The Interim Between the World Wars

The Interim

Events in between the world wars.

The Russian Revolution

Russia had been ruled czars for quite a while – by the Romanov dynasty for about 300 years.

• The czars were the last absolute monarchs in Europe and they intended to keep that absolutism, even though others had reformed.

Russia had long been a powerful empire, but was facing problems by the end of the 1800’s.

• This was due to the efforts of such Czars as Peter the Great and Catherine the Great. They both expanded the Russian Empire and attempted to modernize the country and bring it more in line with Europe.

• Arguably the high point was in 1812 when Napoleon took his Grande Armee into Russia and then took it back to France with only about 5% of the original force.

• This demonstrated Russian military might and the interaction started bringing back more enlightenment ideals to Russia.

• New ideas are disruptive. In 1825, there’s the Decembrist Uprising.

• A group of officers commanding 3,000 men took up a protest outside the winter palace in St. Petersberg.

• They wanted greater social liberalization and were concerned about the plight of the serfs. They were taking advantage of a change of czarship and they didn’t like the new guy, Nicholas I.

• It lasted for most of the day (12/14/1825) before artillery broke them apart.

• By the Crimean War in 1854, it was clear Russia was behind the times.

• The British and French (who wanted to counter Russian expansion at the expense of a weak Ottoman Empire) were clearly technologically and militarily superior.

• While there was a lot of incompetent leadership and losses on both sides, the Euros showed they could project force abroad in a way the Russians couldn’t.

Tsar Alexander II realizes the advantage of free citizen-soldiers.

• He and the reformers also realized they were pretty much the only European power still using the serf system. So serfdom is abolished in 1861.

• In emancipating the serfs, however, they have to balance the desires of the serfs (freedom and land) with the nobility and landowners (cheap labor and land).

• The government passes a compromise meant to help both parties and which winds up working terribly.

• The idea was the serfs would no longer be bound to the land. They would be free. But they wouldn’t just be given land (this would upset the landowners).

• Instead, the landowners would sell land to the peasants.

• The peasant would pay 25% of the cost of the land to the landowner in redemption payments and then the government would front the other 75%. The peasant would then owe the government that 75% plus interest to be paid over the next 49 years.

• Some peasants, if they qualified, were forced to do this. This put them in temporary obligation to the landowners. Kinda like being serfs.

• It didn’t work out all that well for many former serfs.

• At least before, they lived on the land for free. Now they were still stuck on the same land, but had to pay for it. Sometimes, all their money went to land payments and little was left over for other things… like food.

• Household serfs didn’t even get land.

• So the serfs were now free, but freedom was almost worse than slavery.

• Landowners weren’t getting as much money as before and they were losing land.

Russia starts industrializing, building railroads and factories (many of which were foreign-owned).

• Working conditions for the factory workers were often very poor.

Czar Alexander III (czar from 1881 to 1894), for example, quickly rolled back reforms of his father upon taking the throne.

• He also tried Russifying the empire. All ethnicities and nationalities were to learn and use Russian and practice Eastern Orthodoxy.

• He believed in Eastern Orthodoxy, nationalism, and autocracy for the country.

• He also persecuted Jews.

• Ironically, Alexander’s reform-minded father was assassinated by Communist radicals. They thought the assassination would bring about revolution… it brought the opposite (but had later revolutionary results).

Alexander III: Russian bear

You lookin’ at my woman? ‘Cause I’ll

kick your Бут т!

His wife was his former sister-in-law. He married after his brother’s death at his request.

• His policy of anti-Semitism helped create The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

• The Protocols was supposed to be a work for new members of some grand Jewish cabal and it detailed devious Jewish plans for taking over the world.

• It was actually a forgery produced by the Russian secret police that plagiarized an 1863 political satire that was completely unrelated to Judaism.

• The book came out around 1905-1910 and it was debunked as early as 1921.

• Nevertheless, The Protocols became very influential for conspiracy theorists and general anti-Semites – like Nazis. It’s still very influential today in Middle-Eastern countries where it’s still published as fact.

When the covers look like this, it’s a good bet the book is

anti-Semetic.

This is a 2005 Spanish edition.

Nicholas II becomes czar upon the death of his father and continues to poorly handle the growing unrest in the country.

• He makes a few stabs at reform, but his unwillingness to give up any power stalls things.

• He also lacks confidence, is inexperienced, easily influenced, and indecisive – not good leader qualities.

• Several revolutionary groups spring up, one of them was the Mensheviks and the other was the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin (one of history’s greatest monsters, but more on him later).

Nicholas II

• Several things weaken the czarist system and help advance revolution.

• First was the general feeling of the peasants that they were getting the short end of the stick, especially with industrialization.

• The peasants had been serfs but were emancipated in 1861. Unfortunately, it didn’t help them much.

• Second, Russia gets pasted by the Japanese in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. This killed soldiers and wounded the Russian ego.

• Third, the authorities didn’t handle protests well, such as how soldiers opened fire on and killed nearly 1,000 unarmed protesters in 1905.

• Fourth, there was Rasputin.

• He didn’t weaken the czarist system as much as the other things maybe, but he’s still a pretty interesting guy.

Rasputin, the Mad Monk, was, frankly, a nutjob.

• He was a Siberian peasant who fashioned himself as a mystic holy man who came to St. Petersburg and quickly gets in good with the royal family because of his reputation as a healer.

Crazy eyes

• You see, the young czarevich, Alexei (the only male heir), suffered from hemophilia.

• Queen Victoria of England developed her own hemophilia mutation which then got passed on to various European royal families through her daughters. One of her granddaughters was the czarina, Alexandra.

• Rasputin was brought in as a healer for Alexei.

• Interestingly, he worked. Where doctors could do nothing and when Alexei was on death’s door several times, Rasputin would either show up, or pray, and ease Alexei’s suffering and bleeding.

• Rasputin gained more influence with the royal family, which didn’t go unnoticed by the public.

• The public didn’t know about the hemophilia so they didn’t know why Rasputin was hanging out with the royal family. Rumors spread.

• Rasputin was also gaining quite a reputation as an immoral weirdo.

• He believed salvation needed sin and so he sinned… a lot. He drank heavily and was quite promiscuous.

• While Nicholas was away at the front, Rasputin held even more influence over Alexandra, which created all sorts of gossip about the two.

• This included racy satire pamphlets like the censored one below.

He was also seen as the puppet master of the royals.

• Eventually, he’s assassinated by members of the extended royal family (which is an interesting story in itself). But the damage was done.

• Finally, the fifth big cause of the revolution, and this is the big one, is World War I.

• The war was very unpopular with the public.

• They didn’t want to be involved, the army was not nearly as well equipped or trained as the Germans, and so the Russians were getting spanked (though they did much better against the Austrian-Hungarians and the Ottomans).

• It was also sucking up resources.

• The one thing Russia had, though, was lots of people and so the army just kept throwing men at the Germans as cannon fodder. This didn’t appeal to the public either.

• In the 1917 February Revolution (which was actually in March), riots sweep through St. Petersburg.

• Soldiers sent to quell the riots joined them instead.

• Nicholas II is forced to abdicate the throne and a provisional government is established with the Mensheviks as the majority party and the Bolsheviks as the minority. Nicholas and his family were put under house arrest.

• This Duma was relatively moderate in its politics. This didn’t sit well with the radical Lenin who returned from exile.

• In the October Revolution (which was actually in November), the Bolsheviks storm the winter palace, arrested the members of the provisional government, and then established a new government.

• A civil war started shortly afterwards between the Bolsheviks’ Red Army and the czarist White Army. This lasted until 1920 when the White Army was defeated.

• Lenin didn’t want to risk the czar being reinstated, so on July 16, 1918, Nicholas, Alexendra, their four daughters, one son, physician, and three servants were marched down into a basement.

• They were all gunned down. It took several attempts to kill the women because they had sewn jewels into their dresses in the hope of having assets in case of an escape.

In happier times.

After his abdication.

The crime scene.

The execution squad

• The bodies were first thrown into a mine shaft, but the Reds were afraid the Whites would find them. So they burned two bodies, doused the rest with sulfuric acid, buried them in a shallow grave and covered up evidence of the pit.

• The remains weren’t found until 1978 and even then, the guys who found them had to keep it a secret.

The last czar.

A few notes about Vladimir Lenin

• Born in 1870 and the younger brother of a guy who is executed by Alexander III for being in on an assassination bomb plot (the bro was a socialist radical).

• This helps push him towards radical Marxism.

With the fall of the czars, Lenin took over. He was brutal in taking control.

• He creates the Cheka, the Soviet secret police (predecessors of the KGB).

• Lenin fears that political opponents and counter-revolutionaries will try to reverse things. So he commits to the Red Terror.

• Between 1918 and 1921, about 200,000 people are executed. Another 70,000 are sent to the gulags.

• Lenin started suffering strokes in 1922 and he died in January 1924.

• After his death, he’s elevated to a near-deity. Statues are erected everywhere and his body was preserved and put on display.

This is a popular pose for tyrants. Observe:

Kim Il Sung

Mao Tse Tung

Saddam Hussein

I prefer the statues like this.

This Lenin statue, formally outside Goff’s Hamburgers in Dallas, is my favorite.

Lenin and DiCaprio… connection?

After Lenin dies, Stalin moves to take control.

• He and Leon Trotsky fought for power.

• Trotsky was actually the heir apparent and by far the more competent and smarter of the two. Stalin, though, was cunning and quickly moved to sideline Trotsky.

• Stalin took control of Lenin’s funeral plans, spread some rumors about Trotsky, put out some propaganda, etc. He was also very good at playing people off each other.

• Stalin also preached a message of settling down and focusing on the Soviet Union. Trotsky the revolutionary still believed in world revolution and the public wanted to leave that behind.

• Trotsky is exiled in 1928 and he eventually winds up in Mexico City. Stalin-sent assassins kill him in 1940. With the pick of an ice axe.

Stalin takes firm control of the government.

• He develops a personality cult around him, near-deifies Lenin and makes himself Lenin’s successor, and eliminates enemies.

• Stalin was also good at changing history.

There’s Trotsky at a Lenin speech.

Where’d he go?

There’s Trotsky again with Lenin.

Where’d he go?

Original cosmonauts

The guy in the back fell out of favor. Where’d he go?

We’ll start with six.

And end with five. Where’d he go? The missing guy was killed by secret police chief Nikolai Yezhov’s execution squads. About Yezhov…

There’s secret police chief

Nikolai Yezhov walking along the Volga with Stalin.

Where’d he go?

Where’d he go?

I make light of it in the last slide, but it’s important to realize how scary a power this is.

• “Truth” was whatever the state said it was at any given time.

• It wasn’t the case that Stalin was ever photographed with Yezhov. After Yezhov was erased, it never happened.

• Notices would be sent to libraries telling them to rip certain pages out of the encyclopedia. Such as removing the page about Beria and putting one in about the Bering Strait.

• “1984” anyone?

Propaganda was big too.

"Yes, long live equal rights for women in the USSR".

"join the ranks of the front brigades, a fighter needs your hands and aid!"

"The Spirit of Great Lenin and His Victorious Banner inspires us during this Great Patriotic War" (Joseph Stalin)"

"Don't chat! Chatting leads to treason"

Smoke of chimneys is the breath of Soviet Russia

“Look Me in the Eyes and Tell Me Honestly:Who is your friend? Who is your enemy?You have no friends among capitalists.You have no enemies among the workers.Only in a union of the workers of all nations will you be victorious over capitalism and liberated from exploitation.Down with national antagonisms!Workers of the world unite!”

Stalin centralizes the government and the economy, making it a command economy.

• The central committee decides how much of what will be made when. Shortages ensue.

• Peasants are forced onto collective farms, blaming kulaks for problems.

• Collectivization was an initial disaster. Crop yields were way down and peasants resisted. They were forced to give up property, couldn’t sell excess grain, and were making less than before. Many engaged in sabotage.

• Many who resisted were resettled in labor camps or in distant locations, where 5 out of 6 of them died.

• Stalin also exported grain instead of using it to feed his own people so that the Soviet Union would look good and like it had excesses.

• The low grain production was also used to punish people. In Ukraine, where resistance was high, grain was forcibly taken and withheld from the people.

• During the holodomor, millions die of starvation… on purpose. Stalin used it as a tool to empty out the Ukraine some.

• Stalin and the Soviets took great pains to hide the Holodomor from the rest of the world. Some knew, but were fellow travelers or useful idiots and kept quiet.

• One of these despicable fools was Walter Duranty, reporter for the New York Times.

• He was an apologist for brutal Stalinism, played down the famine, and, from the comfort of his hotel room, derided the reporters who actually were talking about the famine and who had seen it first hand. He knew the truth and lied to the world about what was going on in Ukraine.

• He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 of his reports on the Five Year Plans. The Times has refused to give back the award.

Walter Duranty: JERK!

Stalin also recognizes that the USSR is behind the times. So he rapidly industrializes the country with his five year plans.

• The five year plans were harsh. Everybody had a quota. Failure to fulfill your quota, say if you were miner, could result in treason charges and a trip to the gulag.

• While the crash industrialization works, and quite well (although never as well as planned), it helped cause famine and it’s almost impossible to know how successful it was. The Soviet Union’s statistics were not to be trusted.

The economy was also built on theft and forced labor.

• The gulags were a thriving enterprise under Stalin and the labor of prisoners was used for all sorts of building projects.

• People were sent to the gulag for either common or political offenses. The latter got it the worst.

• Conditions were horrible and many were simply worked to death.

• When Stalin needed more slave labor, he simply arrested more people.

• At any one time, there were about 1-3 million people in the gulag. Some estimates go as high as 15-30 million dying in the camps.

• They were also used to populate remote parts of Russia.

• You get sent there for purely innocent crimes, like getting 25 years for joking about a party official. Or stealing a few potatoes to feed your family. Or like this guy, writing ‘comedy’ on the “secret” election ballot you were compelled to put in the ballot box (there was only candidate allowed for each office).

• Property and wealth of those arrested was confiscated by the state, helping to bolster the economy.

• Political prisoners were on the bottom of the gulag hierarchy. Criminals were purposely given positions of authority in the camps and the gulag therefore became like mob-run entities. The poor common people lived under great threat.

• The gulag population went up and down. It decreased during WWII because they were emptied and prisoners were sent to the front lines to be cannon fodder.

• It picked up again right after WWII. Prominent people from eastern Europe were sent there, as were Soviet soldiers who were POW’s in Germany, and even survivors of Nazi concentration camps.

The Great Purge

• Also known as the Great Terror.

• Late 30’s.

• Stalin sought to fully consolidate power in himself and get rid of any and all threats.

• People are arrested en masse. Many are executed, others are sent to the gulag, and some after being put through show trials with specious evidence.

• Stalin purged the Soviet party ranks. Of all the original Bolsheviks who participated in the October Revolution, he alone survived. Of 1,966 delegates to the 1934 Communist Party Congress, 1,108 were arrested and killed/died.

• According to classified Soviet records, between 1937 and 1938, 1,548,366 people were arrested. 681,692 of them were shot (that’s 1,000 people a day). Even these numbers may be low balling, though, since the KGB likely altered the figures.

• Some estimates put the execution toll around 1.7 million. Certainly more died due to deaths in detention.

• The Great Purge was mainly carried out by Nikolai Yezhov.

That guy.

Josef Stalin: One of history’s greatest monsters.

And Time Magazine’s 1939 Man of the Year

And 1942.

Depression

• European economies had some trouble recovering after WWI since the continent had been devastated.

• Germany particularly had problems since it had to pay reparations its own mismanagement of the economy led to hyperinflation.

• To pay for the war and then the reparations, Germany simply printed more money. The more money printed, though, the less it was worth.

• Pretty soon, the German Mark became worthless.

A 50 million mark banknote printed in 1923. It was worth $1. In 1914, it would have been worth $12 million.

A woman burning money for heat because it was cheaper than buying firewood.

• A loaf of bread cost 200 billion marks.

• Making matters worse, Germany defaulted on a some of its reparations due to the currency crisis and so France occupied important German industrial areas.

• This meant less money for Germany, especially when the workers went on strike.

• Eventually, through some currency reform, reparations restructuring, and American loans, Germany’s economy picked back up.

• People had become dissatisfied with the government, though, the Weimar Republic.

• In 1923, a new political party led by a former German corporal tried capitalizing on the economic problems and general humiliation at the terms of the Versailles Treaty when it attempted a coup d’etat in the Beer Hall Putsch.

• The Putsch was unsuccessful and Hitler was imprisoned.

• It was while serving time that Hitler wrote Mein Kampf (My Struggle), that more or less outlines his future plans, details the ideology of the Nazi Party, and is very anti-Semitic (it even draws on The Protocols of Elders of Zion).

• The experience also convinced Hitler that violent revolution was not the way to go. He would instead take power legally by convincing the people to make him their leader.

And 1938’s Man of the Year.

• Going back to the Depression, the big problem was that the world’s economy relied on the U.S. to back it up since Europe was weakened.

• America was an industrial juggernaut during the 1920’s, but there were problems.

• Without disposable income, people didn’t buy products. Without people buying products, manufacturing orders declined and industry decreased.

• Farming technology was increasing, which increased crop yields, which in turn decreased crop prices. Farmers started defaulting on loans. Banks closed.

• Finally, the stock market collapsed in 1929. Production was halved by 1932.

• As the U.S. economy collapsed, the effects were felt around the world.

• Trade decreased as manufacturing decreased and high protectionist tariffs drove up the prices for goods.

• Americans started pulling money out of foreign investments.

• Banks and lenders started calling in their overseas loans.

• All of this helps set the stage for the next great conflict: World War II.