In our previous three programs we talked about the negative effect
which the global economic crisis had on Europe and the United States. However,
the crisis wreaked havoc on Asian, African and Latin American countries
as well. Being largely suppliers of raw materials for the more developed
nations, and, therefore, less capable of grappling with the crisis, these
nations faced the nightmarish prospect of falling demand for and prices
on their food and raw materials. Trying to stabilize the prices, many countries
took the painful decision of destroying their surplus food supplies. In
Argentina, for example, they used grain to keep moving their steam engines
and ships and in Brazil, they dumped 11 million bags of high-grade coffee
into he ocean. Entire regions were hit by mass unemployment and millions
of peasants were seeing the fruits of their life's work going down the
drain. The 1930s brought about major social and political upheavals everywhere
in the world…
The history of the Weimar republic in Germany is a graphic example
of how far the crisis had really gone. Trying desperately to reverse the
situation, the quickly changing governments were falling victim to obsolete
methods of governance by pursuing austerity policies and slashing even
further the already meager social outlays. Such policies gave rise to widespread
public disappointment in both the powers-that-be and democracy as a whole
and strengthened the hand of the anti-democratic parties, mainly the Nazis,
who promised to rule with an iron hand and lead the country out of the
crisis. In 1932 the Nazis were already the biggest party in Germany, with
the Weimar republicans trailing far behind.
The Soviet Union was in no way affected by the global crisis
simply because it was not integrated into the world economic system. The
country was developing according to its own laws and, by 1932, the Soviet
economy had already posted impressive gains. The Belomor-Baltiisky Canal,
the world's biggest, was almost complete, just like the city of Komsomolsk-on-Amur
and other cities in the Far East, the giant Dnieper hydro was already at
work and they were already building an underground rail system in Moscow.
In 1932 Joseph Stalin finally managed to get rid of his longtime enemy,
Leon Trotsky, who had been stripped of his citizenship and had left the
country never to come back again. Also in 1932 Stalin's wife, Nadezhda
Alliluyeva, took her own life under circumstances yet to be investigated…
In the United States, the Republicans suffered a shattering defeat
at the hands of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his Democratic party which
also won the majority of seats in both the House of Representatives and
the Senate.
In Britain, the great novelist and playwright John Galsworthy,
won the 1932 Nobel prize for literature, mainly on the strength of his
all-time epic, The Forsyte Saga, which later served as the basis for an
internationally-acclaimed TV series of the same name.
The year 1932 was the last in the life of Pierre Degeiter, the
author of the Communist hymn, The Internationale. Due to a publisher's
error, only the last name of the author appeared on the sheet music. Pierre's
political foes capitalized on that forcing his brother Adolf to claim authorship.
After lengthy deliberations, the appeals court confirmed the rights of
the 74-year-old composer who had joined the French Communist party two
years before.
The Pulitzer prizewinning American author John Updike was born
in 1932. He got his country's top literary award for a series of books
about Harry Angstom, nicknamed The Rabbit. In 1969 someone named Shakespeare
who was then the head of the official United States Information Agency,
ordered to have Updike's books removed from USIA libraries abroad. The
Agency believed that the books were showing the United States in a bad
light and were critical of the White House .
THE 20th CENTURY:YEAR AFTER YEAR series
of historical programs is prepared by Vladimir Zhamkin.
BACK TO MAIN PAGE
