ABSTRACT
Despite the rise of fascism in Italy during the 1920s, for most of the decade it did not appear that Benito Mussolini's creed would spread beyond Italy. Nor had communism succeeded in any country outside of the Soviet Union, and until 1928 the New Economic Policy (NEP) had spawned hopes that even the Bolsheviks had realized the impracticality of a truly communist system. During the 1930s, an even more virulent and threatening form of fascism would arise in Germany, which sought during this period to recover its great-power status in Europe. In Europe, the growing rivalry between fascism and communism was played out most conspicuously in Spain. The Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and the rise of Hitler to power in 1933 had combined to destabilize international politics. The Soviet Union grew more powerful and communism gained a wider international appeal in a decade of economic crisis in the capitalist world.
