A Short History of the World

by Christopher Lascelles

  The Treaty of Versailles included a clause that called for the creation of a multinational body, the League of Nations, designed to ensure peace in the future and resolve any international disputes before they escalated into war. The Arab states created an equivalent organisation, the Arab League, to look after their own interests. One of the League’s objectives was to help territories liberated from German and Turkish rule to achieve self-determination. As a result, the multi-ethnic Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires were divided into smaller states, a split based roughly on languages spoken. Out of Austria-Hungary came Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Hungary and a new Austrian Republic.101

  In addition to being forced to grant independence to the Baltic states, the Soviet government had also been required to return to Poland the territory Russia had taken from it under the tsar. Between 1772 and 1795 the old Poland had been divided up between tsarist Russia, Habsburg Austria and an emergent Prussia, and had effectively disappeared from the map. At the end of the war, a new independent Polish Republic was recognised by the League of Nations and a weakened Russia and Germany were forced to return much of the land they had taken in the previous century. However, within twenty years Poland would suffer both a brutal German invasion and a Soviet occupation under which the country was once again divided and under which millions of Poles would lose their lives.

  The Ottoman Empire, only previously tolerated because a power vacuum in the region would have been considerably worse, was finally dismembered. Ignoring complaints by the Arabs, who had supported Britain against the Turks on the condition that they would be given their independence, Iraq and Palestine were given to Britain, and Syria and Lebanon to France. To soften the blow they were referred to as ‘mandates’ rather than colonies. Mustafa Kemal Pasha (later called Atatürk or Father of the Turks) abolished the Caliphate and proclaimed the Turkish Republic in 1921. Wishing to turn Turkey into a modern secular republic, Atatürk embarked on a rapid modernisation programme, including the replacement of Sharia law by Western law, and of the Arabic alphabet by the Latin one.

  The Emancipation of Women

  A positive outcome of the war was that the rights and status of women greatly improved, at least in the Western world. For most of history, the role of womankind in a male-dominated society has been to serve and obey their husbands, and produce children. Most professions have traditionally been closed to women and their education has been limited. Despite all the talk of justice and equality that drove the American and French Revolutions, women were still denied equal rights throughout the 19th century.

  While this remains the case in many of the world’s poorer countries today, Europe and North America witnessed a growing movement for women’s rights from the mid-19th century which gradually led to increased education, employment and voting rights. In America, this movement developed from anti-slavery campaigns, many of which had been led by women who began to equate the oppression of women with slavery, as it seemed to them that women had no more political rights than slaves did. In Europe the cultural, political and economic upheaval caused by the industrial and other revolutions helped challenge the status quo and increase demands for reform. The expansion of literacy and communications helped women verbalise and promote their aspirations. Frustrated by the slow pace of change, women in England known as the Suffragettes resorted to violence in order to make their voice heard. In some instances it took the First World War for women to prove that they were capable workers and so deserved the vote.102 Many advances in women’s rights in the US only came about in the 1960s as a result of women entering the workforce in large numbers to replace men called up for military service in the Second World War.

  Moves for equality by women, however, continue to be resisted in many of the poorer, less-industrialised countries and the exploitation of illiterate and uneducated women still thrives in much of Africa, Asia and the Middle East. In these countries, boys, who are often considered a guarantee for economic security in old age, are still regularly favoured over girls, who often continue to lack even basic rights. In all likelihood, this will not change until women are educated to the same level as men.

  The Russian Civil War (1917-1921)

  Despite having sued for peace during the war, the Russians saw no respite for several years. ‘White‘ anti-Bolshevik forces (versus ‘Red’ communist forces), consisting of everything from monarchists and Catholics to landowners and even moderate socialists, declared their intention of overthrowing the new atheist regime. After all, it had embarked upon a radical experiment to destroy an old society in which they had a vested interest, and create an entirely new one. While the Bolsheviks promised peace, prosperity, equality and an end to ethnic discrimination, what they in fact delivered was misery, class warfare and civil war.

  Even more committed to their cause after the communists executed the tsar and his family in 1918, the Whites were supported in both materials and men by a number of nations keen to strangle communism at its birth. These countries were keenly aware that the aim of the Soviet government was to overthrow every other capitalist government.

  In the end, the Bolsheviks won the civil war, but at a huge cost to life and the economy. They were also not helped by a terrible famine in 1920. Their victory was due partly to their ability to hold the key cities, partly to the efficacy of their war machine run by their War Commissar, Leon Trotsky, and partly to the use of the harshest measures, which instilled fear in the general population. But they also survived because the White forces were unable to unite against them.

  Ironically, the Soviet state eventually became much more oppressive than the tsarist one that had preceded it. As the violence of the civil war died down, conditions began to improve only when Lenin relaxed his pure socialist economic policies. However, with his death in 1924 and with Stalin’s rise to power, any trace of a market economy or civil rights disappeared. Creating a cult of personality, Stalin brutally repressed any perceived or actual dissention to his absolute authority. Those who challenged the regime were summarily executed, a policy which has characterised communist regimes ever since.

  The Rise of Fascism and Totalitarianism

  Following the war, Europe witnessed a period of inflation, unemployment and minor revolutionary activity, although the population was generally too tired to support any major uprising. The European economy gradually recovered through consumer demand that grew rapidly after the deprivations of the war. Despite this, there was an undercurrent of fear in the business community that the communists might prey on unrest and come to power, seizing business assets in the process.

  In Italy, wealthy capitalists financed groups of thugs to terrorise communists and socialists who had instigated a wave of strikes. A new anti-democratic fascist movement gained momentum, recommending the use of harsh measures to solve the country’s problems. Such was the support the fascists enjoyed, that they managed to gain power under their leader, Benito Mussolini, a former school-teacher and journalist who gradually imposed a dictatorship on the country.

  In Germany the Kaiser had abdicated after the war. The Weimar Republic that succeeded him attempted to print its way out of its war debts, only to unleash spectacular hyperinflation which caused the financial ruin of millions of Germans. As a result, anyone who promised order received a warm welcome.

  One of these individuals was Adolf Hitler, an Austrian who had served in the First World War. He launched a virtual one-man campaign for Germany to reject the Treaty of Versailles, the harsh terms of which had incensed him and many Germans. In 1923, he proclaimed a revolution and attempted to take over the Bavarian government in Munich with his army of followers – known as the Beer Hall Putsch – a failed uprising for which he received a five-year jail term of which he only served nine months.

  It was in jail that he wrote ‘Mein Kampf’: the Jews were responsible for all the problems in the world, he wrote, particularly communism and Germany’s defeat in the war. Left to their own devices, they would bastardise the pure
German race, as would the Slavs for that matter; they therefore needed to be eliminated. Germany also needed living space, or Lebensraum, and he suggested it would find this by conquering Russia and the Slavic countries. Signatories of the Treaty of Versailles were traitors who had stabbed Germany in the back, and therefore needed to go. Given the economic strife and hyperinflation in Germany, Hitler’s thoughts met a ready audience, with the book selling five million copies before the beginning of the Second World War. Major industrialists, unsupportive of the government and concerned about the communist threat, bankrolled Hitler, erroneously assuming that they could control him.

  In Russia, the plight of the Russians went from bad to worse throughout the twenties and thirties. Before his death Lenin had expressed misgivings about being succeeded by his Georgian colleague and General Secretary of the Communist Party, Joseph Stalin. Nevertheless, Stalin soon out-manoeuvred his rivals to lead the Soviet Union until his death in 1954. Trotsky was declared an enemy of the State, stripped of all authority and forced into exile. Many of the original revolutionaries who resisted Stalin in any way were executed or sentenced to imprisonment in an enormous system of slave-labour camps called gulags.

  As Stalin consolidated his power, he embarked on a parallel course to catch up economically and industrially with the West. In 1928, he launched the first of his five-year plans which involved the full-scale nationalisation of industry and the collectivisation of agriculture. At the time, the Soviet Union was underdeveloped and primarily agricultural with very little industry. A world war, a civil war and a revolution – all in the space of five years – had certainly not helped. Stalin saw that the Soviet Union was 50 to 100 years behind the advanced industrialised countries; if it did not catch up within ten years, he stated, the country would be crushed. He therefore aimed to transform the country into an industrialised state as quickly as possible.

  However, the huge number of workers that such a goal would require needed feeding and the countryside struggled to provide enough food. Stalin and his cronies thought they understood why: lots of small, inefficient farms, with limited machinery could only produce so much. If all the little farms could be incorporated into huge communist farms, they reasoned, then the benefits would be many. The farms would become more efficient, thereby improving agricultural activity, more grain would be provided to the cities, labour would be freed up to work in the factories, and the extra grain produced could be sold internationally to fund more machinery. Most importantly, it would help the communists extend their power over the conservative and religious peasants who were proving difficult to manage.

  The main problem was that Stalin insisted on unrealistic production targets, with the peasants only receiving what remained, if anything. As the targets were set progressively higher, the peasants often received nothing and they starved. Understandably, this was not a good stimulus for them to grow crops. What’s more, the peasants had only just received land as a result of the revolution and as a result were reluctant to give it back. They also had no desire to leave their family homes where they had been raised. Those who owned land were called ‘kulaks’ and denounced as enemies of the state.

  When the Red Army was sent in to appropriate grain, wide-scale rebellion ensued, with people burning their crops and killing their livestock rather than handing it over to the regime. Those who opposed collectivisation were either arrested, sent to forced labour camps (gulags) or shot, and agricultural production was severely damaged as a result. The Ukraine suffered worst of all; at least four million people died between 1932 and 1933 in a period that they commemorate under the name ‘Holodomor’ – their own version of the Holocaust.

  In purely economic terms, Stalin’s industrialisation was successful, with a 50 percent growth in industrial output during the course of the first five-year plan that included hydro-electric dams, railways and canals. While some argue that Stalin’s plans succeeded in providing the Soviet Union with a war machine capable of withstanding Hitler’s onslaught a decade or so later, others understandably argue that the ends could not possibly justify the means.

  The Great Depression (1929–1932)

  In October 1929 the roaring twenties came to an abrupt end when the New York Stock Market crashed. The economic depression that resulted dominated the 1930s. As stock values crashed and banks failed, Americans who had been investing and lending heavily in Europe called back their loans. This caused a ripple of bank failures around the world and reduced the availability of cash for investment in businesses. As demand fell over the coming years, so did industrial production and this, in turn, caused huge unemployment. As times grew tougher, people became ever readier to listen to anyone who could promise them a solution to the problems they faced. To the socialists and communists, it looked as though the end of capitalism was nigh; to Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party, it was the opportunity of a lifetime to get into power.

  As if the Soviet people had not suffered enough, Stalin’s paranoia caused him to instigate a series of purges between 1934 and 1939, during which millions of Soviet citizens were either executed or sent to forced labour camps for being ‘enemies of the people’. The purges were indiscriminate and included anybody who could challenge Stalin’s power. Several top party officials and ‘Old Bolsheviks’ were arrested and forced to confess to crimes against the state in a series of public show trials in Moscow, often after having endured extended brutal torture. The purges hit the educated and professional classes, scientists, intelligentsia, most of the country’s top generals and the largest part of the Soviet officer corps.103 The staggering number of military deaths was given as a contributing factor to Hitler’s early successes against the Soviet Union in the Second World War. Characteristically insensitive, Stalin merely commented, ‘One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is simply a statistic.’

  Change in the East

  If Europe witnessed significant change in the early 20th century, so too did Asia, specifically China and Japan. China looked much like it had done for the last several hundred years, but there was growing discontent with foreign interference and, by association, with imperial rule. When the Qing emperor was overthrown in 1911, 2,000 years of imperial rule came to an end. Officially, the Republic of China came into being, but in reality the country was taken over by warlords. They would not be defeated until 1926 when a nationalist party, the Kuomintang, under the leadership of Chiang Kai-Shek, led a successful campaign to defeat them and unite the country.

  When the nationalists needed cash to pay troops and buy arms, only the Soviet Union was ready to give them assistance. This aid was given on the understanding that they would cooperate with the communists who had founded a Chinese Communist Party under Soviet supervision in 1919. Nevertheless, Kai-Shek had always been strongly opposed to communism and shortly after uniting the country carried out a purge against party members during which tens of thousands of communists were executed.

  Although the communists managed to rebuild support in the cities, where the disparity between rich and poor was greatest, in 1934, the nationalist military campaigns to defeat them eventually forced almost 90,000 communists to retreat in a historic ‘Long March’ over 6,000 miles of land. It was during this march that Mao Zedong became unrivalled leader of the communists. With over one-third of the group dying on the march alone, the nationalists almost succeeded in wiping out the communist threat. They might very well have done so entirely had they not faced a much larger threat from the east: Japan.

  The East at War (1931–1945)

  The Japanese had held an economic interest in north-eastern China since the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars at the turn of the century. Thanks to the speed of Japan’s economic growth and to its siding with the Allies in the First World War, it was invited to sit as a major power in its own right at Versailles. It was here that its territorial gains in China – many of which were made at the expense of the defeated Germans – were recognised.

  Japan had expanded its interest in no
rthern China throughout the 1920s and had been defending its territory there with increasingly hostile military activity. This was driven first by the push of a growing population that Japan could not feed with its limited arable land, and second through the pull of the natural resources that existed in weak, sparsely populated and neighbouring Manchuria. Japanese military strength meant it was confident that it could handle any uprising with which it might be confronted in these territories. When the Great Depression struck, Japan’s trade suffered, as did its ability to pay for imported food. Western governments responded with protectionist trading policies that only worsened the situation in the country and increased the influence of the military within the government.

  In December 1931, using the threat of increased nationalistic activity and anti-Japanese sentiment in the region as an excuse, Japanese troops seized Manchuria. A puppet government was established with the former Chinese emperor as head of state and the territory was subsequently given the suitably Japanese name of ‘Manchukuo’. While Hitler was only talking about Germany needing ‘Lebensraum’ or living space in the east, the Japanese were actually implementing this policy in China. Convinced that the country could become great only by being self-sufficient, it seemed obvious to the Japanese that they needed to expand their territory and gain access to natural resources. What’s more, they had invested heavily in Manchuria and had no intention of losing this investment. The only thing the Western powers could do, mired as they were in their own post-depression nadir, was to condemn Japan through the largely ineffectual League of Nations. Instead of leaving Manchuria, Japan simply withdrew from the League.