Divorce was difficult to obtain
2. Abortion made illegal except in emergency situations
3. Homosexuality declared a criminal offense
7. The Great Terror (1937-1938)
1. One million dead -- 1.5 million to the gulag
2. The elimination of Stalin's enemies, real or imagines
3. Mass repression of internal enemies from the top to the very bottom
4. Purge the "old" Bolsheviks
5. Staged show trials
6. Industrial managers, intellectuals, and the military
7. Targeted ethnic groups (Poles, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Latvians, and Koreans)
8. Stalin and total control
9. Social advances
1. Illiteracy reduced
2. Higher education made available to more people
3. Government assistance for working mothers
4. Free hospitalization
3. The Emergence of Fascism in Italy
1. In the aftermath of war
1. A democracy in distress
2. 700,000 dead, $15 billion debt
3. Territorial disputes
1. Militant nationalists seize Fiume
4. Problems
1. Split between the industrial north and agrarian south
2. Conflict over land, wages, and local power
3. Government corruption and indecision
4. Inflation, unemployment, and strikes
5. Demands for radical reform
2. The rise of Mussolini (1883-1945)
1. Editor of Avantia (leading socialist daily)
1. Lost editorship when he urged Italy to side with the Allies during World War I
2. Founds Il Poplo d'Italia
3. The Fasci
1. Organized to drum up support for the war
2. Attracted young, idealist, fanatical nationalists
4. The Fascist platform (1919): universal suffrage, the eight hour day, and tax on inheritance
5. Fascist support
1. Gained respect of middle classes and landowners
2. Repressed radical movements of workers and peasants
3. Attacked socialists
4. 50,000 fascist militia march on Rome (October 28, 1922)
1. The black shirts
2. Victor Emmanuel III invites Mussolini to form a cabinet
3. Italy under Mussolini
1. One-party dictatorship
1. Statism -- "nothing above, outside, or against the state
2. Nationalism -- the "highest form of society"
3. Militarism -- the "ennoblement" of man in war
2. Changed the electoral laws
3. 3 Abolished cabinet system
4. Mussolini assumes role of prime minister and party leader (Il Duce)
5. Repression and censorship
6. Ending class conflict
1. A managed economy
2. A Corporate state
7. Grants independence to papal residence in the Vatican City
8. Roman Catholicism established as the state religion
9. Maintaining the status quo and making "the trains run on time"
4. Weimar Germany
1. November 9, 1918 Revolution
1. Bloodless overthrow of the imperial government
2. Social Democratic Party (SPD) announces a new German republic
3. The kaiser abdicates
4. Socialists want democratic reforms within existing imperial bureaucracy
2. Problems
1. Elections not held until January 1919
2. Communists and independent Socialists stage armed uprisings (Berlin)
3. Social Democrats try to crush the uprisings
1. The martyrdom of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht
3. The Freikorps
1. Former army officers fighting Bolsheviks, Poles, and communists
2. Called themselves "Spartacists"
3. Fiercely right-wing anti-Marxist, anti-Semitic, and antiliberal
4. The Weimar coalition
1. Socialists, Catholic centrists, and liberal democrats
2. Parliamentary liberalism
1. Pluralistic framework
2. Universal suffrage for men and women
3. Bill of rights
5. The failure of Weimar
1. Social, political, and economic crisis
2. The humiliation of World War I
1. Germany "stabbed in the back" by socialists and Jews
2. What was needed was authoritarian leadership
3. Versailles and reparations
1. $33 billion debt
2. The Dawes Plan (1924), a new schedule of payments
4. The government continued to print money
1. By October 1923, a pound of potatoes cost 40 million marks
2. Middle class employees, farmers, and workers the hardest hit by inflation
5. Economic recovery (1925)
1. Scaled-down reparation payments
2. Government sponsored building projects
3. Large infusion of capital from the United States
6. Further problems
1. US stock market crash
2. Unemployment
3. Production dropped by 44%
4. Peasants stage mass demonstrations
5. Government cuts welfare benefits
6. Left the door open for the opponents of Weimar
5. Hitler and the National Socialists
1. Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)
1. Born in Austria, aspired to be an artist
2. Spent his youth as a tramp in Vienna
1. Learned his Anti-Semitism, anti-Marxism, and pan-Slavism
3. The outbreak of World War I as his liberation
4. After the war, he joins the German Workers' Party
1. 1920: becomes the National Socialist Workers' Party (Nazi)
2. Refused to accept the November (1918) Resolution
2. Hitler as the Nazis
1. November 1923: Munich putsch
1. Hitler imprisoned
2. Dictates Mein Kampf
2. Portrays himself as the savior of the German people
3. Nazi elections
1. 1924: Nazis polled 6.6 % of the vote
2. 1928: Politics polarized between left and right
1. The impossibility of a coalition
2. People abandoned traditional political parties
4. Joseph Goebbels and propaganda
5. Nazi supporters
1. Small property holders and rural middle classes
2. Elitist civil servants
6. 1930 election
1. Nazis win 107 of 577 seats in the Reichstag
2. No party gained a majority
3. Nazis claim no coalition government not headed by Hitler
3. Hitler as Chancellor
1. January 1933: Hitler appointed Chancellor by Hindenberg
2. February 27, 1933: Reichstag set on fire by Dutch anarchist
1. Hitler suspends civil rights
3. March 5, 1933: new elections
1. Hitler granted unlimited power for four years
2. Hitler proclaims the Third Reich
4. Nazi Germany
1. A one-party state
1. Gauleiters -- regional directors of the nation
2. Propaganda
2. Opposition
1. Storm troopers (SA) -- used to maintain party discipline
2. June 30, 1934: Night of the Long Knives
3. Schutzstaffel (SS)
1. Most dreaded arm of Nazi terror
2. Organized by Heinrich Himmler
3. Fighting political and racial enemies
4. Support
1. Played off fears of communism
2. Spoke a language of national pride
3. Hitler as the symbol of a strong, revitalized Germany (the Führer cult)
1. Charismatic leader
2. Gave people what they wanted
4. The recovery of German national glory
5. National recovery
1. Sealed Germany off from the rest of the world
2. Unemployment dropped from 6 million to 200,000
3. Outlawed trade unions and strikes, and froze wages
4. Organized workers into the National Labor Front
5. Popular organizations cut across class lines
1. The Hitler Youth
2. The National Labor Service
5. Nazi racism
1. Nazism racism inherited from 19th century opinions
2. Anti-Semitism
1. Joined by nationalist anti-Jewish theory
2. The Jew as outsider
1. Dreyfus Affair
2. A wave of late 19th century pogroms
3. An "international Jewish conspiracy"
3. April 1933: racial laws exclude Jews from public office
4. 1935 Nuremberg Decrees
1. Deprived Jews of citizenship (determined by bloodline)
5. November 1938: Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass)
6. National socialism and fascism
1. Both arose in the interwar period as responses to war and revolution
2. Intensely nationalistic
3. Opposed parliamentary government and democracy
4. Favored mass-based authoritarian regimes
6. The Great Depression in the Democracies
1. Western democracies
1. France
1. Continued to fear Germany
2. Policy of deflation
3. Class conflict and labor troubles
2. Britain
1. Policy of deflation
2. Reduction in wages and the decline of the standard of living
3. The Labour Party (1924 and 1929)
4. Increasing trade union militancy
3. United States
1. Bastion of conservatism
2. Presidents and the Supreme Court
2. The origins of the Great Depression
1. Causes
1. Instability of national currencies
2. Interdependence of national economies
3. Widespread drop in industrial productivity
4. Restrictions of free trade
2. October 1929: collapse of the New York Stock Exchange
1. United States as world's creditor nation
2. Immediate and disastrous consequences for European economy
3. Banking houses close, manufacturers laid off entire workforces
3. Government response
1. Britain
1. Abandons gold standard and free trade
2. Cautious relief efforts
2. France
1. The Popular Front under Léon Blum
2. Nationalized munitions industry
3. 40 hour week
4. Fixed the price and regulated the distribution of grain
3. United States
1. The New Deal and FDR
2. Recovery without destroying capitalism
3. Managing the economy and public-works projects
4. John Maynard Keynes
7. Interwar Culture: Artists and Intellectuals
1. The rejection of tradition and the experiment with new forms of expression
2. Interwar intellectuals
1. Disillusionment with war and the failure of victory
2. Frustration, cynicism, and disenchantment
3. Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), The Sun Also Rises (1926), the "lost generation"
4. T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), The Waste Land (1922), life is a living death
5. William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), deplored the superficiality of modern life
6. Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), the pointlessness of war, high culture and middle class values
7. James Joyce (1882-1941), Ulysses (1922), "stream of consciousness"
8. The politicization of literature
3. Interwar artists
1. Developments paralleled those in literature
2. The dominance of the avant-garde
1. Subjective experience
2. Multiplicity of meanings
3. Personal expression
4. The rejection of traditional forms and values
5. Pushing the boundaries of aesthetics
3. Expressionism - - paintings need not have subjects at all
1. Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944)
1. His "improvisations" meant nothing
2. George Grosz (1893-1959)
1. Attacked the greed and decadence of postwar Europe
4. The Dadaists
1. Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), Max Ernst (1891-1976), and Hans Arp (1886-1966)
2. Rejection all forms of artistic conventions
3. Haphazard "fabrications"
4. Meaningful and playful works or expressions of the unconscious mind?
5. Surrealism
1. Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) and Salvador Dali (1904-1989)
2. The interior of the mind
3. Political undertones
6. Art for a mass audience
1. Diego Rivera (1886-l957) and José Clemente Orozco (1883-1949)
2. Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) and Reginald Marsh (1898-1954)
3. Depicting social conditions of the modern world
4. The hopes and struggles of ordinary people
7. Architecture
1. Functionalism
1. Otto Wagner (1841-1918) and Le Corbusier (1887-1965)
2. Louis Sullivan (1856-1924) and Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959)
3. "Form ever follows function" (Sullivan)
4. Ornamentation to reflect an age of science and machines
2. Walter Gropius (1883-1969) and Bauhaus
1. An "international" style
4. Interwar scientific developments
1. Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
1. Revolutionized modern physics
2. Challenged our beliefs about the universe
3. New ways of thinking about space, matter, time, and gravity
4. Time, the fourth dimension
5. The theory of relativity
2. James Chadwick (1891-1974)
1. Discovery of the neutron (1932)
3. Otto Hahn (1879-1968) and Fritz Strassman (1902-1980)
1. Split atoms of uranium (1939)
2. Chain reaction
4. Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976) and the "uncertainty principle" (1927)
5. Relativity and uncertainty as metaphors for the ambiguity of modern life
5. Mass culture and its possibilities
1. Explosive rise of mass media -- media for the masses
1. Mass politics as a fact of life
2. Cut across class lines, ethnicity, and nationality
3. Democratic and authoritarian possibilities
2. The radio
1. Europe: broadcasting rights owned by the government
2. United States: broadcasting managed by corporations
3. national soapbox for politicians
1. FDR's fireside chats
2. Nazi propaganda
4. The new ritual of political life -- communication and persuasion
3. Advertising
1. Visual images replace older ads
2. Efficient communication, streamlined and standardized
3. Drew on modern psychology
4. Film
1. France and Italy had strong film industries
2. 1927: sound added to films
3. United States gains the competitive edge in Europe
1. Size of home market
2. Huge investments in equipment and distribution
3. The Hollywood "star system"
4. Germany had the best equipped studios in Europe
1. Universum Film AG
2. Fritz Murnau (1888-1931), Der letzte mann (1924)
3. Fritz Lang (1890-1976), Metropolis (1926) and M (1931)
5. The "Americanization" of culture
1. A threat to European culture?
2. Introduced Europe to new ways of life
6. Stalin and "socialist realism"
7. Mussolini and classical kitsch
8. Hitler despised modern art as decadent
5. The Nazis and propaganda
1. Used film as a means of indoctrination and control
2. "Spectacular politics"
1. Glorifying the Reich
3. Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003), Triumph of the Will (1934)
4. Tried to limit influence of American popular culture
1. Dance and jazz
5. Anti-Semitic films
1. The Eternal Jew (1940) and Jew Sus (1940)
8. Conclusion
1. The strains of World War I
2. The Great Depression
3. International tensions

 

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