18: Nazis, Bolsheviks, Fascists, Stalinists—and Social Democrats, 1870-1953

J. Bradford DeLongProfessor of Economics, U.C. Berkeley

Research Associate, NBER

This Draft: October 2009

From “Requiem” by Anna Akhmatova

No, not under the vault of another sky, not under the shelter of other wings. I was with my people then, there where my people were doomed to be.

Instead of a ForwardDuring the years of Yezhov’s terror, I spent seventeen months standing outside the prison in Leningrad, waiting for news. One day someone recognized me. Then a woman with lips blue from the cold, who was standing behind me, and of course had never heard of my name, came out of the numbness which affected us all. She whispered in my ear (for we all spoke in whispers there): “Can you describe this?”

I said, “I can.”

Then something resembling a smile slipped over what had once been her face…

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Image 18.2: Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo (1868-1907), Il Quarto Stato (The Fourth Estate)

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In 1875, meeting in Erfurt, the German socialists set out their program. They called for:

1. Universal, equal and direct suffrage, with secret, obligatory voting by all citizens at all elections in state or community.

2. Direct legislation by the people. Decision as to peace or war by the people.3. Common right to bear arms. Militia instead of the standing army.4. Abolition of all laws of exception, especially all laws restricting the freedom of the press, of association and

assemblage; above all, all laws restricting the freedom of public opinion, thought and investigation. 5. Legal judgment through the people. Free administration of law.

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6. Universal and equal popular education by the state. Universal compulsory education. Free instruction in all forms of art. Declaration that religion is a private matter.

7. The widest possible expansion of political rights and freedom according to the foregoing demands. 8. A progressive income tax for state and municipality instead of all those existing, especially in place of the

indirect tax which burdens the people. 9. Unrestrained right of unionization. 10. Shortening of the working day according to the needs of society. Abolition of Sunday labor. 11. Abolition of child labor and all female labor injurious to health and morality. 12. Protective laws for the life and health of the worker. Sanitary control of the homes of the workers. Supervision

of the mines, factories, workshops and hand industries by an officer elected by the people. An effectual law of enforcement.

13. Regulation of prison labor. 14. Full autonomy in the management of all laborers' fraternal and mutual benefit funds.

And for:

the erection, with the help of the state, of socialistic productive establishments under the democratic control of the laboring people. These productive establishments are to place industry and agriculture in such relations that out of them the socialist organization of the whole may arise…

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Leninism

When the Civil War ended, Lenin’s regime was in control.

Almost all observers had long seen Czarist Russia as heading for a revolution.

The first imperative facing Lenin's regime was the necessity of eliminating capitalism—according to the Marxist theory that Lenin deeply believed.

But how do you run industry and economic life in the absence of business owners?

Lenin had been impressed by what he saw of the German centrally-directed war economy of World War I:

The war has reaffirmed... that modern capitalist society... has fully matured for the transition to socialism. If... Germany can direct the economic life of 66 million people from a single, central institution... then the same can be done... by the non-propertied masses if their struggle is directed by the class-conscious workers.... Expropriate the banks and... carry out in [the masses’] interests the same thing the [wartime] Weapons and Ammunition Supply Department is carrying out in Germany.

Primitive Accumulation

The second imperative facing Lenin’s regime was to industrialize Russia.

Someday the Communist regime might have to fight a big war to survive…

How do you industrialize rapidly?

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Lenin’s answer was that you take a leaf from Marx’s interpretation of how Britain industrialized.

Marx interpreted the economic history of Britain as one of "primitive accumulation": stealing land from the peasantry, squeeze down their standard of living, force them to migrate to the cities to become a penniless urban working class, and use the resources from squeezing the peasant standard of living to build factories.

Thus Lenin and his successors believed that industrialization was possible only if the ruling Communists first waged economic war against Russia's peasants.

Communist ideologues justified this depression of living standards for the benefit of a nebulous future by saying first that Russia had no choice, and second that the sacrifice was worth it for the sake of the future. Communism could never survive unless Russia were powerful enough to fight off military enemies. And the more the sacrifices of this generation the quicker would utopia be attained….

In fact, industrialization does not have to take place through blood and fire…

The third imperative was to survive. As the British historian Eric Hobsbawm has written of Lenin’s regime, “as Lenin recognized... all it had going for it was the fact that it was... the established government of the country. It had nothing else. Even so, what actually governed the country was an undergrowth of smaller and larger bureaucrats...” And for a government to survive when there are no powerful social classes or interest groups that have ideological allegiances or substantive reasons to back it requires great ruthlessness…

Hitler

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Rearm and Spend on Public WorksForbid Wage Increases—But at Least Everybody Has a JobForeign Trade via BarterImprison Dissenters, Persecute Jews, Busy Giddy Minds with Foreign Quarrels

Hitler Was PopularWilliam Shirer was posted to Berlin in the late summer of 1934, a year and a half after Hitler took power. He found:

much that impressed, puzzled, and troubled a foreign observer about [Hitler’s] Germany. The overwhelming majority of Germans did not seem to mind that their personal freedom had been taken away, that so much of their culture had been destroyed and replaced with a mindless barbarism, or that their life and work had become regimented.... In the background, to be sure, there lurked the terror of the Gestapo.... Yet the Nazi terror in the early years affected the lives of relatively few Germans, and a newly arrived observer was somewhat surprised to see that hte people... did not... feel that they were being cowed and held down by an unscrupulou and brutal dictatorship. On the contrary, they supported it with genuine enthusiasm.... Hitler was... confounding the victorious Allies and making Germany militarily strong again. This was what most Germans wanted.... By the autumn of 1936 the problem of unemployment had been largely licked, almost everyone had a job again, and one heard workers who had been deprived of their trade-union rights joking, over their full dinner pails, that at least under Hitler there was no more freedom to starve.... “The Common Interest before Self-Interest!” was a popular Nazi slogan in those days... the masses were taken in by the new “national socialism” which ostensibly put the welfare of the community above one’s personal gain. The racial laws which excluded the Jews... seemed... to be a shocking throwback...but since the Nazi racial theories exalted the Germans as the salt of the earth... they were far from being unpopular...

Stalinism

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The New Economic Policy

The Scissors Crisis

The Collectivization of Agriculture

The Great PurgesCuriously enough, the most dangerous place to be in Russia in the 1930s was among the high cadres of the Communist Party. Of the 1800 delegates to the Communist Party Congress of 1934, less than one in ten were delegates to the Party Congress of 1939. The rest were dead, in prison, or in Siberian exile. The most prominent generals of the Red Army were shot as well. The Communist Party at the start of World War II was more than half made up of those recruited in the late 1930s, and keenly aware that they owed their jobs and their status in Soviet society to Stalin, Stalin’s proteges, and Stalin’s proteges’ proteges.

As Basil Kerblay writes in his Modern Soviet Society, we know more about how many cows and sheep died in the 1930s than about how many of Stalin’s opponents, imagined enemies, and bystanders were killed.

Magnitogorsk

The Nazi-Soviet Pact

The Shock of June 22, 1941

Was Stalinism the Future?

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Lincoln Steffens:I have seen the future, and it works…

John Maynard Keynes:For me, brought up in a free air... Red Russia holds too much which is detestable. Comfort and habits let us be ready to forgo, but I am not ready for a creed that does not care how much it destroys the liberty and security of everyday life, which uses deliberately the weapons of persecution, destruction, and intenational strife... spending millions to suborn spies in every group and family at home.... How can I acept a doctrine which sets up as its bible, above and beyond criticism, an obsolete econmic textbook [Marx’s Capital] which I know to be not only scientifically erroneous but without interest or application for the modern world? How can I adopt a creed which, preferring the mud above the fish, exalts the boorish proletariat above the bourgeois and the intelligentsia who... are the quality of life and surely carry the seeds of all human advancement? Even if we need a [new] religion, how can we find it in the turbid rubbish of the Red bookshops?

Now that the [Bolshevik Revolution] is done and there is no chance of going back, I should like to give Russia her chance; to help and not to hinder. For how much rather... if I were a Russian, would I contribute my quota of activity to Soviet Russia than to Tsarist Russia!... I should detest the actions of the new tyrants.... But I should feel that my eyes were turned towards, and no longer away from, the possibilities of things...

20: Total War, 1933-1945

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J. Bradford DeLongProfessor of Economics, U.C. Berkeley

Research Associate, NBER

This Draft: October 2009

From “September 1, 1939, ” by W.H. Auden

I sit in one of the dives/On Fifty-second StreetUncertain and afraid/As the clever hopes expireOf a low dishonest decade:/Waves of anger and of fearCirculate over the bright/And darkened lands of the earth,Obsessing our private lives;/The unmentionable odor of deathOffends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can/Unearth the whole offenceFrom Luther until now/That has driven a culture mad,Find what occurred at Linz,/What huge imago madeA psychopathic god:/and the public knowWhat all schoolchildren learn,/Those to whom evil is doneDo evil in return...

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To Munich

German Recovery from the Great Depression

The Fourteen Points

League of Nations

Sovereignty for Languages

Global Disarmament

The Dilemmas of British and French Policy in the 1930s

Austria 1934, Rhineland, Rearmament, Olympics, Anschluss, Munich

Neville Chamberlain: “Peace in our time…”

Nice Doggie…

From Munich to War

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March 1939: Czechoslovakia

Guarantees to Poland and Roumania

Negotiations with the Soviet Union

Hitler’s Expectations of September 1939

“Speak for England”

Honor to Neville Chamberlain

Honor to Edouard Daladier

Casualties

Poland: Nazis 40K KW, Poles 200K KWFrance: Nazis 161K KW, Allies 360K KWRussia first six months: Nazis 1000K KW Russians 4000K KWRussia 1942:

Battle for France 1940 I

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Battle for France 1940 II

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Battle for France 1940 III

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Nazi High Water Mark

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The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere

Manchukuo

Marco Polo Bridge

Invasion of China

Guomindang Retreat to Sichuan

U.S.-Dutch Government-in-Exile Oil Embargo

Decision: Pearl Harbor

Faced with the choice of backing down and abandoning the conquest of China, or seizing the Dutch-held oil fields of the southwestern Pacific and probably becoming embroiled in a war with the United States, the Japanese miliary elected to strike first. On December 7, 1941 atacks began on British, Dutch, and American forces and possessions in the Pacific. Most famous was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that sank the battleships of the U.S. Pacific fleet. Most damaging was probably the attack on the U.S. airbase of Clark Field in the Philippines, which destroyed the B-17 bomber force that might have blocked Japanese seaborne invasions.

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The One World War II Table You Need to Know

“The End of the Beginning”: Midway, Alamein, Torch, Guadalcanal, ONS5/SC30 STALINGRAD

Comparative War Production (U.S. 1944 = 100)As the German Marxist Rosa Luxemburg had warned, the process begins by ruling in the name of the people, then by substituting the judgment

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of the Party for the wishes of the people, then by substituting the decisions of the Central Committee for the judgment of the Party, and then by

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The One World War II Chart You Need to Know

Nazi Army Killed and Missing

050

100150200250300350400450500

Jan-41 Jan-42 Jan-43 Jan-44 Jan-45Date

Thousands

From 1942 on, once the war had become a truly global war, Hitler’s defeat was nearly inevitable. Even Britain alone was matching Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe in war production.

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U.S., British, and Russian (and Free French!) Armies Met in the Rubble that Had Been Germany in the Spring of 1945

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Adolf Hitler committed suicide as the Russian armies closed in on his Berlin command post. Japan, atom-bombed, firebombed, blockaded, and threatened with invasion, surrendered in the summer of 1945.Death and Destruction

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European Jews: 6M (70%)Poland: 6M (16%)Soviet Union: 26M (13%)Germans: 8M (10%)Japan: 2.7M (4%)China: 10M (2%)France: 600K (1%)Italy: 500K (1%)Britain: 400K (1%)United States: 400K (0.3%)

What If?Had World War II gone otherwise, we would live in a very different world…

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Had Franklin D. Roosevelt decided in the spring of 1941 that with Europe ablaze it was unwise for the U.S. to try to use an economic embargo of militarily-necessary oil to pressure Japan to withdraw from China, 1945 would probably have seen the U.S. and Japan at peace, the coastal provinces of China Japanese-occupied colonies, the interior of China an anarchy, and the prestige of the Japanese military that had established this co-prosperity sphere greatly heightened.

Had the British and French governments been willing to use force to remove Hitler when he occupied the Rhineland in 1936, or threatened Czechoslovakia in 1938, there would have been no World War II in Europe.

Had Stalin allied with Britain and France and declared war on Germany when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, in all probability Hitler would have been crushed and World War II in Europe ended by the end of 1941.

Had anyone other than Winston Churchill become British Prime Minister in 1940—had Nevile Chamberlain remained, or had Lord Halifax assumed the post—then the British government would almost surely have negotiated a separate peace with Germany in 1940. When Germany attacked Russia in 1941, it would have done so with its full strength. Stalin’s regime would probably have collapsed, and European Russia up to the Urals (and perhaps beyond) have become German territories, colonies, or puppet states.

It is not likely that Hitler would have refrained from attacking Russia in any possible universe. The need to do so was buried too deeply in his world view to be denied.

Last, what if Hitler had not declared war on the United States in 1941? Would Roosevelt have been able to get congress to declare war on Germany on the grounds that all the Axis powers were allied, or would congress have insisted on concentrating on fighting Japan first? If the second, then would Britain and Russia have been able to defeat Germany by themselves, or would 1945 have seen the United States dominant in the Pacific and Germany dominant in Europe?

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We do not know. We do know that most of the alternative ways that World War II might have gone would trade a postwar period with a Communist evil empire centered in Moscow and dominant over eastern Europe for a postwar period with a Nazi evil empire centered in Berlin and dominant over all Europe, or perhaps Eurasia. Not an improvement. We are very lucky that World War II was not even worse for humanity than it was.

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