Some twentieth century regimes went beyond ordinary authoritarian rule. They sought not just to monopolize political power but to control every aspect of life, including thought, family, religion, culture and the economy, and to remake human beings according to an ideology. Scholars call such regimes totalitarian.

The word

The term was coined in Italy in the 1920s by critics of Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime, who used it as an insult. Mussolini embraced it. In a speech in 1925 he summed up his ideal: “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” In practice, Fascist Italy never achieved that degree of control; the monarchy, the Catholic Church and big business kept considerable independence. The fullest examples of totalitarianism were Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler, from 1933 to 1945, and the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, from the late 1920s to 1953.

Arendt's analysis

The political philosopher Hannah Arendt, a German Jewish refugee who escaped to the United States, published The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951. She argued that totalitarianism was a new form of government, different from older tyrannies. Its essence was the combination of ideology and terror. Totalitarian movements claimed to know the laws of history or nature, such as race struggle for the Nazis or class struggle for the Stalinists, and used terror to make reality conform to them. They thrived among lonely, uprooted masses cut off from traditional communities, and they sought to destroy all independent groups, leaving individuals isolated before the state. The concentration camp, she wrote, was the laboratory in which totalitarian rule tested its claim that everything is possible, including the destruction of human individuality.

The six features

In 1956, the political scientists Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski listed six features that, they argued, defined totalitarian dictatorship:

1. An official ideology covering all aspects of life and promising a perfect future.
2. A single mass party, typically led by one person.
3. A system of terror through a secret police.
4. A near-monopoly of mass communication.
5. A near-monopoly of weapons.
6. Central direction of the economy.

Stalin's terror

In the Soviet Union, Stalin's regime forced peasants into collective farms from 1929, causing famines that killed millions, including the famine in Ukraine of 1932 to 1933 known as the Holodomor. In the Great Terror of 1936 to 1938, the secret police arrested more than a million people; Soviet records show about 680,000 executions in 1937 to 1938 alone. Millions passed through the Gulag, a vast system of forced labor camps. Show trials forced old revolutionaries to confess to absurd crimes. Children were encouraged to inform on their parents.

Nazi Germany

The Nazi regime abolished other parties, took over or dissolved independent organizations, from trade unions to youth clubs, and placed the press and culture under the control of the propaganda ministry. Its ideology of racial struggle led to the persecution of Jews, Roma, people with disabilities and others, and finally to the Holocaust, in which about six million Jews were murdered. Its surviving leaders were tried at Nuremberg after the war.

Later cases

Other regimes have been described as totalitarian, including China under Mao Zedong, especially during the Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1976; the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, whose attempt to create a rural communist society led to the deaths of perhaps one and a half to two million people, about a quarter of the population; and North Korea, ruled by the Kim family since 1948, often considered the most closed society in the world.

Critiques of the concept

Some historians have criticized the totalitarian model. They argue that it made these regimes seem more efficient and complete than they were: in practice, Nazi Germany was full of rival agencies competing for Hitler's favor, and Soviet citizens found ways to evade control. They also note that the concept became a Cold War weapon, used to equate communism with Nazism for political purposes. Defenders reply that the model captures something real and distinctive: the ambition of total control, even if never fully achieved, and the mass terror it produced.

Worked example: a day under total control

Imagine an ordinary office worker in Moscow in 1937. Consider how totalitarian rule reaches into her life.

• Work. Her workplace holds political meetings where colleagues must praise Stalin and denounce enemies. Failing to show enthusiasm is dangerous.
• Information. Newspapers and radio speak with one voice. Foreign broadcasts are forbidden or jammed.
• Family. Her children learn at school that loyalty to the state comes before loyalty to parents.
• Friends. A careless joke could be reported to the secret police by a neighbor seeking her apartment.
• Fear. Arrests happen at night. People keep a packed suitcase by the door.

The example shows why totalitarianism is so destructive: it attacks not only political freedom but the trust between people that makes ordinary life possible. George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in 1949, gave the world lasting images of this, from Big Brother to the Thought Police. Protecting the private sphere of conscience, family and friendship from the state is one of the deepest reasons human rights matter.