By the mid-1930s a new kind of radical dictatorship — termed totalitarian — had emerged in the Soviet Union, Germany, and, to a lesser extent, Italy. Before discussing totalitarianism and how it developed in individual countries, we must first note that many scholars have disagreed quite fundamentally over the definition of totalitarianism, its origins, and to what countries and leaders the term should apply. Moreover, when the Cold War began in the late 1940s (see “The World Remade” in Chapter 31), conservatives, particularly in the United States, commandeered the term as shorthand for an evil, ruthless, frightening Communist regime in the Soviet Union and its satellites. Liberals, especially in the 1960s, used the term more loosely to refer to every system they felt inhibited freedom — from local police to the U.S. Pentagon. Thus by the 1980s many scholars questioned the term’s usefulness. More recently, with these caveats, scholars have returned to the term to explain and understand fascism, Nazism, and communism in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.

It can be argued that totalitarianism began with the total war effort of 1914–1918 (see Chapter 28), as governments acquired total control over all areas of society in order to achieve one supreme objective: victory. This provided a model for future totalitarian states. As the French thinker Élie Halévy observed in 1936, the varieties of modern totalitarian tyranny — fascism, Nazism, and communism — could be thought of as “feuding brothers” with a common father: the nature of modern war.2

The consequences of the Versailles treaty and the severe economic and political problems that Germany and Italy faced in the 1920s left both those countries ripe for new leadership, but not necessarily totalitarian dictators. It was the Great Depression that must be viewed as the immediate cause of the modern totalitarian state. Some scholars have argued that without the global depression and the German economy’s complete collapse, Hitler could not have seized power in the early 1930s. In 1956 American historians Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski identified at least six key features of modern totalitarian states.3 Although some scholars have been critical of their model, the six features remain useful as instruments for comparison and analysis. The six features are (1) an official ideology that demanded adherence from everyone, that touched every aspect of a citizen’s existence, and that promised to lead to a “perfect final stage of mankind”; (2) a single ruling party, whose “passionate and unquestionably-dedicated-to-the-ideology” members were drawn from a small percentage of the total population (following Lenin’s “vanguard of the proletariat” model; see “Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution” in Chapter 28), hierarchically organized, and led by one charismatic leader, the “dictator”; (3) complete control of “all weapons of armed combat”; (4) complete monopoly of all means of mass communication; (5) a system of terror, physical and psychic, enforced by the party and the secret police; and (6) central control and direction of the entire economy.

While all these features were present in Stalin’s Communist Soviet Union and Hitler’s Nazi Germany, there were some major differences. Most notably, Soviet communism seized private property for the state and sought to level society by crushing the middle classes. Nazi Germany also criticized big landowners and industrialists but, unlike the Communists, did not try to nationalize private property, so the middle classes survived. This difference in property and class relations led some scholars to speak of “totalitarianism of the left” — Stalinist Russia — and “totalitarianism of the right” — Nazi Germany.

Moreover, Soviet Communists ultimately had international aims: they sought to unite the workers of the world. Mussolini and Hitler claimed they were interested in changing state and society on a national level only, although Hitler envisioned a greatly expanded “living space” (lebensraum) for Germans in eastern Europe and Russia. Both Mussolini and Hitler used the term fascism to describe their movements’ supposedly “total” and revolutionary character. Orthodox Marxist Communists argued that the Fascists were powerful capitalists seeking to destroy the revolutionary working class and thus protect their enormous profits. So while Communists and Fascists both sought the overthrow of existing society, their ideologies clashed, and they were enemies.

European Fascist movements shared many characteristics, including extreme nationalism; an anti-socialism aimed at destroying working-class movements; a crushing of human individualism; alliances with powerful capitalists and landowners; and glorification of war and the military. Fascists, especially in Germany, also embraced racial homogeneity, a fanatical obsession that led to the Holocaust (see “The Holocaust”). Indeed, while class was the driving force in communist ideology, race and racial purity were profoundly important to Nazi ideology.

Although 1930s Japan has sometimes been called a Fascist society, most recent scholars disagree with this label. Some European Fascist ideas did appear attractive to Japanese political philosophers, such as Hitler’s desire for eastward expansion, which would be duplicated by Japan’s expansion to the Asian mainland. Others included nationalism, militarism, the corporatist economic model, and a single, all-powerful political party. The idea of a Japanese dictator, however, clashed with the emperor’s divine status. Declining support in Europe for democracy and capitalism, plus the Great Depression’s initially devastating effects, also influenced Japanese thinking. However, there were also various ideologically unique forces at work in Japan, including ultranationalism, militarism (building on the historic role of samurai warriors in Japanese society), reverence for traditional ways, emperor worship, and the profound changes to Japanese society beginning with the Meiji Restoration in 1867 (see “The Meiji Restoration” in Chapter 26). These also contributed to the rise of a totalitarian, but not Fascist, state before the Second World War.

In summary, the concept of totalitarianism remains a valuable tool for historical understanding. It correctly highlights that in the 1930s Germany, the Soviet Union, and Japan made an unprecedented “total claim” on the beliefs and behaviors of their respective citizens.4 In this they were never successful. No dictator — whether Hitler, Stalin, or even Mao Zedong later in China — ever gained total control over a nation’s citizens and societies. This was true even when Germans and Russians were building ever-larger concentration camps and gulags (labor camps) to quiet the dissidents and opponents of their regimes. Thus totalitarianism is an idea never fully achieved.