The Years of Fascism

Abstract

The bolshevik success in Russia hung like a menace over Europe and the European outlook in the years after 1918. Fear of the hidden ‘bolshie’, the prototype revolutionary with smoking bomb in hand, haunted the public mind; it crept into every national mythology, provided the political villains of popular journalism and even lurked between the pages of children’s annuals. Yet the important political conflicts in Europe between 1919 and 1939 were less concerned with communism than with another and newer revolutionary movement, fascism. Partly because fascism grew up with and in the very conditions of economic and moral chaos produced by the war, it was at first — and for some, to the very end — unrecognised, or at best half-recognised, for the revolutionary force it actually proved to be.