Examine the statement that "the danger of 'Bolshevism' dominated not only the history of the years immediately following the Russian Revolution but also the inter-war period."

Answer:

The Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 created a fear that shaped European politics for a generation. Anti-Bolshevism influenced the peace settlement, the treatment of labour, the rise of fascism and the diplomacy of appeasement throughout the inter-war years.

The immediate aftermath

• Allied powers intervened militarily in the Russian Civil War from 1918.
• A cordon sanitaire of new states was created to contain the revolution.
• The Comintern, founded in 1919, openly called for world revolution.
• Communist risings in Germany and the Hungarian Soviet Republic alarmed Europe.
• The Red Scare in the United States and Britain produced repression of labour.

Effect on the peace settlement

• Fear of Bolshevism made the powers reluctant to weaken Germany beyond recovery.
• Russia was excluded from the Paris Peace Conference altogether.
• The League of Nations was constructed without the Soviet Union until 1934.

The rise of fascism

• Mussolini gained power in 1922 by promising to save Italy from socialism.
• Industrialists and landowners financed fascist squads against the labour movement.
• Hitler presented Nazism as the bulwark against communism, exploiting the Reichstag Fire of 1933.
• Conservative elites in both countries accepted dictatorship as the lesser evil.
• The Anti-Comintern Pact of 1936 made anti-Bolshevism the basis of an alliance.

Diplomacy and appeasement

• Many in Britain and France preferred a strong Germany as a barrier to the east.
• Distrust of the USSR obstructed collective security against Hitler.
• The Soviet Union was excluded from Munich in 1938.
• That exclusion helped drive Stalin to the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939.

A qualification

• Economic depression and nationalist grievance were also powerful independent causes.
• The Soviet Union itself turned to socialism in one country rather than world revolution.
• Fear of Bolshevism was often exaggerated for domestic political purposes.

Effects beyond Europe

• Communist parties were founded across Asia, including India in 1920.
• Colonial powers used the communist threat to justify repression of nationalists.
• The Comintern's support gave anti-colonial movements an international dimension.
• The Meerut Conspiracy Case in India reflected this wider anxiety.

The statement is therefore substantially justified. As historians of inter-war Europe observe, the spectre of Bolshevism shaped the peace, legitimised fascism and distorted the diplomacy of the 1930s, so that fear of revolution contributed materially to the collapse of the very order it was meant to protect.