On a hot August evening in 1933, a crowd watching a youth baseball game in Toronto's Christie Pits park saw a group of young men unfurl a large banner with a swastika on it. Within minutes, fighting had broken out, and it spread through the surrounding streets for hours. Hitler had come to power in Germany only months before, yet his symbol was already being used to threaten Jewish Canadians at home. In the 1930s, the Depression made many people around the world lose confidence in democracy, and extreme ideologies promised order, strength or equality in its place. Understanding what those ideologies were, and what they did to real people, is essential for understanding the rest of the century.
An ideology is a set of ideas about how society, the economy and government should work. Ideologies are often placed on a left–right spectrum: the left stresses equality and a bigger role for the state in sharing wealth; the right stresses tradition, order, private property and, at its extreme, national or racial hierarchy. A second, separate question is how power is held: democratic systems have free elections, rights and the rule of law, while authoritarian systems concentrate power in a leader or party. A totalitarian state goes further and tries to control every part of life, including work, school, the media and even what people think.
| Communism under Stalin | Fascism | Nazism | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Where and who | Soviet Union; Joseph Stalin held power from the late 1920s until 1953 | Italy; Benito Mussolini, in power from 1922 | Germany; Adolf Hitler, appointed chancellor on January 30, 1933 |
| Core ideas | The state owns farms, factories and property in the name of the workers; one Communist Party rules | Extreme nationalism; the nation and the state matter more than any individual; war and strength are glorified | Fascism plus a racist ideology: claimed a German "Aryan" master race, with antisemitism at its centre |
| Methods | Secret police, show trials, forced labour camps (the Gulag), forced collectivization of farms; hundreds of thousands executed in the Great Terror of 1936–1938 | Banned other parties, used violence against opponents, censored the press, invaded Ethiopia in 1935 | One-party dictatorship, propaganda, concentration camps, laws stripping Jews of rights, persecution of Roma, disabled people, gay men and political opponents |
| Impact | Millions died from repression and famine, including the Holodomor in Ukraine | Democracy destroyed in Italy; aggression abroad | Led to the Second World War and the Holocaust, the murder of about six million Jews |
Extreme ideologies in Canada
- Adrien Arcand, a Montreal journalist, founded the National Social Christian Party in 1934. Its emblem was a swastika surrounded by maple leaves, and it spread antisemitic propaganda modelled on Nazi Germany's. In 1938 he merged fascist groups from Quebec, Ontario and the West into the National Unity Party. When war came, fascist organizations were banned and Arcand was interned in 1940.
- Swastika Clubs formed in Toronto's Beaches neighbourhood in the summer of 1933; members wore swastika badges and said they wanted to keep "undesirable" visitors, meaning Jewish Torontonians, away from the waterfront.
- The Communist Party of Canada (founded 1921) organized unemployed workers and unions in the 1930s. In 1931 its leader Tim Buck and other leaders were jailed under Section 98 of the Criminal Code, a law against "unlawful associations" that was repealed in 1936. The party was banned in 1940.
- Quebec's Padlock Act (1937) let the provincial government close buildings used to spread communism; critics argued it was so vague it threatened free speech.
- Roughly 1,500 to 1,700 Canadians volunteered to fight fascism in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), many in the Mackenzie–Papineau Battalion, even though Canadian law made enlisting in a foreign war illegal from 1937. Dr. Norman Bethune organized a mobile blood-transfusion service there.
The Christie Pits riot, August 16, 1933
In 1933, Toronto had a large Jewish community, many of them immigrants or children of immigrants who lived near Kensington Market and Spadina Avenue. Antisemitism was common and open: some resorts and beaches displayed signs keeping Jews out, and newspapers reported on the new Swastika Clubs. At a playoff game at Christie Pits on August 14, young men taunted the mostly Jewish Harbord Playground team with a swastika. At the next game, on August 16, a group unfurled a large swastika banner. Jewish youths and their supporters rushed to tear it down, and a riot involving thousands of people raged for about six hours, with fists, bats and pipes. Many people were injured, and Toronto's mayor publicly warned against displaying the swastika. Historians consider it one of the worst outbreaks of ethnic violence in Toronto's history, and it showed that Nazi ideas were not only a European problem.
The Holodomor: famine as a weapon, 1932–1933
Holodomor comes from Ukrainian words for hunger and death; it means killing by starvation. In 1929, Stalin began forcing peasants across the Soviet Union to give up their land and animals to large collective farms controlled by the state. Ukraine, a rich grain-growing region, resisted, and many Ukrainians also wanted to protect their language, culture and autonomy. In 1932–1933, the Soviet government set impossible grain quotas for Ukraine, sent brigades to seize grain and other food from homes, blacklisted villages that missed their quotas, punished people harshly for taking even small amounts of grain from collective fields, and in early 1933 stopped starving peasants from leaving Ukraine to look for food. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union kept exporting grain. At the same time, it arrested Ukrainian cultural and political leaders.
The result was a man-made famine that killed millions of Ukrainians. Demographers have estimated about 3.9 million excess deaths in Soviet Ukraine; most scholarly estimates fall between about 3.5 and 5 million, and some are higher. The Soviet government denied the famine for decades and punished people who spoke of it; much of the evidence only became widely available after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. A few Western reporters did tell the truth at the time, including Rhea Clyman, a journalist who had grown up in Toronto and wrote about starvation and repression she saw in the Soviet Union before she was expelled in 1932, while other well-known correspondents downplayed or denied the famine.
Why the Holodomor matters to Ukrainian Canadians
Ukrainian Canadians are one of Canada's largest heritage communities: in the 2021 census about 1.26 million people reported full or partial Ukrainian origin, many with roots in the Prairie farm settlements of the late 1800s and early 1900s. After the Second World War, survivors of the Holodomor came to Canada as displaced persons and brought their testimony with them. Because the Soviet Union silenced memory of the famine inside Ukraine, the community in Canada worked to preserve it: collecting survivor stories, holding annual commemorations, and in 1983, on the 50th anniversary, unveiling in Edmonton the first public monument to Holodomor victims anywhere in the world. Their decades of advocacy led to official recognition. For many Ukrainian Canadians, remembering the Holodomor is part of their identity and of their commitment to human rights, and it helps explain the community's strong response to later threats to Ukraine.