(a) "By the time of 1932 elections, Germany's ruling classes began to feel that the only way to escape from a deep economic…

The interwar crisis in Germany, the terminal stagnation of the Soviet Union, and the intellectual ruptures of modern Europe illustrate how systemic structural crises compel ruling elites to seek radical political realignments.

Crisis of Weimar and the Authoritarian Turn (1929–1933)

The Great Depression shattered Germany’s fragile Weimar Republic, pushing unemployment above six million and precipitating severe social polarization. Chancellor Heinrich Brüning’s orthodox deflationary measures—slashing wages, reducing welfare expenditure, and governing via Article 48 emergency decrees—paralysed parliamentary democracy and intensified public misery. Consequently, the July 1932 elections saw extremist surges, with the Communist Party (KPD) expanding rapidly.

This polarization terrified Germany’s traditional ruling classes: the Junker agrarian elites, Ruhr industrialists, and Reichswehr generals. Fearing a socialist revolution and finding democratic governance unworkable for capital accumulation, they resolved to dismantle the republic. Although the Nazi vote actually declined in the November 1932 elections, the traditional right sought to harness Adolf Hitler’s mass mobilization. Franz von Papen, backed by President Paul von Hindenburg’s aristocratic camarilla, orchestrated a backroom deal. Believing they could "box Hitler in" while using his totalitarian paramilitary force to crush the left and abolish trade unions, Hindenburg appointed Hitler Chancellor in January 1933. The handover of power was thus not an outright electoral conquest, but a deliberate abdication by conservative elites seeking authoritarian stabilization.

Gorbachev’s Reforms: Modernisation and Collapse

Ascending to power in 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev sought to revitalize a stagnant Soviet economy through a multi-pronged reform agenda:

Uskoreniye (acceleration) initially targeted industrial modernization but failed due to fiscal deficits. Gorbachev then introduced Perestroika (economic restructuring), allowing enterprise autonomy, limited private cooperatives, and foreign joint ventures. To overcome bureaucratic inertia, he launched Glasnost (openness/transparency) and Demokratizatsiya (democratization), introducing multi-candidate elections for the new Congress of People’s Deputies in 1989.

Critically, these domestic reforms suffered from fatal internal contradictions. Perestroika dismantled central planning mechanisms without establishing functional market institutions, causing acute consumer goods shortages, hyperinflation, and economic chaos. Unlike Deng Xiaoping in China, who prioritized phased market reforms while maintaining strict political control, Gorbachev simultaneously democratized the political sphere. Glasnost liberated suppressed public discontent, exposing historical atrocities and enabling latent ethnic nationalisms in the Baltic states and the Caucasus to mobilize against the Union.

While Gorbachev viewed his programme as a humane socialist renewal, conservative hardliners like Yegor Ligachev condemned it as the liquidation of the socialist state, culminating in the abortive August 1991 coup. Conversely, radical reformers led by Boris Yeltsin exploited the institutional opening to dismantle the Soviet apparatus, transforming an attempt at systemic salvage into state disintegration.

Enlightenment Anti-Clericalism in Perspective

The anti-clericalism of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment drew upon earlier revolts against Roman Catholic hegemony, yet diverged fundamentally in its epistemology and objectives.

Renaissance humanism (Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola) revived classical antiquity, blending Neoplatonic pagan philosophy with Christian theology without directly attacking institutional dogma. The Protestant Reformation (Martin Luther, John Calvin) broke clerical authority, but it was an intensely spiritual, scripture-based rebellion rooted in sola fide (justification by faith alone), which replaced Catholic orthodoxy with strict biblical dogmatism.

In contrast, Enlightenment anti-clericalism was grounded in secular rationalism, empiricism, and natural science. Thinkers like Voltaire (écrasez l’infâme) attacked the Church not to purify faith, but to eradicate religious intolerance, superstition, and clerical political privilege. Denis Diderot and Baron d'Holbach extended this to philosophical materialism and explicit atheism. The Enlightenment thus rejected the pagan mystical cosmology of the Renaissance while repudiating the revealed theology of the Reformation, establishing secularism as an autonomous modern worldview.

Across these historical junctures, the interplay between structural economic collapse and ideological transformation underscores that when institutional paradigms fail, the resulting political realignments—whether reactionary totalitarianism, unmanaged state reform, or rationalist secularism—fundamentally reshape the modern world order.