The Rise of Dictatorial Regimes

Lenin's new economic policy saved the Soviet Union from complete economic disaster

Lenin pulled Russia back from the abyss he, he abandoned war communism in favor of his New Economic Policy (NEP)

Lenin and the Communists formally created a new state called the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics which is also now as the USSR or as the Soviet Union

Lenin dies

A power struggle began among the seven members of the Politburo the committee that made Communist Party policy

Trotsky held the post of commissar of war, while Stalin was the general secretary for the party.

Stalin was able to eliminate any Bolsheviks from the revolutionary era from the Politburo and create a dictatorship

During the first two five-year plans steel production in Russia increased from 4 million to 18 million tons per year

Real wages in the industrial sector declined about 43%

10 million peasant households had been collectivized. Four years later roughly 26 million family farms had been collectivized into 250,000 units

The numbers of workers increased by millions

Stalin's mania for power also led him to purge or remove all opponents or imagined opponents from the Soviet life

Stalin himself is supposed to have acknowledged that 10 million peasants died in the famines

Most of the Bolsheviks were put on trial and condemned to death

Some governments in the West were not totalitarian but authoritarian

In totalitarian states the major goal was to create a new kind of mass society

Powerful landowners, the churches, and even some members of the middle class feared land reform, communist upheaval and ethnic conflict

Large land owners still dominated the social and political system and they did not want to give up power

General Francisco Franco, Spanish military forces revolted against the democratic government. A bloody civil war began

The Spanish cCivil War came to an end when Franco's forces captured Madrid