09 Europe Between the Wars and the Second World War
Trace the Russian Revolution, the rise of authoritarian movements between the world wars, and the events and human consequences of the Second World War.
The Russian Revolution and its aftermath
World War I intensified shortages, military losses, and political unrest in Russia. In the February Revolution of 1917—March by the Gregorian calendar then used in Western Europe—protests and a military mutiny forced Tsar Nicholas II to abdicate. A Provisional Government took power, but it kept Russia in the war, while workers’ and soldiers’ councils called also wielded influence.
In October 1917—November by the Gregorian calendar—the , led by Vladimir Lenin, overthrew the Provisional Government. Their promise of “peace, land, and bread” accompanied Russia’s withdrawal from the war and the beginning of a communist state under one-party rule. Civil war between the Bolshevik Reds and their opponents ended in Bolshevik victory.
In 1922, Russia became the largest republic in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). After Lenin’s death, Joseph Stalin consolidated power, imposed rapid industrialization and forced collectivization of agriculture, and used purges and repression to eliminate perceived opponents. The revolution created the world’s first durable communist state and intensified fears among many Europeans that similar revolutions might spread.
Fragile democracies between the wars
After World War I, the 1919 Treaty of Versailles imposed territorial losses and reparations on Germany. The new German republic, known as the , faced political violence, economic crises, and opposition from both the far left and far right. A temporary recovery in the mid-1920s proved fragile; the Great Depression, which began in 1929, brought mass unemployment and renewed instability.
These conditions helped extremist movements gain support, but they did not make dictatorship inevitable. Across Europe, democracies faced growing pressure from dictatorships and movements that promised order, national strength, and economic recovery at the cost of civil liberties.
and Nazi rule
was an authoritarian, ultranationalist movement that rejected liberal democracy and promoted obedience to a powerful leader. It treated political violence and militarism as tools of national renewal and opposed communism and independent labor movements. Benito Mussolini came to power in Italy in 1922 and established a dictatorship.
In Germany, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor in January 1933. The Nazis dismantled democratic institutions and established a one-party dictatorship. shared ’s authoritarian nationalism but was especially defined by racial ideology and antisemitism. The Nazi state stripped Jews of rights, excluded them from public life, and persecuted other groups it labeled undesirable.
Expansion and the outbreak of war
During the 1930s, Germany, Italy, and Japan pursued military expansion. Germany rearmed, annexed Austria in 1938, and took the Sudetenland after the Munich Agreement. In August 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed a nonaggression pact that included a secret agreement to divide parts of Eastern Europe into spheres of influence.
Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. Britain and France declared war two days later, beginning the European war, and the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland later that month. Germany conquered much of western Europe in 1940, including France. In June 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, opening a vast and exceptionally brutal Eastern Front. The invasion and occupation were driven in part by plans to seize territory and resources and impose Nazi racial rule.
Japan’s war in Asia had begun earlier: Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931 and began a full-scale war against China in 1937. Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 brought the United States into the wider conflict. Germany, Italy, and Japan were the principal ; the leading included Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States.
The Allied advance and Germany’s defeat
The Allies halted Axis advances, and the balance of the war shifted. Soviet victories at Stalingrad in 1942–43 and Kursk in 1943 helped move the Eastern Front westward. Allied landings in Normandy on June 6, 1944, opened a major western front as Soviet forces advanced from the east.
Germany surrendered in May 1945. May 8 became known in many Allied countries as Victory in Europe Day. The Allied victory brought the destruction of Nazi Germany, while the conflict devastated Europe.
The and wartime persecution
The was the systematic murder of six million Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators. They also persecuted and killed millions of other people, including Roma, people with disabilities, Soviet prisoners of war, and civilians in occupied countries.
The was not separate from the war. Conquest brought millions of Jews under Nazi control and gave the regime conditions to escalate persecution into genocide. The war and Nazi rule therefore involved both military expansion and systematic racial persecution.