When World War II started in 1939, it was primarily the French and British alliance fighting against the German and Soviet Union alliance. Within a few years, however, the war would become much more global. After Germany had defeated France Italy entered the war on the side of the Germans, and grabbed part of France for Italy. Hitler attempted to make an alliance with Franco, the dictator of Spain, but Franco had no real interest to enter the war. Another “neutral” power was the United States. While technically neutral, Franklin Roosevelt desperately wanted to get involved in the war against Germany, but according to polls, 80% of Americans preferred a non-interventionist policy. Instead, Roosevelt gave supplies to Britain and drew up the Atlantic Charter, a war aims document, before the United States had even entered the war.

Japan had signed a pact of non-aggression with the Soviet Union during the first years of World War II. The United States had positioned a Navy outpost at Pearl Harbor to kind of dangle the American fleet in front of them. Shortly before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States stopped selling the Japanese oil. The Japanese and the Americans had both been pushing forward into the Pacific to create a bigger empire. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor Roosevelt declared war on Japan but what he still really wanted was a war with Germany. In fact, the war department had no real plans for a war with Japan because they had been so fixated on Germany. Luckily for Roosevelt, however, the Germans declared war on the United States four days after Pearl Harbor on December 11, 1941. At this point, World War II had reached a global scale.

At the end of World War I the losing powers had to give up much of their territory to create smaller independent countries. These newly formed countries tended to be very nationalistic and aggressive. For example, within two years newly reformed Poland had attacked all of its neighbors. Many of them had dictatorships. In Italy Benito Mussolini had taken over and started the ideas of Fascism. To rally people to Mussolini he created much romance and ceremony around the state such as torchlight parades and sharp looking soldiers marching the streets. Mussolini put the common good of the state before the good of the individual and emphasized in many of his speeches, “Nothing outside the state.” This exemplifies the extreme statist tendencies of many countries in the post-war period. In Russia, there was horrible famine, and after Stalin came to power in 1924 he began his ethnic cleansings and mass murders, solidifying a totalitarian state, and looking forward to the worldwide communist revolution.

In Germany Hitler was running the NSDAP party. In 1924 he attempted to take over the Bavarian capital of Munich but did not succeed. He got off with a very light sentence, and while in prison wrote, Mein Kamph. When he was released he decided to gain power by being elected into office, rather than taking over by force. In the years following his release from prison, the number of votes for the Nazi party went down, but once the depression struck Germany the Nazi party votes went up to 43%. In 1933 Hitler became Chancellor of Germany and established a one-party state. After this, he began enacting laws against the Jews, and laws to consolidate his power, such as making Hitler Youth mandatory for boys. Inflation and an unstable economy from the war period started the Great Depression in the USA but it spread throughout Europe as well. In short, the interwar period was an unstable time with dictatorships and nationalistic tendencies when World War II started in 1939.

In the October revolution of 1918, the Bolshevik party in Russia took over the government. Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik party, was inspired by the works of Karl Marx, but his ideas differed some so that his ideas are often called Marxism-Leninism. The main point that they differed on, was that Marx believed that communism was inevitable and that when the working class realized how they were being oppressed that they would rise up in revolution. Lenin, however, believed that the working class would be too stupid to realize that they were being oppressed and that they would always settle for things like labor unions. Therefore the Bolsheviks stirred up and educated the working class on their condition, and when the Bolsheviks took over it was with a “Vanguard of the proletariat.” These were intellectuals supposedly working for the working class and revolting for them because the proletariat was too busy working to be organizing revolutions.

Once Lenin gained power, he began implementing Marx’s ideas in Russia. He took away private ownership of business, factories, and transportation, and forced all men between the ages of sixteen and fifty to work and sometimes women and children. He sent armed detachments to the countryside to take food away from the peasants, as he thought the reason for the food shortages in Russia must be that peasants were hoarding food. He encouraged peasants to tell on their “hoarding” neighbors, which began widespread peasant revolts. Since the peasants knew that any excess food they produced would just be taken away they began to plant fewer crops. Inflation rose by one-hundred-million times as Lenin wanted to get rid of money. This caused a massive famine starting in 1921 that killed up to five million people. Lenin’s response to people who disagreed with Marxism was the firing squad, as Marxism was based on scientific observation, only a lunatic would think that communism was wrong.

The historian Richard Pipes wrote that, “Soviet Russia was the first society in history to outlaw law.” Examples of this lawlessness include the fact that to be a judge in Soviet Russia, all you had to do was to be literate. Judges were also urged to make rulings based on, “Revolutionary consciousness.”. The Russian legal system under communism was meant to legitimize and spread terror. You could be executed or sent to a concentration camp for the vaguest of reasons. Lenin started the Cheka, the secret police that later became the KBG. The tsar had also had secret police but Lenin’s police was sixteen times larger than the tsars. As the Bolsheviks were a very small minority of Russians, Lenin began to rule by terror in order to keep people under his rule. This became known as the Red Terror and targeted Tsarists, the well-to-do, the bourgeoisie, and society’s undesirables.