Vladimir I. Lenin

Russian revolutionary, leader of the Bolshevik (later Communist) Party, and first ruler of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Vladimir Lenin was born Vladimir Ilich Ulianov and assumed the pseudonym of Lenin in 1900. His father was a school inspector in the central Russian town of Simbirsk, where Lenin was born on April 10, 1870. His older brother, Alexander, was executed in 1887 for his involvement in a failed assassination attempt on the life of Tsar Alexander the Third. Lenin's initial involvement in politics reflected his loyalty to the memory of his dead brother and his devotion to the ideals of equality and justice.

Lenin studied and then briefly practiced law before devoting himself to the revolutionary socialist doctrine of Marxism, beginning in 1893. Lenin married a fellow revolutionary, Nadezhda Krupskaia, after being sentenced in 1895 to his first period of internal exile. On the run from tsarist authorities, Lenin played little part in the unsuccessful 1905 revolution, and from 1907 to 1917 he lived outside of Russia. In 1903 Lenin assumed the leadership of the Bolsheviks, initially one of two factions of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, which was founded in 1898 (the other faction was called the Mensheviks, of which Leon Trotsky was an important leader). Lenin devoted his time to party organization duties and writing in an effort to win control over and give direction to the splintered left-wing opposition to the tsar.

Lenin was so appalled when Europe's socialists supported their countries' participation in World War I that he rejected the label of social democracy and adopted the term communist, in its place. The new name was a reference to the failed revolutionary government of the Paris Commune of 1871.

In 1917 Lenin was living in exile in Switzerland. He was as surprised as nearly everyone else by the sudden and total collapse of the tsarist government in March of that year, but quickly made plans to return home. The German government, seeing an opportunity to add to the chaos in Russia, allowed Lenin to travel on its railway back to Russia, and Lenin arrived there in April 1917. In that month he published his April Thesis, which virtually declared war on the Russian Provisional Government, the liberal but unelected ruling body that had taken over from the tsar. Lenin's genius lay in riding a wave of mounting discontent directed at this provisional government, which foolishly launched a new military offensive, failed to hold elections, and delayed crucial land reform.

At the fall of the tsarist government, the Russian population numbered more than 150 million people, but Lenin's Bolshevik Party boasted only twenty thousand members. Within six months of his return from exile, however, Lenin had greatly expanded his base of support and was in a position to bid for power. With the aid of the former Menshevik, Leon Trotsky, the Bolsheviks won control of the Petrograd garrison and on October 25, 1917, Lenin seized power from the enfeebled Provisional Government.

Lenin shrewdly justified his violent seizure of power as merely a transfer of authority to the soviets, the popular councils elected by workers and soldiers that sprang up everywhere after the fall of the tsar. Lenin declared the formation of a Soviet government, withdrew Russia from World War I, and invited the peasants to take charge of the land that had formerly belonged to the nobles, state, and church. At the same time, Lenin's government quickly moved to shut down opposition political parties and to censor the press, introduced conscription for the Red Army, and requisitioned grain from the peasants in order to fight the bloody Russian Civil War of 1918–1920. In January 1918, Lenin closed down the Constituent Assembly after the Bolsheviks won only 24 percent of the popular vote. In 1918, Lenin renamed the Bolshevik Party as the Communist Party.

The Cheka, the Russian acronym for the Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle against Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, was established on December 7, 1917, as the government's instrument of terror in its fight against political enemies. When Lenin was badly injured in a failed assassination attempt on August 30, 1918, his government quickly responded with the September 5, 1918, announcement of a policy of Red Terror that would take the form of arrests, imprisonments, and murders, triggering a civil war. Historian Richard Pipes has estimated that the Russian Civil War claimed two million combat deaths, two million deaths from epidemics, and five million deaths from famine. Another two million or more, mostly drawn from the bettereducated classes, fled in the face of the violence. Their departure drained the country of its already small pool of experienced leaders, managers, and entrepreneurs. The final death toll of the Russian Civil War exceeded the eight million deaths of World War I.

Lenin believed that socialism was irreversible, and he admired the revolutionary spirit of the Russian working class, but he despaired of its economic and cultural backwardness. Karl Marx had predicted that socialism would triumph first in an advanced capitalist country like Britain or Germany, but Lenin hoped to lead the way and believed that the establishment of a Soviet government in Russia would inspire similar revolutions elsewhere in Europe. In August 1920, Lenin urged the Red Army to move rapidly to occupy Poland as a first stage in an attack upon the postwar settlement established by the Treaty of Versailles. For Lenin Russia was no more and no less than a staging post on the road to world revolution.

When the Red Army proved unable to defeat Poland and Communism failed to inspire a successful revolution in Germany, Lenin, retreated to a more cautious set of policies. In 1921 he initiated the New Economic Policy (NEP). Peasants were subjected to minimum taxation and allowed to trade their surpluses, whereas the government maintained its control of large industry and foreign trade. In December 1922, Lenin renamed his revolutionary state as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Meanwhile, working-class protestors who demanded greater democracy, such as the Kronstadt mutineers in 1921, were brutally suppressed. The same fate awaited dissident factions within the Bolshevik Party, which were banned at the Tenth Party Congress of 1921. Before Lenin's death in 1924, the Soviet Union's first labor camps were set up on the remote Solovetsky Islands, and by the following year the population of these camps reached 6,000 prisoners. Under Stalin, these camps would evolve into the notorious Gulag, through which more than 20 million forced laborers would pass. During Lenin's rule compulsory collective farms never became policy, but he created the system of repression that, under Stalin, would lead not only to collectivization but also the extermination of kulaks (wealthy landholders).

Lenin suffered his first stroke on May 26, 1922, and died of a cerebral hemorrhage on January 21, 1924. Unlike Stalin, Lenin had never encouraged a personality cult. Nevertheless, after his death his body was embalmed and put on public display in Red Square. A cult celebrating the "living Lenin" was encouraged and pressed into service by his successors to add legitimacy to their rule. For sixty years, Russians read a sanitized version of Lenin's life. Documents that portrayed him in an unfavorable light were banned until after the Gorbachev era (1985–1991). For more than sixty years, Russian readers did not know that Lenin was happy to accept money from the German government in 1917 or that he probably ordered the murder of the tsar and the entire royal family in Ekaterinburg on July 16, 1918.

Both during his life and after his death, critical views of Lenin circulated. Bertrand Russell visited the Russian leader in 1920, and came away disturbed by Lenin's seeming indifference to the human suffering and loss that had taken place during the Russian Civil War. Other critics characterized him as an intelligent but humorless and intolerant fanatic. Since the fall of communism, archival documents dating from his rule tend to confirm previously existing impressions of the man and his rule. Nevertheless, historians are still divided over Lenin and his legacy. John Gooding, Roy Medvedev and Neil Harding consider Lenin to have pursued worthy ideals that were grotesquely distorted by the subsequent dictatorship of Stalin. Martin Malia, on the other hand, has argued that it was Lenin's championing of a

wildly impractical strain of Marxism that condemned Russia to its failed communist experiment. Pipes has described Lenin as embodying the hubris of Russia's intelligentsia, who were willing to sacrifice millions of lives for the sake of their utopian fantasies. According to Pipes, Lenin's system of government was the model whose features were copied not only by Stalin, but also by Benito Mussolini, Adolph Hitler and Mao Tse Tung.

Lenin was a prolific writer. His first essay appeared in 1894 and his collected works amounted to fifty-five volumes. In What Is To Be Done, Lenin argued for a strongly centralised party of professional revolutionaries. Critics have found in What is to be Done the germ of the idea for a one-party state. Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) argued that finance capital had reached its final irrational phase and a new wave of revolutions was to be expected. State and Revolution (1917) is the most utopian of Lenin's writings, in that it hints at the Marxist vision of the good life after capitalism. His last pamphlets, including Better Fewer But Better (1923) suggest a less radical Lenin who is ready to accept a more evolutionary political path for the Soviet Union.

Lenin's fanatical commitment to his ideals in the face of immense human suffering must be viewed within the context of the repressive tsarist political system that preceded him and the pointless slaughter that took place throughout Europe during World War I. These events confirmed for Lenin that parliamentary democracy was a sham concealing the horror of war and repression. Abandoning all democratic constraints upon the activities of his revolutionary government, Lenin moved Europe and the world further along the road towards the mass killings of the later twentieth century.

Stephen Brown Vladimir I. Lenin." Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity. Ed. Dinah L. Shelton. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2005. Gale Biography In Context. Web. 23 Nov. 2010.

Joseph Stalin

The Soviet statesman Joseph Stalin (1879-1953) was the supreme ruler of the Soviet Union and the leader of world communism for almost 30 years.

Under Joseph Stalin the Soviet Union greatly enlarged its territory, won a war of unprecedented destructiveness, and transformed itself from a relatively backward country into the second most important industrial nation in the world. For these achievements the Soviet people and the international Communist movement paid a price that many of Stalin's critics consider excessive. The price included the loss of millions of lives; massive material and spiritual deprivation; political repression; an untold waste of resources; and the erection of an inflexible authoritarian system of rule thought by some historians to be one of the most offensive in recent history and one that many Communists consider a hindrance to further progress in the Soviet Union itself.

Formative Years

Stalin was born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili on Dec. 21, 1879, in Gori, Georgia. He was the only surviving son of Vissarion Dzhugashvili, a cobbler who first practiced his craft in a village shop but later in a shoe factory in the city. Stalin's father died in 1891. His mother, Ekaterina, a pious and illiterate peasant woman, sent her teen-age son to the theological seminary in Tpilisi (Tiflis), where Stalin prepared for the ministry. Shortly before his graduation, however, he was expelled in 1899 for spreading subversive views.

Stalin then joined the underground revolutionary Marxist movement in Tpilisi. In 1901 he was elected a member of the Tpilisi committee of the Russian Social Democratic Workers party. The following year he was arrested, imprisoned, and subsequently banished to Siberia. Stalin escaped from Siberia in 1904 and rejoined the Marxist underground in Tpilisi. When the Russian Marxist movement split into two factions, Stalin identified himself with the Bolsheviks.

During the time of the 1904-1905 revolution, Stalin made a name as the organizer of daring bank robberies and raids on money transports, an activity that V. I. Lenin considered important in view of the party's need for funds, although many other Marxists considered this type of highway robbery unworthy of a revolutionary socialist.

Stalin participated in congresses of the Russian Social Democratic Workers party at Tampere, London, and Stockholm in 1905 and 1906, meeting Lenin for the first time at these congresses. In 1912 Stalin spent some time with Lenin and his wife in Crakow and then went to Vienna to study the Marxist literature concerning the nationality problem. This study trip resulted in a book, Marxism and the National Question. In the same year Lenin co-opted Stalin into the Central Committee of the Bolshevik party.

Stalin's trips abroad during these years were short episodes in his life. He spent the major portion of the years from 1905 to 1912 in organizational work for the movement, mainly in the city of Baku. The secret police arrested him several times, and several times he escaped. Eventually, after his return from Vienna, the police caught him again, and he was exiled to the faraway village of Turukhansk beyond the Arctic Circle. He remained here until the fall of czarism. He adopted the name Stalin ("man of steel") about 1913.

First Years of Soviet Rule

After the fall of czarism, Stalin made his way at once to Petrograd, where until the arrival of Lenin from Switzerland he was the senior Bolshevik and the editor of Pravda, the party organ. After Lenin's return, Stalin remained in the high councils of the party, but he played a relatively inconspicuous role in the preparations for the October Revolution, which placed the Bolsheviks in power. In the first Cabinet of the Soviet government, he held the post of people's commissar for nationalities.

During the years of the civil war (1918-1921), Stalin distinguished himself primarily as military commissar during the battle of Tsaritsyn (Stalingrad), in the Polish campaign, and on several other fronts. In 1919 he received another important government assignment by being appointed commissar of the Workers and Peasants Inspectorate. Within the party, he rose to the highest ranks, becoming a member of both the Political Bureau and the Organizational Bureau. When the party Secretariat was organized, he became one of its leading members and was appointed its secretary general in 1922. Lenin obviously valued Stalin for his organizational talents, for his ability to knock heads together and to cut through bureaucratic red tape. He appreciated Stalin's capabilities as a machine politician, as a troubleshooter, and as a hatchet man.

The strength of Stalin's position in the government and in the party was anchored probably by his secretary generalship, which gave him control over party personnel administration--over admissions, training, assignments, promotions, and disciplinary matters. Thus, although he was relatively unknown to outsiders and even within the party, Stalin doubtless ranked as the most powerful man in Soviet Russia after Lenin.

During Lenin's last illness and after his death in 1924, Stalin served as a member of the three-man committee that conducted the affairs of the party and the country. The other members of this "troika" arrangement were Grigori Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev. The best-known activity of this committee during the years 1923-1925 was its successful attempt to discredit Leon Trotsky and to make it impossible for him to assume party leadership after Lenin's death. After the committee succeeded in this task, Stalin turned against his two associates, who after some hesitation made common cause with Trotsky. The conflict between these two groups can be viewed either as a power struggle or as a clash of personalities, but it also concerned political issues--a dispute between the left wing and the right wing of bolshevism. The former feared a conservative perversion of the revolution, and the latter were confident that socialism could be reached even in an isolated and relatively backward country. In this dispute Stalin represented, for the time being, the right wing of the party. He and his theoretical spokesman, Nikolai Bukharin, warned against revolutionary adventurism and argued in favor of continuing the more cautious and patient policies that Lenin had inaugurated with the NEP (New Economic Policy).

In 1927 Stalin succeeded in defeating the entire left opposition and in eliminating its leaders from the party. He then adopted much of its domestic program by initiating a 5-year plan of industrial development and by executing it with a degree of recklessness and haste that antagonized many of his former supporters, who then formed a right opposition. This opposition, too, was defeated quickly, and by the early 1930s Stalin had gained dictatorial control over the party, the state, and the entire Communist International.

Stalin's Personality

Although always depicted as a towering figure, Stalin, in fact, was of short stature. He possessed the typical features of Transcaucasians: black hair, black eyes, a short skull, and a large nose. His personality was highly controversial, and it remains shrouded in mystery. Stalin was crude and cruel and, in some important ways, a primitive man. His cunning, distrust, and vindictiveness seem to have reached paranoid proportions. In political life he tended to be cautious and slow-moving. His style of speaking and writing

was also ponderous and graceless. Some of his speeches and occasional writings read like a catechism. He was at times, however, a clever orator and a formidable antagonist in debate. Stalin seems to have possessed boundless energy and a phenomenal capacity for absorbing detailed knowledge.

About Stalin's private life, little is known beyond the fact that he seems always to have been a lonely man. His first wife, a Georgian girl named Ekaterina Svanidze, died of tuberculosis. His second wife, Nadezhda Alleluyeva, committed suicide in 1932, presumably in despair over Stalin's dictatorial rule of the party. The only child from his first marriage, Jacob, fell into German hands during World War II and was killed. The two children from his second marriage outlived their father, but they were not always on good terms with him. The son, Vasili, an officer in the Soviet air force, drank himself to death in 1962. The daughter, Svetlana, fled to the United States in the 1960s.

Stalin's Achievements

In successive 5-year plans, the Soviet Union under Stalin industrialized and urbanized with great speed. Although the military needs of the country drained away precious resources and World War II brought total destruction to some of the richest areas of the Soviet Union and death to many millions of citizens, the nation by the end of Stalin's life had become the second most important industrial country in the world.

The price the Soviet Union paid for this great achievement remains staggering. It included the destruction of all remnants of free enterprise in both town and country and the physical destruction of hundreds of thousands of Russian peasants. The transformation of Soviet agriculture in the early 1930s into collectives tremendously damaged the country's food production. Living standards were drastically lowered at first, and more than a million people died of starvation. Meanwhile, Stalin jailed and executed vast numbers of party members, especially the old revolutionaries and the leading figures in all areas of endeavor.

In the process of securing his rule and of mobilizing the country for the industrialization effort, Stalin erected a new kind of political system characterized by unprecedented severity in police control, bureaucratic centralization, and personal dictatorship. Historians consider his regime one of history's most notorious examples of totalitarianism.

Stalin also changed the ideology of communism and of the Soviet Union in a subtle but drastic fashion. While retaining the rhetoric of Marxism-Leninism, and indeed transforming it into an inflexible dogma, Stalin also changed it from a revolutionary system of ideas into a conservative and authoritarian theory of state, preaching obedience and discipline as well as veneration of the Russian past. In world affairs the Stalinist system became isolationist. While paying lip service to the revolutionary goals of Karl Marx and Lenin, Stalin sought to promote good relations with the capitalist countries and urged Communist parties to ally themselves with moderate and middle-of-the-road parties in a popular front against the radical right.

From the middle of the 1930s onward, Stalin personally managed the vast political and economic system he had established. Formally, he took charge of it only in May 1941, when he assumed the office of chairman of the Council of Ministers. After Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Stalin also assumed formal command over the entire military establishment.

Stalin's conduct of Russian military strategy in the war remains as controversial as most of his activities. Some evidence indicates that he committed serious blunders, but other evidence allows him credit for brilliant achievements. The fact remains that under Stalin the Soviet Union won the war, emerged as one of the major powers in the world, and managed to bargain for a distribution of the spoils of war that

enlarged its area of domination significantly, partly by annexation and partly by the transformation of all the lands east of the Oder and Neisse rivers into client states.

Judgments of Stalin

Stalin died of a cerebrovascular accident on March 5, 1953. His body was entombed next to Lenin's in the mausoleum in Red Square, Moscow. After his death Stalin became a controversial figure in the Communist world, where appreciation for his great achievements was offset to a varying degree by harsh criticism of his methods. At the Twentieth All-Union Party Congress in 1956, Premier Nikita Khrushchev and other Soviet leaders attacked the cult of Stalin, accusing him of tyranny, terror, falsification of history, and self-glorification.

Source Citation:

"Joseph Stalin." Encyclopedia of World Biography. Detroit: Gale, 1998. Gale Biography In Context. Web. 23 Nov. 2010.

Benito Mussolini

Name variations: Il Duce (the leader). Born July 29, 1883, near the village of Predappio in the region of east central Italy known as the Romagna; died at Giulino di Mezzegra in northern Italy on April 28, 1945; son of a blacksmith and an elementary school teacher; married: Rachele Guidi; children: (two daughters) Edda and Anna Maria; (three sons) Vittorio, Bruno, and Romano. Predecessor: Luigi Facta. Successor: Marshal Pietro Badoglio.

In 1883, Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was born in a small house outside the village of Predappio in the Romagna region of Italy. He was named after three famous revolutionaries, two of whom were anarchists and the third was the great Mexican leader, Benito Juarez. It was Mussolini's father who exercised the most influence on his son and whom the son respected and imitated. The elder Mussolini was a blacksmith who worked only intermittently and was often in debt; he had a strong character, subscribing to a mixture of socialist, anarchist, and republican ideas, and took an active part in the politics of his town. He drank to excess and was frequently unfaithful to his wife.

Although Benito admired his father's courage and political idealism and loved his mother, an elementary schoolteacher and a pious Catholic, in later years he complained about the unhappiness of his childhood. Ironically, for someone who was to become one of Europe's greatest orators, as a child Benito had difficulty in learning to speak and for months his parents feared he might never be able to do so. Only after patient attention from his parents and a medical consultation, did Benito begin to talk. In later years, Mussolini recalled a lack of tenderness and affection in his family. His father believed in corporal punishment and a thick leather strap was used to discipline the children. Mussolini described his character at this time as embittered and "almost savage."

When he was nine, his mother sent him to a strict Catholic school, which discriminated against him because of his lowly origins. Along with the poorer boys who paid low tuition, Mussolini ate inferior food, such as ant-infested bread. Once, when a teacher tried to punish him with a ruler, the boy exploded in anger, hurling an inkpot at the man. Often disciplined for breaking the school's rules, young Benito was finally expelled for stabbing a fellow student with a penknife (on another occasion he even knifed his girlfriend).

After working at a few odd jobs, including teaching, the 19-year-old Mussolini emigrated to Switzerland. There he experienced rough times. Broke, he once lived in a packing case underneath a bridge. He even had the humiliation of being imprisoned for begging. Eventually, he fell in with a group of Italian revolutionary socialists. It was in their company that the rootless Mussolini found himself. From then on the chief passion in his life was to be political agitation.

He Edits Official Socialist Newspaper

After a few years of working for the socialists by lecturing, writing, and organizing, in 1908 Mussolini's friends obtained for him the editorship of an Italian socialist paper in the Austrian city of Trent. In 1912, he reached the top when he was appointed the editor in chief of Avanti!, the official socialist newspaper for all of Italy. Mussolini proved to be an extraordinary journalist. Under his direction Avanti!'s readership increased threefold. One reason for this was that Mussolini had a great talent for composing catchy headlines. His editorials, which appeared on the front page were thrilling. He wrote in a way that was, to use his own terms, "electric" and "explosive." Mussolini's rhetoric often swept people off their feet before they had a chance to think about what he was saying. He could be so "electric" and "explosive" because he always adopted the most extreme, revolutionary position on any question. Soon he was the leader of the left-wing socialists, and for a few years after 1912, he was the de facto head of the entire Socialist Party.

Yet despite all his popularity and talent for politics, in 1914 the Socialists dumped him, expelling Mussolini from the Party. The basic reason was that Mussolini took a position diametrically opposed to the Socialist Party's policy on Italian intervention in World War I. In August 1914, when Germany and Austria-Hungary went to war against Britain, France, and Russia because of nationalist rivalry and disputes in the Balkans, the Italian government decided to proclaim its neutrality. The Italian Socialist Party also favored neutrality. For a man of Mussolini's violent and impulsive temperament, neutrality was boring while war was exciting; it also promised to open up new political opportunities and make for wonderful newspaper stories. When Mussolini wrote an editorial advocating that Italy support France and Britain in the war, even to the point of military intervention, the Socialists threw him out.

Mussolini immediately founded a pro-war newspaper, The People of Italy. A few months after the country declared war on Austria in May 1915, he went off to fight and later boasted of his heroic deeds during battle. Nevertheless, he was not highly decorated for his actions; after a grenade-thrower exploded during a practice session, wounding him with 40 fragments, Mussolini was released from the army in June 1917.

By war's end in November of 1918, Mussolini had returned to his position as editor of The People of Italy and was casting around for a larger political role. In March 1919, he brought together a motley group of war veterans, Futurists, anarchists, nationalists, and others to form the Fasci di combattimento or "fighting leagues" (literally, fasci means "groups"). These "fighting leagues" soon revealed themselves to be a total dud as a political movement. Their political program, embodying extreme nationalism with far-left economic and social reforms, garnered only a few thousand votes in the elections of 1919, and Mussolini failed in his bid to enter Parliament.

But Mussolini was a quick learner and a great opportunist. He realized that while the Socialist Party had a hammerlock on the leftist voters, few political leaders were providing dynamic leadership for Italians on the right. Moreover, a powerful offshoot of the fasci soon mushroomed in the Italian countryside. This was squadism, a form of right-wing gangsterism that specialized in beating up socialist and other leftist politicians, breaking up strikes, and trashing leftist-controlled newspapers and townhalls. Among the squadists' favorite weapons were clubs and castor oil. Castor oil, when forced down the throat of an opponent in large quantities, not only humiliated the victim, since it served as a powerful laxative, but might also kill him through dehydration. Mussolini did not originate these tactics, but he knew how to take advantage of them. He saw that many middle- and upper-class Italians were desperately afraid that a socialist or even a Bolshevik revolution might soon sweep through Italy. These frightened people, as well as many liberal politicians, now turned to the Fascists for protection and help in stopping the extreme left. The Liberals even included the Fascists in the government electoral coalition, which in May 1921 facilitated the election of Mussolini and 34 other Fascists to Parliament.

This entrance into national political life, rather than domesticating the Fascists as the old-guard politicians had hoped, only increased Mussolini's intransigence and desire to seize power. He noted that, while Italy sank deeper and deeper into a profound social and economic crisis marked by tremendous inflation, incessant strikes, land seizures by the peasants, and escalating political violence, the old political parties and leaders were ineffectual. In this unstable situation, Mussolini showed himself to be a consummate political tactician, maneuvering between the different political groups in such a way that, although few in Parliament really wanted Mussolini in power, his appointment to lead the country increasingly seemed the only solution for Italy's crisis.

Appointed Youngest Prime Minister in Italian History

It was in this situation of violence and chaos in the countryside, and political anarchy at the top, that the famous "March on Rome" took place in October 1922. From his command post in Milan, Mussolini ordered thousands of blackshirted Fascists to descend on Rome and seize power. Unsure of the reliability of the army and after receiving the advice of several prominent politicians, King Victor Emmanuel III yielded to these pressure tactics, hoping to avoid a civil war. On October 29, he appointed Mussolini prime minister at the age of 39, the youngest prime minister in Italian history.

When Mussolini met with Parliament in November, it voted him full powers for a year. Despite Parliament's submissiveness, Mussolini determined to acquire a majority for his Fascist Party at the next elections. These were held in April 1924 in an atmosphere of unparalleled violence and intimidation, returning a Fascist majority of 65% of the vote. In June, Fascist thugs murdered Giacomo Matteotti, a prominent Socialist member of Parliament and relentless critic of these electoral abuses. When news of the murder reached the public, a wave of revulsion swept across Italy and threatened to topple Mussolini from power. Mussolini always denied personally ordering the murder, but he was certainly responsible morally, given his encouragement of Fascist thugs and his belief that "a good beating never does any harm." Taken off guard by the sudden change in public opinion, Mussolini remained unsure of what course to follow. His ulcers began to act up and he vomited blood.

But after several months Mussolini regained his confidence and, benefiting from his opponents' inept tactics, in January 1925 he publicly assumed complete responsibility for the Matteotti murder. During the next two years, he consolidated his dictatorship. The opposition press was silenced and all non-Fascist parties were dissolved. Non-Fascist ministers were dismissed from the government, and Fascist control over the government bureaucracy and local government was strengthened. Mussolini established a secret police force, the "OVRA" (a meaningless term intended to frighten people). Later Mussolini acquired a new title, "Head of Government," a rank which made him responsible to no one except the king. Increasingly, he was referred to as Duce (Leader).

Mussolini's authority, however, did not spring simply from the machinery of dictatorial control. Besides skills at political maneuvering such as those that had brought him to power and had seen him through the Matteotti crisis, he possessed substantial charisma due to his oratorical abilities and the general force of his personality. When Mussolini spoke, he always gave the impression of absolute sincerity, decisiveness, and toughness. This lent an extraordinary authority to his words and made them sound irrefutable. His speeches were declamatory in style, consisting mainly of short, staccato sentences; the official designation for this style was "lapidary," which literally means "etched in stone." Mussolini used few gestures as he spoke, and if he did gesticulate, he would immediately return to a pose of immobility. By adopting this style, Mussolini deliberately set himself apart from the ordinary, highly animated Italian. The image Mussolini wanted to project was one of rock-solid strength, someone in whom one could place total confidence.

After he became prime minister and later dictator, his favorite site for speechmaking was the balcony outside his office located in the Palazzo Venezia in the heart of Rome. He referred to this balcony as his stage. Standing there he would invite the crowd to answer his rhetorical questions in chorus so as to involve the people actively in his speech. This was a relatively new technique, although Mussolini has been accused of stealing it from the poet-adventurer Gabriele D'Annunzio. Mussolini was a master at inventing catchy slogans and phrases, sometimes even during the middle of public speeches. This verbal cleverness, this inspired spontaneity, charmed the crowds.

Mussolini also possessed a magnetic personality and personal presence. His practice of journalism had sharpened an already excellent memory for facts. European politicians who visited Rome noted Mussolini's economy of words, the clarity with which he expressed his thoughts, and his mastery of the

subject under discussion. But the impact of Mussolini's personality came from more than his intelligence and quickness of mind. People who met him were also thrilled by his immense, animal-like vitality. Enhancing his image as one of the greatest sex symbols of his generation was his frequent appearance, particularly for photographers, on horseback. Even dismounted, his presence was exciting, unsettling, and dominating. His white face with its enormous eyes added to the dramatic impact of his appearance, which he could heighten even further by rolling up his eyeballs to show only the whites. As he grew older, Mussolini gained weight and had his head shaven completely bald; these physical characteristics, together with his propensity to appear in public scowling, his lips pursed into a pout as he stared ahead, gave him a ferocious look.

Pope Recognizes Italian State

Following his successful resolution of the Matteotti crisis, Mussolini went from success to success for the next dozen years. One of his greatest triumphs came in February 1929 when he signed the Lateran Accords with the Catholic Church. Previously the Church's relationship with the Italian government had been poor; indeed, Pope Pius IX had refused to recognize any Italian government as legitimate after the latter took Rome away from him in 1870.

Mussolini was an odd person to bring about a reconciliation with Catholicism. He had never been a churchgoer, and in his younger days had written heretical and atheistic pamphlets and even a novel about a lecherous cardinal. Il Duce was shrewd enough, however, to realize the immense benefits his regime would gain from an agreement with Pope Pius XI, and after long negotiations, a concordat and treaty were signed. In return for one square mile of territory (Vatican City) and other concessions, the pope recognized the official existence of the Italian state and proclaimed that Mussolini was "the man whom God has sent us." After this settlement, Mussolini's prestige soared both at home and abroad.

As his popularity and confidence grew, so did his ambitions. He saw himself as a new Caesar who would refound the Roman Empire. Indeed he proclaimed that the acquisition of "empire" was central to the meaning of fascism and that Italy must expand or decay. Choosing as his victim Ethiopia, one of the last independent countries in Africa, Mussolini invaded in October 1935. Against Haile Selassie and the poorly armed Ethiopians, the duce authorized his army to employ ruthless tactics, including a "policy of terror and extermination" and the use of poison gas. The League of Nations, set up in 1919 and a forerunner of the United Nations, condemned this unprovoked aggression and voted for economic sanctions against Italy. This only led to a backlash of patriotic fervor among Italians who rallied around their embattled leader. In May 1936, Mussolini's armies conquered Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital.

Mussolini's triumph over Ethiopia and successful resistance to the League's sanctions prompted a new wave of adulation for Italy's leader. Peasants in the fields knelt before him, women held up their children for him to bless, and hospital patients called upon his name as an anesthetic before operations. Government-controlled newspapers referred to him as "our divine Duce." As Denis Mack Smith points out, this cult of the duce increasingly undermined Mussolini's capacity to make sound decisions. Since "Mussolini" was "always right," as a contemporary slogan went, there was no reason for the duce to take advice, let alone criticism, from lesser mortals.

Rather than making his decisions based on realistic assessments, Mussolini increasingly relied on considerations of ideology and prestige. In November 1936, he proclaimed a "Rome-Berlin Axis," i.e., a vague alliance, between the two Fascist powers that previously had not been notably friendly toward each other (in private Mussolini spoke of Adolf Hitler as slightly mad, as "a gramophone with just seven tunes and once he has finished playing them he start[s] all over again"). Italy's intervention (alongside Germany) on behalf of General Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) further cemented

ties with the Nazis but gained Italy nothing except huge losses of men and matériel. The unpopularity of the Fascist regime caused by the war in Spain was deepened by Mussolini's sudden proclamation in 1938 of laws curbing the rights of Italian Jews. There was little support for these laws in Italy; even Mussolini admitted in private: "I don't believe in the least in this stupid anti-Semitic theory. Whatever I am doing is entirely for political reasons."

Mussolini Joins Nazis

Convinced by a trip to Germany in 1937 that Hitler's army was invincible (and believing that Britain and France had the "spines of chocolate eclairs"), Mussolini allied himself closer and closer with his powerful northern neighbor. Nonetheless, when World War II broke out in September 1939, Mussolini, who had been kept in the dark about Hitler's plans and grudgingly realized that Italy was ill prepared for war, proclaimed "non-belligerency" (a word he coined). Only in June 1940, when Germany was well on its way to crushing France, did Mussolini join the Nazis. While Mussolini boasted that he would overwhelm his enemies with a "lightening war" and an army of 8 million men, his rhetoric soon proved hollow. Humiliating defeats followed in Greece and Africa.

By 1943, Mussolini's health was failing. Observers noted that he had lost weight and often looked like a wreck of his former self. He experienced severe and incapacitating stomach pains, often lapsing into lethargy, without his old mental capacity and willpower. This physical and mental collapse, together with the Allied conquest of Sicily in July, convinced leading Fascists and King Victor Emmanuel that Mussolini had to be removed from power. Following a confused meeting of the Fascist Grand Council on July 24-25 that indicated a loss of confidence in the duce, the king dismissed him from office and put him under arrest.

On September 12, 1943, a German commando unit of glider planes rescued Mussolini from his place of captivity atop Mount Gran Sasso. Subsequently, Hitler installed Mussolini as the titular head of the "Italian Social Republic" in northern Italy. While Mussolini and his government took up residence in resort towns along the shores of Lake Garda, true power lay in German hands. Within a year and a half, the Allied armies had fought their way up the peninsula and threatened to overrun all of northern Italy. In this desperate situation, Mussolini tried to escape into Austria by joining a column of retreating German soldiers. Stopped by communist guerilla fighters near the northern tip of Lake Como, the Germans allowed them to search the convoy and seize Mussolini. On April 28, 1945, these partisans machine-gunned to death the 61-year-old Mussolini and his lover, Clara Petacci, who had insisted on joining him in his final moments.

August 27, 2006: Mussolini's grandson, Guido Mussolini, filed an official request to have Mussolini's body exhumed and examined in hopes that it will provide more clues about how Mussolini died. The official story holds that Mussolini was executed by a partisan fighter, but Guido Mussolini and some others believe the partisans created this tale to cover up the actual circumstances of Mussolini's death. Source: Reuters, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=worldNews&storyid=2006-09-04T183533Z_01_SIB466675_RTRUKOC_0_US-ITALY-MUSSOLINI.xml, September 5, 2006.

Source Citation:"Benito Mussolini." Historic World Leaders. Gale, 1994. Gale Biography In Context. Web. 23 Nov. 2010

Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler was the most infamous political ruler of the twentieth century. Hitler rose from obscurity to become the leader of Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, triggering World War II because of his

expansionist foreign policy. Moreover, as the philosophical and political leader of the National Socialist (Nazi) Party, Hitler implemented government policies based on anti-Semitism and racism. These policies became more severe over time and lead to the mass extermination of Jews, racial minorities and other groups. Though Hitler committed suicide in the last days of the war, many of his aides were convicted at the Nuremberg Trials for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Hitler was born in Braunau am Inn (sometimes Braunauam Inn), Austria on April 20, 1889. Hitler dropped out of high school and moved to Vienna, but he found that his dream of becoming a painter was impossible to realize. At this time Vienna was a hot bed of ideas that centered on German nationalism and a virulent strain of anti-Semitism. Hitler soaked up these ideas, including the proposed merger of Austria and Germany. In 1913 he moved to Munich, Germany and firmly established his support of this nation by renouncing his Austrian citizenship. With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Hitler had another opportunity to support his new motherland. He served as a corporal in an infantry regiment and was decorated after being wounded in 1917. When Germany surrendered in 1918, Hitler looked for ulterior reasons to explain the defeat. He, like many other Germans, concluded that the disloyalty of Jews and the political subversion of Communists had caused the defeat. Seen in this light, the only way to prevent this from happening in the future was to eliminate these groups from society.

In 1919 Hitler made a decisive change by becoming politically active for the first time in his life. He joined the German Worker's Party and within a year he had taken over its leadership. Renamed the National Socialist German Worker's Party (Nazi), Hitler's platform was simple: create a new nation that included all German people and rebuild the German military forces. Under the Treaty of Versailles, which the victors had required Germany to sign after World War I, Germany's armed forces were reduced to a shell of their former selves In addition, Germany was forced to pay billions of dollars to the Allies as war reparations. These provisions effectively consigned Germany to second-rate status and crippled its economy.

In 1923 Hitler led an unsuccessful takeover of German government. The so-called Beer Hall Putsch was an embarrassing failure for Hitler and the Nazis, as Munich police quickly subdued the insurrection lead by Nazi storm troopers. Hitler was sentenced to five years in prison for treason but political pressure led the government to release him after only serving nine months. During his imprisonment he wrote his political testament and blueprint for a Nazi regime, Mein Kampf (My Struggle). For the first time, Hitler expounded on his racial views, declaring that Germans were part of an Aryan race that was superior to all others. He also railed against the Jews and other "impure" groups. As for politics, Hitler advocated a dictatorship that would totally control German society and impose severe restrictions on groups hostile to his belief.

Hitler and the Nazi Party were regarded as a fringe group during the 1920s and were not taken seriously as a national force. This perception changed in the early 1930s as the world economic depression took hold in Germany. Political and economic instability led the public to listen more closely to Hitler's calls for the rebuilding of Germany and the repudiation of the Treaty of Versailles. The popularity of the Nazis skyrocketed and by 1933 Hitler had taken office as chancellor of Germany. Despite his extreme views, the economic and political leadership still did not take him seriously. They soon found out that Hitler's actions matched his extreme beliefs. Through a series of phony events, Hitler engineered the shift from democracy to dictatorship. He abolished all other political parties as well as all labor unions. In addition, he named himself Fuhrer, the leader of Germany. He was the first modern leader to understand the importance of the mass media, creating a propaganda ministry that controlled the press. In addition, he established large secret police force that used terror as its weapon to maintain Nazi dominance. Finally, Hitler imposed racial laws that effectively removed Jews from civil society. However, he soon went beyond discrimination to persecution, locking up Jews and political enemies in concentration camps.

Hitler followed through with his plan and repudiated the Treaty of Versailles. At first he tried to keep Germany's rearmament a secret but by 1935 he proudly displayed Germany's new army, navy and air force. European nations did nothing to enforce the treaty, leading Hitler to conclude that he could begin to create his vision of a new German nation. In1936 he reclaimed the Rhineland from France and in 1938 he annexed Austria to Germany. France and Great Britain agreed at a meeting in Munich to the annexation on the understanding that Hitler would make no more territorial demands. The Munich agreement only made Hitler more convinced that he could continue his expansion. Within months German troops had marched into German-populated areas of Czechoslovakia and in 1939 Hitler annexed all of that country. Britain and France finally reacted when Hitler's armies invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. War was declared, leading to the Second World War that would last until 1945.

Hitler and his generals destroyed the French Army in 1940 and soon occupied Poland, France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, and Norway. Hitler sought to invade Great Britain but a vicious air war eventually discouraged an invasion. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the United States and Great Britain became allies. Hitler's great blunder came in June 1941, when he ordered the invasion of the Soviet Union. The two countries had been allies to that point and had divided Polish territory. Though the German army drove deep into Russia, a harsh winter stopped it in it tracks. Within a year the army was in full retreat. The Allies made steady progress and in June of 1944 they invaded France. Soon these forces had broken out and began a drive to Germany itself. By early 1945 the Soviet armies on the east and the U.S. and British forces on the west were pushing deeper into Germany. Hitler, who had taken over control of the German military, threw old men and young boys into the cause but it was hopeless. As the war moved to a close, the extermination of Jews and other peoples accelerated at the death camps.

As Soviet troops entered Berlin, Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945. Many of his top aides were tried and executed for the crimes that Hitler ordered during his twelve year rule.

Source Citation:"Adolf Hitler." World of Criminal Justice. Gale, 2002. Gale Biography In Context. Web. 23 Nov. 2010