The establishment of the Bolshevik communist totalitarian regime in Russia in 1917 was facilitated by the existing institutional genes necessary for totalitarian rule, including the autocratic Tsarist system, the Russian Orthodox Church, and the secretive political organizations. Chapter 7 studies the origins and evolution of these institutional genes and it also examines their role in the failure of the Russian constitutional reforms and the genesis of communist totalitarian ideology and organization in Russia.

In past decades, the relationship between fascism and communism was of major interest. The theory of totalitarianism viewed them as different versions of the same phenomenon. Communists saw fascism as a function of capitalism, and communism as its only legitimate opponent. Both views marginalized the Holocaust. As the Holocaust came to the fore in Western scholarship, entanglements with communism slipped out of view. This chapter argues that they deserve closer attention. Though its roots were older, after 1917 anticommunism gave the right a new focus, giving radical fringe groups respectability. Communism exerted a “negative fascination” on the right, encouraging mutually escalating extremes. Anti-Marxism legitimated Nazi violence after 1933, drawing support even from the Churches. For their part, even after the adoption of the popular front strategy in 1935, the KPD continued to believe that the SPD was the main enemy, and long remained silent on the persecution of Jews. Since the end of the Cold War, the question of the relationship between communism, Nazism, and the Holocaust has been expressed above all in the culture of remembrance.

Chapter 1 introduces the figure of the foreign fighter in the interwar period by focusing on the Spanish Civil War. It shows how the image of the nineteenth-century adventurer haunts the imaginary of the actors preoccupied with finding a legal status for the volunteers in Spain. This image is nonetheless constantly split in two: idealists and freebooters; heroes and opportunists; barbaric troops and brave highlanders. The chapter moves from the League to the Anglo-American doctrine, to domestic discussions and ends at The Hague in 1907. It is there that rules on foreign volunteers are codified in an international convention for the first time. The chapter further links the Brussels Conference of 1874 to those of Geneva in 1949 and offers a lens through which to understand how the shifting image of the adventurer reaches the decolonization period.

Marx’s thought on nationhood emerged from the cosmopolitan legacy of the “radical Enlightenment.” It took shape in the crucible of European nationalisms, the persistence of dynastic multinational empires, and the appearance of socialism as a new political actor.1 In 1848, the national question was deeply intermingled with the question of class. As a minority current of socialism, at least until the end of the nineteenth century, Marxism promoted a new form of political internationalism of which the most significant expression was the foundation of the International Workingmen’s Association in 1864. A constitutive tension quickly appeared between this cosmopolitan aspiration – well synthesized by The Communist Manifesto’s sentence: “the workers have no country”2 – and the growing tendency of the nascent socialist movements to inscribe themselves into national patterns made of inherited cultures, languages, traditions, and social practices.

This chapter examines the relationship between nationalism, ethnic cleansing, and genocide from the perspective of Eastern Galicia, a multiethnic and multireligious region populated for 400 years by Poles, Ruthenians, and Jews, which was transformed by the advent of nationalism from a society of never-harmonious but rarely violent interethnic coexistence into one of extreme violence. Special attention is given to the town and district of Buczacz as representative of what is now known as western Ukraine. In writing this chapter, I have drawn on the research conducted for my recent study, Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz.1 But while the book provides a heavily documented narrative of events in this locality, it largely refrains from explicitly discussing the theoretical and methodological concepts that undergird it.

In July 1914, Vladimir Lenin and his comrade Gregory Zinoviev found themselves as political émigrés “in a god-forsaken little mountain village in Galicia.” Under gathering clouds of war, Zinoviev recalls making a bet with Lenin that the German Social Democratic Party would never support financing a war. Lenin gladly took up this wager in full confidence that European socialist parties, as declared by the Second International, would call for a general strike of the proletariat in the event of war. As Zinoviev recalls, Lenin observed that “no, they [German Socialist Party or SPD ] are not such scoundrels as all that. They will not, of course, fight the war, but they will, to ease their conscience, vote against the credits lest the working class revolts against them.”

Chapter 7 offers a newly comprehensive interpretation of the political and ideological war that escalated at the heart of the First World War. It argues that at the core the war turned into a transatlantic struggle not only between war-aim agendas but indeed between competing liberal-progressive, imperialist and Bolshevik visions of peace and future order. It elucidates the unprecedented scope of this struggle by examining not only the aims and conceptions of the different wartime governments and leaders like Wilson, Lloyd George, Ludendorff and Lenin but also the contributions that intellectuals, opinion-makers and other non-governmental actors and associations on both sides of the trenches made to what became the greatest war for “national minds” and “world opinion” in history (up until then). And it brings out the far-reaching consequences this struggle had, both for peacemaking after the war and in the longer term. The analysis emphasises that it catalysed or brought to the fore formative ideas and ideologies of international and domestic-political order for the remainder of the “long” 20th century, including notions of self-determination and universal but hierarchical democratisation, ideas for a modern league of nations and competing blueprints for an internationalist system of communist states.

Chapter 18 analyses how the principal western policy- and decision-makers of 1919 sought to deal with the Bolshevik challenge or, more precisely, the political challenge posed by Lenin’s regime and the political and ideological challenge posed by what they regarded as the threat of a transnational spread of Bolshevism across and beyond Europe. It also reassesses the overall significance of the Bolshevik threat for the making of the nascent Atlantic order after the First World War, underscoring that it affected the peacemaking process but was not as decisive as generations of cold war historians have claimed and highlighting that this process was by no means shaped by a struggle between Wilsonianism and Leninism. It then examines how Lenin, Trotsky and other leading Bolsheviks interpreted the western powers’ pursuits and sought to expand the communist revolution westwards, also through the Communist International. And, finally, it illuminates how difficult it proved for Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau and their advisers to agree on a common approach both towards the Russian civil war and the Bolshevik regime – and how they eventually concentrated on isolating it and preventing a German-Bolshevik alliance, ensuring that subsequently the Soviet Union would remain outside the nascent Atlantic system.

The Marxist legacy is rich, plural, and contradictory. It is characterized by complexity and difference, but it can also be understood as bifurcated. There are two souls of socialism. One leads to domination; the other seeks out emancipation. This chapter seeks to map both the dualism and the diversity that have been suggested by thinkers ranging from Marx himself through to his remaining followers today.

Peter Beilharz is Professor of Culture and Society at Curtin University, Western Australia, and Professor of Critical Theory at Sichuan University. He is the author of 30 books and 200 papers. He founded the journal Thesis Eleven in 1980.

To provide the proper background to understand jazz in the GDR (founded in 1949), the book opens with a brief historical account of jazz in Germany prior to the creation of the East German state.examines the arrival of jazz in Germany after World War I, offering a brief synopsis of the cultural politics of the Weimar (1919-1933) and the National Socialist (1933-1945) eras. These years witness the influx of jazz music and dance culture into the defeated German empire, its ambivalent reception by the bourgeoisie, and the emergence of deep questions about national cultural identity against newfound American trends and influences. Under the twelve years of National Socialism, these questions took on new dimensions: Nazi propaganda unequivocally ostracized jazz as an emblem of racial transgression, categorizing it alongside other degenerate works, yet also recruited the popularity of the music for propagandist purposes throughout the regime, even until its collapse.