Totalitarianism: On Liberalism's Wrongful Equating of Stalin and Hitler. By: Marc-Antoine Dupuis

​The Soviet Union will be accused of many evils by the West. The author of "The Gulag Archipelago," Solzhenitsyn, even going as far as accusing the USSR of having killed 110 million people (Le Monde 1976). This is an exaggerated case but symptomatic of Cold War propaganda. One of the most well-known discourses stemming from the Cold War is the comparison between Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin: they are totalitarian twins. Popularized by Arendt (1907-1975), she identifies Nazi Germany and Stalin's USSR as the only two totalitarian regimes. More precisely, Germany after 1938, and the USSR in the 1930s (Arendt 2018 [1951]: 56-57).

In "The Origins of Totalitarianism" (1951), Arendt describes the typology of totalitarianism. Her methodology is derived from Montesquieu (Ibid: 16 and 28.). The latter designates three types of regimes: the Republic, the Monarchy, and Despotism. Here is his definition of despotism: "(...) in despotic rule, one person, without law or rule, drives everything by his will and whims." (Montesquieu 2019 [1748]: 70). This regime is characterized notably by the imposition of terror, fear (Ibid: 51). For Arendt, the terms totalitarian and despotic are almost similar: "The proximity between totalitarian governments and despotic regimes is quite evident and extends to almost all areas." (Arendt 2018 [1951]: 48). The totalitarian regime differs from the despotic regime in that, while the despotic regime is without law or rule, the totalitarian regime obeys the great Laws of history and any opposition to progress, justified by these great laws (historical materialism, racism, etc.), will be eliminated. (Ibid 41-42).

The aim here is not to debate whether, firstly, the term totalitarian is relevant to describe a political regime and whether, secondly, the USSR under Stalin was a totalitarian regime. In fact, the question is whether the comparison between Hitler and Stalin, made under the banner of totalitarianism, is pertinent. The thesis is that, as described by Arendt and as propagated during the Cold War, this comparison is not relevant. Among other reasons, because this term is biased by Cold War propaganda, the Nazi regime is, in many respects, much closer to the American and British regimes, Nazi extermination camps are far from comparable to Soviet gulags, and, far from being a homogeneous bloc, the Soviet Communist Party was a place of numerous heterogeneous debates and did not have the technical means to impose a totalitarian regime.

The Cold War

The use of the term totalitarianism does not specifically come from Arendt. Before her, authors like Horkheimer (1895-1973) and Adorno (1903-1969) speak of totalitarianism to draw parallels between the Third Reich and the extreme violence of Western capitalist countries towards colonies and the poorest within the metropolises (Losurdo 2004: 115-116). Simone Weil (1909-1943) will compare Nazi Germany to the USSR, but will draw more comparisons between the Third Reich and colonial empires (Ibid). According to Weil, the reign of Louis XIV (1643-1715) is already marked by a proto-totalitarianism, due to its "reckless and unscrupulous expansionism" (Ibid: 116).

It is necessary to first understand that Arendt's typology of totalitarianism spans three works. In the first two volumes, she includes countries like France, due to its antisemitism, and England for its colonial empire, or denounces the totalitarian practices of Israel towards Arab populations in 1948 (Losurdo 2004: 118-119). It is only in the third volume that she draws a comparison between the USSR and Nazi Germany, published at the beginning of the Cold War. Thus, countries like Mussolini's fascist Italy (1922-1943), which even claimed to be totalitarian, will not be considered totalitarian regimes, nor will Franco's Spain (1936-1975) or Salazar's Portugal (1932-1968) (Ibid: 119). Two of these countries, Portugal under Salazar and Italy, will join NATO, whose main goal is to defend against the USSR. For Arendt, these regimes become "only" single-party dictatorships (Ibid: 124). As she indicates in "The Origins of Totalitarianism": "Neither Lenin nor Mussolini were totalitarian dictators, and they did not even know what totalitarianism really meant" (Arendt 2018 [1951]: 53).

Thus, after 1951 and the beginning of the Cold War, criticisms of Western countries ceased, and the only "politically correct" thesis became the one that targeted only the Third Reich and the USSR (Losurdo 2004: 119). In essence, for Western leaders: "(...) the ideological goal was to equate Stalin and Hitler, even presenting them as 'twin monsters'." (Losurdo 2020: 156). In essence, far from being neutral, this narrative served well during the Cold War to equate Stalin and Hitler, rejecting any other regime that could have fit into the totalitarian category.

The Hitlerian colonial project and the complicity of the West.

In 1953, Arendt describes the world as "The struggle between the free world and the totalitarian world" [emphasis added] (Arendt 2018 [1953]: 87). But what exactly is the free world? Let's first recall that the United States still operates under apartheid, and France still holds a large number of colonies, and fights, or will fight, to keep them. This so-called "free" world actually has strong ties to Hitler's pre-war regime.

Already in Mein Kampf, Hitler regards the United States, a country of white race with "unprecedented inner strength" (Losurdo 2010). In fact, Hitler's colonial project is rather simple, aiming to replicate in the East what the United States did in the West (Losurdo: 2004). The American Indians will be compared to the Slavs of Eastern Europe, a region which, for the Nazis, becomes the new Wild West (Ibid). And American colonization served as a motif to justify Nazi colonization in the East (Whitman 2017: 9).

This comparison is evident from the establishment of the Nuremberg Laws. Indeed, for Hitler, the United States is a "healthily racist" country and serves as a model for the implementation of laws (Whitman 2017: 2). Nazi leaders visiting New York during the New Deal era saw it as a country of white supremacy (Ibid: 28). Many Americans traveled to Germany after 1933 on "study trips and ideological pilgrimages" (Losurdo 2004).

More than just an ideological connection, there was even real complicity between the West and Nazi Germany. For the British, a division of spheres of influence between their empire and the Third Reich was considered a reasonable proposal (Shypley 2020: 155). British and Canadian interests encouraged Hitler's expansion project to the East, as long as it did not interfere with their affairs (Ibid: 156-157). When Liberal Prime Minister Mackenzie King (1926-1948) visited Hitler in 1937, he praised him, especially for his legal repression of communism (Ibid: 155). It is also worth noting that the British, French, Americans, and Japanese intervened in the USSR after the revolution, until 1922, to support the White Army. Thus, nearly 3000 Canadians were sent to counter the Bolsheviks (Ibid: 117). Anticommunism was therefore a common factor between fascism and liberal democracies. And as soon as these fascists came to power, they sabotaged labor rights and privatized many public enterprises, to the detriment of German and Italian workers (Parenti 1997: 7).

In fact, it was to preserve capitalist interests that the British (and Canadians) fought against the Boers in South Africa, between 1899 and 1902 (Ibid: 110). As for the First World War, it was primarily a fight between colonial empires, to see who would take the largest share of the cake (Ibid: 115), at the expense of colonized peoples. It was for these same interests that Americans and Canadians supported right-wing coups in South America or Japanese fascism (Ibid: 132). During the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), Western countries simply turned a blind eye, hoping that the socialists would not take power (Ibid: 146-147). Thus: "We must reconcile with a difficult-to-digest fact: fascism was never ideologically far from the positions of the so-called Western democracies" (Shypley 2020: 149).

The elimination of the individual for progress among the English and Americans.
​
In Nazi Germany, Hitler would use the infamous death camps in his Final Solution as early as 1941. Among others, nearly six million Jews (including 1.3 million Soviet Jews), about six million Soviet civilians, and three million Soviet prisoners of war would be killed in this campaign [1]. The Eastern Front alone would see approximately 40 million casualties out of the 70 to 85 million deaths of the Second World War [2]. A colossal toll for what was essentially a colonial expansion project.

For Arendt, a key element of totalitarianism is the elimination of the individual in favor of progress and the grand Laws of History: any hindrance must be crushed (Arendt 2018 [1951: 71-73). Thus, Stalin and Hitler are equated because both the Soviet leader and the führer used extermination methods to achieve their goals (Ibid: 41-42). However, thanks in part to archives, we know that the gulags have nothing to do with Nazi extermination camps, which have more in common with Western practices. Let's first examine the case of the United States and the British Empire.

Firstly, if the concept of totalitarianism is to be adequate, it must be able to explain the use of concentration camps elsewhere than in Nazi Germany, such as those used by Europe in the colonies (Losurdo 2004: 142). Often it is non-Western researchers who have compared the treatment of colonial peoples to the genocidal practices of the Third Reich, rather than to the Soviet Union: for example, the deportation of indigenous peoples under Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt's attitude toward non-Whites, or England's treatment of the Irish, which will be similar to the treatment that indigenous peoples will undergo (Losurdo 2020: 156).

Let's go back to the United States, which, as a reminder, is an inspiration for Hitler. For their expansion to the West, a recent estimate puts the number of deaths caused by the "American Holocaust" at 13 million (Smith 2017: 13). An expansion also marked by the annexation of part of Mexico, French and Russian possessions, and distant islands such as Hawaii, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines (where orders were given to kill all those over ten years old) (Chomsky and Prashad 2024: 15). After the Second World War, 2 million North Koreans, 3 million Vietnamese, nearly 500,000 Cambodians, 1.5 million Angolans, or 1 million Mozambicans would be killed by Americans (Parenti 1997: 25). It is also nearly 500,000 to 1 million communists killed in the Philippines between 1965 and 1966 by the regime supported by the CIA (Vann 2021). The wars against terrorism, after September 11, would cause nearly 4.5 million casualties (Berger 2023): unpopular wars and often without international support (Chomsky and Prashad 2024: 64). In fact, the United States acts as a godfather: "The United States cannot tolerate any country, regardless of its size, successfully challenging it." (Ibid: 65). Examples abound where the United States eliminates individuals for the advancement of its interests, yet it is not classified as a totalitarian regime.

As for the British, one need only look at the horrors committed in India. Simply through Churchill's policies, in 1943, nearly 3 million Indians died in the Bengal famine (Safi 2019). Taking into account the excess mortality in India between 1820 and 1920, compared to its pre-colonial period, the number of victims rises to nearly 165 million people. (Sullivan and Heckel: 2023). In reality, even if this does not represent the number of direct deaths, which is rather estimated at tens of millions of people (Ibid), it is an interesting indicator. The British simply deindustrialized India and pillaged its wealth, regardless of the number of victims generated by this process, much like they imposed, at gunpoint, the opium trade in China (Chomsky and Prashad 2024: 69). They eliminated individuals for progress, but are not classified as totalitarian regimes.

The USSR: the Gulags and the Purges

Now let's move on to the Soviet Union, which is supposed to be equivalent to the Third Reich. Fundamentally, the Gulags and the Nazi extermination camps had nothing in common. The opening of archives after the fall of the USSR allows us to observe some important elements about the Gulags. At its peak, about 3 million people were incarcerated in the USSR, for a population of 164 million people. Approximately 1.5 million people died in these camps, more than half of them between 1941 and 1943 during the German invasion. In fact, during this invasion, the Soviet government created a special food fund for the Gulags, and the conditions of the prisoners improved as the war turned in favor of the Soviets. Far from being a tool to eliminate the bourgeoisie, the majority of detainees were there for non-political reasons and with sentences of less than five years. And in the Gulags, at least until 1937, most deaths occurred mainly due to malnutrition and poor organization:

"(...) it was not the intention of homicide that horrors were caused: it is a significant example of how things can go wrong due to lack of adequate planning" (Losurdo 2020: 130). Unlike Nazi camps, there was no systematic extermination, no gas chambers or crematoriums, and the majority of prisoners were reintegrated into society.  (Parenti 1997 : 79).

However, these places remained prisons, with very difficult conditions and where numerous abuses against prisoners took place. It is important to place these camps, inherited from tsarist Russia, in their context. Unfortunately, Soviet Russia did not have the privilege of being a "normal" state: there was always a danger, a state of emergency. We have noted the Allied invasion, from 1918 to 1922, after the Revolution, in a country devastated by the First World War. There was also the war against the Kulaks, the threat from Japan and Germany from the 1930s, or the Trotskyist front which called for a Second revolution just before the Nazi invasion. The German threat should not be taken lightly: the Third Reich openly called for the "Germanization" of Eastern Europe and the enslavement of its millions of inhabitants, with the complicity of the Western powers. There was also the need to industrialize the country, under penalty of death. Joseph Stalin declared in 1931, ten years before the German invasion:

"Lenin said on the eve of October: 'Either death or catching up with and surpassing the advanced capitalist countries.' We are 50 to 100 years behind the advanced countries. We must cover this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we will be crushed."
Far from being a homogeneous bloc, the 1930s in the USSR and within the party were marked by immense chaos at the administrative level: "If the Soviet government was a dictatorship, or tried to be, it certainly was not totalitarian" (Getty 2009 [1985]: 198). At the local level, the authorities were marked by disastrous incompetence, and Moscow sought more to know "what exactly was happening" than to impose a totalitarian rule. Stalin's role was that of an executor: to intervene occasionally, to correct certain policies, to consult experts, etc. It is in this confused, chaotic Soviet Union, threatened from the outside, that the Moscow Trials took place, where 681,000 people were executed. These purges were not the result of Stalin's own planning, but the result of this chaotic bureaucracy, internal party rivalries, the incompetence of certain politicians, etc. (Getty 2009 [1985]: 205-206). Stalin "... was an executive and reality forced him to delegate most of the authority to subordinates, who had their own opinions, interests, and clienteles" (Ibid).

This is an extremely large number of individuals, and the authoritarian character of the Soviet regime should not be dismissed. However, these facts call into question Arendt's narrative that Stalin succeeded in rising to power after a fierce struggle against the peasants, and then against his political opponents. If the elimination of these individuals constitutes a criterion for placing the USSR in the category of totalitarian regimes, then we must include the United States and the British Empire.

*This article was translated from French by the author using Chat GPT. 
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Monographs and periodical articles

Arendt, H. (2018 [1951]. La nature du totalitarisme, dans Idem, La nature du totalitarisme : suivi de Religion et politique (11-84), Paris : Éditions Payot.
Arendt, H. (2018 [1953]. Religion et politique, in , La nature du totalitarisme : suivi de Religion et politique (87-140), Paris : Éditions Payot.
Chomsky, N. et Prashad, V. (2024). Le retrait : La fragilité de la puissance des États-Unis : Irak, Libye, Afghanistan. Montréal : Lux éditeur.
Getty, J. A. (2009 [1985]). Origins of the Great Purges : The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938. Cambridge University Press.
Getty, A. J, Rittersporn, G. T. et Zemskov, V. K. (1993). Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years : A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence. The American Historical Review, 98(4), 1017-1049.
Losurdo, D. (2004). Pour une critique de la catégorie de totalitarisme, Actuel Marx, 1(35), 115-147.
Losurdo, D. (2020). Stalin : The History and Critique of a Black Legend.
Losurdo, D. (2010). The International Origins of Nazism.
Montesquieu (2019 [1748]). De l’esprit des lois: Anthologie. Paris : Flammarion.
Parenti, M. (1997).  Blackshirts and Reds : Rational Fascism & the Overthrow of Communism. San Francisco : City Lights Books.
SHIPLEY, Tyler A. (2020). Canada in the World. Settler Capitalism and the Colonial Imagination, Ottawa :  Fernwood Publishing.
Smith, D. M. (2017). Counting the Dead: Estimating the Loss of Life in the Indigenous Holocaust, 1492-Present.
Sullivan, D. et Heckel, J. (2023). Capitalism and extreme poverty: A global analysis of real wages, human height, and mortality since the long 16th century. World Development 161(Janvier 2023).
Whitman (2017). Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law New Jersey : Princeton University Press.

Web pages

American Heritage Museum. « Eastern Front »  https://www.americanheritagemuseum.org/exhibits/world-war-ii/eastern-front/#.
Berger, M. (15 may 2023). Post-9/11 wars have contributed to some 4.5 million deaths, report suggests. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/05/15/war-on-terror-911-deaths-afghanistan-iraq/
Encyclopédie multimédia de la Shoah. (16 may 2019). « DOCUMENTER LE NOMBRE DE VICTIMES DE L'HOLOCAUSTE ET DES PERSÉCUTIONS NAZIES ». https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/fr/article/documenting-numbers-of-victims-of-the-holocaust-and-nazi-persecution
Le Monde. (23 march 1976). « Soljenitsyne estime que les Espagnols vivent dans la " liberté la plus absolue. ». https://www.lemonde.fr/archives/article/1976/03/23/soljenitsyne-estime-que-les-espagnols-vivent-dans-la-liberte-la-plus-absolue_2961304_1819218.html
Neygebauer, J. (18 february 2023)  «Rattraper et dépasser»: le rôle de l’Allemagne dans l’industrialisation soviétique des années 1930, Russia Beyond, https://fr.rbth.com/histoire/89324-industrialisation-urss-aide-allemagne
Safi, M. (29 march 2019). Churchill's policies contributed to 1943 Bengal famine – study. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/29/winston-churchill-policies-contributed-to-1943-bengal-famine-study.
Vann, M. G. (23 january 2021). The True Story of Indonesia’s US-Backed Anti-Communist Bloodbath. Jacobin. https://jacobin.com/2021/01/indonesia-anti-communist-mass-murder-genocide
[1] Encyclopédie multimédia de la Shoah. (16 may 2019). « DOCUMENTER LE NOMBRE DE VICTIMES DE L'HOLOCAUSTE ET DES PERSÉCUTIONS NAZIES ». https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/fr/article/documenting-numbers-of-victims-of-the-holocaust-and-nazi-persecution
[2] American Heritage Museum. « Eastern Front »  https://www.americanheritagemuseum.org/exhibits/world-war-ii/eastern-front/#.

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Author

​Marc-Antoine Dupuis, political scientist at the University of Québec in Montréal, Canada.

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