ABSTRACT
The three regimes tackled very different projects, and although each failed, they ended in quite different ways. Their lifespans were very different as well. Hitler’s “twelve-year Reich” could not possibly have entailed the variety, the ins and outs, of the Soviet experiment, which spanned seventy-four years-longer than the French Third Republic. Although also relatively short-lived, Fascist Italy lasted much longer than Nazi Germany, long enough to face more seriously the challenges of generational change, for example. Yet in following the three cases individually, we noted certain common features that justify, even mandate, treating them together as, at least on one level, participants in a single supranational, historically specific departure-and not merely parallel national departures in chronological proximity.
