ABSTRACT

The story of Communism between the Wars is a story of anti-climax. Its leaders, from Marx and Engels, who had written the Communist Manifesto as long before as 1848, up to and including Lenin, had presumed that the coming revolution would break out in Germany, as Europe’s most socialist-minded state. The successful Russian revolution of 1917 was seen as an almost irrelevant precursor in a backward agricultural country to the real revolution, which would erupt in Germany and spread to the rest of western Europe. It did not happen. German social democracy split at the end of the War between the Communist revolutionaries in Berlin and Munich and the liberal Social Democrats who had come to power in the political vacuum caused by the flight of the Kaiser. The liberal Social Democrats allied themselves with the Army establishment bloodily to suppress revolution, leaving scars between the two wings of the socialist movement which contributed significantly to the rise of Hitler. Lenin’s strategy of exporting revolution westwards through Poland had lost its point. Communist revolution in Hungary temporarily enjoyed more success, partly because it was associated with Hungarian national resistance to the territorial changes sought by the Allies, notably the loss of Slovakia. Nevertheless, by August 1919, it had been overcome by a combination of internal and external pressures.