Unit 13 · The Extremes: Communism and Fascism

In the 1840s Karl Marx, a German writer, lived in cities full of new factories. He saw children working long shifts and families crowded into one room. Factory owners grew rich, while workers earned barely enough to eat. Marx asked why a world that made so much wealth left so many people poor.

His answer was class struggle. Marx said every society splits into groups based on who owns the means of production, such as land, mines and factories. In his day, owners formed the bourgeoisie. The workers who sold their labor formed the proletariat. Marx believed owners kept part of the value workers made, and he called this exploitation.

Marx predicted that workers would rise up, take the factories and share them. In time, he wrote, a communist society would have no classes, no private ownership of factories and, in the end, no need for a state at all. Supporters saw a vision of justice. Critics said it ignored human nature and gave no plan for protecting freedom along the way.

In early 1917 Russia was losing badly in World War I. Bread lines stretched through the capital, Petrograd. Workers and soldiers rebelled, and Tsar Nicholas II gave up his throne in March. A temporary government took over, but it kept fighting the war and could not end the hunger.

Vladimir Lenin led a small, disciplined party called the Bolsheviks. Lenin added a key idea to Marx. He said workers would not rise up on their own. They needed a vanguard party of full-time revolutionaries to lead them. This blend of ideas became known as Marxism-Leninism. In November 1917 the Bolsheviks seized power with the slogan Peace, Land and Bread.

Lenin’s government soon shut down rival parties and newspapers. It closed an elected assembly in January 1918 after the Bolsheviks failed to win a majority in it. A secret police called the Cheka arrested and shot opponents. A brutal civil war followed until about 1921. In 1922 the new state was named the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or USSR. Supporters saw a workers’ victory. Critics saw a new dictatorship.

After Lenin died in 1924, Joseph Stalin outmaneuvered his rivals. By about 1929 he held nearly total power. The Communist Party was the only legal party. It ran the government, the army, the newspapers, the schools and the unions. A system in which one party rules and no rival is allowed is called a one-party state.

Stalin wanted to turn a farming country into an industrial power fast. His Five-Year Plans built steel mills, dams and whole new cities. To feed the workers and sell grain abroad, he forced peasants to give up their own plots and join collective farms. The state set what they grew and how much they handed over.

Many peasants resisted. Some slaughtered their animals rather than give them up. Stalin blamed better-off farmers, called kulaks, and ordered them removed as a class. Well over a million people were deported to remote regions. Soviet factories grew quickly, and supporters pointed to that growth. Critics point to the hunger, the lost freedom and the lives it cost.

Collectivization disrupted farming across the USSR, and hunger struck several regions, including Kazakhstan. In Ukraine the famine of 1932 and 1933 was especially deadly. Grain quotas stayed high even as people starved. Brigades searched homes and took seed grain and other food, as in the chapter’s opening story.

Several policies made things worse. Villages that missed quotas were blacklisted and cut off from stores. In January 1933 most peasants were barred from leaving Ukraine to find food. Meanwhile the USSR kept exporting grain. Scholars estimate that roughly 3.5 to 5 million people died in Ukraine. Ukrainians call the famine the Holodomor, death by hunger.

Historians still debate one question. Was the famine a deliberate genocide aimed at Ukrainians as a nation, or a crime of brutal policy aimed at peasants everywhere? Ukraine and many other countries have officially called it a genocide, and so has the U.S. Congress. Some historians stress Stalin’s fear of Ukrainian nationalism. Others stress the wider war on the peasantry. All agree the deaths were caused by human decisions.

The Gulag was the Soviet system of forced labor camps. Prisoners cut timber, dug canals and mined gold in freezing places such as Kolyma in the far northeast. Many had done nothing a free country would call a crime. A joke about Stalin, a late arrival at work or a relative abroad could be enough.

In 1937 and 1938 the arrests became a flood called the Great Terror. The secret police, then called the NKVD, worked from quotas of enemies to find in each region. Old Bolsheviks confessed to wild charges at public show trials. Army officers, engineers, poets and ordinary workers were arrested. Soviet records later showed that roughly 680,000 people were shot in those two years.

Writers who survived told the world. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a former prisoner, described camp life in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, published in 1962. Later he wrote The Gulag Archipelago. After the USSR opened its archives around 1991, historians confirmed much of what survivors had said.

Mao Zedong’s Communist Party won China’s civil war in 1949. Many peasants welcomed land reform, which took land from landlords and gave it to poor farmers. The reform was also violent. Large numbers of landlords were killed at village meetings. Within a few years, the land was pooled again into collectives.

In 1958 Mao launched the Great Leap Forward. He wanted China to pass Britain in steel output within about fifteen years. Villages were merged into huge people's communes. Families ate in shared canteens. Millions of peasants left the fields to melt pots and tools in small backyard furnaces. Much of the iron they made was useless.

Local officials, afraid of punishment, reported record harvests that did not exist. The state took grain based on those false numbers. From 1959 to 1961, famine swept the countryside. Scholars’ estimates of the deaths range from about 15 million to 45 million, and many cite around 30 million. When the defense minister, Peng Dehuai, raised concerns in 1959, Mao purged him.

Picture a middle school in Beijing in 1966. Students paste large handwritten posters on the walls accusing their teachers of being enemies of the revolution. Some teachers are forced to wear dunce caps and are beaten. A few are killed. This was the start of the Cultural Revolution, which lasted until Mao’s death in 1976.

Mao, sidelined after the Great Leap, wanted to regain control and keep the revolution alive. He called on young Red Guards to smash the Four Olds: old customs, culture, habits and ideas. They wrecked temples, burned books and paraded officials in public struggle sessions, where a person was shouted at, humiliated and forced to confess.

A cult of personality surrounded Mao. Millions carried his Little Red Book of quotations. Schools and universities closed for years. Millions of city youths were later sent to the countryside to learn from peasants. Deaths are estimated in the hundreds of thousands at least, and some scholars estimate far more. China’s later leaders officially called the period a grave mistake.

On April 17, 1975, Khmer Rouge soldiers entered Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. Within days they ordered the whole city, well over a million people, to march into the countryside. The sick were pushed out of hospitals. The new rulers, led by Pol Pot, declared Year Zero, a complete break with the past.

The Khmer Rouge wanted a pure society of peasants with no money, markets, schools or religion. People worked on farms from dawn to night under guard. Teachers, doctors, monks, city people and ethnic minorities such as Vietnamese and Cham Muslims were targeted. Mass graves later found across the country became known as the killing fields.

At a former school in Phnom Penh called S-21, or Tuol Sleng, thousands of prisoners were photographed, tortured and killed. Scholars estimate that about 1.5 to 2 million Cambodians died from execution, starvation, overwork and disease. That was roughly a fifth of the population. The regime fell when Vietnam invaded in January 1979. It is sometimes called an autogenocide, a people destroyed by rulers from its own nation.

In 1959 Fidel Castro’s rebels overthrew Cuba’s dictator, Fulgencio Batista. Castro soon declared the revolution socialist and allied with the USSR. His government expanded schooling and free health care, and it ran a large literacy campaign in 1961. Supporters still point to these gains.

Castro’s Cuba also became a one-party state. Independent newspapers were closed, and critics were jailed. Private businesses were taken over. Well over a million Cubans have left the island since 1959, many for Florida. Critics describe a country where people lack free speech and free elections.

North Korea was founded in 1948 under Kim Il Sung. His son and grandson have ruled since. The state teaches Juche, or self-reliance, and surrounds the Kim family with a cult of personality. A famine in the 1990s killed hundreds of thousands of people, by many estimates. A United Nations inquiry in 2014 reported vast political prison camps. North Korea is often called the most closed country on earth.

Imagine a landless farmworker in China in the 1940s. He pays half his crop to a landlord and owes money he can never repay. A Communist organizer arrives and promises land of his own. For people like him, the offer was powerful. Communism spoke to real suffering.

Across the world, communism promised equality, an end to exploitation, jobs for all and freedom from foreign rule. In colonies, it offered a way to fight empires. In the 1930s, when capitalist countries sank into the Great Depression, the USSR claimed to have no unemployment. Some Western writers visited and praised it, often without seeing the famines.

In power, the pattern was often the same. A single party claimed to know the one true path. Anyone who disagreed became an enemy. With no free press, courts or elections to check them, leaders made disastrous choices and no one could stop them. Defenders of socialist ideas argue that these regimes betrayed Marx’s goals. Critics argue that concentrating all economic and political power made abuse likely.

On the night of November 9, 1989, East German officials announced, by mistake, that their citizens could cross the border freely. Crowds rushed to the Berlin Wall, which had divided the city since 1961. Guards opened the gates. People climbed on the wall and chipped pieces off with hammers.

The fall came after years of pressure. Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader from 1985, allowed more open talk, called glasnost, and tried economic reform. In Poland the Solidarity trade union, led by Lech Walesa, won partly free elections in 1989. That year communist rule ended across Eastern Europe, mostly without bloodshed. Romania was the violent exception.

In 1991 the USSR broke into fifteen independent countries, including Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan. The Soviet flag came down over the Kremlin on December 25. China’s Communist Party kept power, but it crushed the Tiananmen Square protests in June 1989 and later opened its economy to markets. The Cold War contest between communism and the West was over.

After World War I, many Italians felt cheated. Italy had been on the winning side, yet the peace treaties gave it less land than it had hoped. Prices rose, and workers held strikes and took over factories in 1919 and 1920. Property owners feared a revolution like Russia’s.

Benito Mussolini, a former socialist newspaper editor, founded the fascist movement in 1919. The name came from the fasces, a bundle of rods carried in ancient Rome as a sign of authority. His armed squads, called Blackshirts, beat up socialists and burned union halls. Many police and landowners looked the other way or helped.

In October 1922 thousands of Blackshirts gathered for a March on Rome. King Victor Emmanuel III refused to use the army against them and asked Mussolini to become prime minister. By 1926 Italy was a one-party state. Other parties were banned, and newspapers were controlled. Mussolini took the title Il Duce, the leader.

In 1924 Giacomo Matteotti, a socialist member of parliament, stood up and accused the Fascists of cheating in that year’s election. Days later, Fascist thugs kidnapped and murdered him. Mussolini at first seemed in trouble. Then in January 1925 he told parliament that he took responsibility for what had happened, and he moved to crush all opposition.

Mussolini described his goal as a total state, where every part of life served the nation. Schools taught children to believe, obey and fight. Youth groups trained boys for war. Posters showed Il Duce as an athlete, farmer and soldier. This cult of the leader told people that one man embodied the whole nation.

Supporters praised Fascism for order, national pride and new public works. The claim that Mussolini made the trains run on time was popular, though historians doubt it. Critics saw jailed opponents, a controlled press and, from 1935, a brutal war of conquest in Ethiopia. In 1938 Italy passed anti-Jewish racial laws, and it joined Hitler’s war in 1940.

Picture a Berlin family in 1923. Prices double every few days. A loaf of bread that cost a few marks costs billions by November. Their savings are worthless. This hyperinflation followed Germany’s defeat in World War I and the Treaty of Versailles, which took land and demanded large payments called reparations.

Many Germans believed a false story that the army had been stabbed in the back by traitors at home, especially Jews and socialists. Adolf Hitler, leader of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or Nazis, spread that myth. After a failed coup in Munich in 1923, he chose to win power through elections.

Then the Great Depression hit in 1929. By 1932 about six million Germans were out of work. Communist and Nazi fighters clashed in the streets. Many middle-class voters, farmers and business leaders feared a communist revolution. The Nazi vote soared. In January 1933, conservative politicians persuaded President Hindenburg to make Hitler chancellor, hoping they could control him.

On February 27, 1933, the Reichstag, Germany’s parliament building, caught fire. Hitler blamed the communists. The next day an emergency decree suspended freedom of speech, the press and assembly. Police arrested thousands of communists and socialists. The first concentration camp opened at Dachau in March 1933.

On March 23, 1933, the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act. It let Hitler’s government make laws without parliament. Storm troopers filled the hall, and communist members had already been arrested. Only the Social Democrats voted no. By July, every party but the Nazis was banned.

The Nazis then brought every group into line, a process called Gleichschaltung. Unions were dissolved. Jewish and opposition civil servants, including teachers, were fired. Books were burned in May. When Hindenburg died in 1934, Hitler became Fuhrer, or leader, and soldiers swore an oath to him personally. A democracy had been taken apart largely through legal-looking steps.

At the center of Nazism was antisemitism, hatred of Jews. Hitler taught a false racial ideology. It claimed that humanity is divided into higher and lower races in a struggle to the death. It cast Jews as a race behind both capitalism and communism. There was no science behind these claims.

Persecution came step by step. In April 1933 the Nazis called a boycott of Jewish shops. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 took away Jews’ citizenship and banned marriages between Jews and other Germans. Jewish children were pushed out of schools. Jewish doctors and lawyers lost their right to work.

On November 9 and 10, 1938, Nazi mobs attacked Jewish communities across Germany and Austria. They burned hundreds of synagogues and smashed thousands of shop windows. About 30,000 Jewish men were sent to concentration camps. The night is called Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. Many Jews tried to flee, but many countries, including the United States, admitted only limited numbers.

When Germany invaded Poland in 1939 and the Soviet Union in 1941, millions more Jews came under Nazi control. Jews were forced into sealed ghettos, like the one in Warsaw, where many starved. Behind the front in the Soviet Union, mobile killing units shot Jews by the hundreds of thousands. At Babi Yar, near Kyiv, nearly 34,000 Jews were shot in two days in September 1941.

In January 1942, Nazi officials met at Wannsee, near Berlin, to coordinate what they called the Final Solution: the murder of all of Europe’s Jews. Trains carried families from across Europe to killing centers in occupied Poland, such as Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau. At Auschwitz alone, about 1.1 million people were murdered, most of them Jews.

The Holocaust was the murder of about six million Jews, about two out of every three Jews in Europe. The Nazis also murdered Roma, disabled people, Poles, Soviet prisoners of war and others. The word genocide was created in 1944 by the lawyer Raphael Lemkin to name crimes like these. Survivors’ testimony and the Nazis’ own records document what happened.

In April 1943, several hundred young Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto took up a handful of guns and homemade bombs. They held off German troops for nearly a month. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was the largest Jewish revolt of the war. The fighters knew they would likely die. They chose to resist on their own terms.

Inside Germany, a few people spoke out. Sophie Scholl and her brother Hans, students in Munich, belonged to the White Rose group. They printed leaflets calling on Germans to resist. In February 1943 they were caught and executed. Others hid Jews in attics and cellars for years, at the risk of their own lives.

Whole communities also acted. In the French village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, Protestant families sheltered thousands of people, many of them Jewish children. In October 1943, people in Denmark helped ferry about 7,000 Jews across the sea to safety in Sweden. Israel’s memorial, Yad Vashem, honors non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews as Righteous Among the Nations.

On April 26, 1937, German and Italian planes bombed the Basque town of Guernica on a market day. Much of the town burned. Pablo Picasso painted a huge canvas, Guernica, that became one of the most famous protests against war. The bombing was part of the Spanish Civil War, fought from 1936 to 1939.

The war began when army officers, led by General Francisco Franco, rose against Spain’s elected republic. Franco’s side, the Nationalists, drew support from many Catholics, landowners and conservatives who feared the left. Hitler and Mussolini sent them troops and planes. The Soviet Union and volunteers from many countries, including Americans in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, helped the Republicans. Both sides committed killings of civilians.

Franco won in 1939 and ruled as a dictator until his death in 1975. Tens of thousands of opponents were executed after the war, and many more were jailed. Franco’s regime was built on the army, the Catholic Church and one official party. Historians debate whether it was truly fascist or a conservative military dictatorship. After 1975 Spain made a peaceful transition to democracy.

In September 1931 Japanese army officers set off a small explosion on a railway in Manchuria, in northeast China. They blamed Chinese soldiers and used it as an excuse to seize the whole region. Leaders in Tokyo had not ordered the attack, but they accepted it. The military was starting to act on its own.

Japan in the 1930s was not a copy of Nazi Germany. It had no single party and no one dictator. Instead, militarism, the belief that the military and its values should lead the nation, took hold. Army officers assassinated politicians who opposed them. Schools taught devotion to the emperor, Hirohito. Censorship silenced critics.

In 1937 Japan launched a full war on China. When Japanese troops took the city of Nanjing that December, they killed large numbers of civilians and prisoners and committed mass rapes. Estimates of the dead range widely and remain disputed, and many historians cite figures in the tens of thousands to around 200,000 or more. In December 1941 Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, bringing the United States into the war.

Hannah Arendt was a German Jewish thinker who fled the Nazis in 1933 and later settled in New York. In 1951 she published The Origins of Totalitarianism. She asked how two regimes with opposite stated goals, one on the far right and one on the far left, could come to look so alike in practice.

Arendt described totalitarianism as a new form of government. It is not just a harsh dictatorship. It tries to control every part of life, even private thought. It rests on an ideology that claims to explain all of history. It uses terror against whole groups, not only against real opponents. Nazi Germany and Stalin’s USSR, she argued, both fit this model.

Other scholars have added and argued. Some say the model hides real differences: Nazism aimed at racial conquest, while Soviet communism spoke of universal equality. Others say it fits some periods, such as Stalin’s rule, better than others. Many agree on a lesson from the century. When one party or leader holds unchecked power in the name of a perfect society, ordinary rights are the first thing lost.