Totalitarianism: Nazism and Soviet Communism

What is Totalitarianism

Hannah Arendt, in "The Origins of Totalitarianism" (1951), created a classic analysis of a phenomenon that previously had no historical precedents. Totalitarianism is not simply dictatorship or authoritarianism. It is an attempt at a total restructuring of society according to ideology, the destruction of public and private space, and the replacement of reality with a fictitious world of the official narrative.

Distinguishing features: mass terror (aimed not at real opponents, but at arbitrary "enemy classes" or "races"), ideology as a total explanation of the world, monopoly on organization (all structures—from school to trade union—under party control), and the cult of the leader.

Nazism: Racial Biopolitics

Hitler’s National Socialism was a synthesis of several trends: vulgar Darwinism ("struggle of races"), German nationalism with its "humiliation" after Versailles, anti-Semitism with a thousand-year history, socialism for "Aryans" with capitalism for the nation. This was a strange mixture, but it worked: the NSDAP won the 1932 elections honestly.

Hitler came to power in January 1933. Within several months, a one-party dictatorship was established. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 stripped Jews of citizenship. The "Kristallnacht" of 1938 was the first mass pogrom. The "Final Solution"—the systematic extermination of Jews, which began in 1941 and claimed 6 million lives—is a unique example in history of industrial-scale production of death.

Stalinism: "Communism" as State Terror

The Soviet Union under Stalin was another type of totalitarianism, based not on racial biology, but on class struggle and "scientific" Marxism. The collectivization of 1929–1933 destroyed peasant economy and claimed from 5 to 7 million lives through starvation (Holodomor in Ukraine). The GULAG—system of camps, through which 18 million people passed, 1.5 to 1.8 million died.

The Great Terror of 1936–1938: show trials, executions of old Bolsheviks, army purge (35,000 officers shot on the eve of war). This army purge was one of the reasons for the catastrophic Soviet losses at the start of the war with Germany.

Parallels and Differences

Arendt and Karl Popper pointed out: both regimes were products of modernism, faith that science and rationalization can create a perfect society. The difference lies in the object of "perfection": racially pure society vs. classless society. The commonality: the total power of the state over the individual, systematic terror, destruction of civil society.

These regimes clashed in 1941. World War II on the Eastern Front was a war of two totalitarianisms, the most brutal war in history: 27 million Soviet citizens perished.

Question for reflection: Arendt showed that the "banality of evil" lies in ordinary people carrying out orders. How can organizations protect themselves from the institutionalization of cruelty through the normalization of small concessions?