The document provides an overview of totalitarian and single-party states based on an IBS study. It defines totalitarian regimes as being repressive of pluralism and individual freedoms, maintaining power through propaganda and secret police. Both Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union are presented as prime examples of totalitarian states that sought to subordinate all aspects of citizens' lives to state control. The concept of totalitarianism originated in the 20th century, enabled by new technologies to control large populations.

1. T HE R OOTS OF TOTALITARIAN AND
S INGLE PARTY S TATES : A N IB S TUDY

2.  For centuries mankind has
known pitiless, violent, and
murderous rulers.
 Queen Elizabeth ruthlessly
pursued her Catholic
opponents. Isabella and
Ferdinand persecuted and
expelled the Jews.
 And the French
government used deadly
force against workers and
rebels in Paris in 1848 and
1871.

3.  But the totalitarian state
was a creation of the
twentieth century.
 The fascist and communist
states seem to have been
qualitatively different from
even the most repressive
of their nineteenth century
predecessors.

4. D EFINITIONS :
 Totalitarian regimes are repressive of pluralism.
Outlawed are activities by individuals or groups
such as labor unions that are not directed by the
state. Power is maintained through secret police,
propaganda disseminated through the media,
the elimination of open criticism of the regime,
and use of terror tactics.
Secret Police Propaganda

5.  Internal and external threats are created to
foster unity through fear.
 Totalitarian governments intend on changing the
basic structure of society.

6.  In totalitarian systems, the ruling ideology
requires that every aspect of an individual's life
become subordinated to the state, including
occupation, income, and religion.
 The concepts of "the state" and "the people"
become merged.
 This is also called the carceral state — a prison-
like state.

7.  Authoritarian regimes control many aspects of
citizen’s lives, especially politics, coupled with the
use of force.
 Unlike totalitarian regimes, there is no desire or
ideological justification the state’s control, and
the state will generally ignore the actions of an
individual unless it is perceived to be directly
challenging the state.

9.  Authoritarian governments
leave the social fabric
largely intact.
 For example, Lee Kuan Yew,
Singapore's first Prime
Minister, purportedly
justified its strict social
conduct laws as "a way to
force civility onto a third-
world country," which it
was at the time of its
separation from Malaysia.

10.  "The Fascist conception of
the State is all-embracing;
outside of it no human or
spiritual values can exist,
much less have value. Thus
understood, Fascism is
totalitarian, and the Fascist
State--a synthesis and a
unit inclusive of all values--
interprets, develops, and
potentiates the whole life
of a people."
 ~ Benito Mussolini

11.  It is enough that the people
know there was an
election. The people who
cast the votes decide
nothing. The people who
count the votes decide
everything.
 ~ Joseph Stalin

12.  A totalitarian regime is
generally controlled by a
political party such as the
Nazi Party or a communist
party which in turn is
controlled by apolitburo
small group such as a or
central committee which is
often dominated by a
single individual, the
dictator.

13.  Eric Hoffer in his book The
True Believer argues that
mass movements like
communism, Fascism and
Nazism had a common trait
in picturing Western
democracies and their
values as decadent, with
people "too soft, too
pleasure-loving and too
selfish" to sacrifice for a
higher cause, which for
them implies an inner
moral and biological decay.

14.  He further claims that those movements offered
the prospect of a glorious future to frustrated
people, enabling them to find a refuge from the
lack of personal accomplishments in their
individual existence. The individual is then
assimilated into a compact collective body and
"fact-proof screens from reality" are established.

15. O RIGIN OF C ONCEPT
 Hannah Arendt (1906–
1975) popularized the use
of the term totalitarianism
(notably in her 1951 book
The Origins of
Totalitarianism in order to
illustrate the
commonalities between
Nazism and Stalinism (in
1963 she coined the
phrase the "banality of
evil" - referring to the
“normalcy” of Adolf
Eichmann and his
submission to the Nazis).

16.  Joseph Stalin's Soviet
Union and Adolf Hitler's
Germany are widely
considered to be the two
best examples of
totalitarian regimes. A
contemporary example is
North Korea; certain
religious fundamentalist
regimes, such as that found
in Iran, are also sometimes
described as totalitarian.

17.  The fictional “Big Brother”
regime described in
George Orwell's novel
Nineteen Eighty-Four is
considered to be a
quintessential example of
totalitarianism.

18.  Most political scientists believe totalitarian
regimes were rare before the 20th century
because neither technological means nor
ideological justifications existed for controlling
large numbers of people.

19.  Today, however, television, radio, and other mass
media make it relatively easy for totalitarian
regimes to make their presence felt, often
through campaigns of propaganda or the
creation of a vast personality cult.

21.  The terms totalitarian democracy and totalitarian
republic have also been used to classify a
different style of totalitarian rule. In these
regimes, the government is generally popular (at
least at the beginning), and the ideological
justification of the state comes on behalf of the
people. Hitler's democratically-elected Nazi
regime is often used as an example of a
totalitarian democracy.

22.  Although Hitler’s totalitarian Germany came into
being through a slow and gradual decrease in
rights, most totalitarian regimes are born as a
result of a revolution which replaces what is
generally regarded as an ineffective government.

23.  It has been argued that totalitarianism requires a
cult of personality around a charismatic "great
leader" who is glorified as the legitimizer of the
regime (ex.: Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Mussolini, Pol
Pot, and Kim Il-Sung).

25.  In the Khrushchev era the
cult of leadership
diminished, although the
government remained
totalitarian. This has made
more popular the belief
that a charismatic leader is
a frequent but not a
necessary characteristic of
totalitarianism.

26. C HARACTERISTICS OF THE S OVIET
U NION

27. P OLITICAL S YSTEM
 Single party rule combined with a (supposedly)
democratically elected but centralized
government. In practice, the government
consisted of a hierarchical structure which with
the aid of a secret police enforced decisions
made by a small group of members of the ruling
party (Politburo).

28. E CONOMIC S YSTEM
 All property and economic organizations were
owned and controlled by the state which
administered them according to plans developed
by a central planning bureaucracy. Economic
planners focused on development of heavy
industry and defense industries. Consumer goods
had a low priority. Imports were strictly
controlled especially in the area of consumer
goods and food.

29. L EGAL S YSTEM
 A large secret police organization monitored
public activities closely; substantial efforts were
made to discover expressions of dissent
especially by government employees and
Communist Party members and their families
using a network of informers.

30.  Control over dissent was achieved through
imprisonment, commitment to mental hospitals,
and especially during establishment of the
regime by death. During the first decades of the
regime an extensive system of labor camps was
maintained, the Gulag. The judicial system was
controlled by the Party. Travel was tightly
controlled with borders closed to both entrance
and exit.

32. I DEOLOGY
 Education and political discourse proceeded on
the assumption that it was possible to mold
people into an ideal Soviet man or woman. The
validity of all ideas, were evaluated in terms of
adherence to the ideology of Marxism-Leninism
as interpreted by the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union.

33. R USSIAN D OMINATION
 Despite the formal organization of the Soviet
Union as a federation of republics, control was
highly centralized in central institutions
dominated by Russians. Russian language and
culture predominated in education and public
discourse. Nationalities which resisted were
subject to repression which in the early years of
the regime included mass imprisonment and
deportation.

34. C ONTROL OF I NFORMATION
 All publications and media were censored, use of
copying machines and imports of written
material tightly controlled, foreign electronic
media jammed. Access to government
documents and press archives was strictly
limited.

35. F OREIGN A FFAIRS
 The regime maintained
close relationships on a
world wide basis with
revolutionary parties
continuing support for an
international movement to
supplant capitalism with
communism. It portrayed
itself as subject to attack
by developed capitalist
countries and maintained
massive military forces in
anticipation of war.

36. P ROBLEMS OF I DENTIFICATION AND
D ISTINCTION : S TALINISM , N AZISM
AND TOTALITARIANISM
 Both the Soviet Union and
Nazi Germany came into
conflict with the "free
world", either directly
(World War II), or indirectly
(the Cold War). Allied
forces led by the Soviet
Union and the United
States (amongst others)
liberated Germany on V-E
Day. Arendt, in particular,
draws parallels between
fascism and Stalinism.

37.  Many political theorists in
the US and Western
Europe have argued that
similarities exist between
Nazi Germany and the
Soviet Union. Some
emphasize the perceived
"socialism" of the Nazi
(Nationalsozialismus, i.e.
National Socialism) and
Soviets. Others state that
the Nazi’s were not
socialists in practice. But
both argue that Nazism
and Stalinism represent
forms of totalitarianism.

38.  Historians such as Ian Kershaw, Hans Mommsen,
and Joachim Fest argue that the origins of the
Nazi Party lie in the far-right nationalist and racist
movements that existed in Germany in the post-
World War I period.

39.  They propose that Hitler
and the Nazi ideologues
consistently rejected all
traditions of German
socialism as articulated by
Karl Marx, Ferdinand
Lassalle, Karl Kautsky, and
others. These historians
state that the Nazis looked
up to intellectuals like
Nietzsche, which lie in
right-wing nationalist and
racist thought, not in the
socialist tradition.

40.  Further, the Nazis rejected and reviled the French
and 1848 Revolutions. They also saw these
revolutions as part of a Jewish conspiracy.

41.  Much of this debate ultimately revolves around
the meaning of the term socialism, making
argument as much about semantics as about
actual substantive differences.

42.  Politically, National Socialism was a variety of
fascism that incorporated elements from left-
wing and right-wing ideologies, but, in practice,
was a form of far right politics (Fritzsche, Peter.
1998. Germans into Nazis. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press; Eatwell, Roger, Fascism,
A History, Viking/Penguin, 1996, pp.xvii-xxiv, 21,
26–31, 114–140, 352. Griffin, Roger. 2000.
"Revolution from the Right: Fascism," chapter in
David Parker (ed.) Revolutions and the
Revolutionary Tradition in the West 1560-1991,
Routledge, London).

43. S OURCES
 Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism (1958, new ed. 1966)
 John A. Armstrong, The Politics of Totalitarianism (New York: Random House,
1961)
 Borkenau, Franz. The Totalitarian Enemy, London, Faber and Faber 1940
 Bracher, Karl Dietrich. “The Disputed Concept of Totalitarianism,” pages 11–
33 from Totalitarianism Reconsidered edited by Ernest A. Menze (Port
Washington, N.Y. / London: Kennikat Press, 1981), ISBN 0804692688.
 Friedrich, Carl, and Brzezinski , Z. K., Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy
(2nd edn 1967)
 Gleason, Abbott. Totalitarianism : The Inner History Of The Cold War, New
York: Oxford University Press, (1995), ISBN 0195050177
 Kirkpatrick, Jeane. Dictatorships and Double Standards: Rationalism and
reason in politics (1982)
 Laquer, Walter. The Fate of the Revolution Interpretations of Soviet History
From 1917 to the Present, London: Collier Books, (1987) ISBN 0-02-034080-X.

44.  Linz, Juan and Stepan, Alfred. Problems Of Democratic Transition And
Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, And Post-Communist Europe,
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, (1996), ISBN 0801851572.
 Murray, Ewan. Shut Up: Tale of Totalitarianism (2005)
 Payne, Stanley. A History of Fascism (Routledge, 1996)
 Pipes, Richard (1995), Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, New York: Vintage
Books, Random House Inc., ISBN 0-394-50242-6.
 Sartori, Giovanni. The Theory of Democracy Revisited (Chatham, N.J: Chatham
House, 1987)
 Saur, Wolfgang. "National Socialism: totalitarianism or fascism?" pages 404-
424 from The American Historical Review, Volume 73, Issue #2, December
1967.
 Schapiro, Leonard. Totalitarianism (London: The Pall Mall Press, 1972)
 Žižek, Slavoj. Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? (London: Verso, 2001)
 Keller, Marcello Sorce. “Why is Music so Ideological, Why Do Totalitarian
States Take It So Seriously: A Personal View from History, and the Social
Sciences”, Journal of Musicological Research, XXVI (2007), no. 2-3, pp. 91–
122