What accounted for the rise of totalitarian leaders in japan, germany, italy, and the soviet union and how did their rule impact their nations politically, economically and socially?

Answer 1

It is difficult to answer to give a single authoritative answer to this question, however, there are some answers that I can give. In his book Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy argues that Italy, Germany, Japan, and Tsarist Russia failed to implement a French or American-style bourgeois revolution that would allow for the efficient development of capitalism while at the same time giving the peasantry a stake and voice in the political regime of each country. In each country, the aristocracy acted as break on social reform, the rising industrialists and the middle classes feared that the workers and poor peasants might create an alliance to overthrow them and so they supported the aristocracy and the monarchist "establishment" of their respective countries.

This description is generally accurate but has some flaws: 1. the anti-revolutionary nature of the bourgeoisie can in Italy and Russia can be questioned, the first more than the second, as Italian revolutionaries (many of whom were bourgeois) did manage to unify Italy (which weakens aristocratic power in Duchies and statelets) and managed to pass universal male suffrage in 1913; Russia might've had a French-style bourgeois revolution under Kerensky but the ascension of the Bolsheviks to power foreclosed the 1917 revolution stopping there 2. France, the nation with arguably the most thorough bourgeois revolution, had strong fascist and communist movements despite democracy, reduction of feudal power, and peasant stakeholders in the system -- France did not fall on its own, of course, but mostly fell through Nazi invasion -- however, the Vichy-state was composed of those right-wing French totalitarians willing to collaborate with Germany. 3.the totalitarian revolutions (for lack of a better term) that overtook said countries largely arose in the aftermath of traumatic wars and brutal economic depressions. Therefore, certain counter-factuals about said countries, like what might have happened in Germany if the Great Depression hadn't happened, does have validity -- for, instance, during the stable years of the mid-20s the Nazi party receded in popularity as the economy improved.

As regarding the impact of the rule of each regime, it varies from country to country. Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany perpetuated what were probably worst genocides to occur in the 20th century; the warmongering of each regime led them into disastrous wars that decimated their own population, led to major military defeat, economic turmoil, and the political-social-economic collapse of each regime in its phase. The Soviet regime did lead to rapid economic growth for at least a time but at the cost of what scholars estimate to be hundreds of thousands if not millions of deaths in the Terror and the gulag system. The Soviet system was ultimately far more stable than the far-right totalitarian regimes in Germany, Japan, and Italy but ultimately came to an end in 1992. Scholars continue to debate whether the Russian people would be better off if the Revolution had not occurred; there does not seem to be much debate that the German, Italian, and Japanese people were better-served by democratic regimes that came after WWII than the ones that preceded them. The longest serving fascist regime, that of Mussolini, was perhaps the least disastrous in human, economic, and social terms, but ultimately ended with Mussolini being hung by his own people and a transition back to democratic rule after Allied occupation.