The Interwar Period: Russian Revolution and the USSR, Crisis of Democracies, Fascism and the Second World War
What this domain tests
Interwar Europe - the revolutionary rupture in Russia, the fragility of liberal democracies, the rise of fascism - plus the Second World War. Questions typically ask for comparison (Stalinism against Nazism, Lenin's NEP against the five-year plans) or for the causal chain leading to 1939.
Core content
- 1917: February revolution and the abdication of Nicholas II; dual power between the Provisional Government and the soviets; the April Theses; the October insurrection; decrees on land and peace; Brest-Litovsk (March 1918); civil war 1918–21; War Communism, Kronstadt 1921, the NEP.
- USSR: formed 1922; five-year plans from 1928, forced collectivisation and dekulakisation, the great purges of 1936–38, the 1936 Constitution, the cult of personality.
- Crisis of democracy: the 1929 crash, mass unemployment and deflation; the New Deal and Keynesian demand management; the collapse of the Weimar Republic.
- Fascism: Mussolini's March on Rome (October 1922), the Lateran Pacts 1929, the corporate state; Hitler appointed chancellor on 30 January 1933, the Reichstag fire, the Enabling Act, the Nuremberg Laws 1935, the remilitarisation of the Rhineland 1936.
- Road to war: Anschluss March 1938, Munich September 1938, Prague March 1939, Molotov–Ribbentrop August 1939, invasion of Poland 1 September 1939; then the Holocaust, Stalingrad, the landings and 1945.
Worked example
Question: compare Lenin's and Stalin's economic policy. Reasoning: goal (regime survival against rapid industrialisation); method (limited market concession and a grain tax replacing requisition, against total planning and coercion); result (recovery by 1928 against heavy industry built at the cost of millions of lives and a permanent agrarian crisis); justification (the retreat as tactical against socialism in one country). A two-column plan in the margin prevents an unrequested chronological essay.
Traps
Dating October 1917 by the Julian calendar without giving 7 November; saying the NEP was Stalin's; treating fascism as a branch of socialism; confusing the Munich agreement with the Anschluss; putting American entry into the war in 1942 instead of December 1941; presenting the Depression as a cause of the Russian Revolution.