1. In Russia, revolutions in 1917 brought the Bolsheviks under Lenin to power. After winning a bitter civil war, the Bolsheviks began introducing communism into the new Soviet Union.

2. In Italy, Mussolini led the Fascist party to power and established an increasingly powerful dictatorship.

3. Uncertainty and pessimism characterized dominant trends in thought and culture during the first decades of the twentieth century.

4. Authoritarian regimes, often approaching fascism, spread during the 1920s and 1930s in eastern, central, and southern Europe.

5. A devastating and seemingly uncontrollable Depression debilitated the West during the 1930s.

6. In Germany, Hitler's Nazism, building upon anti Semitism and militaristic struggle, became a terrifying form of totalitarianism.

7. In the Soviet Union totalitarianism under Stalin succeeded--through the five-year plans and the Great Purges--in collectivizing agriculture, industrializing the country, and eliminating all potential enemies.