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

(a) Crisis of Weimar and the authoritarian turn (1929–33)

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 made the Nazis the largest party, with 37% of the vote and 230 seats, while the Communist Party (KPD) also grew; together the two anti-republican parties held a majority of the Reichstag.

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 fell to 33% in the November 1932 elections while the KPD rose to about 17%, the traditional right sought to harness Adolf Hitler’s mass mobilization. After Papen (June–November 1932) and Schleicher (December 1932–January 1933) failed to build a mass base, Franz von Papen, backed by President Paul von Hindenburg’s camarilla and after meeting Hitler at the banker Kurt von Schröder's house (4 January 1933), orchestrated a backroom deal; in November 1932 a group of industrialists and landowners had already petitioned Hindenburg to appoint Hitler. 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. Historians differ on how far big business drove this: Henry Ashby Turner finds that most industrialists gave the Nazis little money before 1933, while others stress the agrarian lobby and the army; Ian Kershaw describes a 'backstairs intrigue' by a small circle rather than a collective class decision.

(b) 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 machine-building and investment but, together with the anti-alcohol campaign (1985) and the fall in oil prices, widened the budget deficit. Gorbachev then introduced Perestroika (economic restructuring), through the Law on State Enterprise (1987), which gave enterprises autonomy, the Law on Cooperatives (1988), which legalised small private business, 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, after the Chernobyl disaster (1986) had exposed the costs of secrecy and the 19th Party Conference (1988) had approved political reform. In March 1990 Article 6, which guaranteed the Communist Party's leading role, was repealed and Gorbachev became executive President.

Critically, these domestic reforms suffered from fatal internal contradictions. Perestroika dismantled central planning mechanisms without establishing functional market institutions, causing acute shortages of consumer goods, open inflation, a budget crisis and the rejection of the '500 Days' market plan (1990). 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, and hardliners led by Kryuchkov and Yanayev staged the abortive August 1991 coup to stop the New Union Treaty. 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: the Belovezha Accords (8 December 1991) dissolved the Union, and Gorbachev resigned on 25 December. Archie Brown credits Gorbachev with deliberately ending the party's monopoly, while Stephen Kotkin stresses that the reforms destroyed the institutions that held the system together.

(c) 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 and Hermetic pagan philosophy with Christian theology; Lorenzo Valla exposed the Donation of Constantine (1440) and Erasmus satirised clerical corruption, but the humanists stayed within Christianity. 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. Most philosophes, including Voltaire and Rousseau, were deists, while Denis Diderot and Baron d'Holbach extended the critique to philosophical materialism and explicit atheism. The philosophes admired classical authors such as Cicero and Lucretius as models of reason (Peter Gay called the Enlightenment a 'modern paganism'), but they rejected the Renaissance's occult Neoplatonism and its accommodation with the Church, just as they rejected the Reformation's revealed theology. The Enlightenment thus made secular reason an autonomous standard for judging religion.