Totalitarianism is a system of political power in which the state, with the help of power structures, establishes total control over all spheres of society. It differs from authoritarianism - another undemocratic system - in that it tries to penetrate thoughts, personal life, and even the beliefs of each person. 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 from the time of Stalin and longing for a “firm hand” are still found among citizens. They are opposed by people with opposing views who claim that totalitarianism is Stalinism. They argue for their theory with the following arguments: the official ideology of "Marxism-Leninism" dominated the Stalinist empire, which all citizens should have shared. Loyalty to this worldview should have been demonstrated by everyone everywhere - for example, even scientific works on mathematics that were far from politics should have been preceded by references to the great achievements of socialist management.
The second argument that totalitarianism is Stalinism is that police control was established in the Land of Soviets of that period, and total control. From the kindergarten, a feeling was raised that the whole country lives surrounded by enemies, both external - imperialist "camp countries" and internal - saboteurs who are wrecking. Any citizen could turn out to be this "enemy of the people", and the majority of the population was afraid of representatives of a special omnipotent power structure - the Cheka, the NKVD, and later the KGB.
The one-party system of power also testifies in favor of the fact that totalitarianism is Stalinism. The Communist Party produces ideological absolutism - any “deviation” is brutally persecuted. All organizations, the press and education are subordinate to the dominant 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 an unregulated power to generate income. Slave labor (Gulag) was widely used.
So, by what system are some of our pensioners nostalgic? If everything was so bad, then where did such sentiment come from to the image of “friend of all athletes” and “father of nations” Stalin? Yes, the Soviet Union of the 1930s was a totalitarian regime, but in a later period it could not be so called. The later Soviet system, rather, fell under the description of authoritarianism. These two systems of undemocratic state system - 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, spiritual and ideological.
Under authoritarianism, there is a whole layer of the population that feels comfortable and safe under this regime - workers in large cities in the USSR, the middle class under General de Gaulle in France, and large industrialists under Pinochet. Under totalitarianism, no one feels safe except the ruling elite. The history of the twentieth century is particularly replete with such regimes. The term “totalitarianism” was born in Italy in the times of Mussolini, but found its extreme manifestation a little later - in Nazism of the Third Reich Hitler, the ideology of the Khmer Rouge, Maoism, Turkmenistan under Turkmenbashi and the Juche ideology in North Korea