Compare and contrast the economic and political developments in the USSR and Germany 1918-1924

        The October reforms in Germany, however, were not enough. By early November sailors had taken over major ports like Kiel and Hamburg; believing that the naval officers were planning a suicidal assault on the British navy. The discontent among the people became apparent as the call for revolution spread. So on November 9th, Germany was declared a republic and Kaiser Wilhelm II went into exile in Holland.

        Germany now had a provisional government, under the new Chancellor Ebert, that consisted of three left-wing parties: the SPD, USPD, and the Spartacists. The splits were significant as the SPD wanted a socialist republic, the USPD was in favour of a socialist republic too, but with radical economic and social changes, and the Spartacists called for the creation of a soviet republic.

        When talking of the distribution of power the Ebert-Groener agreement should be noted; this gave Ebert the support of the army and the ability to use it to maintain stability in the new German state and in return Ebert agreed to retain the authority of the army officers. This agreement allowed the stability and survival of what was to be the Weimar Republic, however, it also meant that a major Imperial Germany institution was left intact and was an element that made the democracy more authoritarian; a similarity of the communist rule of Russia at the time, as both nations used oppressive tactics against opposition. These methods can be exemplified in both countries.

        In January 1919 the Spartacists had felt it was time to revolt against the provisional government. The Spartacists revolt, however, was quenched by the Freikorps over three days of fighting and 100 deaths.

        From 1918-1921 Lenin reigned using the ‘Red Terror.’ He used the Cheka to wage a class war; “exterminating the enemies of the working class,” a key victim of this being the former Tsar and his family who were killed in July 1918. The Red Army’s severity also contributed to the Terror, especially in the years of the civil war.

        In Russia the first two years after the war were marked by a civil war opposing Bolshevik rule. The three warring fractions were the Reds (Bolshevik forces), Whites (Bolshevik’s political opponents, not unified) and Greens (national minorities wanting independence). Eventually, however, through effective use of the railway networks of Russia and the Red Army under Trotsky, the Bolsheviks managed to defeat the threat and reassert their control over Russia as a one party state. However, even during the war years there were still significant political developments.

        In March 1919, the Bolshevik party changed its name to the Communist Party. The party had risen up in a time of war and had to consolidate its powers during a war; it therefore had a “readiness to resort to coercion, rule by administrative fiat, centralised administration and summary justice,” it was these principles that made Soviet Russia authoritarian. Another development that added to authoritarianism was the introduction of Centralisation. In 1919, due wartime pressure, power went from the CCCP to the two sub-committees: the Politburo and Orgburo, which became closely entwined with the Sovnarkom.

        In contrast to this, Germany had managed to form a National Assembly that met for the first time on the 6th of February, 1919. By July 31st, the Reichstag voted to accept a constitution of federal structure and a government of proportional representation. The democratic elections of Germany that year gave a lot of support to the democratic parties. Later though, much of that support shifted to the extreme right and left and by 1921 the democratic parties had lost about 28% of their voters. A democratic Germany led to political instability; 6 different governments over the course of 4 years, and attempts to seize power by force.

        In March 1920 Wolfgang Kapp and General Luttwitz convinced 12’000 troops to march into Berlin and seize power. The Weimar government was forced to flee as the army refused to fire on their fellow troops. However, the government managed to initiate a strike in protest of the military government. After four days of the general strike, Kapp and his troops fled Berlin.

        The Weimar constitution drew up the powers and functions of the president, parliament, and Supreme Court, and wrote the Bill of Rights. The main bodies and their powers can be seen in figure 2 below.

        

Figure 2: The Weimar Constitution

        A key document that was to affect Germany very strongly was the Treaty of Versailles. By 1919 Germany had lost 16% of its coal industry, 13% of agricultural land, and 48% iron and ore, value of the mark feel to less than half, from 1914-1918 national debt went from 5000 million marks to 144’000 million marks and reparations were £6600million. Due to the cost of total war for four years, introducing the welfare provisions of the Bill of Rights and the French occupation of the Ruhr, Germany faced an increasingly worse economic situation.

        From 1918, the government tried to solve the crisis by keeping the money with the people, as to give them spending power and increase demand for goods and thereby create more working places so that eventually taxes could be claimed. By the end of 1923, however, Germany was undergoing hyper-inflation. A major factor of this development was that the government was printing excess amounts of money. This eventually led to the mark losing its value. By November 1923; the value of the mark to the dollar was 200billion, as opposed its 1919 value of 8.9.

        It was due to this economic crisis that the extreme right-wing felt that the Weimar Republic was weak enough to rise against and they attempted a march on Berlin that became known as the Munich Beer Hall putsch and was lead by Adolf Hitler. But the support for revolution was not as strong as Hitler had expected, and the putsch was unsuccessful.

        Stresemann was appointed chancellor on the 12th of August 1923, and managed to reverse the course of the German economy. He promised France to re-start paying the reparations and they withdrew from the Ruhr region, the Dawes Plan was established, governments expenses were cut and 700’000 civil workers were fired and Germany got a new currency; the Rentenmark. 

        Russia’s initial economic policy after WWI was War Communism. The idea of it was to centralise all of Russia’s industries and agriculture, bringing it under governmental control. The Decree on Nationalisation was issued on the 28th of June, 1918, and within two years put nearly all the large industries under Bolshevik control. Due to the civil war, government faced a problem in the factories; lack of workers. Like Germany, the situation was further worsened by hyper-inflation, with the rouble having “fallen to one per cent of its worth in 1917”

        When grain requisitioning began in July 1918 the peasants did not cooperate with the Bolsheviks. The peasants simply started producing only enough grain to feed their families, there was no reason to produce a surplus when the government did not pay fair prices for it. The famine that ensued was in turn blamed on the Kulaks that were ‘hoarding’ all their grain.

        War communism came to an end with the Kronstadt rising in 1921. This uprising scared Lenin as it was the workers that the Bolsheviks were meant to represent that now revolted. Even though Lenin used the force of the Red Army to quell the rising like any other challenges to Bolshevik rule, he knew that War Communism could not continue and in March 1921 the New Economic Policy (NEP) was introduced. The NEP was a compromise between socialism and capitalism, it stopped grain requisitioning and allowed the peasants to store and sell their grain for profit again. This policy, though it was meant to have been temporary, stayed in practice till after Lenin’s death in 1924.

         

        The years following the end of World War I were ones of pragmatic politics and policies; “an approach in which policies are changed and modified according to circumstance rather than in keeping with a fixed theory.”

        The two new political institutions had survived the years up till 1924, and had some political stability and were undergoing economic recovery.

        A democratic Germany and a communist Russia are two very different ideologies. However, the similarities between them were numerous; these were two countries that had lost WWI and now had new and fragile institutions at their head. Both faced economic crises of hyper-inflation and challenges from other political fractions. Both the USSR and the Weimar Republic strayed from their ideologies in order to fulfil what they saw as the most important task. Using oppressive methods the Weimar Republic survived the hard years of economic crisis and challenges from both the extreme left and right that followed after WWI, and managed to make Germany into a democracy. Similarly, the Bolsheviks and Lenin used oppressive methods, in the form of the Red Terror and against the Whites in the civil war, but to achieve a different goal, one of control over Russia and to establish and uphold a Communist state.

        

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Bibliography

Layton, Geoff. Weimar and the Rise of Nazi Germany 1918-33. London, England: Hodder Murray, 2005.

Lynch, Michael. Reaction and Revolution: Russia 1894-1924. London, England: Hodder Murray, 2005.

“Weimar Germany.” History Learning Site [online] Available .

“Stub Pictures (countries).” Wikimedia Commons [online] Available .

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