The term “totalitarianism” appeared for the first time in 1928 in “the New Review”. It was later adopted by Benito Mussolini, the Duce of Italian Fascism, to indicate its own mode. This term is retroactive today because it includes at least three models of experiments: the German Fascism of Hitler, the Italian Fascism of Mussolini and the Stalinist Communism.
Is it abusive to use the same word to indicate the two experiments of Nazi and Stalinist or is there a similarity between the two? Our analysis is divided into two parts: we initially see that in both cases the idea is identical but methods are different.
The interwar period is a fertile ground for the expansion of totalitarian models. The idea embodied in the very word "totalitarianism" implies an entire society that is no longer formed by people, but a mass.
Nazi and Stalinist projects aim to reshape society to their liking, according to their own approach to the "new man". The "Führer" wants to purify his race, which the elements deemed pathogenic while the "Great Leader" wants to make a Soviet man, stripped of all national sentiment Czech, Slovak, Yugoslav, Polish, and Finnish between the compositions of the mosaic of nationalities that characterizes Eastern Europe.
In Germany, after the Great War and its defeat in 1918, the national sentiment is humiliated by the "Diktat" of Versailles and Hitler found fertile ground for the remodeling of German national sentiment.
Tags: totalitarianism, New Review, comparison between Nazi and Stalinist totalitarianism
[...] You can find some continuity in Nazi totalitarianism while turning 180 degrees is common in Stalinist totalitarianism. The Class against class struggle plays in alternation with the policy of popular fronts and political alliance. After signing the Nazi- Soviet pact of 1939, Stalin became Stalingrad after a battle of the same name, and was seen as a symbol of resistance to Nazism. The ambiguity between the Soviet hesitates between" Socialism in One Country" and the export of the communist model contrasts with the continuity Nazi aims to expand ever deeper into "Mitteleuropa". [...]
[...] Official literature also exists: while Berlin burned books and works of art of artistic creation called "degenerate", in Moscow, everything had to pass the scrutiny of the writers of the totalitarian regime officials before publication. The sciences called "bourgeois" were prohibited, and a unique culture was needed in Stalinist totalitarian system. Hitler wanted a return to the original sources of the German nation, and revived the triptych "Raum, Rasse und Reich" Space, Race and Empire to regenerate Germany, while Stalin banned all cosmopolitanism in order not to impair the purely communist. [...]
[...] He used elements which were already in place such as the Pan-concept born in 1891, to graft his designs, and deliver the agenda which forged the myth of Germania by Tacitus. The German people did not believe in the Judeocide of birth, but Hitler knew how to play with the opportunities and benefits of the crisis to permeate a society with xenophobic and racist sentiments. Nazi totalitarianism is based on the small extreme right party of Drexler, that Hitler remodeled in his own way and radicalized by calling NSDAP, and then he himself becomes its leader. [...]
[...] The physical elimination of those deemed surplus was also held at the "Night of Long Knives" and the “Kristallnacht In the USSR Stalinist totalitarianism also operated on a primary Darwinism. But instead of race struggle, Stalin emphasized Marx's thesis of class struggle. He also wanted to make a new man and supported the individual from childhood, to shape him in the same mold used to make, not Aryan, but Soviet people. The book "The ABC of Communism" was taught in all schools. [...]
[...] Although the term "totalitarianism" is now widely in use and applies to both the Nazi experience and the Stalinist experience, as demonstrated by Hannah Arendt, the fact remains that there are specific types, and that globalizing term should be used only for the sake of convenience. The historian himself cannot be satisfied with that term which is too encompassing. [...]
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