Totalitarian Triumph

Representative government collapsed in many countries under the sheer weight of social and economic crisis. After 1929, Mussolini in Italy, Stalin in the USSR, and Hitler in Germany were able to mobilize vast support for their regimes. Desperate for economic relief, many citizens supported political violence as key to restoring well-being. Scholars have classified the fascist, Nazi, and communist regimes of the 1930s as totalitarian. The term totalitarianism refers to highly centralized systems of government that attempt to control society and ensure obedience through a single party and police terror. Born during World War I and gaining support in its aftermath, totalitarian governments broke with liberal principles of freedom and natural rights and came to wage war on their own citizens. Still, important differences existed among totalitarian states, especially between fascist and communist states. Whereas communism denounced private ownership of property and economic inequality, fascism supported them as crucial to national might. (See “Terms of History: Fascism.”)