Editing Totalitarianism (section)

==Historiography==
=== "Totalitarians" and "Revisionists" ===
The Western [[historiography]] of the USSR and of the Soviet period of Russian history and is in two schools of research and interpretation: (i) the traditionalist school of historiography and (ii) the revisionist school of historiography;<ref name="Haynes & Klehr 2003, pp. 11–57"/> the traditionalists and neo-traditionalists, or anti-revisionists, are also known as 'totalitarian school' or 'totalitarian approach' and 'Cold War' historians,<ref name="mawdsley"/><ref name="suny">[[Ronald Suny]]. ''Red Flag Unfurled: History, Historians and the Russian Revolution'' ([[Verso Books]], 2017).</ref> for relying on concepts and interpretations rooted in the early years of the Cold War and even in the sphere Russian [[White émigré]]s of the 1920s.<ref name="mawdsley"/>

Traditionalist-school historians characterise themselves as objective reporters of the claimed totalitarianism allegedly inherent to [[Marxism]], to [[Communism]], and to the political nature of [[Communist states]], such as the USSR, while the Cold War revisionists criticized the politically liberal and anti-communist bias they perceived in the predominance of the traditionalists and describe their approach as emotional and oversimplifying.<ref name="Haynes & Klehr 2003, pp. 11–57"/> Revisionist-school historians criticise the traditionalist school's concentration upon the police-state aspects of Cold War history which they say leads it to{{failed verification|date=January 2025}} anti-communist interpretation of history biased towards a right-wing interpretation of the documentary facts. The revisionists also oppose the equation of Nazism and Communism and Stalinism and stress such their ideological differences as the humanist and egalitarian origins of Communist ideology.<ref name="Haynes & Klehr 2003, pp. 11–57">{{cite book |last1=Haynes |first1=John Earl |author-link1=John Earl Haynes |last2=Klehr |first2=Harvey |author-link2=Harvey Klehr |date=2003 |chapter=Revising History |title=In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage |location=San Francisco |publisher=Encounter |pages=11–57 |isbn=1893554724}}</ref> In the 1960s, revisionists studying the Cold War and the Communist movement in the U.S. criticized the dominant ideas that American Communists were an actual threat to the United States<ref name="Haynes & Klehr 2003, pp. 11–57"/> and that the Cold War was the fault of Stalin's territorial and political ambitions and that Soviet expansionism and its alleged strife to conquer the world forced the U.S. to turn from isolationism to a global containment policy.<ref name="suny"/>

The difference between these two historiographic directions is not only political, but also as methodological: the 'traditionalists' focus on politics, ideology and personalities of the Bolshevik and Communist leaders, putting the latter in the centre of history while largely ignoring social processes,<ref name="suny"/> and traditionalists present "history from above", directed by the leaders, while the revisionists put emphasis on "history from below"<ref name="mawdsley">{{Cite book |last=Mawdsley |first=Evan |author-link=Evan Mawdsley |title=The Russian Civil War|year=2011|publisher=Birlinn |isbn=9780857901231}}</ref> and social history of the Soviet regime,<ref name="suny"/> and they describe the traditionalists as '(right-wing) [[Romanticism|romantics]].'<ref name="Haynes & Klehr 2003, pp. 11–57"/> In their turn, the traditionalists defend their approach and methodology, dismiss focus on social history and accuse their opponents of Marxism and of rationalizing the actions of the Bolsheviks and failing to recognize the primary role of "one man" leading a movement ([[Vladimir Lenin]] or [[Adolf Hitler]]). Between the late 1970s and early 1980s, revisionist approaches became largely accepted in academic circles, and the term "revisionism" migrated to characterize a group of social historians focusing on the working class and the upheavals of the Stalin years. At the same time, traditionalist historians retained popularity and influence outside academic circles, especially in politics and public spheres of the United States, where they supported harder policies towards the USSR: for example, [[Zbigniew Brzezinski]] served as National Security Advisor to President [[Jimmy Carter]], while [[Richard Pipes]], a prominent historian of 'totalitarian school', headed the CIA group [[Team B]]; after 1991, their views have found popularity not only in the West, but also in the former USSR.<ref name="suny"/>
[[File:Dyadya lenin.jpg|thumb|upright|1920 Soviet propaganda poster with a complimentary cartoon of [[Vladimir Lenin]] by [[Viktor Deni]]. According to 'traditionalist' historians, Lenin was the first politician to establish a totalitarian regime; such description have been opposed by the 'revisionists' and other authors.]]

=== Leninism and the October Revolution ===
{{main|October Revolution#Historiography}}
Since the 1980s, there has been a debate  over the nature of the [[October Revolution]] between the traditionalists and the revisionists as well as a debate about the nature of the government of [[Vladimir Lenin]]. Traditionalist scholars believe that the government of Vladimir Lenin was a totalitarian dictatorship but revisionist scholars do not; the core argument of the traditionalists was based on their belief that the Revolution was a violent act which was carried out "from above" by a small group of intellectuals with brute force.<ref name="mawdsley"/> Such traditionalist historians as [[Richard Pipes]] claimed that [[History of Soviet Russia and the Soviet Union (1917–1927)|Soviet Russia of 1917–1924]] was as totalitarian as the [[History of the Soviet Union (1927–1953)|Soviet Union under Stalin]] was, and they also claim that [[Stalinism|Stalinist totalitarianism]] was a mere continuation of Lenin's policies because Stalinism was prefigured by [[Leninism|Lenin's ideology]],<ref name="lenin1"/><ref name="ryan">{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=xxGttzFXqaYC | isbn=978-0-415-67396-9 | title=Lenin's Terror: The Ideological Origins of Early Soviet State Violence | date=2012 | publisher=Routledge }}</ref> thar Lenin was the "inventor" (Riley) of totalitarianism, and that further totalitarian regimes just implemented the policies already invented:<ref name="riley"/> for example, Pipes compared Lenin to Hitler and stated that "The Stalinist and Nazi [[holocaust]]s" stemmed from Lenin's [[Red Terror]] and had "much greater decorum" than the latter.<ref name="suny"/> The revisionists, on the contrary, stressed the genuinely 'popular' nature of the 1917 Revolution, and tended to see a discontinuity between Leninism and Stalinism;<ref name="mawdsley"/> a revisionist historian [[Ronald Suny]] cites Hannah Arendt who distinguished Lenin's terror of the [[Russian Civil War]], "a means to exterminate and frighten opponents", from totalitarian terror aimed not at specific enemies but at fulfilling ideological goals, solving the problem of inequality and poverty, "an instrument to rule masses who are perfectly obedient."<ref name="suny"/> It was also noted that Stalin became an uncontested dictator after a period of "authoritarian pluralism",<ref name="san"/> while the one-party dictatorship and mass violence (the Red Terror) were interpreted not as a result not of Lenin's totalitarian "blueprint", but rather of reactions (yet justified by the ideology) to current events and external factors, including wartime conditions and the struggle for survival,<ref name="ryan"/><ref name="suny"/> some historians highlighted the initial attempts of the Bolsheviks to form a coalition government.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Carr |first1=Edward Hallett |author-link1=E. H. Carr|title=The Bolshevik revolution 1917 – 1923. Vol. 1 |date=1977 |publisher=Penguin books |isbn=978-0-14-020749-1 |pages=111–112 |edition=Reprinted}}</ref>

[[Martin Malia]] noted that the debates on history were politically significant: if the 'traditionalists' were right, "[[Communism]]" "must be abolished", but if they were not, it could be reformed.<ref name="suny"/> Understanding of relationship of Lenin and Stalin as a continuity of the totalitarian regime was consensual for a major period; the first revisionists of the 1960s, social historians, also believed it to be a continuity, but as a continuity of policies of modernisation, not as a continuity of totalitarianism; starting from the end of the 1960s, availability of new Soviet materials allowed to dispute the continuity for such historians as [[Moshe Lewin]] and break the consensus.<ref>{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=sJGoHCNBoOQC | title=Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation | publisher=Transaction Publishers | isbn=978-1-4128-3502-2 }}</ref> According to [[Evan Mawdsley]], "the 'revisionist’ school had been dominant from the 1970s", and achieved "some success" in challenging the traditionalists.<ref name="mawdsley"/>

=== Revisionists on Stalinism ===
[[File:PropagandaStudy 6.jpg|thumb|A document from the collection of [[Henri Max Corwin]], equating [[Nazism]] with [[Stalinism]].]]
The death of Stalin in 1953 voided the simplistic ''totalitarian model'' of the police-state USSR as the epitome of ''the totalitarian state''.<ref name="Laqueur, Walter pages 225-227">{{cite book |last=Laqueur |first=Walter |author-link=Walter Laqueur |date=1987 |title=The Fate of the Revolution: Interpretations of Soviet History from 1917 to the Present |location=New York |publisher=Scribner's |pages=225–227 |isbn=978-0684189031}}</ref> Starting from the 1970s, the 'revisionist' historians,<ref name="ahor"/> described as those who "insisted that the old image of the Soviet Union as a totalitarian state bent on world domination was oversimplified or just plain wrong" and focused not on typology of power, but social history,<ref>{{cite journal|last=Lenoe|first=Matt|title=Did Stalin Kill Kirov and Does It Matter?|journal=The Journal of Modern History|volume=74|issue=2|year=2002|pages=352–380|issn=0022-2801|doi=10.1086/343411|s2cid=142829949}}</ref><ref name="trav2"/> such as [[Sheila Fitzpatrick]] began challenging the totalitarian paradigm; without denying the state violence by the regime, these scholars argued that the Stalinist system could not and did not rule only through coercion and terror, and pointed to support within the population for many of Stalin's policies and argued that the party and state were often responsive to people's desires and values.<ref name="ahor">{{Cite book |last1=Riasanovsky |first1=Nicholas Valentine |author-link1=Nicholas V. Riasanovsky |url=https://archive.org/details/historyofrussia0000rias_l2q3 |title=A History of Russia |last2=Steinberg |first2=Mark D. |author-link2=Mark D. Steinberg |date=2011 |publisher=[[Oxford University Press]] |isbn=978-0-1953-4197-3 |edition=8th |location=New York Oxford |page=468}}</ref> More to it, they examined the substantial differences of Stalinist and Nazi violence that inevitably put into question the attempt to gather Stalin's and Hitler's regimes into a single category which was presented by the concept of totalitarianism.<ref name="trav2"/> In 1999 the sociologists [[Randall Collins]] and [[David Waller]] grouped the concept of totalitarianism among the "theories that were completely wrong"; in ''Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared'' (2008), Fitzpatrick and [[Michael Geyer]] critically examined the concept of totalitarianism and made a very detailed comparison of similarities and substantial differences between Hitler and Stalin and made conclusion in agreement with the point of Collins and Waller.<ref>{{cite journal | url=https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/8/article/460844/pdf | title=Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared (Review) | journal=Holocaust and Genocide Studies | date=2011 | volume=25 | issue=3 | pages=457–459 | last1=Orlow | first1=Dietrich | doi=10.1093/hgs/dcr052 }}</ref>

Some historians who did not align themselves with the 'revisionist school' later openly stated that Stalinist system cannot be regarded as totalitarian. For example, the historian [[Robert Service (historian)|Robert Service]] in his biography of Stalin wrote that "this was not a totalitarian dictatorship as conventionally defined because Stalin lacked the capacity, even at the height of his power, to secure automatic universal compliance with his wishes."<ref>{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=hSWK6Dh4wRgC | isbn=978-0-674-01697-2 | title=Stalin: A Biography | date=2005 | publisher=Harvard University Press }}</ref> [[Eric Hobsbawm]] wrote that although Stalin indeed wanted to achieve total control of the population, he did not establish an actual totalitarian system, what, as he said, "throws considerable doubt on the usefulness of the term."<ref>{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ktcvDwAAQBAJ | isbn=978-963-386-130-1 | title=Totalitarian Societies and Democratic Transition: Essays in memory of Victor Zaslavsky | date=10 July 2017 | publisher=Central European University Press }}</ref>

According to Fitzpatrick, "totalitarian-model scholarship" - the USSR as a "top-down entity," a monolithic party grounded on ideology and ruling by terror over a passive society – "was in effect a mirror image of the Soviet self-representation, but with the moral signs reversed (instead of the party being always right, it was always wrong)."<ref name="trav2"/> A fact common to the revisionist-school interpretations of the [[History of the Soviet Union (1927–1953)|reign of Stalin]] (1927–1953) was that the USSR was a country with weak social institutions, and that [[state terrorism]] against Soviet citizens indicated the political illegitimacy of Stalin's government:<ref name="Laqueur, Walter pages 225-227"/> to critics of totalitarian model state terror was a mark of a weak regime, and [[J. Arch Getty]] wrote of a "technically weak and politically divided party whose organisational relationships seem more primitive than totalitarian", commenting the [[Smolensk Archive]], and so, the criticism of accepted model began with labelling Stalinism as "inefficient totalitarianism", where the dictator had to rely on "shock methods" to counter the resistance of local autonomies and administrations and political factionalism within the apparatus (including its highest levels);<ref name="san"/> the citizens of the USSR were not devoid of [[Agency (sociology)|personal agency]] or of material resources for living, nor were Soviet citizens [[Social alienation|psychologically atomised]] by the totalist ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union<ref name="Fitzpatrick 1999">{{cite book |last=Fitzpatrick |first=Sheila |author-link=Sheila Fitzpatrick |date=1999 |title=[[Everyday Stalinism|Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s]] |location=New York |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=978-0195050004}}</ref>—because "the Soviet political system was chaotic, that [[Bureaucracy|institutions]] often escaped the control of the centre, and that Stalin's leadership consisted, to a considerable extent, in responding, on an ''ad hoc'' basis, to political crises as they arose",<ref>{{cite book|last1=Davies|first1=Sarah|last2=Harris|first2=James|title=Stalin: A New History|chapter=Joseph Stalin: Power and Ideas|date=8 September 2005|publisher=Cambridge University Press|isbn=978-1-139-44663-1|pages=4–5}}</ref> and many purges and forced collectivisations were local or even "popular initiatives which Stalin and his henchmen' could not control", while the people collectively resisted by such methods as refusing to work efficiently and migrating by the millions.<ref name="san"/> That the [[legitimacy (political)|legitimacy]] of Stalin's régime of government relied upon the popular support of the Soviet citizenry as much as Stalin relied upon state terrorism for their support. That by politically purging Soviet society of anti–Soviet people Stalin created employment and upward [[social mobility]] for the post–War generation of working class citizens for whom such socio-economic progress was unavailable before the [[Russian Revolution]] (1917–1924). That the people who benefited from Stalin's social engineering became [[Stalinism|Stalinists]] loyal to the USSR; thus, the Revolution had fulfilled her promise to those Stalinist citizens and they supported Stalin because of the state terrorism.<ref name="Fitzpatrick 1999"/> 

The revisionists also conducted new comparative studies of the Third Reich and the USSR, but stressed substantial differences between them. Thus, fascisms lasted much shorter, but experienced cumulative radicalization until their collapse, while Stalinism arose in stabilized and pacified country and fell apart due to an internal crisis after a post-totalitarian period; fascism maintained traditional elites, while Stalinism was a result of revolution and radical social transformation; their ideologies were antipodal; totalitarian model likened "[[charismatic authority|charismatic authorities]]" of Stalin and Hitler and Mussolini, but they were different: Hitler and Mussolini were popular figures of "providential men" who needed an almost physical contact with the followers and exemplified the totalitarian "New Man" with their bodies and behaviour, while Stalin's cult is described as "afar", purely artificial and much more distant, and Stalin never merged with the people, always staying "hidden from his followers". Mass state violence was also different: Soviet violence was primarily internal, while the one of the Nazis primarily external; the former was an ineffective and irrational means of a rational goal, modernization, while Nazis sought extremely irrational goals with rational industrial means; the efficiency of Soviet [[forced labour camps]] ([[Gulag]]s) was measured by the authorities by practical results, like building train tracks, which would eventually lay a basis of modernity, while Nazism mobilized industry for extermination, and the efficiency of [[extermination camps]] was measured by the number of deaths. Thus, the revisionists have argued, both regimes committed inhumane mass violence, but their internal logic was fundamentally different.<ref name="trav2"/>

In the case of [[East Germany]], Eli Rubin posited that East Germany was not a totalitarian state but rather a society shaped by the confluence of unique economic and political circumstances interacting with the concerns of ordinary citizens.<ref>{{cite book |last=Rubin |first=Eli |date=2008 |title=Synthetic Socialism: Plastics & Dictatorship in the German Democratic Republic |location=Chapel Hill |publisher=University of North Carolina Press |isbn=978-1469606774}}</ref>

=== Nazism and Fascism ===
[[File:Gen. Otto Schumann, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Fritz Schmidt (1941, Den Haag).jpg|thumb|upright|[[Otto Schumann]], [[Arthur Seyss-Inquart]] and [[Fritz Schmidt (Generalkommissar)|Fritz Schmidt]] award a sportswoman with a portrait of [[Adolf Hitler]].]]
[[Enzo Traverso]] and Andrew Vincent point out that the "totalitarian approach" or the theoretical concept of totalitarianism, which presented the idea of a monolithic party, no separation between state and society, and total mobilization of the atomized masses and total control over the state, society and economy, is not applicable not only to the USSR, but also to Nazi Germany and Fascist states as well, since it also did not present a monolithic structure exercising total control over society, but on the contrary, that Nazi bureaucracy was highly "chaotic", anomic and disorganized and disunited, and that Adolf Hitler was a "weak dictator" and "[[laissez-faire]] leader", as said by such historians as [[Hans Mommsen]] and [[Ian Kershaw]];<ref name="trav2"/><ref name="san"/> this description of Nazi Germany was first introduced in 1942 by [[Franz Leopold Neumann]] in the work ''[[Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism]]'', where he provocatively presented Hitlerism "a Behemoth, a non-state, a chaos, a rule of lawlessness, disorder, and anarchy", and later entered historiography of Nazism. In the 1970s, the German historians of [[Functionalism–intentionalism debate|functionalist school]] presented Nazism as a "[[Polycracy|polycratic]]" system grounded on different centers of power – the Nazi party, the army, the economic elites, and the state bureaucracy; to such historians, totalitarian monolithic state and party were just a facade (similarly to Fitzpatrick's assessment of Stalinism).<ref name="trav2"/><ref name="av">{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Q6XpEAAAQBAJ | title=Modern Political Ideologies | isbn=978-1-119-98165-7 | last1=Vincent | first1=Andrew | date=15 December 2023 | publisher=John Wiley & Sons }}</ref> Historians like Mommsen and [[Ian Kershaw]] were critical of concepts of totalitarianism and focused on lack of bureaucratic coherence in the Nazi system and on its immanent tendency towards self-destruction. Michael Mann wrote that these descriptions doubted theories of totalitarianism, since "anything less like the rigid top-down bureaucracy of totalitarian theory is hard to imagine", but that Stalinism and Nazism "belong together", and that "it is only a question of finding the right family name". According to Mann, "totalitarian theorists depicted an unreal level of coherence for any state. Modern states are a long way short of Hegelian or Weberian rational bureaucracy and they rarely act as singular, coherent actors. Normally regimes are factionalised; in an unpredictable world they stumble along with many foul-ups. Second, we should remember Weber's essential point about bureaucracy: it kept politics out of administration. Political and moral values ('value rationality') were settled outside of bureaucratic administration, which then limited itself to finding efficient means of implementing those values ('formal rationality'). Contrary to totalitarian theory, the twentieth-century states most capable of such formally rational bureaucracy were not the dictatorships but the democracies."<ref name="san"/>

The concept of totalitarianism appeared in the debates among German historians and public intellectuals known as ''[[Historikerstreit]]'', in which one of the parties defended the idea of exceptionalism of Nazism, while their conservative opponents believed that the Third Reich may be explained through comparison with the USSR; at the same time, such conservative historians as [[Karl-Dietrich Bracher]] and [[Klaus Hildebrand]] rejected the notion of Nazism as a branch of generic fascism, on the grounds that the uniqueness of Nazism lay in the person and ideology of Hitler and that Nazism was defined primarily by Hitler's personality and personal beliefs rather than by any external factors.<ref>{{cite journal | url=https://newleftreview.org/issues/i176/articles/ian-kershaw-the-nazi-state-an-exceptional-state | title=The Nazi State: An Exceptional State? | journal=New Left Review | date=August 1989 | issue=I/176 | pages=47–67 | last1=Kershaw | first1=Ian }}</ref>

[[Stanley Payne]] wrote that indeed, both Mussolini and Hitler failed to achieve full totalitarianism, and of Mussolini it was said that his regime was not totalitarian (excluding "merely fascist" Italy from totalitarian regimes, started by [[Hannah Arendt]] who also thought that Nazism became totalitarian only in 1938–1942, is a not unpopular but contested position in contemporary historiography<ref name="italy">{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=3urAEAAAQBAJ | isbn=978-0-691-22612-5 | title=Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin: Freedom, Politics and Humanity | date=21 November 2023 | publisher=Princeton University Press|quote=Of course, the exclusion of fascist Italy from the totalitarian family is not a surprising claim today. Those who separate ('merely' fascist) Italy from (properly totalitarian) Germany and Russia are hardly a minority among recent scholars, though their view remains contested.}}</ref>), so Payne concludes that "only a socialist or Communist system can achieve full totalitarianism, since total control requires total institutional revolution that can only be effected by state socialism" (according to Payne, both Lenin and Stalin were totalitarian). Payne writes that "it is easy to argue either that many different kinds of regimes are totalitarian or conversely that none were perfectly total", yet, he writes that the concept "totalitarianism is both valid and useful if defined in the precise and literal sense of a state system that attempts to exercise direct control over all significant aspects of all major national institutions."<ref>{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=x_MeR06xqXAC | title=A History of Fascism, 1914–1945 | isbn=978-0-299-14873-7 | last1=Payne | first1=Stanley G. | date=January 1996 | publisher=University of Wisconsin Pres }}</ref>

=== Further debates ===
==== 1980s - 1990s ====
[[File:G-Antitota.jpg|thumb|An 'anti-totalitarian' graffiti in Bucharest, Romania, in 2013, equating Communism with Nazism and [[Iron Guard|Legionarism]]]]
Writing in 1987, [[Walter Laqueur]] dismissed the arguments of revisionists as "reappraisals of Stalin and Stalinism" and compared them with [[Historikerstreit|German 'revisionist' historians]] of Nazism, particularly [[Ernst Nolte]], whom he did not distinguish from functionalist historians of Nazism ("weak dictator" thesis), and called their analysis "Marxist", for which Stalin was "not promising material".<ref name="Laqueur, Walter p. 228">{{cite book |last=Laqueur |first=Walter |author-link=Walter Laqueur |date=1987 |title=The Fate of the Revolution: Interpretations of Soviet History from 1917 to the Present |location=New York |publisher=Scribner's |page=224, 228|isbn=978-0684189031}}</ref> As Laqueur wrote, the historians who disagreed with the revisionists "still ha[d] very strong feelings" towards Stalinism and found concepts such as modernisation inadequate tools for explaining Soviet history, unlike the concept of totalitarianism; citing [[Mikhail Gorbachev]] using the term "totalitarianism", Laqueur wrote that the efforts of the revisionists to abolish the totalitarian model "ha[d] become difficult."<ref>{{cite book |last=Laqueur |first=Walter |author-link=Walter Laqueur |date=1987 |title=The Fate of the Revolution: Interpretations of Soviet History from 1917 to the Present |location=New York |publisher=Scribner's |page=233 |isbn=978-0684189031}}</ref>

[[Laure Neumayer]] posited that "despite the disputes over its heuristic value and its normative assumptions, the concept of totalitarianism made a vigorous return to the political and academic fields at the end of the Cold War".<ref>{{cite book |last=Neumayer |first=Laure |author-link=Laure Neumayer |year=2018 |title=The Criminalisation of Communism in the European Political Space after the Cold War |publisher=Routledge |isbn= 9781351141741}}</ref> In 1978, the term was 'revived' in Western Europe: such historians as [[François Furet]] produced 'revisionist' critical re-evaluations of the [[French Revolution]] which, according to them, led to the emergence of totalitarianism, while in Italy, "anti-anti-Fascist" historians, notably [[Renzo De Felice]] and after him [[Emilio Gentile]], challenged the 'myth' produced by the hegemonic role of the Communists in the Italian resistance, stated that the choice between Fascism and Communism was equal for Italy, and implied that the latter could be even worse, what led to the resurgence of the concept of totalitarianism as a new dimension of studies of Fascism, while the ones who doubted their theories were "swept away" with the collapse of the Eastern Bloc between 1989 and 1991. The 'revival' of the concept which started in the 1970s in Europe took some time to re-appear in English-language literature, as the 'revisionists' achieved hegemony in the academy, while the 'totalitarians' retained control over public discourse; the European debates were transferred to English-language historiography by [[Martin Malia]]. In 1995,<ref name="tot2013">{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=gcFEAQAAQBAJ | isbn=978-1-135-04397-1 | title=Totalitarian Dictatorship: New Histories | date=8 October 2013 | publisher=Routledge }}</ref> Furet made a comparative analysis<ref>{{cite journal |last=Schönpflug |first=Daniel |date=2007 |title=Histoires croisées: François Furet, Ernst Nolte and a Comparative History of Totalitarian Movements |journal=European History Quarterly |volume=37 |issue=2 |pages=265–290 |doi=10.1177/0265691407075595|s2cid=143074271 }}</ref> and used the term ''[[Comparison of Nazism and Stalinism|totalitarian twins]]'' to link Nazism and Stalinism.<ref>{{cite magazine |last=Singer |first=Daniel |author-link=Daniel Singer (journalist) |date=17 April 1995 |title=The Sound and the Furet |url=http://www.thenation.com/doc/19950417/singer |url-status=dead |magazine=[[The Nation]] |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080317075608/https://www.thenation.com/doc/19950417/singer |archive-date=17 March 2008 |access-date= 7 August 2020 |quote=Furet, borrowing from Hannah Arendt, describes Bolsheviks and Nazis as totalitarian twins, conflicting yet united.}}</ref><ref>{{cite magazine |last=Singer |first=Daniel |author-link=Daniel Singer (journalist) |date=2 November 1999 |url=https://www.thenation.com/article/exploiting-tragedy-or-le-rouge-en-noir/ |title=Exploiting a Tragedy, or Le Rouge en Noir |magazine=[[The Nation]] |access-date=7 August 2020 |quote=... the totalitarian nature of Stalin's Russia is undeniable. |archive-date=26 July 2019 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190726020527/https://www.thenation.com/article/exploiting-tragedy-or-le-rouge-en-noir/ |url-status=live }}</ref><ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.remember.org/guide/Facts.root.nazi.html |title=Nazi Fascism and the Modern Totalitarian State |last=Grobman |first=Gary M. |date=1990 |website=Remember.org |access-date=7 August 2020 |quote=The government of [[Nazi Germany]] was a fascist, totalitarian state. |archive-date=2 April 2015 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150402073405/http://www.remember.org/guide/Facts.root.nazi.html |url-status=live }}</ref> Pipes and Malia continued depicting ideological developments as the grounds of communism, and thus, totalitarianism, drawing a line from utopianism and the French Revolution, which Pipes compared to a "virus", to Lenin, and to describe the nature of totalitarianism, they used the concept of [[ideocracy]]. Furet and [[Ernst Nolte]], a historian praised by Furet, also identified [[anti-Fascism]] as Communist totalitarianism; Nolte presented a conflict between totalitarianisms as [[European Civil War]], stating that it was begun by Bolshevism and produced Nazism, an "inverted Bolshevism", thus assessing the latter as only a response to the threat of Bolshevism and the Holocaust and [[Operation Barbarossa]] as "both a retaliation and a preventive measure" against Bolshevism. Another major work belonging to the same period was ''[[The Black Book of Communism]]'' (1997), the editor of which, [[Stephane Courtois]], stressed structural homology of totalitarian systems embodied in identity of "class genocide" of Communism and "race genocide" of Nazism, and concluded that Communism was more murderous than Nazism<ref name="trav2"/><ref>Traverso, Enzo. "The New Anti-Communism: Rereading the Twentieth Century" // History and Revolution: Refuting Revisionism, ed. Mike aynes and Jim Wolfreys (London: Verso, 2007), 138–155.,</ref> or any other ideology from counting and summing the number of victims that can be attributed to '[[Communist state]]s' and thus communism in general, what triggered an emotional debate in France on whether Communism should be treated as a single unified phenomena and whether "a blanket condemnation" of Communism as an ideology makes sense.<ref name="dbt"/> While Nolte and the historians supporting him were not victorious in the ''Historikerstreit'', but his influence on Furet and the historians outside Germany legitimized his ideas, and they returned to Germany in other forms, what thus led to the resurgence of the concept in Germany. The concept entered historiography in Eastern Europe, in former countries of the Eastern Bloc, describing not only Stalinism, but the whole Communist project in general<ref name="tot2013"/> along with the "[[Double genocide theory]]", which summarized Nazi and Stalinist violence into a single metanarrative and became an influential framework of interpretation.<ref name="dbt">{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=u29KEAAAQBAJ | title=European Memory and Conflicting Visions of the Past | isbn=978-3-030-79843-7 | last1=Toth | first1=Mano | date=25 October 2021 | publisher=Springer }}</ref>

Furet's totalitarian interpretation of the French Revolution, directed against the classic "Marxist" or "Jacobin" interpretation, triggered debates with such historians as [[Michel Vovelle]], who led new studies on it; as [[Eric Hobsbawm]] concluded in 2007, "the Furet Revolution" was "now over".<ref>{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=9bstBgAAQBAJ | title=A Companion to the French Revolution | isbn=978-1-118-97752-1 | last1=McPhee | first1=Peter | date=15 December 2014 | publisher=John Wiley & Sons }}</ref> In regards to Furet's ideas on the 20th century, Hobsbawm wrote that "[Nazism and Stalinism] were functionally and not ideologically derived [...] Furet, as a distinguished historian of ideas, knows that they belonged to different if structurally convergent taxonomic families"; contrary to conception of anti-Fascism as a mask of Stalinism, Hobsbawm attributed the "alliance" between liberalism and communism, which had enabled capitalism to overcome its crisis, and wrote that Furet's work "reads like a belated product of the Cold War era".<ref>{{cite journal | url=https://newleftreview.org/issues/i220/articles/eric-hobsbawm-history-and-illusion | title=History and Illusion | journal=New Left Review | date=December 1996 | issue=I/220 | pages=116–125 | last1=Hobsbawm | first1=Eric }}</ref><ref>{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=8YvXEAAAQBAJ | title=Learning from the Enemy: An Intellectual History of Antifascism in Interwar Europe | isbn=978-1-80429-227-3 | last1=Bresciani | first1=Marco | date=18 June 2024 | publisher=Verso Books }}</ref> Historians [[Enzo Traverso]] and [[Arno J. Mayer]] and the author [[Domenico Losurdo]] accepted Nolte's concept of the "European Civil War", although set its beginning to 1914 and differently interpreted it, not in terms of struggle between two totalitarianisms.<ref>{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=MeKzEAAAQBAJ | title=Stalinism and the Dialectics of Saturn: Anticommunism, Marxism, and the Fate of the Soviet Union | isbn=978-1-6669-3090-0 | last1=Greene | first1=Douglas | date=20 March 2023 | publisher=Rowman & Littlefield }}</ref>

[[Michael Parenti]] (1997) and [[James Petras]] (1999) have suggested that the totalitarianism concept has been politically employed and used for anti-communist purposes. Parenti has also analysed how "left anti-communists" attacked the Soviet Union during the Cold War.<ref>{{cite book |last=Parenti |first=Michael |author-link=Michael Parenti |date=1997 |title=Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism |location=San Francisco |publisher=City Lights Books |pages=41–58 |isbn=978-0872863293}}</ref> For Petras, the [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]] funded the [[Congress for Cultural Freedom]] to attack "Stalinist anti-totalitarianism."<ref>{{cite journal |last=Petras |first=James |author-link=James Petras |date=November 1, 1999 |title=The CIA and the Cultural Cold War Revisited |url=https://monthlyreview.org/1999/11/01/the-cia-and-the-cultural-cold-war-revisited/ |url-status=live |journal=[[Monthly Review]] |volume=51 |issue=6 |page=47 |doi=10.14452/MR-051-06-1999-10_4 |access-date=June 19, 2021 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210516153420/https://monthlyreview.org/1999/11/01/the-cia-and-the-cultural-cold-war-revisited/ |archive-date=May 16, 2021}}</ref>

According to some scholars and authors, such as [[Domenico Losurdo]] calling Joseph Stalin ''totalitarian'' instead of ''authoritarian'' has been asserted to be a high-sounding but specious excuse for Western self-interest, just as surely as the counterclaim that allegedly debunking the totalitarian concept may be a high-sounding but specious excuse for Russian self-interest. For Losurdo, totalitarianism is a polysemic concept with origins in [[Christian theology]] and applying it to the political sphere requires an operation of abstract schematism which makes use of isolated elements of historical reality to place fascist regimes and the Soviet Union in the dock together, serving the anti-communism of Cold War-era intellectuals rather than reflecting intellectual research.<ref>{{cite journal |last=Losurdo |first=Domenico |author-link=Domenico Losurdo |date=January 2004 |title=Towards a Critique of the Category of Totalitarianism |journal=Historical Materialism |volume=12 |issue=2 |pages=25–55 |doi=10.1163/1569206041551663}}</ref>

====After the 1990s====
After 1990s, criticisms of totalitarianism as a historical concept and a tool of analysis continued; however, while these critics called for expulsion of the concept from academic field, they stated that its legitimate outside it.<ref name="trav2"/> [[Hans Mommsen]] criticized it as "a descriptive concept, not a theory" with "little or no explanatory power": "But the basis of comparison is a shallow one, largely confined to the apparatus of rule." However, he wrote that "the totalitarianism concept allows comparative analysis of a number of techniques and instruments of domination, and this, too, must be seen as legitimate in itself", and that it is legitimate in "non-scholarly usage".<ref name="san"/> [[Enzo Traverso]] in his essay "Totalitarianism Between History and Theory" (2017) dismisses the term as "both useless and irreplaceable" for political science and academic history and cites [[Franz Leopold Neumann]] who called it a Weberian "ideal type", an abstraction that does not exist in reality as opposed to concrete totality of history, and believes it to be a term of abuse in Western political science and propaganda, he writes about its legitimacy for storing traumatic collective experience of the 20th century state violence:
<blockquote>Thus, if the concept of totalitarianism continues to be criticized for its ambiguities, weaknesses, and abuses, it probably will not be abandoned. Beyond being a Western banner, it stores the memory of a century that experienced Auschwitz and Kolyma, the death camps of Nazism, the Stalinist Gulags, and Pol Pot's killing fields. There lies its legitimacy, which does not need any academic recognition.<ref name="trav2"/></blockquote>

In the essay, "Totalitarianism: Defunct Theory, Useful Word" (2010), the historian [[John Connelly (historian)|John Connelly]] said that ''totalitarianism'' is a useful word, but that the old 1950s ''theory'' about totalitarianism is defunct among scholars, because "The word is as functional now as it was fifty years ago. It means the kind of régime that existed in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the Soviet satellites, Communist China, and maybe Fascist Italy, where the word originated. . . . Who are we to tell [[Vaclav Havel|Václav Havel]] or [[Adam Michnik]] that they were fooling themselves when they perceived their rulers as totalitarian? Or, for that matter, any of the millions of former subjects of Soviet-type rule who use the local equivalents of the Czech [word] ''totalita'' to describe the systems they lived under before 1989? [Totalitarianism] is a useful word, and everyone knows what it means as a general referent. Problems arise when people confuse the useful descriptive term with the old 'theory' from the 1950s."<ref name="Connelly 2010">{{cite journal |last=Connelly |first=John |date=2010 |title=Totalitarianism: Defunct Theory, Useful Word |journal=Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History |volume=11 |issue=4 |pages=819–835 |doi=10.1353/kri.2010.0001|s2cid=143510612 }}</ref>