Totalitarianism is a system of political power in which the state, with the help of law enforcement agencies, establishes total control over all spheres of society. It differs from authoritarianism - another non-democratic regime - in that it tries to penetrate the thoughts, personal lives and even beliefs of each individual. He tries to forcibly regulate even the family life of citizens and establishes a system of total surveillance.
On the territory of the former Soviet Union, nostalgic suffering for the times of Stalin and longing for a "firm hand" are still found among citizens. They are opposed by people with opposite views, who claim that totalitarianism is Stalinism. They cite the following arguments in favor of their theory: in the Stalinist empire, the official ideology of “Marxism-Leninism” dominated, which all citizens had to share. Loy alty to this worldview should have beendemonstrate everything and everywhere - for example, mentions of the great achievements of socialist economic management should have preceded even scientific works on mathematics far from politics.
The second argument that totalitarianism is Stalinism is that police control was established in the Land of the Soviets of that period, and total. From kindergarten, the feeling was brought up that the whole country lives surrounded by enemies, both external - imperialist "captain camp countries" and internal - saboteurs who sabotage. Any citizen could turn out to be this "enemy of the people", and the majority of the population was afraid of representatives of the special all-powerful power structure - the Cheka, the NKVD, and later the KGB.
In favor of the fact that totalitarianism is Stalinism, the one-party system of power also testifies. The Communist Party produces ideological absolutism - any "deviationism" is severely persecuted. All organizations, press and education are subordinate to the ruling party. All citizens are deprived of the right to dissent. The economy is fully regulated by the state, any private business is perceived as an encroachment on the receipt of income unregulated by the state. Slave labor (Gulag) was used on a large scale.
So what kind of system are some of our pensioners nostalgic for? If everything was so bad, then why such sentiments towards the image of "friend of all athletes" and "father of peoples" Stalin? Yes, the Soviet Union of the 1930s was a totalitarian regime, but in a later period it cannot beit was already called that. The later Soviet system, rather, fell under the description of authoritarianism. These two systems of undemocratic government - authoritarianism and totalitarianism - have many common features, but one very important difference. The first system does not seek to penetrate and establish control over all spheres of society, limiting itself only to the political and spiritual-ideological.
Under authoritarianism, there is a whole layer of the population that feels comfortable and safe under this regime - the workers of large cities in the USSR, the middle class under General de Gaulle in France, the big industrialists under Pinochet. Under totalitarianism, no one feels safe, except for the ruling elite. The history of the 20th century is especially replete with such regimes. The term "totalitarianism" was born in Italy under Mussolini, but found its extreme manifestation a little later - in the Nazism of the Third Reich of Hitler, the ideology of the Khmer Rouge, Maoism, Turkmenistan under Turkmenbashi and the ideology of "Juche" in North Korea
