World Wars of the Twentieth Century 337the past, what ought to be called national socialism, if Hitler had not
preempted the term, emerged from the barracks and purchasing
offices of the European armed services and, with the help of a coalition
of administrative elites drawn from big business, big labor, academia,
and big government, made European society over in an amazingly
short time.
Part of the secret of war mobilization was that when it was launched
everyone thought it would last for only a few months. Sacrifice of
familiar routines and creature comforts mattered less when return to
normal as soon as the war had been won was taken for granted by all
concerned. This disarmed conservatives time and again. Moreover,
the sufferings of soldiers at the front made everything demanded of
civilians in the rear seem trivial by comparison and discredited those
who sought to hold fast to rights and privileges that the new managers
of society found standing in the way of the war effort.
Yet irony and ambiguity lay at the heart of this whole affair. Accep
tance of the differentiation between ruler and ruled, shepherd and
sheep, staff officer and cannon fodder depended on the strength of a
shared conviction that the war had to be fought to a finish, cost what it
might. Obedience, sustained by that conviction, paradoxically became
an expression of freedom. But if the conviction wavered, still more if
it disappeared entirely, then the new ruling elites thrown up by the
war were suddenly transmogrified into bloodthirsty and tyrannous
usurpers, holding everyone in chains for evil reasons of their own. In
other words, freedom and justice changed sides when people ceased
to believe that victory at any price was a self-evident good. Whenever
and wherever that shift of outlook took hold, the extraordinary en
largement of public power required for efficient mobilization of the
home front threatened to break down even more rapidly than it had
come into being, though what the alternative might be—civil war,
anarchy, defeat, and national humiliation, or, alternatively, the dawn
of a new and juster society—remained a matter of faith and fear rather
than of foresight.
These dimensions of the war effort became poignantly evident
during 1917. The collapse of tsarist autocracy in March of that year
seemed to bring Russia into the parliamentary and democratic camp.
But the new government never consolidated its legitimacy and failed
utterly to solve the food crisis afflicting the cities. The resulting decay
of Russia’s capacity to wage war reached a climax in November, when
Lenin seized power with the professed purpose of giving peace to the
people, land to the peasants, and food to the workers of Russian cities.