The Study of Totalitarianism

Abstract

THE general study of totalitarianism is of recent origin. In the I920'S, interest in Soviet Communism centered in the ideological issues of Marxism-Leninism, the economic aspects of anticapitalism, and the political aspects of dictatorship. In those remote days, only a very few observers (such as Winston Churchill) saw in Soviet Communism more than a single-country experiment, appropriate to a backward country like Russia, but unlikely to have a profound effect on the rest of the world. Similarly, Italian Fascism was viewed in the I920's as a temporary development peculiar to Italy, rather than as the prototype of a world-wide system of thought and action challenging traditional liberal political and economic systems. The first realization that totalitarianism was a more general problem for scholarly analysis and public policy came in the I930's-more specifically, with the triumph of the Nazi Party in Germany in I933. German political scientists and publicists frankly proclaimed that the totalitarian state (der totale Staat) was the highest form of political development, and the only one suitable for the German people. Shortly after Hitler's appointment as Chancellor of the Reich, arbitrary arrests by the secret police, torture and murder, and the setting-up of concentration camps showed the world that the Nazis meant business, and that they were not going to waste much time in translating totalitarian theory into practice. A few years later, in the middle I930's, the mass purges in the Soviet Union together with the first reports on Soviet slave-labor camps hastened the realization that, despite certain differences, Nazism and Communism were fundamentally both totalitarian, and that this likeness was more important than the differences between the two. Finally, the German-Soviet pact of August I939, as well as the policies of the Soviet Union from September I939 to June I94I, gave rise to the popular phrase that Communism was but red Fascism. The forced entry of the Soviet Union into the war on the side of the Western democracies following the German attack in June I94i reawakened the older