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 undemocratic system - in that it tries to penetrate the thoughts, personal life, and even the beliefs of each person. He is trying to forcibly regulate even the family life of citizens and establishes a system of total surveillance.
On the territory of the former Soviet Union so faramong the citizens there are nostalgic sufferings in the times of Stalin and longing for a “firm hand”. They are opposed by people with opposing views, who claim that totalitarianism is Stalinism. They cite the following arguments in favor of their theory: the official ideology of "Marxism-Leninism" prevailed in the Stalinist empire, which all citizens should share. Fidelity to this worldview should have been demonstrated by everyone everywhere - for example, references to the great accomplishments of socialist management should have been preceded even by scientific works on mathematics that were far from politics.
In favor of the fact that totalitarianism is Stalinism,evidence and one-party system of government. The Communist Party produces ideological absolutism - every “deviationism” is cruelly persecuted. All organizations, the press and education are subordinated to the ruling party. All citizens are denied the right to dissent. The economy is fully regulated by the state, any private enterprise is perceived as an encroachment on income unregulated by the state. Slave labor (GULAG) was used on a large scale.
So what is the rank of our nostalgicsome of our senior citizens? If everything was so bad, then where did such sentiments come from to the image of “the friend of all athletes” and the “father of nations” Stalin? Yes, the Soviet Union of the 1930s was a totalitarian regime, but in a later period it could not be called that. The later Soviet system, rather, fell under the description of authoritarianism. These two systems of an undemocratic state structure — authoritarianism and totalitarianism — have many similarities, but one very important difference. The first order does not seek to penetrate and establish control over all spheres of the life of society, limited only to political and spiritual-ideological.
With authoritarianism, there is a whole layera population that feels comfortable and safe under this regime — workers of large cities in the USSR, the middle class under General de Gaulle in France, large industrialists under Pinochet. Under totalitarianism, no one feels safe except for the power elite. The history of the twentieth century is particularly replete with such regimes. The term “totalitarianism” was born in Italy since the times of Mussolini, but it found its extreme manifestation a bit later - in Hitler’s Third Reich’s Nazism, the Khmer Rouge ideology, Maoism, Turkmenia’s Turkmenism and Juche’s ideology in North Korea
