ABSTRACT
The chief characteristic of educational development in the early decades of the twentieth century was the advent of the state as the major source of educational provision, leading to expansion on a scale never previously experienced as governments throughout the Western world were forced to recognize that the working classes had come to share in political power, and that their increasing educational aspirations had to be accepted as legitimate and, consequently, to be provided for. All Western governments at the beginning of the century, however, remained predominantly representative of conservative forces, and even in the 1920s, when fascism and Nazism came to power allegedly representing the interests of the working classes, these movements turned into brutally oppressive, ultra-rightist totalitarian states. Meanwhile, the establishment of a communist government in Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and the formation of the Soviet Union in December 1922, was considered everywhere as the most momentous event of the twentieth century, although attitudes to the emergence of communism varied enormously. Working-class and radical movements welcomed it as the arrival of the socialist millennium, the vindication of Marx’s scientific, historically based socialism, 485and the harbinger of a succession of worldwide workers’ revolutions which would create the new moral order. The conservative Right, defending the notion of social inequality, viewed communism with greater alarm than it did fascism and Nazism, because communists expressly sought to overthrow existing regimes and establish everywhere new governments based, in the words of the Communist Manifesto, upon the dictatorship of the proletariat.
