The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

The term "totalitarianism" first came into use in the late 1920s, soon after the first totalitarian regimes formed. At the beginning it was simply descriptive, used by both opponents and supporters of regimes that aimed to totally transform societies, as did the Soviet, Italian, and later German leaders. In fact, the first person to use the phrase "totalitarian state" may have been Benito Mussolini, in a 1925 speech in which he extolled the virtues of concentrating all of society in a single state entity. At that point, "totalitarian state" was a vision rather than a system, but it was a vision clearly opposed to Western democratic arrangements, which it saw as weak. By implied definition, a totalitarian state would draw its strength from concentrating all power—including the power of every individual's support for the regime—into a single whole. Both the Germans and the Italians saw the Soviet Union as a successful model of achieving such concentration. Before the Second World War, a few thinkers attempted to describe what made totalitarian regimes different from any that had come before. In 1936, Luigi Sturzo, an Italian priest and politician in exile, identified four key characteristics of the totalitarian state:

Administrative centralization is carried to extremes—the suppression not only of all local autonomy . . . but also of the autonomy of all public or semi-public institutions, charitable

organizations, cultural associations, universities The

independence of the legislature and judiciary has completely disappeared, and even the government is reduced to a body subordinate to a leader, who has become dictator under the euphemisms of Duce, Marshal, or Fuhrer. . . .

The Party is militarized. Either it dominates the army or the army allies itself with the prevailing power and the two armed forces cooperate or amalgamate. The youth of the country is militarized, collective life is felt to be military life, dreams of revanche or of empire, conflicts at home and abroad, penetrate the whole social structure. . . .

Everyone must have faith in the new state and learn to love it. From the schools up to the universities conformity of feeling is not enough; there must be an absolute intellectual and moral surrender, a trusting enthusiasm, a religious mysticism where the

new state is concerned A whole new moral environment must

be created in addition to the work of the school. Hence the official textbook, the state inspired and standardized newspaper, the cinema, the wireless, sports, school societies, the grant[ing] of prizes, are not only controlled but are directed toward an end—the worship of the totalitarian state, whether its banner be nation, race or class. The whole of social life is continually mobilized in parades, festivals, pageants, plebiscites, sporting events, calculated to capture the mind, the imagination, the feeling of the populace. And to excite this collective spirit of exaltation the worship of the state or class or race would be too vague in itself. The vital focus of emotion is the man, the hero, the demigod—Lenin, Hitler, Mussolini—whose person is sacred and whose words are the works of a prophet. . . .

(d) It is impossible for the totalitarian state to allow economic freedom to either capitalists or workers. There is no room for free trade unions or free employers' associations. Instead there are state syndicates or corporations, with no freedom of action, controlled

and organized within the state and for the state.⁵