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Countries with a totalitarian regime in the 21st century. Totalitarian Regimes and Modernity (Totalitarianism as a Phenomenon of the 20th Century)

Totalitarianism (from Latin totalitas - wholeness, completeness) is characterized by the desire of the state for absolute control over all areas of public life, the complete subordination of a person to political power and the dominant ideology. The concept of "totalitarianism" was introduced into circulation by the ideologist of Italian fascism G. Gentile in the early twentieth century. In 1925, this word was first heard in the Italian parliament in a speech by the leader of Italian fascism, B. Mussolini. Since that time, the formation of a totalitarian regime began in Italy, then in the USSR (during the years of Stalinism) and in Nazi Germany (since 1933).

In each of the countries where a totalitarian regime arose and developed, it had its own characteristics. At the same time, there are common features that are characteristic of all forms of totalitarianism and reflect its essence.

These include the following:

One-party system - a mass party with a rigid paramilitary structure, claiming complete subordination of its members to the symbols of faith and their spokesmen - the leaders, the leadership as a whole, grows together with the state and concentrates real power in society;
- non-democratic way of organizing the party - it is built around the leader. Power comes down from the leader, not up from the masses;
- ideologization of the entire life of society. A totalitarian regime is an ideological regime that always has its own “Bible”. The ideology that the political leader defines includes a series of myths (about the leading role of the working class, about the superiority of the Aryan race, etc.). A totalitarian society conducts the widest ideological indoctrination of the population;
- monopoly control of production and the economy, as well as all other spheres of life, including education, the media, etc.;
- terrorist police control. In this regard, concentration camps and ghettos are being created, where hard labor, torture are used, and massacres of innocent people take place. (So, in the USSR, a whole network of camps was created - the Gulag.

Until 1941, it included 53 camps, 425 correctional labor colonies and 50 juvenile camps). With the help of law enforcement and punitive bodies, the state controls the life and behavior of the population.

In all the variety of reasons and conditions for the emergence of totalitarian political regimes, the main role is played by a deep crisis situation. Among the main conditions for the emergence of totalitarianism, many researchers call the entry of society into the industrial stage of development, when the possibilities of the media increase sharply, contributing to the general ideologization of society and the establishment of control over the individual. The industrial stage of development contributed to the emergence of the ideological prerequisites for totalitarianism, for example, the formation of a collectivist consciousness based on the superiority of the collective over the individual. An important role was played by political conditions, which include: the emergence of a new mass party, a sharp strengthening of the role of the state, the development of various kinds of totalitarian movements. Totalitarian regimes are capable of changing and evolving. For example, after the death of Stalin, the USSR changed. Board N.S. Khrushchev, L.I. Brezhnev - this is the so-called post-totalitarianism - a system in which totalitarianism loses some of its elements and, as it were, is eroded, weakened. So, the totalitarian regime should be divided into purely totalitarian and post-totalitarian.

Depending on the dominant ideology, totalitarianism is usually divided into communism, fascism and national socialism.

Communism (socialism), to a greater extent than other varieties of totalitarianism, expresses the main features of this system, since it implies the absolute power of the state, the complete elimination of private property and, consequently, any autonomy of the individual. Despite the predominantly totalitarian forms of political organization, humane political goals are also inherent in the socialist system. So, for example, in the USSR the level of education of the people sharply increased, the achievements of science and culture became available to them, the social security of the population was ensured, the economy, space and military industries developed, etc., the crime rate dropped sharply. In addition, for decades, the system almost did not resort to mass repression.

Fascism is a right-wing extremist political movement that arose in the context of revolutionary processes that swept the countries of Western Europe after the First World War and the victory of the revolution in Russia. It was first installed in Italy in 1922. Italian fascism sought to revive the greatness of the Roman Empire, to establish order and firm state power. Fascism claims to restore or purify the "people's soul", to ensure a collective identity on cultural or ethnic grounds. By the end of the 1930s, fascist regimes had established themselves in Italy, Germany, Portugal, Spain, and a number of countries in Eastern and Central Europe. With all its national characteristics, fascism was the same everywhere: it expressed the interests of the most reactionary circles of capitalist society, which provided financial and political support to fascist movements, seeking to use them to suppress the revolutionary uprisings of the working masses, preserve the existing system and realize their imperial ambitions in the international arena.

The third type of totalitarianism is National Socialism. As a real political and social system, it arose in Germany in 1933. Its goal is the world domination of the Aryan race, and the social preference is the German nation. If in communist systems aggressiveness is directed primarily against its own citizens (class enemy), then in National Socialism it is directed against other peoples.

Yet totalitarianism is a historically doomed system. This is a Samoyed society, incapable of effective creation, prudent, enterprising management and existing mainly due to rich natural resources, exploitation, and limiting consumption for the majority of the population. Totalitarianism is a closed society, not adapted to qualitative renewal, taking into account the new requirements of a continuously changing world.

Totalitarian political regime

Totalitarianism (from lat. totalis - whole, whole, complete) is one of the types of political regimes characterized by complete (total) control of the state over all spheres of society.

“The first totalitarian regimes were formed after the First World War in countries belonging to the “second echelon of industrial development”. Italy and Germany were extremely totalitarian states. The formation of political totalitarian regimes became possible at the industrial stage of human development, when not only comprehensive control over the individual, but also total control of his consciousness became technically possible, especially during periods of socio-economic crises.

This term should not be considered only as a negative evaluative one. This is a scientific concept that requires an appropriate theoretical definition. Initially, the concept of "total state" had quite a positive meaning. It denoted a self-organizing state, identical with the nation, a state where the gap between political and socio-political factors is being eliminated. The current interpretation of the concept was first proposed to characterize fascism. Then it was extended to the Soviet and related models of the state.

“The ideological origins, individual features of totalitarianism are rooted in antiquity. Initially, it was interpreted as the principle of building an integral, unified society. In the VII-IV centuries. BC e. rationalization theorists of Chinese political and legal thought (legists) Zi Chan, Shang Yang, Han Fei and others, rejecting Confucianism, came up with the rationale for the doctrine of a strong, centralized state that regulates all aspects of public and private life. Including for vesting the administrative apparatus with economic functions, establishing mutual responsibility among the population and officials (along with the principle of responsibility of an official for his own affairs), systematic state control over the behavior and mindset of citizens, etc. At the same time, they considered state control in the form of a constant struggle between the ruler and his subjects. The central place in the program of the legists was occupied by the desire to strengthen the state through the development of agriculture, the building of a strong army capable of expanding the borders of the country, and the stupidity of the people.

The concept of a totalitarian regime was developed in the work of a number of German thinkers of the 19th century: G. Hegel, K. Marx, F. Nietzsche and some other authors. And yet, as a complete, formalized political phenomenon, totalitarianism matured in the first half of the 20th century.

Thus, we can say that the totalitarian regime is a product of the twentieth century. Political significance was first given to it by the leaders of the ideologists of the fascist movement in Italy. In 1925, Benito Mussolini was the first to use the term "totalitarianism" to characterize the Italo-fascist regime.

“The Western concept of totalitarianism, including the direction of its critics, was formed on the basis of an analysis and generalization of the regimes of fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Francoist Spain and the USSR during the years of Stalinism. After the First World War, China, the countries of Central and South-Eastern Europe became the subject of additional study of political regimes.

Although totalitarianism is called an extreme form of authoritarianism, there are signs that are characteristic in particular only of totalitarianism and distinguish all totalitarian state regimes from authoritarianism and democracy.

I consider the following to be the most important:

General state ideology,
- state monopoly on the media,
- state monopoly on all weapons,
- strictly centralized control over the economy,
- one mass party headed by a charismatic leader, that is, exceptionally gifted and endowed with a special gift,
- a specially organized system of violence as a specific means of control in society.

Some of the above signs of one or another totalitarian state regime developed, as already noted, in ancient times. But most of them could not be finally formed in a pre-industrial society. Only in the XX century. they acquired the qualities of a universal character and together they made it possible for the dictators who came to power in Italy in the 1920s, in Germany and the Soviet Union in the 1930s, to turn political regimes of power into totalitarian ones.

Perhaps the most important feature of totalitarian regimes was the creation and maintenance of a developed, stable "relationship" between the "top" and the "bottom", between the charismatic "leader" - "Fuhrer" and the manipulated, but full of enthusiasm and selflessness, masses of supporters that make up the movement permeated with a unitary ideology. It is precisely in this "coupling" that the strength of the totalitarian regime lies, which manifests itself especially visibly at the moment of the proclamation and at least partial solution of the mobilization tasks set by it at the forefront. On the other hand, the fundamental weakness of the system and the guarantee of its final collapse is manifested in the impossibility of indefinitely maintaining a sufficiently high intensity of exalted enthusiasm and blind faith.

As a result of the socio-political shifts of the 30s. in the USSR, a social structure has developed that, in a number of parameters, corresponds to other regimes that are now called totalitarian (for example, the Nazi regime in Germany).

The most important features of this system include:

The ruling elite, having formed in a society weakened by military cataclysms, destroys the mechanisms of control from the outside: society over it and, destroying traditional social structures, sharply expands its power over society;
- super-centralism, necessary for the ruling corporation for this domination, leads to similar processes within it; the role of society is played by the mass, which is not included in the narrow center. The struggle with power from time to time takes on a bloody character;
- all legal spheres of society are subject to the leadership of the elite, and the majority of structures incompatible with this subordination are destroyed;
- industrial growth is stimulated by the use of non-economic forms of forced labor;
- the creation of large, easier to manage forms of the state economy, focused on the military-industrial complex;
- a policy of cultural-national leveling is being carried out, "hostile culture" is being destroyed or suppressed, and the art of applied propaganda character is dominating.

At the same time, Stalinism and Hitlerism cannot be identified. The ideology of these two forms of totalitarianism was based on different principles. Stalinism, as a form of the communist movement, originated from class domination, while Nazism originated from racial domination. The total integrity of society in the USSR was achieved by methods of rallying the entire society against "class enemies" that potentially threatened the regime. This suggested a more radical social transformation than in fascist systems, and an active orientation! regime for internal rather than external purposes (at least until the end of the 1930s). Stalin's policy assumed national consolidation, but it was not accompanied by racial purges (persecution) on a national basis appeared only in the 40s).

USSR 30s. passed the same stage as Germany in the development of an industrial-etacracy society, but with its own very significant features. Judging by the experience of Western countries, this stage was a "zigzag" in development, and not an obligatory phase.

Consequently, totalitarianism forcibly removes problems: civil society - the state, the people - political power.

Hence the features of the organization of the totalitarian system of state power:

Global centralization of public power headed by a dictator;
- domination of repressive apparatuses;
- abolition of representative bodies of power;
- the monopoly of the ruling party and the integration of it and all other socio-political organizations directly into the system of state power.

“The legitimation of power is based on direct violence, state ideology and personal commitment of citizens to the leader, political leader (charisma). Truth and individual freedom are virtually non-existent. A very important feature of totalitarianism is its social base and the specificity of the ruling elites due to it. According to many researchers of Marxist and other orientations, totalitarian regimes arise on the basis of the antagonism of the middle classes and even the broad masses in relation to the previously dominant oligarchy.

The leader is the center of the totalitarian system. His actual position is sacralized. He is declared the most wise, infallible, just, tirelessly thinking about the welfare of the people. Any critical attitude towards him is suppressed. Usually charismatic individuals are nominated for this role.

In accordance with the installations of totalitarian regimes, all citizens were called upon to express support for the official state ideology, to spend time studying it. Dissent and the release of scientific thought of the official ideology were persecuted.

A special role in a totalitarian regime is played by its political party. Only one party has life-long ruling status, acts either in the singular, or "leads" a bloc of parties or other political forces, the existence of which is allowed by the regime. Such a party, as a rule, is created before the emergence of the regime itself and plays a decisive role in its establishment - by the one that once comes to power. At the same time, her coming to power does not necessarily take place by violent means. For example, the Nazis in Germany came to power in a completely parliamentary way, after the appointment of their leader A. Hitler to the post of Reich Chancellor.

The specific features of a totalitarian regime are organized terror and total control, used to ensure the adherence of the masses to the party ideology. The apparatus of the secret police and security services, through extreme methods of influence, forces society to live in a state of fear. In such states, constitutional guarantees either did not exist or were violated, as a result of which secret arrests, detention without charge and torture became possible. In addition, the totalitarian regime encourages and makes extensive use of denunciation, flavoring it with a "great idea", for example, the fight against the enemies of the people. The search and imaginary intrigues of enemies become a condition for the existence of a totalitarian regime. Mistakes, economic misfortunes, impoverishment of the population are written off precisely on “enemies”, “pests”. Such bodies were the NKVD in the USSR, the Gestapo in Germany. Such bodies were not subject to any legal and judicial restrictions. To achieve their goals, these bodies could do anything. Their actions were directed by the authorities not only against individual citizens, but also against entire peoples and classes. The mass extermination of entire groups of the population during the time of Hitler and Stalin shows the enormous power of the state and the helplessness of ordinary citizens.

In addition, for totalitarian regimes, an important feature is the monopoly of power on information, complete control over the media.

Rigid centralized control over the economy is an important feature of a totalitarian regime. Here control serves a dual purpose. Firstly, the ability to dispose of the productive forces of society creates the necessary material base and support for the political regime, without which totalitarian control in other areas is hardly possible. Second, the centralized economy serves as a means of political control. For example, people can be forcibly moved to work in those areas of the economy where there is a shortage of labor.

Militarization is also one of the main characteristics of a totalitarian regime. The idea of a military danger, of a "besieged fortress" becomes necessary, firstly, to unite society, to build it on the principle of a military camp. The totalitarian regime is inherently aggressive and aggression helps to achieve several goals at once: to distract the people from their disastrous economic situation, to enrich the bureaucracy, the ruling elite, to solve geopolitical problems by military means. Aggression under a totalitarian regime can also be fueled by the idea of world domination, world revolution. The military-industrial complex, the army are the main pillars of totalitarianism.

Left-wing political regimes to increase labor productivity in the economy used various programs that encourage workers to work intensively. The Soviet five-year plans and the economic transformations in China are examples of the mobilization of the labor efforts of the peoples of these countries, and their results cannot be denied.

“The radical right-wing totalitarian regimes in Italy and Germany solved the problems of total control over the economy and other spheres of life using different methods. In Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, they did not resort to the nationalization of the entire economy, but introduced their own effective methods and forms of party-state control over private and joint-stock business, as well as over trade unions and over the spiritual sphere of production.

Right-wing radical totalitarian regimes with a right bias appeared for the first time in industrialized countries, but with relatively undeveloped democratic traditions. Italian fascism built its model of society on a corporate-state basis, and German National Socialism - on a racial-ethnic basis.

Totalitarian regime in the USSR

Features of the totalitarian regime in the USSR:

The enormous role of ideology, and above all the idea of the class struggle, which justified repression against entire sections of the population;
a return to the idea of a strong state power and imperial foreign policy - a course towards restoring the borders of the former Russian Empire and strengthening the influence of the USSR in the world;
mass repressions ("great terror"). Goals and reasons: the destruction of potential opponents and their possible supporters, the intimidation of the population, the use of free labor of prisoners during forced industrialization. In addition, the desire of the repressive apparatus to prove its necessity gave rise to the "disclosure" of non-existent conspiracies.

Results: during the years of Stalin's rule, a total of up to 4 million people suffered. A regime of unlimited personal power of Stalin was established in the country.

Key dates:

1929 - "Shakhty case": accusation of specialist engineers in the mines of Donbass in sabotage.
1934 - the murder of S.M. Kirov on domestic grounds was used as a pretext for repression, first against Stalin's real competitors, and then against potential opponents of the regime.
December 1936 - adoption of the new Constitution of the USSR. Formally, it was the most democratic in the world, but in reality its provisions did not work.
1936-1939 - mass repressions, the peak of which falls on 1937.
1938-1939 - mass repressions in the army: about 40 thousand officers (40%) were repressed, out of 5 marshals - 3, out of 5 army commanders of the 1st rank - 3, out of 10 army commanders of the 2nd rank - 10, out of 57 corps commanders - 50, out of 186 commanders divisions - 154, out of 456 regiment commanders - 401.

The strengthening of the totalitarian principles of the political system was required by the very low level of material well-being of the vast majority of society, which accompanied the forced version of industrialization, attempts to overcome economic backwardness. The enthusiasm and conviction of the advanced sections of society alone was not enough to keep the standard of living of millions of people during a quarter of a century of peacetime at the level that usually exists for short periods of time, in years of war and social catastrophes. Enthusiasm, in this situation, had to be reinforced by other factors, primarily organizational and political, regulation of labor and consumption measures (severe penalties for theft of public property, for absenteeism and being late for work, restrictions on movement, etc.). The need to take these measures, of course, did not in any way favor the democratization of political life.

Characteristic of the bulk of society, this type of political culture is also reproduced within the framework of the Bolshevik Party, which was formed mainly by people who came from the people. Coming from war communism, the "Red Guard attack on capital", the reassessment of the role of violence in the political struggle, indifference to cruelty weakened the sense of moral validity, the justification of many political actions that had to be carried out by the party activists.

The main characteristic feature of the political regime in the 1930s was the transfer of the center of gravity to party, emergency and punitive bodies. The decisions of the Congress of the CPSU (b) significantly strengthened the role of the party apparatus: it received the right to directly engage in state and economic management, the top party leadership acquired unlimited freedom, and ordinary communists were obliged to strictly obey the leading centers of the party hierarchy.

The party's ingrowth into the economy and the public sphere has since become a distinctive feature of the Soviet political system. A kind of pyramid of party and state administration was built, the top of which was firmly occupied by Stalin as General Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks. Thus, the originally minor position of the general secretary turned into a paramount one, giving its holder the right to supreme power in the country.

The assertion of the power of the party-state apparatus was accompanied by the rise and strengthening of the power structures of the state, its repressive bodies. Already in 1929, so-called "troikas" were created in each district, which included the first secretary of the district party committee, the chairman of the district executive committee and a representative of the Main Political Directorate (GPU). They began to carry out out-of-court trials of the guilty, passing their own sentences. In 1934, on the basis of the OGPU, the Main Directorate of State Security was formed, which became part of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD). Under it, a Special Conference (OSO) is established, which at the union level has consolidated the practice of extrajudicial sentences.

Thus, we can conclude that a combination of economic, political, and cultural factors contributed to the formation of a totalitarian regime in the USSR in the 1930s, the system of Stalin's personal dictatorship.

Signs of a totalitarian regime

Signs of a totalitarian regime:

1. Political censorship and propaganda in the media.
2. The cult of personality, leaderism.
3. The only obligatory state ideology.
4. Lack of real rights and freedoms of citizens.
5. Merging of the state and party apparatus.
6. Isolation from the outside world (“iron curtain”).
7. Persecution of dissent, creation in the public mind of the image of the “enemy of the people” (internal and external).
8. Rigid centralization of state administration, incitement of social and national discord. Unleashing terror against their own people.
9. Command-administrative economy, lack of private property and economic freedoms.
10. Political monopolism, suppression of regional independence and abolition of local self-government.

The term itself appeared in the late 1920s, when some political scientists sought to separate the socialist state from democratic states and were looking for a clear definition of socialist statehood.

The concept of "totalitarianism" means the whole, whole, complete (from the Latin words "TOTALITAS" - wholeness, completeness and "TOTALIS" - all, complete, whole). It was introduced into circulation by the ideologue of Italian fascism G. Gentile at the beginning of the 20th century. In 1925, this concept was first heard in the Italian parliament. Usually, totalitarianism is understood as a political regime based on the desire of the country's leadership to subordinate the way of life of people to one, undividedly dominant idea and to organize the political system of power so that it helps to realize this idea.

The totalitarian regime is characterized, as a rule, by the presence of one official ideology, which is formed and set by the socio-political movement, political party, ruling elite, political leader, "leader of the people", in most cases charismatic, as well as the desire of the state for absolute control over all areas social life, the complete subordination of man to political power and the dominant ideology. At the same time, the authorities and the people are thought of as a single whole, an inseparable whole, the people become relevant in the struggle against internal enemies, the authorities and the people against a hostile external environment.

The ideology of the regime is also reflected in the fact that the political leader determines the ideology. He can change his mind within a day, as happened in the summer of 1939, when the Soviet people suddenly learned that Nazi Germany was no longer an enemy of socialism. On the contrary, its system was declared better than the false democracies of the bourgeois West. This unexpected interpretation was maintained for two years until Nazi Germany's perfidious attack on the USSR.

The basis of totalitarian ideology is the consideration of history as a natural movement towards a specific goal (world domination, building communism, etc.).

The totalitarian regime allows only one ruling party, and all others, even pre-existing parties, seek to disperse, ban or destroy. The ruling party is declared the leading force of society, its attitudes are regarded as sacred dogmas. Competing ideas about the social reorganization of society are declared anti-people, aimed at undermining the foundations of society, at inciting social hostility. The ruling party seizes the reins of state administration: there is a merging of the party and state apparatuses. As a result, the simultaneous holding of party and state positions becomes a mass phenomenon, and where this does not happen, state officials carry out direct instructions from persons holding party posts.

In public administration, the totalitarian regime is characterized by extreme centralism. In practice, management looks like the execution of commands from above, in which the initiative is actually not encouraged at all, but is severely punished. Local authorities and governments are becoming mere transmitters of commands. Features of the regions (economic, national, cultural, social, religious, etc.), as a rule, are not taken into account.

Against this background, the power of the executive bodies is strengthened, the omnipotence of the nomenklatura arises, that is, officials whose appointment is consistent with the highest bodies of the ruling party or is carried out at their direction. The nomenklatura, the bureaucracy exercises power for the purpose of enrichment, conferring privileges in the educational, medical and other social fields. The political elite uses the possibilities of totalitarianism to obtain privileges and benefits hidden from society: household, including medical, educational, cultural, etc.

The totalitarian regime will widely and constantly use terror against the population. Physical violence acts as the main condition for strengthening and exercising power. For these purposes, concentration camps and ghettos are being created, where hard labor is used, people are tortured, their will to resist is suppressed, and innocent people are massacred.

Under totalitarianism, complete control is established over all spheres of society. The state seeks to literally “merge” society with itself, to fully nationalize it. In economic life, there is a process of stateization in various forms of ownership. In the political life of society, a person, as a rule, is limited in his rights and freedoms. And if political rights and freedoms are formally enshrined in law, then there is no mechanism for their implementation, as well as real opportunities for using them. Control permeates the sphere of people's personal lives. Demagoguery, dogmatism become a way of ideological, political and legal life.

The totalitarian regime uses police investigation, encourages and widely uses denunciation, flavoring it with a "great" idea, for example, the fight against the enemies of the people. The search and imaginary intrigues of enemies become a condition for the existence of a totalitarian regime. Mistakes, economic misfortunes, impoverishment of the population are written off precisely on “enemies”, “pests”.

Militarization is also one of the main characteristics of a totalitarian regime. The idea of a military danger, of a "besieged fortress" becomes necessary for the rallying of society, for building it on the principle of a military camp. The totalitarian regime is inherently aggressive, and aggression helps to achieve several goals at once: to distract the people from their disastrous economic situation, enrich the bureaucracy, the ruling elite, and solve geopolitical problems by military means. Aggression under a totalitarian regime can also be fueled by the idea of world domination, world revolution. The military-industrial complex, the army are the main pillars of totalitarianism. An important role in totalitarianism is played by the political practice of demagogy, hypocrisy, double standards, moral decay and degeneration.

The psychology of leveling is developing, there is a significant lumpenization of society. On the one hand, a completely demagogic, decorative, formal totalitarian regime, and on the other hand, social dependency of a part of the population nourish and support these varieties of political regime. Often the totalitarian regime is painted in nationalistic, racist, chauvinistic colors.

Totalitarianism is a historically doomed system. This society is a Samoyed, incapable of effective creation, prudent, enterprising management and existing mainly at the expense of rich natural resources, exploitation, and limiting the consumption of the majority of the population.

Totalitarianism is a closed society, not adapted to modern qualitative renewal, taking into account the new requirements of a constantly changing world.

Features of a totalitarian regime

The most characteristic features of a totalitarian regime are:

1. Absolute, universal (total) control over the life of the individual and society by the state, recognition of its supremacy; the enormous predominance of the role of state power and the nationalization (statization) of public life; complete and comprehensive subordination of the individual and society to state power, suppression of democratic public self-government; merging state and party power, state and party apparatuses; complete denial of the autonomy and independence of public associations.

2. A gross, unceremonious violation of the universally recognized rights and freedoms of man and citizen, even with their formally declarative constitutional proclamation, and the absence of their real, including judicial, guarantees; the complete lack of rights of the individual and the suppression of his individuality on the basis of the recognition of the absolute priority of the state and public over the personal, individual; complete actual removal of the masses of the population from real participation in the formation and activities of state bodies, in determining state policy; frequent refusal to hold elections, their non-free and purely decorative nature, in the absence of a real choice for voters, a real political alternative.

3. Bet on the massive and systematic use of violence up to the methods of direct terror; complete renunciation of the subordination of state power to law, of the observance of law and order; widespread use of forced labor; the use of the army to solve internal problems associated with the armed suppression of resistance to tyranny; non-legal legislation, in which expressions of dissatisfaction with the existing state of affairs and criticism of government policy, which are quite natural and common for a democratic society and state, are recognized as a crime and entail the strictest criminal and political prosecution.

4. Complete disregard for the democratic principle of separation of powers; the actual concentration of all power in the hands of the most often deified leader (the Fuhrer in Nazi Germany; the Duce in fascist Italy; the "leader of all times and peoples" in the Stalinist USSR, etc.); an extremely high degree of centralization and bureaucratization of state-political administration, including super-centralized, command-and-order state management of the militarized economy; complete rejection of real federalism and local self-government; understanding and practical application of the principle of centralism as a requirement for the complete and unconditional subordination of the minority to the majority, the lower classes to the upper classes, etc.

5. Complete rejection of political and ideological pluralism; the undivided dominance of one, the ruling party, the legislative consolidation of its leading and guiding role, the actual one-party system with a possible formal, fictitious multi-party system; imposition of a single state ideology and conformity, persecution of dissent and political surveillance; the strictest control over the mass media and their monopolization; the desire of state-political power to control not only the behavior, but also the mindset of people, their upbringing in the spirit of superstitious admiration for the state and devotion to the “only true” dominant ideology; widespread use of populist demagogy, etc.

Of course, not all of the signs of totalitarian regimes given here are necessarily and to the same extent found in each of them. But all of them are quite typical of totalitarianism, although in each individual case they may not appear in full and more or less prominently. Therefore, only by the totality of all these indicators can one judge whether a given country belongs to the number of totalitarian countries or not. By themselves, for example, the establishment of a dictatorship, the use of violence in public administration, its non-legal nature, the persecution of dissent or high centralization do not make the regime totalitarian. Another thing is if all this takes place in a necessary, essential relationship with the other features mentioned. This is especially important to keep in mind when distinguishing between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes.

Totalitarian regime in Germany

The National Socialists called their state the "Third Reich". In German legends, this was the name of the coming happy age. At the same time, this name was supposed to emphasize the continuity of imperial claims: the medieval Holy Roman Empire was considered the first Reich, the German Empire created by Bismarck was the second.

The National Socialists abolished the principle of parliamentarism and democratic government. They replaced the Weimar Republic with a model of an authoritarian state based on the principle of "fuhrership". According to him, decisions on all issues were made not by a majority of votes, but by a "responsible leader" at the appropriate level in the spirit of the rule: "authority from top to bottom, responsibility from bottom to top." Accordingly, the Nazis did not completely abolish the Weimar Constitution of 1919, but made fundamental changes to it and canceled a number of its fundamental provisions. First of all, the Decree "On the Protection of the People and the State" eliminated the guarantees of personal rights and freedoms (freedom of speech and press, association and assembly, secrecy of correspondence and telephone conversations, inviolability of the home, etc.).

If in republican Germany laws were adopted by the parliament - the Reichstag with the participation of the representative body of the lands (Reichsrat) and the president, then, in accordance with the "Law on overcoming the plight of the people and the Reich", laws could also be adopted by the government. It was assumed that they could diverge from the constitution of the country, unless they concern the institutions of the Reichstag and the representative body of the lands that made up Germany, the Reichsrat. Thus, the legislative power of Parliament was reduced to nothing.

During the spring and summer of 1933, the regime dissolved or forced all other political parties to dissolve themselves. From July 14, 1933, the creation of new parties was officially prohibited by law. Since November 12, 1933, the Reichstag, as a "organ of popular representation," was already elected according to the "single list" of the Nazi Party. With the disappearance of the opposition, he became a mere extra on government decisions.

The Reich government, headed by the Reich Chancellor, became the supreme authority in the country. This post since January 1933 was held by the Fuhrer of the Nazi Party, Adolf Hitler. He determined the main directions of state policy. After the death of President Hindenburg, the post of head of state was combined with the post of Reich Chancellor. Thus, the entire supreme power in the country was concentrated in the hands of the Fuhrer. The Reich Reorganization Act gave the government the power to create a new constitutional law.

The Nazis destroyed the federal structure of the German state. According to the Law on the Unification of the Lands with the Reich of April 7, 1933, the President, on the proposal of the Reich Chancellor, appointed governors in the Lands responsible to the Chancellor.

The National Socialist German Workers' Party played a special place in the system of the Nazi Reich. The law on ensuring the unity of the party and the state declared her "the bearer of the German state idea." To strengthen the interaction between the party and the state, the Deputy Fuhrer in the party leadership became a member of the Reich government.

The Nazi regime carried out the "unification" of all public (professional, cooperative, civil and other) organizations. They were replaced by specialized organizations of the Nazi Party.

The program of the Nazi Party promised the creation of a "estate state", and the "estates", in essence, acted as an analogue of fascist corporations. This is how the "imperial estates" (industry, crafts, trade, etc.) arose. However, the Hitler government did not follow the path of the Italian fascists, who created a special Chamber of Corporations. The role of the corporate body in Nazi Germany was played by the German Labor Front, which brought together workers, employees and entrepreneurs.

The repressive system played a key role in the mechanism of Nazi domination. A huge and ramified apparatus was created, which suppressed any oppositional or subversive activity and kept the population in constant fear. Another major motive for terror was the racial politics of the Nazis.

In March 1933, the secret state police "Gestapo" was created within the framework of the Prussian police, which later came under the control of SS chief Heinrich Himmler. Ultimately, a branched Reich Security Office (RSHA) was formed, which included the SS, the Gestapo, the Security Service (SD), etc. The RSHA served as another autonomous center of power.

Thus, we can say that the main goal of the regime established at that time in Germany was the reorganization of the old governing structures and the redirection of power into the hands of the ruling party. To support this new model, a repressive apparatus was created that did not allow individual outbreaks of discontent to reach a national scale. A side effect of the rigid centralization and hierarchization of power was the bureaucratization of the state apparatus. Later, this played an important role in the fall of the Third Reich.

totalitarian regime of power

The concept of totalitarianism comes from the Latin words "totalitas" - wholeness, completeness and "totalis" - whole, complete, whole. Usually, totalitarianism is understood as a political regime based on the desire of the country's leadership to subordinate the way of life of people to one, undividedly dominant idea and to organize the political system of power so that it helps to realize this idea.

The totalitarian regime is, as a rule, a product of the first half of the 20th century; these are fascist states, socialist states of the periods of the “cult of personality”. The formation of political totalitarian regimes became possible at the industrial stage of human development, when not only comprehensive control over the individual, but also total control of his consciousness became technically possible, especially during periods of socio-economic crises. The first totalitarian regimes were formed after the First World War (1914-1918), and for the first time the leaders and ideologists of the fascist movement in Italy gave it political significance. In 1925, Benito Mussolini was the first to use the term "totalitarianism". After the Second World War, China and the countries of Central Europe became the subject of additional study of political regimes.

This list, far from complete, indicates that totalitarian regimes can arise on various socio-economic bases and in diverse cultural and ideological environments. They may be the result of military defeats or revolutions, appear as a result of internal contradictions, or be imposed from outside.

A totalitarian regime often arises in crisis situations - post-war, during a civil war, when tough measures are needed to restore the economy, restore order, eliminate strife in society, and ensure stability. Social groups that need protection, support and care of the state act as its social base.

The following features are distinguished that distinguish all totalitarian state regimes from democracy:

General state ideology.

The totalitarian regime is characterized, as a rule, by the presence of one official ideology, which is formed and set by the socio-political movement, the political party, the ruling elite, the political leader, the “leader of the people”.

One mass party headed by a leader.

The totalitarian regime allows only one ruling party, and all others, even pre-existing parties, seek to disperse, ban or destroy. The ruling party is declared the leading force of society, its attitudes are regarded as sacred dogmas. Competing ideas about the social reorganization of society are declared anti-people, aimed at undermining the foundations of society, at inciting social hostility. Thus, the ruling party seizes the reins of government. The leader is the center of the totalitarian system. He is declared the most wise, infallible, just, tirelessly thinking about the welfare of the people. Any critical attitude towards him is suppressed. Usually a charismatic personality is nominated for this role.

A specially organized system of violence, terror as a specific means of control in society.

The totalitarian regime widely and constantly uses terror against the population. Physical violence acts as the main condition for strengthening and exercising power. Under totalitarianism, complete control is established over all spheres of society. In the political life of society, a person, as a rule, is limited in his rights and freedoms. And if political rights and freedoms are formally enshrined in law, then there is no mechanism for their implementation, as well as real opportunities for using them. Control permeates the sphere of people's personal lives. Under totalitarianism, there is terrorist police control. The police exist under different regimes, however, under totalitarianism, police control is terrorist in the sense that no one will prove guilt in order to kill a person.

Police investigation is also used in the state, denunciation is encouraged and widely used. The search and imaginary intrigues of enemies become a condition for the existence of a totalitarian regime. The apparatus of the secret police and security services, through extreme methods of influence, forces society to live in a state of fear.

Constitutional guarantees either did not exist or were violated, which made possible secret arrests, detention without charge and torture.

Rigidly centralized control over the economy and state monopoly on the media.

Rigid centralized control over the economy is an important feature of a totalitarian regime. The ability to dispose of the productive forces of society creates the necessary material base and support for the political regime, without which total control in other areas is hardly possible. The centralized economy serves as a means of political control. For example, people can be forcibly moved to work in those areas of the economy where there is a shortage of labor. In economic life, there is a process of stateization in various forms of ownership. The totalitarian state opposes an economically and, accordingly, politically free person, in every possible way limits the entrepreneurial spirit of the worker. With the help of the mass media, under totalitarianism, political mobilization and almost one hundred percent support for the ruling regime are ensured. Under a totalitarian regime, the content of all media materials is determined by the political and ideological elite. Through the media, the views and values that the political leadership of a given country considers desirable at a given moment are systematically introduced into the minds of people.

State monopoly on all weapons.

There is an increase in the power of the executive bodies, there is an omnipotence of officials, the appointment of which is consistent with the highest bodies of the ruling party or is carried out at their direction. The bureaucracy exercises power for the purpose of enrichment, conferring privileges in the educational, medical and other social fields. Powers that are not provided for and not limited by law are increasing. The “power structure” (army, police, security agencies, prosecutor's office) stands out against the background of the expanded executive bodies, i.e. punitive authorities. The political elite uses the possibilities of totalitarianism to obtain privileges and benefits hidden from society: household, including medical, cultural.

The state under totalitarianism takes care of every member of society. Under the totalitarian regime, the population develops the ideology and practice of social dependency. Members of society believe that the state should provide, support, protect them in all cases, especially in the field of healthcare, education, and housing. However, the social price for such a way of exercising power increases over time (wars, drunkenness, the destruction of motivation to work, terror, demographic and environmental losses), which ultimately leads to the realization of the harmfulness of the totalitarian regime, the need to eliminate it. Then the evolution of the totalitarian regime begins. The pace and forms of this evolution (up to destruction) depend on socio-economic shifts and the corresponding increase in people's consciousness, political struggle, and other factors.

Within the framework of a totalitarian regime that ensures the federal structure of the state, national liberation movements can arise that destroy both the totalitarian regime and the federal structure of the state itself.

Totalitarianism in its communist form proved to be the most tenacious. It still exists today in some countries. History has shown that a totalitarian system has a fairly high ability to mobilize resources and concentrate funds to achieve limited goals, such as victory in a war, defense construction, industrialization of society, etc. Some authors consider totalitarianism even as one of the political forms of modernization of underdeveloped countries.

Communist totalitarianism has gained considerable popularity in the world due to its connection with the socialist ideology, which contains many humane ideas. The attraction of totalitarianism was also facilitated by the fear of the individual, who had not yet broken away from the communal-collectivist umbilical cord, before alienation, competition and responsibility, inherent in a market society. The vitality of the totalitarian system is also explained by the presence of a huge apparatus of social control and coercion, the brutal suppression of any opposition.

Yet totalitarianism is a historically doomed system. This is a Samoyed society, incapable of effective creation, prudent, enterprising management and existing mainly due to rich natural resources, exploitation, and limiting the consumption of the majority of the population. Totalitarianism is a closed society, not adapted to timely qualitative renewal, taking into account the new requirements of a constantly changing world. Its adaptive possibilities are limited by ideological dogmas. The totalitarian leaders themselves are prisoners of an inherently utopian ideology and propaganda.

Totalitarianism is not limited to dictatorial political systems opposed to idealized Western democracies. Totalitarian tendencies, manifested in the desire to organize the life of society, limit personal freedom and completely subordinate the individual to state and other social control, also take place in Western countries.

Totalitarianism has its own ideological prerequisites and psychological roots. The first group includes the utopian dreams of the working masses of a just social system, which does not require property and social inequality, the exploitation of man by man. The transformation of a totalitarian utopia into the only true ideology is a natural stage in the development of mankind. The mechanism of infantilism discovered by Z. Freud should be attributed to the psychological roots of totalitarianism. Its essence lies in the fact that a completely adult person in a stressful situation is able, like a child, to delegate his rights to the almighty sacred Power, identified by him with the Leader-Father. There is a merging of an individual with power in the form of sincere love for the dictator.

The bearers of the mythology of totalitarianism are people both belonging and not belonging to the power elite.

The main elements of the totalitarian picture of the world are:

1. Belief in the simplicity of the world is the central characteristic of the totalitarian consciousness. Belief in a "simple world" does not allow you to feel either your own individuality or the individuality of a loved one. This belief leads to the spread of a negative attitude towards knowledge in general and towards the intelligentsia as its bearer in particular. If the world is simple and understandable, then all the work of scientists is a senseless waste of people's money, and their discoveries and conclusions are just an attempt to confuse people's heads. The illusion of simplicity also creates the illusion of omnipotence: any problem can be solved, it is enough to give the right orders.
2. Faith in an unchanging world. All elements of social life - leaders, institutions, structures, norms, styles - are perceived as frozen in immobility. Innovations in everyday life and culture are ignored until they are imported in such quantities that they will be perceived as long known. Inventions are not used, discoveries are classified. Faith in the immutability of the world entails distrust of change.
3. Faith in a just world. The reign of justice is realized in every totalitarian regime. Communism does not yet exist - the environment prevents it from being built, but social justice has already been achieved. The preoccupation of people with justice, in its strength and universality, is difficult to compare with any other human motive. In the name of justice, the most kind and most monstrous deeds were done.
4. Faith in the miraculous properties of the world. It shows the isolation of totalitarian consciousness from reality. Carrying out industrialization, the government was interested in creating a cult of technology. The miracles of progress were given magical properties. However, the credit of this belief is not infinite. There are already tractors on every collective farm, but there is no abundance. The authorities have to promise new miracles.

We found the stage of the rebirth of faith, when power, technology, and official culture not only lost their miraculous power, but generally ceased to attract attention and hopes. The collapse of the totalitarian consciousness in the Brezhnev and post-Brezhnev era was marked by an extraordinary flowering of irrational beliefs.

Totalitarian regimes in Europe

Many Europeans became disillusioned with the institutions of democracy and the free market, which failed to protect against the turmoil that befell people during the First World War and in the post-war years. In Italy and Germany, in contrast to the United States, Great Britain and France, where a way out of the crisis was found in the conditions of maintaining democracy, the crisis situation led to the establishment of dictatorships and the emergence of totalitarian regimes.

Supporters of communist ideas saw a way out in revolution and building a classless socialist society. Their opponents, frightened by the scope of the communist movement and dreaming of a firm order, sought to establish a dictatorship. Among the supporters of harsh measures were small proprietors, entrepreneurs who were hit hard by the economic crisis, workers who did not trust the socialists, peasants, and the lumpen proletariat. In conditions of economic turmoil, they dreamed of redistributing social wealth at the expense of large owners, by expropriating the property of wealthy representatives of national minorities, territorial seizures and robbery of other countries.

Dictatorships were characterized by the establishment of state control over the life of each individual and society as a whole. The state itself merged with the ruling party, which received unlimited power. Other political forces were either eliminated or turned into "decorations". Totalitarianism dissolved a specific personality in the mass - the people, the class, the party, trying to impose on it common ideas, a way of life for all, to oppose "us" and "them". At the same time, the boundless power of one person, the leader, was forming in society. The ideology of the ruling party, speaking on behalf of the entire people, became the sole and dominant one. Civil society collapsed.

Totalitarianism is characterized by the integrity of all structures of social life - society, state, party, individual. The leadership of the state set a global goal for society, which had to be achieved by any means, despite the difficulties and sacrifices. Such a goal could be the realization of the idea of the greatness of the nation, the creation of a thousand-year empire, or the achievement of the common good. This predetermined the aggressive nature of totalitarianism.

An important tool was powerful propaganda that penetrated everywhere. The official ideologists, the mass media, who were completely dependent on the authorities, daily and hourly "brainwashed" ordinary citizens, convincing people of the correctness of the goal set by the authorities, mobilizing them to fight for its implementation. One of the tasks of propaganda was to identify and expose "enemies". The "enemies" could be communists, socialists, capitalists, Jews, and anyone who interfered with the achievement of great goals. Following one defeated enemy was immediately another. The totalitarian regime could not do without a constant search for an enemy, the need to fight which predetermined the restriction of democracy and the material needs of people.

The emergence of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes was a characteristic feature of European life in the first half of the 20th century. Anti-democratism found fertile ground among large segments of the population, frustrated by the inability of democratic governments to cope with the difficulties in a liberal economy. Aggressive totalitarianism has put humanity on the brink of a new war.

Formation of a totalitarian regime

Researchers distinguish four stages in the evolution of Stalinist totalitarianism:

1) 1923-1934, when the process of formation of Stalinism takes place, the formation of its main tendencies;
2) mid-30s. - before the Great Patriotic War - the implementation of the Stalinist model of the development of society and the creation of a bureaucratic basis of power;
3) the period of the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945, when there was a partial retreat of Stalinism and the foreground of the historical role of the people; the growth of national self-consciousness, the expectation of democratic changes in the internal life of the country after the victory over fascism;
4) 1946-1953 - the peak of Stalinism, growing into a crisis of the system, the beginning of the regressive evolution of Stalinism. In the second half of the 50s. in the course of implementing the decisions of the XX Congress of the CPSU, a partial de-Stalinization of Soviet society was carried out, however, a number of signs of totalitarianism remained in the political system until the 80s.

The origins of the Stalinist system go directly to the events of October 1917, as well as to the peculiarities of the political history of autocratic Russia. What were the most important prerequisites for the emergence of this system?

Firstly, the monopoly power of one party that developed after the summer of 1918. In addition, the decisions of the X Congress of the RCP (b) led to the curtailment of internal party democracy, the suppression of the interests of the minority, the inability for him to defend his views and, ultimately, to the transformation of the party into a silent and obedient appendage of the party apparatus.
Secondly, the change in party composition in the 1920s played an additional role. Already the “Lenin call” (admission to the RCP (b) of about 240 thousand people after Lenin’s death) indicated a trend in admitting to the party, along with skilled workers, young workers with a low level of literacy and culture, who were socially marginal, intermediate strata of society .
Thirdly, the dictatorship of the proletariat turned into the dictatorship of the party, which, in turn, already in the 20s. became a dictatorship of the Central Committee.
Fourthly, a system was formed that controlled the political moods of citizens and shaped them in the direction desired by the authorities. For this, the organs of the OGPU (since 1934 - the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs, the NKVD) were widely used, informing the leadership with the help of censorship of correspondence, secret agents.
Fifth, the elimination of the NEP made it possible for the bureaucratic system to penetrate into all structures of society and establish the dictatorship of the leader. The cult of personality became its ideological expression.
Sixth, the most important element of this system was the party-state, which turned the party and state apparatus into the dominant force in society. It relied on a centralized system of planned economy. Party committees were responsible to higher bodies for the results of the activities of economic organizations on their territory and were obliged to control their work. At the same time, while giving directives to state and economic bodies, the party as a whole did not bear direct responsibility for them. If the decisions were erroneous, all responsibility was shifted to the performers.
Seventh, the right to make decisions belonged to the "first persons": directors of large enterprises, people's commissars, secretaries of district committees, regional committees and the Central Committee of the republics within their powers. On a national scale, only Stalin possessed it.
Eighth, even the formal semblance of collective leadership gradually disappeared. Party congresses, which met annually under Lenin, were convened less and less frequently. For the period from 1928 to 1941. Three party congresses and three party conferences took place. Plenums of the Central Committee and even meetings of the Politburo of the Central Committee became irregular.
Ninth, the working people were in fact alienated from power. Democratic bodies provided for by the Constitution of the USSR in 1924 and 1936. (local Soviets, congresses of Soviets and the Central Executive Committee of the USSR, according to the Constitution of 1924, the Supreme Soviet - after 1936), served as a "democratic screen", approving the decision of the party bodies worked out in advance. Attempts in accordance with the Constitution of 1936 to nominate alternative candidates were suppressed by the NKVD. All this completely contradicted the ideas of democracy proclaimed during the creation of the Soviet state.
Tenth, the economic basis of the totalitarian system was the monopoly state-bureaucratic property.

Features of Stalinism:

1. Stalinism strove to act under the brand name of Marxism, from which it drew individual elements. At the same time, Stalinism was alien to the humanistic ideal of Marxism, which, like any ideology, was historically limited, but played an important role in the development of scientific thought and ideas about social justice.
2. Stalinism combined the strictest censorship with primitive formulas that were easily perceived by the mass consciousness. At the same time, Stalinism sought to cover all areas of knowledge with its influence.
3. An attempt has been made to turn the so-called Marxism-Leninism from an object of critical reflection into a new religion. Related to this was the fierce struggle against Orthodoxy and other religious denominations (Muslims, Judaism, Buddhism, etc.), which unfolded especially widely in the late 1920s.

One of the most important ideas of Stalinism is the assertion of the preservation and continuous intensification of the class struggle both within the country and in international relations. It served as the basis for the formation of the "image of the enemy", internal and external, as well as for mass repressions. At the same time, as a rule, mass repressions were preceded and accompanied by their ideological campaigns. They were called upon to explain and justify arrests and executions in the eyes of the broad masses. For example, the trials of the old intelligentsia (the "Shakhty case" - 1928, the "trial of the industrial party" - 1930, the "academic case" that took place without an open trial in 1929-1931, the trial of the "Union Bureau of the Mensheviks" - 1931 . etc.) were combined with rude attacks on the historical, philosophical and economic sciences.

On January 26, 1934, the 17th Party Congress opened, which was supposed to adopt the second five-year plan, demonstrating loyalty to the principles of party unity. Leaders of the former oppositions, Bukharin, Rykov, Tomsky, Pyatakov, Zinoviev, Kamenev, came forward with "self-criticism" at the congress.

The discussion of the second five-year plan revealed two currents in the leadership of the party - supporters of accelerated industrialization (Stalin, Molotov, and others) and supporters of moderate rates of industrialization (Kirov, Ordzhonikidze). The congress also showed the markedly increased authority of Kirov - during the elections of the new Central Committee, Stalin received fewer votes; many former oppositionists (Pyatakov, Bukharin, Rykov, Tomsky) were elected to the Central Committee. Some Soviet historians are inclined to believe that during this period a new opposition emerged, headed by Kirov. They regard as evidence of this the speech of Kirov, published in Pravda on July 19, criticizing Stalin (L. V. Zhukov).

The coexistence of two positions in the party also predetermined the duality of this period: on the one hand, the tightening of the regime, and on the other, some “relaxations”.

On the one hand, numerous arrests are being carried out, a law on the responsibility of the families of the repressed is being adopted, on the other hand, special settlers have been partially amnestied, and the number of “disenfranchised” has decreased. On the one hand, on July 10, the GPU was dissolved, issues of state security were transferred to the jurisdiction of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (G. Yagoda). State security organs are deprived of the right to pass death sentences, and prosecutorial supervision is established over their activities; on the other hand, in November, special meetings are established under the NKVD, Prosecutor General Vyshinsky gives the state security agencies complete freedom of action, practically freeing them from prosecutorial supervision.

On December 1, 1934, Kirov (L. Nikolaev) was killed in the Smolny corridor under unclear circumstances. From that moment on, a new wave of repressions began. The term of the investigation was reduced to ten days to consider these cases and pass a sentence on them, even death, in the absence of the accused, sentences in such cases were not subject to appeal and review.

The “Leningrad center” was accused of murdering Kirov (Zinoviev and Kamenev, among others, appeared before the court); in connection with the same case, on the 20th of January, a trial took place over the Leningrad employees of the NKVD.

After the death of Kirov, Stalin's positions were significantly strengthened. After the February 1935 plenum, many of his supporters were appointed to leading positions (A. I. Mikoyan was added to the Politburo of the Central Committee; A. A. Zhdanov and N. S. Khrushchev were appointed first secretaries of the Leningrad and Moscow party organizations, respectively; he was elected secretary of the Central Committee N I. Ezhov, G. M. Malenkov became his deputy, A. Ya. Vyshinsky was appointed Prosecutor General).

An offensive was launched against the "old guard": in March 1935, "obsolete" works by Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev were confiscated from the libraries; By a resolution of the Central Committee of May 25, the Society of Old Bolsheviks was liquidated, and after a while, the Society of Former Political Prisoners.

On August 20, 1934, the exchange of party tickets began. At the same time, local party organizations were ordered to carefully check party members (to identify fake tickets, etc.), especially for sympathy for Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev.

The establishment of the Stalinist system and its activities met with resistance in various sections of society.

This resistance can be divided into several levels:

1. Mass resistance of the masses. This was most acutely manifested during collectivization. In subsequent years, the main way to express mass discontent was the numerous flow of letters to the country's leaders describing the real state of affairs.
2. The creation of illegal, most often youth, student organizations that opposed the policy of repression, for the development of democracy.
3. Resistance to the totalitarian system, coming from the ranks of the ruling party itself:
- group of S. I. Syrtsov - V. V. Lominadze. Syrtsov (Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR, candidate member of the Politburo of the Central Committee), Lominadze (Secretary of the Transcaucasian Regional Committee) and their comrades, discussing the problems of the country's development in 1930, believed that the country was on the verge of an economic crisis, and advocated the removal of Stalin from his post ;
- the illegal "Union of Marxist-Leninists" under the leadership of M. N. Ryutin (member of the party since 1914, former secretary of the Krasnopresnensky district committee of the party in Moscow) condemned the "adventurist pace of industrialization and collectivization";
- a group of leading workers of the RSFSR (A.P. Smirnov, V.N. Tolmachev, N.B. Eismont) also opposed the pace of industrialization and collectivization, which "led the country to the deepest crisis", "monstrous impoverishment of the masses and famine ... ";
- People's Commissar of Health G. N. Kaminsky and member of the Central Committee I. A. Pyatnitsky in June 1937 at the plenum of the Central Committee spoke out against mass repressions and accused the NKVD of fabricating cases and using illegal interrogation methods;
- published articles criticizing Stalinism in the foreign press, who refused to return to the USSR, Ambassador to Bulgaria F.F. Raskolnikov, Ambassador to Greece A.G. Barmin, one of the leaders of Soviet intelligence V.G. Krivitsky.

Such resistance, being unable to resist Stalinism, was at the same time of great moral significance, forcing this system to make certain concessions.

On August 19, 1936, the first Moscow Trial began. Most of the 16 defendants were party veterans. They were accused of having links with Trotsky, of involvement in the assassination of Kirov, etc. On August 24, they were sentenced to death, which was carried out almost immediately.

In October 1936, Pyatakov was arrested, and with him other former Trotskyists (Sokolnikov, Serebryakov, Radek). On January 23, 1937, the second Moscow Trial began. Of the 17 defendants (in attempts to overthrow the Soviet government, organizing attempts on its leaders, collaborating with Germany and Japan, etc.), 13 were sentenced to death, 4 to long-term imprisonment.

In February - early March 1937, Bukharin and Rykov were arrested. Displacement of cadre party workers began, in whose places nominees from the time of the first five-year plan were appointed. In March-April, local and district committees of the party were re-elected, as a result of which up to 20% of the leadership was updated. From May to June 1937, a purge of the command staff of the army and the republican party leadership began. The staffs of the people's commissariats were completely replaced. The revolutionaries-internationalists, employees of the Comintern, were also repressed.

From March 2 to March 13, 1938, the third Moscow Trial took place (in the case of the "anti-Soviet right-wing Trotskyist bloc"). The defendants (21 people, including Bukharin, Rykov, Rakovsky, Yagoda) were accused of murdering Kirov, poisoning Kuibyshev and Gorky, conspiracy against Stalin, sabotage in industry, spying for Germany and Japan, etc. 18 defendants were sentenced to the death penalty, 3 - to imprisonment.

Stalin's repressions went beyond the borders of the Soviet Union. The leaders of the Comintern and many foreign communists were repressed. Even Soviet intelligence lost almost all of its residents in Western countries, not counting many ordinary employees who were also suspected of treason or disloyalty to Stalin.

Repressive policies were carried out against entire peoples. In 1937, the Council of People's Commissars and the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks decided to immediately evict the Korean population living there from the Far Eastern Territory. The necessity of this act was motivated by the possible sending of Chinese and Korean spies to the Far East by the Japanese special services. Following this, over 36 thousand Korean families (more than 170 thousand people) were deported to the regions of Central Asia.

The repressions affected the commanding cadres of the Red Army (M. N. Tukhachevsky, I. E. Yakir, I. P. Uborevich, A. I. Egorov, V. K. Blucher). The defendants were accused of intending to liquidate the social and state system existing in the USSR, to restore capitalism. They supposedly intended to achieve this goal by means of espionage and sabotage activities, by undermining the country's economy.

Tens of thousands of innocent people were arrested on false denunciations and accusations of "counter-revolutionary" activities. They were sentenced to imprisonment and forced labor in the system of the State Administration of Camps (GULAG). The labor of prisoners was used in logging, construction of new factories and railways. By the end of the 30s. the Gulag system included more than 50 camps, over 420 correctional colonies, 50 juvenile colonies.

In parallel with the constitutional reform, the bodies of Soviet justice were reorganized. Most of the crimes of a political nature were not subject - more precisely, not fully subject - to the jurisdiction of ordinary courts, but were the prerogative of the NKVD. The punishment for them in most cases was imprisonment for a period of three to twenty-five years in forced labor camps. Despite the fact that forced labor as a principle of state organization was abolished in 1921, nevertheless, as a measure of punishment, it continued to be applied to both political and criminal offenders.

After the trials of the late 1930s, the number of labor camp prisoners steadily increased. Since the government has never published reliable data on the number of prisoners, it is not possible to accurately determine it, and estimates of various unofficial sources differ significantly. Analyzing the total population of the Soviet Union, researchers come to the conclusion that the number of prisoners ranged from 2 to 5 million people (V. G. Vernadsky).

According to official, clearly understated, data, in 1930-1953. 3.8 million people were repressed, of which 786 thousand were shot.

If the initial goal of sending to the camps was to suppress the resistance of any - overt or covert - opponents of the regime, then subsequently, at the expense of the convicts, sources of forced labor were replenished at various economic facilities, such as the construction of canals and the laying of railways in the North of Russia and Siberia, and also gold mining in the Far East.

The expansion of the scale of repression was accompanied by a violation of the law. The Central Executive Committee of the USSR adopted several resolutions that became the basis of the ongoing lawlessness. A special meeting was created - an extrajudicial body in the state security system. His decision on the grounds and measures of repression was not subject to control. Other non-judicial non-constitutional bodies - "troikas" and "twos" of the NKVD - built their work on the same principle. A new procedure for conducting cases of terrorist acts was established. Their consideration was carried out within ten days without the participation of the defense and the prosecution. One of the legal theorists who provided a "scientific base" for the arbitrariness of the 1930s was the USSR Prosecutor General A. Ya. Vyshinsky.

The administrative-command methods of managing the socio-political and cultural life of the country were strengthened. Many public organizations have been liquidated. The reasons for their abolition varied. In some cases - small numbers or financial turmoil. In others - being in the composition of the "enemies of the people" societies. The All-Union Association of Engineers, the Russian Society of Radio Engineers, the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature, the Society of Russian History and Antiquities were liquidated. The Society of Old Bolsheviks and the Society of Former Political Prisoners and Exiled Settlers ceased to exist, uniting, in addition to the Bolsheviks, former anarchists, Mensheviks, Bundists, Socialist-Revolutionaries, etc. Continued to operate mainly those associations that could be used in the interests of the state (OSOAVIAKHIM, the Society of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, International Organization for Assistance to Revolutionary Fighters - MOPR, etc.). Professional associations of the creative intelligentsia were placed under the control of party and state officials.

The "Great Terror" meant the formation of a totalitarian regime in the USSR and pursued the following goals:

1) the destruction of any, even potential, opposition, the slightest disloyalty to the supreme power, personified by Stalin;
2) the elimination of the "old party guard" and the remnants of the former ("non-socialist") social groups that interfered with the new charismatic leader with their traditions, knowledge of real history and capable of independent thinking;
3) the removal of social tension through the punishment of "switchmen" - the "culprits" of mistakes, negative phenomena in society;
4) cleansing of the "decomposed" party functionaries, suppression in the bud of parochial, departmental sentiments.

At the end of the 30s. these goals were largely achieved. A totalitarian regime was formed in the country, Stalin became the sole ruler of the Soviet Union, its economy, politics, ideology, as well as the international communist movement. In addition, the destructive consequences of mass terror for the national economy were revealed. In December 1938, as head of the NKVD, Yezhov was replaced by L.P. Beria, and then (like his predecessor Yagoda) was shot. A new purge of the NKVD was carried out, during which many prominent participants and eyewitnesses dangerous to Stalin of the "great terror" of 1937-1938 were destroyed.

The political regime of the 30s. with his terror, the periodic shake-up of personnel was associated with the chosen model of industrialization, with the administrative system that took shape in the course of it.

From May 10 to May 21, 1939, the 18th Party Congress was held in Moscow. The congress approved a new, more "democratic" edition of the Party Rules - the conditions for admission and the duration of the candidate's term became the same for everyone, without distinction of social origin. Purges 1933-1936 were condemned. Stalin acknowledged that many mistakes were made during their implementation, but he laid the blame for this on the local party organs. The new Charter gave the right to appeal and, possibly, to reinstate the expelled in the party (the mechanism for exercising this right remained on paper).

Thus, in the 20-30s. a totalitarian system is taking shape in the country, any opposition and dissident elements are suppressed in it. An appropriate political ideology is being formed. The entrenched repressive apparatus begins carrying out mass repressions, and a "cult of personality" is formed.

Establishment of a totalitarian regime

The reason for the establishment of a totalitarian regime is the uniqueness and strength of the totalitarian leader on the masses, caused by the psychological characteristics of the leader. These features played a role in order for the people to believe their leader and follow his thoughts. But here it is important to look, is it really only the personal qualities of the leader that helped to achieve control over people, and their faith in his words? Consider Germany, and its most notable authoritarian leader, Adolf Hitler. Something had to push the people to believe the words of Hitler. The generation of people in Germany born at the beginning of the 20th century experienced a lot of adverse psychological consequences of historical events. This is the first world war, which means that many grew up in single-parent families, and the revolution of 1918-1919. in Germany, and a difficult economic situation, followed by famine. The First World War, the post-war ordeal of this generation, had a decisive traumatic influence on the formation of the personality of young Germans, contributed to the formation of future Nazis such psychological qualities as a weak personality, increased aggressiveness, anger, which ultimately led to submission to a totalitarian leader.

Historical events must be taken into account, since the generation that grew up in a particular era will have its own individual outlook on life and character, due to the influence of historical events, economic, and cultural conditions.

For the generation of Germans who grew up in these historical, cultural and economic conditions, the following “mental deviations” are characteristic:

Identity crisis;
the need for identification with the father, reaching obsessive states;
time perspective disorder;
identification of male power with military pursuits;
a pseudo-male role complex that characterizes the attitude towards women from the position of abnormal asceticism and increased sexual control over oneself, the development of feelings of superiority over them. (G. Himmler, P. Levenberg).

The absolute power of groups of people, parties, in the industrial societies of the 20th century was called totalitarianism.

All totalitarian regimes have common features:

The cult of the people's leaders;
the growth of the apparatus of repression;
centralized pulling together of the resources of the nation, for sovereign tasks and plans;
control over the private life of a person, replacing the latter with the socio-political goals of the regime.

Under an authoritarian regime, the supreme ruler takes into account corporations and estates, this is the authority. A corporate-estate personality is closely included in its environment and communicates little outside of it. Totalitarianism centers power, it consistently breaks and subjugates the microsocial environment of the individual. According to its rules, nothing should shield a person from power: colleagues, acquaintances, relatives should become propagandists or spies of the regime.

The totalitarian regime is moving towards the goal of a perfect human structure. Everything should be subordinated to this goal, including the private life of the citizens of the country.

Under totalitarian rulers, most of the money and time are devoted to the construction of concentration camps, factories for the destruction of people, equipment and improvement of the army and military industry. This government wants to adjust the whole people for itself, what would everyone think and do, as they want "above". This deplorable example befell not only Germany with its ruler A. Hitler, but also the Soviet Union under the rule of Stalin.

The totalitarian rulers bring their power and their idea into every family of their country. Portraits of the first persons of the state hang in every house, newspapers with articles about the policy of the rulers are printed, monuments of the leader are made during his lifetime, and all this mass propaganda reaches the most remote settlements of the country. And the people are convinced that the government's policy is actually correct and useful for the state. And those who did not accept the current government and did not agree with it were usually sent to concentration camps, evicted from the country, or even worse, killed. The murder of political opponents brings totalitarian rulers pleasure, since the murder makes them feel like masters over the highest value - human life. And this is complete power for them.

Yes, this is exactly how cruel and uncritical of itself the totalitarian government is. This is the idea of one mentally ill person, massively infected the whole country, this does not mean that the people became sick, just strong and successful propaganda did its job, and people believed. Of course, the opinion of the people was not taken into account here, here there is an obsession with only one person who wants power over everything and everyone.

Features of the totalitarian regime

Features of the totalitarian regime. What are they in? As we can see from history, the government shows inadequacy in the management of society in two ways: either it does not carry out sufficiently effective management in those areas where it is necessary (insufficient passionarity of the authorities), or, conversely, it tries to impose its management where society is capable of develop independently.

The "independence" of the development of society without the signs and characteristics of a totalitarian regime is a very mysterious phenomenon. Today we are only approaching an understanding of the laws by which this development takes place - the laws of the unconscious that governs us from within ourselves. People without any prescriptions and directives get up in the morning, go to work, build personal relationships, create families, develop science, financial systems, write books, in a word - produce thoughts, obeying mainly their unconscious innate desires, their nature. Out of all this seemingly disparate and chaotic movement, in some surprising way, a whole society is created that does not need the presence of the features of a totalitarian regime. This is a society whose "health" directly depends on the active actions of each of its members to realize their innate potential, their abilities. Even with a shallow understanding of system-vector psychology, it becomes clear that here we are dealing with a certain mechanism by which nature itself controls us.

Features of the totalitarian regime, the intervention of the obsessed with the idea

It is easy to guess what will happen if an insufficiently prepared conscious control thought tries to interfere with this subtlest mechanism of unconscious natural control. In this case, the collective idea (as a substitute for natural control) ceases to be primary (beneficial to society), and the collective state of the sound obsession of the ruling elite or some significant part of it becomes primary. When this state turns into concrete actions, the so-called "totalitarian syndrome" arises in society. Become observable features of the totalitarian regime. The state begins to interfere in almost all spheres of society's life, allegedly with the aim of their ideologization, but in fact, as already mentioned, in the first place here is not ideology at all, but the intervention itself - as an opportunity to influence, control, shape without limit this response.

The ideal model of a state with the features of a totalitarian regime is a state in which people even experience desires and produce thoughts in the way that the authorities need, and not in accordance with their unconscious program. In order to achieve this, the ruling elite systematically remakes a person from the inside, turns his psyche into an absolutely manageable and plastic one - brings out the so-called "new type of people". All the inner content is, as it were, removed from a person in layers, and another, “correct” one is put in its place. From here follow the other signs of an ideal state, which are, in fact, only methods for achieving this main goal - the artificial replacement of natural management with one's own.

Signs and features of a totalitarian regime:

1. The ideology on which the political system of society is built is all encompassing and unique.

2. The presence of a single party, usually led by a dictator, which merges with the state apparatus and the secret police. A “hierarchy” is being built, where there is a certain superman (leader, leader), on whom all adoration is ideally focused. He is sinless and indisputable, he does not make mistakes, his forecasts are always correct, he knows everything about everyone, but he himself is inaccessible. Between the image of the leader and the people stands a party consisting of ordinary people who, although higher (smarter, more educated, more ideological) than the people, still, unlike the leader, have their own visible shortcomings. But, despite this, the party members, since they are an intermediate link between the demigod-leader and the people, receive the psychological right to be considered one qualitative (if not evolutionary) step above the rest. It is the ideality of the leader that gives them this right to be higher in the sound sense of the word (which in principle means almost complete permissiveness in relation to the “lower ones”).

At the same time, a person who plays the role of a leader, in accordance with the characteristics of a totalitarian regime, may not be so sinless, he may not exist at all: to create such a hierarchy (on the scale of “divinity”), his very image is important.

3. Denial of traditions, including traditional morality, absolute subordination of the choice of means to the declared goals - building a "new society". The whole system of relations in society is gradually reduced to only one of their types - this is the relationship "man - power". This goal is served both by the complete isolation of such a society and the destruction in it of all kinds of social ties that are unconsciously built between people (respect, trust, friendship, love, transfer of knowledge, cultural restrictions, etc.). Methods can be very different: from propaganda and encouragement of denunciation to repression. The so-called “atomization” of society leads to the fact that all the libidinal energy of a person, previously unconsciously directed by him to other people, is now artificially redirected into the right direction, which means that the person himself becomes completely dependent on the features of the totalitarian regime and is controlled within this channel.

Thus, totalitarianism (from the Latin totalis - whole, whole, complete) is the reverse side of the sound ideology, its opposite. It arises when ideological thought is unnaturally woven into the structure of social ties, thereby disfiguring them.

In practice, this turned out to be at least somewhat possible only at the very peak of the historical phase of development (30s, 40s of the 20th century), when the features of the totalitarian regime manifested themselves in full and the ideologization of the world grew so much that it hit its “ceiling”. ”and, according to all natural laws, tried to break through it: There were attempts to impose ideology in those areas of society where it was not needed. As you might guess, thanks to a chain of "accidents", these attempts ended in a crushing failure, because the world already demanded a different quality of sound thought, and not an unlimited (total) growth of ideology. Ideology was limited, left in the past, and the Second World War became the turning point that made this symbolic separation of the past from the present in the perception of people.

The essence of a totalitarian regime

The totalitarian regime is inherently aggressive, and aggression helps to achieve several goals at once: to distract the people from their disastrous economic situation, enrich the bureaucracy, the ruling elite, and solve geopolitical problems by military means. Aggression under a totalitarian regime can also be fueled by the idea of world domination, world revolution. The military-industrial complex, the army are the main pillars of totalitarianism.

An important role in totalitarianism is played by the political practice of demagogy, hypocrisy, double standards, moral decay and degeneration.

The state under totalitarianism, as it were, takes care of every member of society. Under the totalitarian regime, the population develops the ideology and practice of social dependency. Members of society believe that the state should provide, support, protect them in all cases, especially in the field of healthcare, education, and housing. The psychology of leveling is developing, there is a significant lumpenization of society. On the one hand, a completely demagogic, decorative, formal totalitarian regime, and on the other hand, social dependency of a part of the population nourish and support these varieties of political regime. Often the totalitarian regime is painted in nationalistic, racist, chauvinistic colors.

However, the social price for such a way of exercising power increases over time (wars, drunkenness, the destruction of motivation to work, coercion, terror, demographic and environmental losses), which ultimately leads to the realization of the harmfulness of the totalitarian regime, the need to eliminate it. Then the evolution of the totalitarian regime begins. The pace and forms of this evolution (up to destruction) depend on socio-economic shifts and the corresponding increase in people's consciousness, political struggle, and other factors. Within the framework of a totalitarian regime that ensures the federal structure of the state, national liberation movements can arise that destroy both the totalitarian regime and the federal structure of the state itself.

Can a totalitarian system change and evolve? Friedrich and Brzezinski argued that the totalitarian regime does not change, it can only be destroyed from the outside. They assured that all totalitarian states perished, as the Nazi regime perished in Germany. Subsequently, life has shown that this aspect is erroneous. Totalitarian regimes are capable of changing and evolving. After Stalin's death, the USSR changed. The board of Brezhnev L.I. listens to criticism. However, it cannot be said that they are the same. This is the so-called post-totalitarianism. A post-totalitarian regime is a system when totalitarianism loses some of its elements and, as it were, is eroded and weakened (for example, the USSR under N.S. Khrushchev). So, a totalitarian regime should be divided into purely totalitarian and post-totalitarian.

Yet totalitarianism is a historically doomed system. This society is a Samoyed, incapable of effective creation, prudent, enterprising management and existing mainly at the expense of rich natural resources, exploitation, and limiting the consumption of the majority of the population. Totalitarianism is a closed society, not adapted to modern qualitative renewal, taking into account the new requirements of a constantly changing world.

Examples of a totalitarian regime

Examples of totalitarian regimes:

The communist regime of Lenin and Stalin in the USSR, Mao Zedong in China and other countries of the "socialist camp".

Today, two such regimes have survived - the regime of R. Castro Ruz in Cuba and the regime of Kim Jong Il in North Korea, which keep their population on the verge of starvation.

The North Korean regime is trying to survive and threaten other countries through the development of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles.

Fascist regimes of Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy.

Nationalist regime of Emperor Hirohito in Japan.

These regimes were defeated as a result of the Second World War.

The Islamic-fundamentalist Taliban regime in Afghanistan, the regime of Imam Khomeini in Iran.

This regime has survived to this day and is trying to threaten the world with the creation of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles.

The Taliban regime was defeated as a result of a military operation carried out by the United States.

Characteristics of the totalitarian regime

A totalitarian regime (or totalitarianism) is a state-political structure of society, characterized by complete (total control) of the state over all spheres of society.

It is characterized by the nationalization of not only public, but also to a large extent private life, the maximum infringement of the rights and freedoms of citizens.

Z. Brzezinski and K. Friedrich took the provisions of American laws as the basis for their definition of totalitarianism and offered a more detailed description of totalitarianism.

They identified the following features:

A single mass party led by a charismatic leader;
- one, the only possible ideology, which should be recognized by all. Division of the whole world according to ideology into friends and enemies;
- monopoly on mass media;
- monopoly on all means of armed struggle;
- legalization of terror and the system of terrorist police control;
- centralized economic management system.

This description of totalitarianism is more fundamental. It is focused on the description of not all, but the most characteristic features and brings it closer to understanding its essence. And, nevertheless, it is also vulnerable, since the author does not share two political questions - what are the relations of power and how is power organized. And although in life these issues are interconnected. Yet they exist as two questions. Totalitarianism is a concept designed, first of all, to express the relationship between power and society. Therefore, the description of the mechanism of power (strong centralization, methods of legitimation) are secondary, derivative signs of totalitarianism.

The most aggregated signs of totalitarianism are absoluteness, aggressiveness, mobilization of power. The absoluteness of power means that power is the starting point of all initiatives, movements, and changes. There is no civil society, or the sphere of its life is extremely narrowed. Economic, spiritual interests exist as they are allowed to be by the authorities. As W. Churchill once put it about the Soviet order: "Everything is forbidden here, and what is allowed is ordered." This sign brings us closer to the understanding of totalitarianism, points to its affinity with the Eastern despotisms, the Asian mode of production, or the Protestant formation. The peculiarity of the latter is that the initial principle lies not in the economic interest of a person, but in the interest of the authorities, which cannot completely ignore the interests of people, but is able to subordinate them to itself, can neglect them, deforming them. In society, an opinion is created about the existence of a strong, omnipotent power. Here, arbitrariness is combined with a peculiar order.

Totalitarianism is characterized by a special ideology. It claims to cover all spheres of life, substantiates its monopoly right to the truth, and prohibits political pluralism. Under such a regime, it is officially considered that the vast majority of the population is unanimously committed to this ideology. Even emotions and thoughts are taken under control. Ideas are brought to the masses by the most accessible methods (movies, songs, etc.).

Totalitarian ideologies deny the past and present in the name of a great and bright future. Society is marginalized. The elite is turning into the nomenklatura - the anti-elite.

In the ideology and practice of totalitarianism, a special role is played by the figure of the leader, who is unnaturally endowed with the whole set of positive qualities, including charismatic abilities.

In the political sphere - the monopoly of one party, and the party itself under the rule of one leader. Under a totalitarian regime, the party is merging with the state apparatus. Public organizations are an appendage of the state. Self-government is excluded from life.

There is a stateization of society. The independence of public life from the state is shrinking; civil society is destroyed. A totalitarian society divides people into enemies and friends.

The role of law under such a regime is downplayed. Power gets unlimited powers. The state becomes illegal.

Monopoly in the economy, politics is associated with a monopoly on information. All media are taken under strict control. Totalitarianism is characterized by anti-intellectualism.

Preservation and ordering of this entire system of monopolies is impossible without violence. Therefore, the use of terror is characteristic of a totalitarian regime. This is a means of domestic policy of the state.

Modern Ukrainian political scientist V.I. Polohalo believes that in the concept of totalitarianism it is important to pay more attention not to forms, but to essence. In Ukraine, in his opinion, what can be called neo-totalitarianism or post-communist totalitarianism has practically taken shape. The state, V.I. Polokhalo notes, has become a previously unprecedented “trust company” in which all citizens are forced depositors. And they have been unable to receive anything from this state for six years now.

Totalitarianism can be divided into tyrannical, fascist and military-dictatorial. To summarize what has been said, we can conclude that totalitarianism rests on three “pillars”: fear, hatred and enthusiasm of the masses.

As history shows, totalitarian regimes, as a rule, are not able to ensure the viability of society for a long time. The reasons lie in their nature: limited opportunities for self-development, poor adaptability to a rapidly changing world. A well-known American specialist in management theory believes that the advent of the age of informatics is incompatible with a totalitarian regime of power.

Totalitarian concepts eliminate any restrictions on political influence, proceed from a comprehensive, total politicization of society, political command over the economy, culture, science, etc. In totalitarian models, politics directly governs all other spheres, effectively abolishes civil society and the autonomy of private life. In totalitarian states, the ideological origins of the cult of personality lie in ideology, its claims to the monopoly possession of social truth, universal, universal significance.

In a totalitarian society, the scope of such dependence is essentially unlimited. This includes getting a job, and a career, and getting housing, bonuses and other social benefits, and various kinds of sanctions against the disobedient. Reflected in the mass consciousness and accompanied by appropriate systematic ideological processing, all this gives rise to the population's belief in the omnipotence of the leader, fear of him, slavish obedience and servility. The heavy legacy of such an attitude towards political leadership is still evident in many states of the world, especially in the countries of the East.

The concept of totalitarianism comes from the Latin words "TOTALITAS" - wholeness, completeness and "TOTALIS" - whole, complete, whole. Usually, totalitarianism is understood as a political regime based on the desire of the country's leadership to subordinate the way of life of people to one, undividedly dominant idea and to organize the political system of power so that it helps to realize this idea.

Totalitarian regimes are those in which:

There is a mass party (with a rigid, semi-military structure, claiming complete subordination of its members to the symbols of faith and their spokesmen - the leaders, the leadership as a whole), this party grows together with the state and concentrates real power in society;
- the party is not organized in a democratic way - it is built around the leader. Power comes down from the leader, not up from the masses;
- the role of ideology dominates. A totalitarian regime is an ideological regime that always has its own “Bible”. The ideology of the regime is also reflected in the fact that the political leader determines the ideology. He can change his mind within a day, as happened in the summer of 1939, when the Soviet people suddenly learned that Nazi Germany was no longer an enemy of socialism. On the contrary, its system was declared better than the false democracies of the bourgeois West. This unexpected interpretation was maintained for two years until Nazi Germany's perfidious attack on the USSR;
- totalitarianism is built on monopoly control of production and the economy, as well as on similar control of all other spheres of life, including education, the media, etc.;
- under totalitarianism there is a terrorist police control. The police exist under different regimes, however, under totalitarianism, police control is terrorist in the sense that no one will prove guilt in order to kill a person.

All of the above characteristics are called "syndromes" by Heidenberg professor Karl Friedrich. The presence of one or more of these characteristics is not enough for the system to become totalitarian. For example, there are regimes where the police carry out terror, but they are not totalitarian, remember Chile: at the beginning of the reign of President Pinochet, 15,000 people died in concentration camps. But Chile is not a totalitarian state, because there were no other "syndromes" of totalitarianism: there was no mass party, there was no "sacred" ideology, the economy remained free and market. The government had only partial control over education and the media.

Totalitarian systems do not arise spontaneously, but on the basis of a certain ideological image. Totalitarianism is a product of the human mind, its attempt to put all public and private life under direct rational control, to subordinate it to certain goals. Therefore, in identifying the common features of this type of political system, the starting point is the analysis of the underlying ideology and public consciousness. It is in ideology that the totalitarian system draws its vitality. The ideology is called upon to perform a social integration function, to cement people into a political community, to serve as a value guide, to motivate the behavior of citizens and state policy.

The ideologization of all social life, the desire to subordinate all economic and social processes to the “only true” theory with the help of planning is the most important feature of a totalitarian society. Various forms of totalitarian ideology have some common properties. The teleologism of the totalitarian ideology is manifested in the consideration of history as a natural movement towards a specific goal, as well as in the value priority of the goal over the means to achieve it in accordance with the principle "the end justifies the means". In its content, the totalitarian ideology is revolutionary. It substantiates the need for the formation of a new society and man. Its entire building is based on social myths, for example, about capitalism and communism, about the leading role of the working class, about the superiority of the Aryan race, and so on. These myths are not subject to criticism and have the character of religious symbols. Only on their basis is a rational explanation of all social events given.

The totalitarian ideology is imbued with a paternalistic spirit, the patronizing attitude of leaders who have comprehended social truth towards the insufficiently enlightened masses. Ideology as the only true doctrine is obligatory for all.

Totalitarianism is characterized by a monopoly of power on information, complete control over the media, extreme intolerance of any dissent, and consideration of ideological opponents as political opponents. This system eliminates public opinion, replacing it with official political assessments. The universal foundations of morality are denied, and morality itself is subject to political expediency and is essentially destroyed.

Individuality, originality in thoughts, behavior, clothing, etc. are suppressed in every possible way. Herd feelings are cultivated: the desire not to stand out, to be like everyone else, leveling, as well as base instincts: class and national hatred, envy, suspicion, denunciation, etc. In the minds of people, an image of an enemy is intensely created, with which there can be no reconciliation. Fighting moods, an atmosphere of secrecy, a state of emergency are maintained in every possible way, which does not allow relaxation, loss of vigilance. All this serves to justify command methods of control and repression.

The formation of totalitarian regimes

Signs of a totalitarian political regime.

Totalitarianism is a political regime in which the state exercises complete control and strict regulation of all spheres of the life of society and the life of every person, which is provided mainly by force, including the means of armed violence.

The main features of a totalitarian regime are:

1) the supremacy of the state, which is total in nature. The state does not simply interfere in the economic, political, social, spiritual, family and everyday life of society, it seeks to completely subjugate, nationalize any manifestations of life;
2) the concentration of the entirety of state political power in the hands of the leader of the party, which entails the actual exclusion of the population and ordinary members of the party from participation in the formation and activities of state bodies;
3) monopoly on the power of a single mass party, merging of the party and state apparatus;
4) the dominance in society of one omnipotent state ideology, supporting the masses' conviction in the justice of this system of power and the correctness of the chosen path;
5) centralized system of control and management of the economy;
6) complete lack of human rights. Political freedoms and rights are formally fixed, but are not really present;
7) There is strict censorship of all media and publishing activities. It is forbidden to criticize government officials, state ideology, speak positively about the life of states with other political regimes;
8) the police and special services, along with the functions of ensuring law and order, perform the functions of punitive bodies and act as an instrument of mass repression;
9) suppression of any opposition and dissent through systematic and mass terror, which is based on both physical and spiritual violence;
10) suppression of personality, depersonalization of a person, turning him into a cog of the same type in the party-state machine. The state strives for the complete transformation of a person in accordance with the ideology adopted in it.

Prerequisites for the formation of totalitarianism in the USSR. As the main factors that contributed to the formation of a totalitarian regime in our country, one can single out economic, political and sociocultural ones. The accelerated economic development, as noted in one of the previous sections, led to a tightening of the political regime in the country. Recall that the choice of a forced strategy assumed a sharp weakening, if not complete destruction of the commodity-money mechanisms for regulating the economy, with the absolute predominance of the administrative and economic system. Planning, production, technical discipline in the economy, devoid of the levers of economic interest, was most easily achieved by relying on the political apparatus, state sanction, and administrative coercion. As a result, the same forms of strict obedience to the directive on which the economic system was built prevailed in the political sphere.

The strengthening of the totalitarian principles of the political system was also required by the very low level of material well-being of the vast majority of society, which accompanied the forced version of industrialization, attempts to overcome economic backwardness. The enthusiasm and conviction of the advanced sections of society alone was not enough to keep the standard of living of millions of people during a quarter of a century of peacetime at the level that usually exists for short periods of time, in years of war and social catastrophes. Enthusiasm, in this situation, had to be reinforced by other factors, primarily organizational and political, regulation of labor and consumption measures (severe penalties for theft of public property, for absenteeism and being late for work, restrictions on movement, etc.). The need to take these measures, of course, did not in any way favor the democratization of political life.

The formation of a totalitarian regime was also favored by a special type of political culture, characteristic of Russian society throughout its history. It combines a disdainful attitude towards law and law with the obedience of the bulk of the population to power, the violent nature of power, the absence of legal opposition, the idealization of the population of the head of power, etc. (subordinate type of political culture). Characteristic of the bulk of society, this type of political culture is also reproduced within the framework of the Bolshevik Party, which was formed mainly by people who came from the people. Coming from war communism, the "Red Guard attack on capital", the reassessment of the role of violence in the political struggle, indifference to cruelty weakened the sense of moral validity, the justification of many political actions that had to be carried out by the party activists. The Stalinist regime, as a result, did not meet active resistance within the party apparatus itself. Thus, we can conclude that a combination of economic, political, and cultural factors contributed to the formation of a totalitarian regime in the USSR in the 1930s, the system of Stalin's personal dictatorship. The essence of Stalinist totalitarianism. The main characteristic feature of the political regime in the 1930s was the transfer of the center of gravity to party, emergency and punitive bodies. The decisions of the 17th Congress of the CPSU (b) significantly strengthened the role of the party apparatus: it received the right to directly engage in state and economic management, the top party leadership acquired unlimited freedom, and ordinary communists were obliged to strictly obey the leading centers of the party hierarchy.

Along with the executive committees of the Soviets in industry, agriculture, science, culture, party committees functioned, whose role in fact becomes decisive. Under conditions of concentration of real political power in party committees, the Soviets carried out mainly economic and cultural organizational functions.

The policy of repression: causes and consequences. Relying on a powerful system of punitive organs, the Stalinist leadership in the 30s spins the flywheel of repression.

According to a number of modern historians, the repressive policy in this period pursued three main goals:

1) a real cleansing of the “decomposed” from the often uncontrolled power of functionaries;
2) suppression in the bud of departmental, parochial, separatist, clan, opposition sentiments, ensuring the unconditional power of the center over the periphery;
3) removal of social tension by identifying and punishing enemies. The data known today about the mechanism of the "great terror" allow us to say that among the many reasons for these actions, the desire of the Soviet leadership to destroy the potential "fifth column" in the face of a growing military threat was of particular importance.

During the repressions, the national economic, party, state, military, scientific and technical personnel, representatives of the creative intelligentsia were subjected to purges. The number of prisoners in the Soviet Union in the 1930s is determined by figures from 3.5 million to 9-10 million people.

What was the result of the policy of mass repression? On the one hand, it must be admitted that this policy really increased the level of "cohesion" of the country's population, which was then able to unite in the face of fascist aggression. But at the same time, without even taking into account the moral and ethical side of the process (torture and death of millions of people), it is difficult to deny the fact that mass repressions have disorganized the life of the country. Constant arrests among the heads of enterprises and collective farms led to a drop in discipline and responsibility at work. There was a huge shortage of military personnel. The Stalinist leadership itself in 1938 abandoned mass repressions, purged the NKVD, but basically this punitive machine remained untouched. As a result of mass repressions, a political system was entrenched, which is called the regime of Stalin's personal power (Stalin's totalitarianism). During the repression, most of the country's top leaders were destroyed. They were replaced by a new generation of leaders ("promoters of terror"), wholly devoted to Stalin. Thus, the adoption of fundamentally important decisions finally passed into the hands of the General Secretary of the CPSU (b).

Periodization. Four stages are usually distinguished in the evolution of Stalinist totalitarianism:

1. 1923-1934 - the process of formation of Stalinism, the formation of its main trends.
2. The middle of the 30s - 1941 - the implementation of the Stalinist model of the development of society and the creation of a bureaucratic basis of power.
3. The period of the Great Patriotic War, 1941 - 1945 - partial retreat of Stalinism, highlighting the historical role of the people, the growth of national identity, the expectation of democratic changes in the country's internal life after the victory over fascism.
4. 1946 - 1953 - the apogee of Stalinism, growing into the collapse of the system, the beginning of the regressive evolution of Stalinism.

In the second half of the 1950s, during the implementation of the decisions of the 20th Congress of the CPSU, a partial de-Stalinization of Soviet society was carried out, but a number of signs of totalitarianism remained in the political system until the 1980s.

Maxim KALASHNIKOV

TOTALITARISM OF THE XXI CENTURY
New forces - against the new barbarism and the Dark Ages

“There is no dictatorship in Louisiana. There is a perfect democracy, and it is difficult to distinguish a perfect democracy from a dictatorship.”
So spoke America's idol of the 1930s, Louisiana Senator Huey Long. Long, who came to power under the slogans of de facto American national socialism. He founded the "Share Our Wealth" movement with more than 7.5 million supporters and was to win the 1936 presidential election, far ahead of F.D. Roosevelt in the polls. But he was very handy for Roosevelt, shot dead by a Jewish doctor Weiss in September 1935. By the way, Long's figure is very revered by Bill Clinton, US President in 1992-2000.
Ahead is the era of the collapse of the notorious democracy under the onslaught of both the global crisis and the new barbarism. So I advise you not to have false hopes. "The end of history" according to Fukuyama results in the beginning of a new era. Hefty, I would say, cruel. And you need to determine your place and role in the reality of the Cruel Age.
What can the world be like without liberal-bourgeois democracy?

The future will give us several variants of totalitarianism.
By the way, do you know what it is - "totalitarianism"? The idea is firmly imprinted into the minds of the simpletons and the profane that these are, without fail, detachments of stormtroopers, beating all those who disagree. And at the head is a dictator, the Great Leader, who rules the country with the help of an exclusively pyramidal bureaucratic apparatus.
But it is not so. As far back as the 1920s, the West perceived the word "totalitarianism" as quite positive. For what is the main idea of a totalitarian system? The fact that the people (or the nation, if you like it) is not just the sum of selfish individuals, but something whole. A kind of superorganism, a giant living being - with its own national character, the desire for survival, expansion, "nutrition" in the form of access to resources. According to the views of social scientists and philosophers of those times, the nation, like a huge living organism, goes through the stages of childhood, youth, maturity and decrepitude. The superorganism can die or perish in the struggle with other organism-nations. This means that an individual person is a part, a cell of a colossal organism. As in any organism, everything in a nation must be subordinated to the interests of the survival and development of the people-superorganism. Therefore, the interests of the whole must prevail over the egoism of individuals. And everyone should be able to work harmoniously, in the name of the highest national efficiency.
Another name for totalitarianism is "organic society". Here - as in the body, everything - in its place. There are no competing hearts or digestive systems in the body. Everything is functional and rational. As Mussolini used to say, in such a society everyone feels himself in his place, everyone is surrounded by attention, everyone is inside the state, and not a single child is left to the mercy of fate.
This is the meaning of totalitarianism. The interests of the nation are paramount. The minority obeys the will of the majority. And everyone can be as one. And one for all, and all for one. In this respect, totalitarianism can correspond to the will of the majority of the nation. It was in this spirit that the Louisianian Long spoke. For more details about the sympathy for totalitarian regimes experienced by the American progressive-liberal establishment in the 1920s and 1930s, see the American bestseller John (Jonah) Goldberg "Liberal Fascism" (2007). With murderous facts, which after 1945 are hushed up in every possible way.

I must say that modern science provides a lot of evidence for such a theory. Indeed, communities of individuals behave like giant transpersonal, intelligent beings. (Unintelligent ants or bees in a swarm also constitute one collective superorganism). Let us recall the Lelik-Lazarchuk theory of golems, as well as similar theories. Golems have a sense of self-preservation, a strategy of behavior, fight for resources and living space, defend and attack. However, Sergey Kugushev and I pretty much wrote about this in the “Third Project” (2006)
The very concept of "national character" - in the same spirit. For it presupposes that the nation is a huge being, possessing such a character. The very existence of national characters cannot be denied; this is a completely empirical reality. At the same time, Lev Gumilyov's theory of ethnogenesis pours water on the mill of totalitarianism. And in Gumilyov, ethnic groups are super-beings with their own stages of life.
That is why totalitarianism in tomorrow's world will become a common reality. Not least because totalitarian systems work perfectly in conditions of acute and deep crises, emergency situations and global force majeure. The whole experience of mankind says that in critical situations everyone must obey the will of the army commander or the captain of the ship. Anyone who tried the opposite under such circumstances simply did not survive. The principle of unity of command is written in blood. Totalitarian systems can really mobilize forces and resources, dragging entire countries out of the clutches of death, out of the traps of terrible crises.
Now is the time for global force majeure. And for decades to come. This is comparable to war. Moreover, hot wars are inevitable here. This means that the second coming of totalitarian regimes is inevitable.
But I will emphasize in particular: the regimes are precisely totalitarian, which correspond to the interests of the majority of the people and turn it into a single superorganism. Not every dictatorial regime is totalitarian. For example, Putinism is not totalitarianism at all. For it represents the omnipotence of the comprador "elite" hostile to the Russians. In the same way, the dictatorships of Latin American "gorilla" generals were not totalitarian regimes. But Hitler, for example, was quite a totalitarian: his power wholeheartedly supported the majority of Germans. The totalitarian authorities were the reigns of Stalin, Mussolini and the New Deal under Roosevelt. (Jonah Goldberg rightly believes that the world's first totalitarian - but temporary - regime was created by the administration of US President Woodrow Wilson in 1913-1921, and Mussolini, the Nazis, and Soviet communists took a lot of his practice). Totalitarian systems always rely on mass grassroots support, on a rati of enthusiasts and volunteers.

And why is there a sin to conceal? Give complete freedom and honesty of elections in the Russian Federation today - and a nationalist dictator with strong socialist principles in politics will come to power very quickly and quite legally. Our analogue of H. Long.
This is evidenced by sociological soundings. Russians are generally a monarchical people. We love strong rulers. (The monarchism of our society is even proved by the fact that the main slogan of the “democratic opposition” in the winter of 2011-2012 at street rallies in the Russian Federation was “Russia without Putin!”. As you can see, even racist “democrats” profess naive monarchism on the contrary: not in the system, but in the “bad king”). Russians today will vote for who will provide them with jobs, careers, high wages, life prospects, safety on the streets. For someone who really starts a new industrialization and creates millions of jobs. For the one who really outweighs the thieves and corrupt officials of the last twenty years, who will return the loot to the people, who will take away the seized property from the oligarchs and senior officials. Those who will not only promise, but actually begin to destroy crime, the drug mafia, ethnic and other mafias will be voted for. For the one who will protect our children from corruption, from obsessive propaganda of homosexuality, promiscuity, the cult of the Golden Calf. People don't give a damn about the "holy canons of democracy" - the above is more important to them. And it doesn't matter how it will be provided. Putin could easily rule for at least thirty years, if he managed to do all this. With the full support of the majority of the people, who would tear the oppositionists to shreds. But he cannot do this - and this is the main reason for the inevitable fall of the regime.
And one should not think that Russians are very different from Westerners in this. They are the same. According to polls conducted in March 2010, 80% of residents of East Germany (ex-GDR) and 72% of the inhabitants of its Western part said that they would not mind living in a socialist country if they were guaranteed only three things: work, security and social protection. 23% of Easterners (Ossies) and 24% of West Germans (Wessies) admitted that from time to time they dream of recreating the Berlin Wall. Only 28% of the Aussies surveyed consider liberal freedom the main value. Every seventh in the West and every 12th of the polled Vessi said that for 5 thousand euros they are ready to sell their vote in the elections in favor of any party.
Thus, the quarter-century domination of liberal-monetarist, ultra-market forces (beginning with Helmut Kohl), the reunification of Germany, the influx of Asian immigrants and the current Megacrisis have driven the Germans to the edge. Now they are ready to live in a socialist state. (Or - National Socialist?) After all, in general, the three main aspirations of the current Aussies / Wessies are, in fact, the Hitlerite pop program. Resurrection of the memory of the totalitarian Third Reich.
And in the United States at the beginning of 2012, 70% of the population strongly supported President Obama's plans to increase taxes on the rich, considering them to be the culprits of the crisis that befell the country and deindustrialization, catastrophic in its consequences. As you can see, this is a kind of reincarnation of Huey Long's policy of the 1930s with his idea of a fair distribution of wealth. For 70 years, the psychology of Americans has not changed. They will also follow possible totalitarianism, which will ensure the construction of new industry and new infrastructure. Of course, Obama (far from F.D. Roosevelt) doesn’t have enough guts for that, but there is a public demand for the Fuhrer - and he will still be satisfied.
Do you think Western liberals do not smell this? How they smell! They are well aware that the power of the majority will look a lot like a dictatorship. Max Weber, the luminary of Western sociology, at the beginning of the 20th century created the theory of plebiscitary leader democracy based on the majority. That is why the liberals of the West are trying their best to convince us that democracy is not the rule of the majority, but "the protection of the rights of minorities." But they will not deceive anyone. And on the same big burn.
There is also history. As soon as the West encounters an emergency (supercrisis or war), it instantly throws away all democratic norms, introducing the same mechanisms as the USSR and Nazi Germany. Restrictions on personal freedoms are rapidly appearing, secret police are being established, surveillance of the unreliable is being established, censorship is being introduced. I advise you to remember both 1917-1921, and the thirties, and the Second World War, and the 1950s with McCarthyism, and Nixon's attempt to introduce an imperial presidency in 1973-1974, and Bush's son's police innovations after 2001.
Do you think that the current crisis, when it gains momentum, will not cause this? Oh-oh! We will see many more amazing...

I think that in this century we will see anti-crisis totalitarianism of two types.
The first is the old-style totalitarian regimes known from 1917-1945. At that time there were no modern technologies of socionics and management. Therefore, the highest embodiment of the nation-superorganism was the state with an extensive administrative apparatus, which tried to listen to the opinion of the masses as far as possible. But this is a really outdated and not quite effective model of totalitarianism.
The second type of totalitarianism has yet to be created. It combines the power of the leader with a perfect machine for the formation of public opinion, with anti-bureaucratic mechanisms of state administration (automation, "electronic government", Mukhinskaya delokratiya instead of bureaucracy), with strong self-government in cities and rural areas and in large enterprises (participation of workers in ownership). Paradoxically, the system of Councils based on neuroprinciples, which we have written about many times, also falls here.
Well, in parallel, we will see a series of non-totalitarian dictatorships - frantic attempts by the old capitalist "elite" to maintain their power over the masses.

And now let's sum up the first results.
Thus, in the first half of the very turbulent and crisis of the 21st century, the one who will be the first to create a new type of totalitarian regime will be successful. Very high tech and innovative. Truly democratic, popular. For the new barbarians, thank heavens, will not make up the majority of the people for a long time to come.
Such popular totalitarianism should launch not only a new industrialization, but also start a whole range of bold, breakthrough projects that literally create a highly developed civilization of the Future, pulling humanity out of the embrace of a new barbarism. All this must be accompanied by a mass reforging of human capital, the destruction of the conditions for the genesis of a new barbarism, endowing our life with the highest Meaning and Common Cause. In fact, we will have to restore the social significance of honest, hard work, creativity, teaching, scientific research. We will often have to forcibly turn new barbarians into full-fledged citizens, put them at their desks, put them at the benches.
The goal is the creation of a new era and a new humanity, the next stage of evolution (and not degradation).
This, in fact, is the philosophy of a new oprichnina and a civilizational breakthrough, well known to readers of my past books. Such demo-totalitarianism will become a temporary, transitional phenomenon. He will be dissolved in the new reality that he himself will give rise to. For the oprichnina, having covered the whole country, will cease to be something “oprichnina” (special). It will become a new, victorious reality.
Here is a strategic plan for victory over the new barbarism and the Dark Ages. My USSR-2 (aka Russian Union, Neo-Empire, Supernova Russia). This is the dream of the author of these lines. The fate he wants for his people.
If we can do this, we will save ourselves, and at the same time the whole world, showing him the right path. If we can't, amen will come to us. And then some “PRC-2” or Supernova America may turn out to be the winners. Or in general - some new structure with floating cities in the ocean and combat viruses that destroy billions of inferior and unnecessary bipeds.
If this does not work out for anyone, then the Earth will be enveloped in the darkness of a new barbarism. With the death of billions of extra people, with a rollback to the realities of not only feudalism, but already neo-slavery and tribal savagery. To what clever Neil Stevenson warned about in Anathema.

MOSCOW FINANCIAL AND LEGAL ACADEMY

Faculty: jurisprudence

COURSE WORK

By discipline: Theory of state and law

Subject: Totalitarian State

Student: Lyudmila Valerievna Solomina

Scientific adviser: Loktionova E.S.

MOSCOW 2013

WORK PLAN

Introduction.
I. The concept of a totalitarian state

II. Types of totalitarian states

2.1 Fascist totalitarian state

2.2 Communist totalitarian state

2.3 Modern totalitarian state

III. Advantages and disadvantages of totalitarian states

IV. Conclusion

V. References

INTRODUCTION

Totalitarianism is a political phenomenon of the 20th century. Totalitarianism from the point of view of political science is a form of relationship between society and power, in which political power takes society under complete (total) control, completely controlling all aspects of human life. The manifestation of the opposition in any form is severely and mercilessly suppressed or suppressed by the state. Another important feature of totalitarianism is the creation of the illusion of full approval by the people of the actions of this government. The totalitarian state is characterized by unlimited powers of power, the elimination of constitutional rights and freedoms, repression against dissidents, the militarization of public life.

The expression "totalitarianism" usually implies that the regimes of Adolf Hitler in Germany, Joseph Stalin in the USSR and Benito Mussolini were totalitarian. The starting point of the totalitarian model of the state is the declaration of a certain higher goal, in the name of which the regime calls on society to part with all political, legal and social traditions, since according to the totalitarian model, the pursuit of a higher goal was the ideological basis of the entire political system, and its achievement could not be announced , since ideology occupied a subordinate position in relation to the leader of the country and could be arbitrarily interpreted by him depending on the situation. Another aspect of the totalitarian model is the justification for organized large-scale violence against a certain large group (for example, the Jews in Nazi Germany or the kulaks in the Stalinist USSR). This group was accused of hostile actions against the state in the difficulties encountered.

To study this topic, we set the following tasks:

Expand the concept of a totalitarian state;

Identify the cause of the occurrence;

Consider the types of totalitarian states;

And also to show the advantages and disadvantages of totalitarian regimes.

The work used educational and special literature, and a number of publications.

Chapter 1. The concept of a totalitarian state

The term "totalitarianism" in its modern sense was formulated in the 20th century and expresses the universal or total nationalization of all its aspects of life, expressed by Mussolini's slogan "everything within the state, nothing outside the state." Nevertheless, the principle of universal nationalization has been known to mankind since ancient times.

The first totalitarian power in known history was the Sumerian Third Dynasty of Ur, which ruled Mesopotamia about four thousand years ago (2112 BC - 2003 BC). During the reign of this dynasty, the total nationalization of crafts was carried out, a state monopoly on foreign trade was introduced, and most of the land was nationalized. The economy was based on the forced labor of state slaves who worked for a fixed ration. For control, there was an extensive class of officials, a complex system of bureaucratic reporting was created. The power of the king was unlimited, and there was also a liquidation of the independence of communities, aristocrats and city-states traditional for Ancient Mesopotamia. Such a system was the forerunner of the state-monopoly system that Stalin created in our country, which was called socialist. The second example of totalitarianism can be attributed to the ancient Chinese philosophy of legalism. Legalism or "school of law" is formed in the 4th - 3rd centuries. BC. theoretical substantiation of the totalitarian - despotic government of the state and society, which was the first in Chinese theory to achieve the status of a single official ideology in the first centralized Qin empire (221 - 207 BC). Legist doctrine is expressed in authentic tracts of the 4th - 3rd centuries. BC.

The ideology reached its apogee in the theory and practice of the ruler of the Shang region in the kingdom of Qin, Gongsun Yang, who is considered the author of Shang jun siu, the masterpiece of Machiavellianism. Shang Yang came to the conclusion that the people are stupid and easy to control with the help of the law. So the legalists practiced the principle of mutual responsibility, according to which all his relatives of the convicted person along three lines - father, mother and wife - were also punished for committing a crime. The death penalty was widely practiced, and the jurisprudence was dominated by the presumption of guilt of the accused, according to which he himself had to prove his innocence. The course towards extreme military aggression was also encouraged, and the merits of commanders and soldiers were measured literally in the heads of the killed opponents.

But in the 20-30s, in a group of states - the USSR, Germany, Italy, then Spain and a number of countries in Eastern Europe (and later Asia) political regimes developed that had a whole range of similar features. Therefore, such questions arise: What is a totalitarian phenomenon? How was power exercised? Why have these regimes lasted so long?

Already at the very beginning, totalitarianism was identified with fascism and communism. As a result, the term "totalitarianism" began to be used to refer to the fascist regime in Italy and the German National Socialist movement in the 20s. Since 1929, starting with the publication in the Times newspaper, it began to be applied to the political regime of the Soviet Union. So in 1939, an American philosopher, for the first time, made an attempt to give a scientific interpretation of totalitarianism - "an uprising against the entire historical civilization of the West."

There are several principles of totalitarianism: the combination of executive and legislative power in one person with the actual absence of an independent judiciary; the principle of leaderism, and the leader of the charismatic type. Therefore, we can say that a totalitarian state could not and cannot be legal, that is, one where the court would not be independent of the authorities, and the laws were actually observed, therefore, formally recognizing civil liberties, totalitarian regimes used one condition: you can use such regimes it was solely in the interests of the system that the leaders preached, which would mean support for their dominion. In addition to foreign policy reasons and propaganda, it is also important that the totalitarian regime was obliged to provide legal guarantees to those on whom it relied, that is, the parties. Formally, the laws protected the rights of all citizens, but in reality only those who did not fall into the category of "enemies of the people" or "enemies of the Reich."

It must be borne in mind that totalitarianism is not only a certain dictatorial political system - it is the restriction of personal freedom and the subordination of the individual to state and other social control. Totalitarianism is one of the controversial concepts in science. Some authors attribute it to a certain type of state, a dictatorship of political power, others to a socio-political system, others to a social system covering all spheres of public life, or to a certain ideology. In our opinion, this is a certain social system, which is characterized by the violent political, economic and ideological domination of the bureaucratic party-state apparatus headed by the leader over society and the individual, the subordination of the entire social system to the dominant ideology and culture.

The main link in the political structure in totalitarianism is not the state, but the party - the bearer of the ideology that created the given socio-political system. The constitutional consolidation of the leading role of the ruling party leads to the unification of the party with the state, the usurpation of power and privileges, the exit of the state apparatus from the control of elected bodies. Vengerov A.B. believes that a totalitarian regime usually arises in crisis situations - post-war, during a civil war, when it is necessary to restore the economy by tough measures and ensure stability. Social groups that need protection, support and care of the state act as its social base. Powerful bureaucratic structures also provide claims to power with the help of totalitarianism. Therefore, totalitarianism has certain advantages in governing the state due to the rapid timing of the adoption of the necessary laws, simplified procedures. But its final forms, as history testifies, present a sad spectacle of impasse, decline, decay. Such an extreme form of totalitarianism is the fascist regime, which is primarily characterized by a nationalist ideology, ideas about the superiority of some nations over others, and extreme aggressiveness.

In a totalitarian state, strict centralized control over the economy is an important criterion. The ability to dispose of the productive forces of society creates the material base and support necessary for the political regime, without which total control in other spheres of life is hardly possible. The centralized economy serves as a means of political control.

According to K. Popper, the totalitarian model has long been the subject of study by historians and political scientists. In his work The Open Society and Its Enemies, he contrasted totalitarianism with liberal democracy. He argued that the process of accumulation of human knowledge is unpredictable, then the theory of ideal government, which underlies totalitarianism, does not exist in principle, therefore the political system must be flexible so that the government can smoothly change its policy and that the political elite can be removed from power without bloodshed.

So Juan Linz argued that the main feature of totalitarianism is not terror in itself, but the desire of the state to oversee all aspects of people's lives, public order, the economy, religion, and culture. However, Linz identified a number of features of totalitarian terror: systemic, ideological nature, unprecedented scale and lack of a legal basis.

The emergence of totalitarianism, as Max Weber believed, is preceded by a deep crisis, expressed in the aggravation of the conflict between the desire for self-realization and the predominance of the outside world. Since the 19th century, this conflict manifests itself on a number of levels: social (individual versus people), economic (capitalism versus socialism), ideological (liberalism versus democracy).

Therefore, wherever totalitarianism came to power, everywhere it brought with it completely new political institutions and destroyed all the social, legal and political traditions of a given country. Isolation is a dead end where people are driven when the political structure in which they can act together is destroyed.

Chapter 2. Types of totalitarian states

2.1 Fascist totalitarian state

Such a social phenomenon as fascism, which shook the 20th century, will be of interest to researchers of history, political scientists, psychologists and people of a different scientific orientation for a long time to come. These events with incredible force influenced the course of events around the world. There are many myths associated with fascism. The most persistent is that fascism, in exchange for freedom, gives order and prosperity. Usually fascism is attributed to Nazi Germany and less often to Pinochet's Chile or Franco's Spain.

An integral part of the inhuman fascist ideology was the “concept of a totalitarian state”, designed to justify the establishment by the fascists of a cruel terrorist dictatorship after their usurpation of state power in their own country.

The totalitarian state was by no means supra-class. It was a state of the big bourgeoisie, expressing the irresistible tendency of state-monopoly capital. Totalitarianism acted as an alternative to the liberal-democratic state after the bourgeois-democratic revolutions. The well-known German educator W. Humboldt defined the attitude of classical liberalism towards the state. In his opinion, the state should take care of its citizens and not take on other functions, except for ensuring security.

Fascist ideologists largely relied on the views of their predecessors. For example, the Italian fascist philosopher Gentile argued that the liberal state cannot exercise the general will because it is based on a false understanding of freedom. He believed that the role of the state lies in the fact that it takes upon itself the implementation of the national destiny, and since the state determines the fate of the nation, it must have unlimited power, it must be totalitarian.

Explaining the concept of the fascist state, Mussolini proclaimed that the state is an absolute in comparison with which all individuals or groups are of relative importance, "everything is in the state, nothing is outside the state." These words were a kind of ideal conditions for the development of fascism.

In a fascist state, the main force of the state apparatus is the fascist parties in which large masses are united by ideology, which simplifies control over society and pressure on it. Fascism takes on large-scale forms and that total control over society is exercised, which is an integral part of the totalitarian form of government, which is the definition of totalitarianism - the desire of the state or political system for complete control over all spheres of society. The goals of Mussolini's fascism were still formulated before he came to power. He declared that with fascism a grandiose period in the history of Italy would begin. The expanded program of fascism was to turn Italy into a colonial empire, extending its power to the lands surrounding the Adriatic and Mediterranean seas, as well as to the lands of Egypt, part of Turkish territory in Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, French and English possessions in East Africa.

To carry out the predatory plans of Italian imperialism, Mussolini set himself the task of "transforming the Italians into a warlike, militaristic nation." The establishment of the fascist dictatorship led to significant changes, the destruction of the democratic principles of the organization and operation of the state mechanism. This was manifested in the concentration of all power in the hands of the fascist elite on the basis of the principle of leaderism with the concentration of power in the hands of the leader of the party and the de facto head of state, in the transformation of the leading bodies of the fascist party into the leading link of the state apparatus, in the strict centralization of state administration and the deprivation of representative bodies of their real powers (and then in replacing them with a corporate system), in establishing an open terrorist regime.

From the point of view of V. Vipperman, Italian fascism owes its success not to the "excess", but to the "lack" of capitalism, the industrialization of the industrial proletariat, it was only a kind of dictatorship that served to create industrial capitalism. Thus, while attributing absolute and original sovereignty to the state, the fascists rejected democracy, democratic institutions, and any democratic procedures.

Even more complex and ambiguous was the structure and functioning of the corporate system. The main principles of corporate policy were set forth in the "Labor Charter" approved by the Great Fascist Council in 1927. Twenty-two corporations were created corresponding to various branches of the national economy, industry, agriculture, trade, banking, transport, etc. At the head of the entire organization was the national council of the corporation, which, in addition to representatives of employers and workers, included delegates of the fascist party, ministers and their deputies, various experts and specialists. Moreover, all members of the Council were appointed by government decree, which completely turned it into a bureaucratic body.

Undoubtedly, the establishment of a corporate system allowed Mussolini to deal with Parliament. Instead, one "chamber of fascist organizations and corporations" was created. The rights of the chamber were defined: cooperation with the government in issuing laws. The fascist Italian corporate state served as an instrument of the monopolies, which in turn served the interests of the fascists for the party and state elite. It is fair to say that the fascist regime cannot hold out except by means of mass suppression, by bloody reprisals. Accordingly, the significance of the police, or rather the many police services that were created under the Mussolini regime, is determined. To deal with the enemies of the regime, special commissions called police courts were created. The members of these commissions were officials of the fascist repressive apparatus: the chief of police, the prosecutor, the head of the fascist police. For conviction, no other motives were required, except for the suspicion of political “unreliability”. The most important political cases were considered by a "special tribunal", an example is the conviction of the outstanding founder and leader of the Communist Party of Italy, Antonio Gramsci, to twenty years in prison.

An important role in the ideological support of the fascist regime was played by the Catholic Church, cooperation with which was secured in 1929 by the Latern Pact, concluded between the government and the Pope. The government recognized the sovereignty of the pope over the territory of the Vatican, and the Catholic religion - the official religion of the country and pledged to pay the Vatican a significant amount of money. Thus, the pope used the influence of the Catholic Church to support fascism and strengthen its foreign policy positions, which the fascist dictatorship badly needed.

Now consider the "order and prosperity" of Nazi Germany. After all, it is about her that they talk most often both in terms of restoring order and in terms of rapid economic growth.

So, the start of fascism in Germany took place in 1933, eleven years later than in Italy. So the Nazis came to power, like other fascists, under the slogans of reviving the country, liberating foreign capital from power, class peace (as in a “corporate state”), increasing wages, and eliminating debt slavery.

German fascism is one of the extreme forms of totalitarianism, primarily characterized by nationalist ideology, ideas about the superiority of some nations over others, and extreme aggressiveness. Fascism in Germany was based on nationalistic, racist demagogy, which was elevated to the rank of official ideology. The purpose of the fascist state was declared to be the protection of the national community, the solution of geopolitical social problems, the protection of the purity of the race.

During the period of fascism domination, the system of state-monopoly regulation reached unprecedented proportions. In order to implement the plans for armaments and the military economy, covering the entire economy, a centralized system was created, which subjugated all the resources of the economy by violent means. Monopolists received more and more direct state powers. Already in June 1933, a decree was created on the forced syndicalization of industry. Only these were not Soviet trusts and production associations that belonged to the country - these were syndicates subordinate to the largest and most influential monopolists, such as Krupa, Thysen, Flick, Fleger.

The Nazi totalitarian state was a terrible system of spiritual and physical suppression of the working people, all democratically minded citizens. The Nazis created a specific system of total control over all spheres of people's lives. For example, everyone, starting with six-year-old children, swore an oath to serve fascism to the last drop of blood. The upbringing of children went in the slogan: Believe - obey - fight. In order to suppress any attempts at resistance, the Nazis created an extensive system of intimidation of people. These were extrajudicial persecutions, exiles, concentration camps.

In our opinion, the fascist empire was not only a criminal police machine, but also absolutely immoral. A bad example came straight from the top. Drunkenness, adultery, corruption, sexual perversity were in the order of things, and were not subject to any punishment, subject to slavishly blind loyalty to Hitler.

As S. Haffner noted, at the final stage of the existence of the “Third Reich”, its constitutional legal order was more like a gang than a state, and Hitler was more the boss of gangsters than the head of state or government. The question arises, where did the prosperity of the economy of the fascist dictatorship come from:

1. Refusal to pay reparations with the support of England and the USA;

2. Ariization of capital. Businesses were taken away from non-German entrepreneurs and transferred to German owners, some began to prosper, while others were sent to concentration camps. For example, the Aryanization against the Jews.

3. The robbery of the occupied lands. Industry has doubled. Germany received gold and the currencies of Austria and Czechoslovakia. At the same time, Czech gold was transferred to the Nazis by the British from English banks.

But despite the growth, Germany was unable to develop without a big war. The Nazi fascists in Germany prepared the country for war much faster and better than the fascists in Italy, which led to a crisis from which there was no other way out than war.

But there were also countries of “peaceful fascism” that existed on the periphery of the main political storms. Spain, Portugal, Chile and Greece. There was no noticeable surge, there was no overtaking pace of development. In Chile, for example, it came to food riots, and in Paraguay, to the inability of the inhabitants of the capital to pay for water. And in Spain, the entirety of political, legislative, executive, judicial and military power at all stages of the existence of the fascist dictatorship was in the hands of Caudillo Franco. He had unlimited powers in determining the norms and direction of the government, in approving decrees and laws, in appointing military and civil officials, deputies of the Cortes and municipalities. Franco was the head of state, commander-in-chief of the armed forces and the only political party - the fascist Spanish Falange, and after its collapse - the National Movement, which united all supporters of the regime.

Similar features were inherent in fascist regimes not only in Europe, but also in other countries. For example, in Japan, totalitarianism manifested itself in the cult of the emperor, the army and the samurai. Everyone had to submit to the supra-class imperial state. In our opinion, fascism in these countries solved the same problem as in Italy and Germany - the fight against democracy, but turned out to be only a temporary game of the "corporate state". With the class struggle, fascism returned power in the country to big capital, and the order turned out to be the most severe dictate, so we can say with confidence that fascism is a disguised totalitarian dictatorship of capital.

2.2 Communist totalitarian state

The first communist totalitarian state in the world was the Soviet Union. This regime took shape as a result of the sociopolitical shifts of the 1930s. The Bolsheviks who came to power in Russia rejected the nationalism of the right wing of social democracy, they proclaimed the building of a free society as the ultimate goal, but shared the social democratic ideas about the way to it through a centralized state, which was supposed to work as a monopoly serving the interests of all society. At the same time, they acted with harsh authoritarian methods of coercion, believing that the construction of socialism is possible only under the leadership of revolutionary power.

IN AND. Lenin believed that “accounting and control is the main thing that is required for the proper functioning of a communist society. All citizens are transformed into employees for hire by the state, which are armed workers, all citizens become employees and workers of one nationwide state syndicate. So Lenin brought his ideas to life, in the post-October period he created the policy of war communism. The established social structure largely corresponded to other totalitarian regimes, such as Hitler's regime in Germany, but still there were differences. The ideology of these two forms of totalitarianism was based on different principles. Stalinism as a form of the communist movement proceeded from class domination, while Nazism from racial domination. Stalin's policy assumed national consolidation, it was not accompanied by racial purges, although there were persecutions (albeit unofficial) of Jews. The dictatorship in the USSR was covered by lofty ideals inherited from socialist thought. But in fact, everything turned out differently.

Before the proclamation of socialism in the USSR by the Constitution of 1936, the dictatorship of the proletariat and the poorest peasantry officially operated. The Soviet political system did not recognize the principle of separation and independence of powers, putting the legislative power above the executive and judicial. Formally, only the decisions of the legislator, that is, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, which consisted of the Chairman, 15 Vice-Chairmen, the Secretary and 20 other members, were formally the source of law. The establishment of a totalitarian regime in the USSR was not an accidental phenomenon, it was due to many historical objective and subjective reasons and circumstances, faith in a communist utopia. The totalitarian regime in the USSR lasted a long time. One of the reasons was the power of the party nomenklatura. The leading and guiding force of Soviet society, the core of its political system, state and public organizations was the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Therefore, the actual power in the USSR belonged to the leadership of this party, which functioned in accordance with its internal charter. If the population of the entire Soviet Union was 250 million people, then 19 million of them were party members.

In the first years of Soviet power, a certain dose of democracy, free-thinking, exposition of various views on the problems of socialist construction was allowed in the party. But Lenin's intransigence towards dissent was manifested in the battles against the "left" communists during the conclusion of the Brest Peace, against the "anarcho-syndicalists", "workers' opposition" and other groups in the party after October. The 10th Congress of 1921 turned out to be a turning point, adopting the well-known resolution "On the Unity of the Party", which banned the functional in practice, which meant the suppression of any dissent, the expulsion from the party of representatives of various blocs, deviations, factions and their isolation from society. Thus, under one party, the dictatorship of the class led to the dictatorship of the party, and then to the totalitarian power of its nomenklatura, which led to the establishment of a regime of power in the country.

Another reason for the long existence of totalitarianism in the USSR was the education in people of blind faith in the communist ideal, devotion to Stalin - the "leader of the party" and the entire Soviet people, intolerance for a different ideology and a different way of thinking and life, readiness not to think to obey the "will of the party".

The approval of a single ideology and a one-party system of power was facilitated by the state monopoly on information, mass communications and citizen organizations, which the Bolsheviks introduced from the first days of coming to power. They sought to ensure totalitarian control over the social and spiritual life of society. By decrees of the Council of People's Commissars, liberal right-wing socialist, religious newspapers and magazines of the Cadets, Socialist-Revolutionaries, and Mensheviks were closed, and censorship was established over all others. The means of popular control over power became the mouthpiece of the party, and then of its apparatus. Lenin pointed out that there was no other way to socialism than through democracy, through political freedom, but he thought of this freedom within the framework of the dictatorship of the proletariat. In our opinion, under conditions of forced unanimity, society practically ceased to develop, moving in the direction pleasing to the Bolsheviks.

There is also another reason for the long existence of totalitarianism - this is a system of terrorist control and repression, which was the main pillar of the party and Bolshevism. The dictatorship of the proletariat, established in a country where the working class constituted an insignificant political minority, inevitably led to the oppression of the vast majority. For example, Lenin declared a merciless war against the kulaks: “Death to them! Hatred and contempt for the parties defending them: the Right Socialist-Revolutionaries, the Mensheviks and the present Left Socialist-Revolutionaries! In this leaflet, Lenin demanded the death of 10-12 million people. Real calls for genocide, this defined Bolshevism - communism in its original essence. Here one cannot fail to recall the execution of the royal family - Nicholas II, his wife and children.

Soviet historiography claims that the Red Terror began as a response to the White Terror only after the assassination of Uritsky and the assassination attempt on Lenin in the summer of 1918, but in fact, terror and mass repressions began with the Bolsheviks coming to power. With the outbreak of a large-scale civil war, the official decree of the Red Terror from the summer of 1918 made it possible for the Cheka in the center and in the localities to introduce the institution of hostages and shoot them without trial or investigation. So, in Petrograd, in September, 500 were shot, in Kronstadt - 400, Moscow - 300 hostages and suspicious persons. In the same month, F. Dzerzhinsky's order followed, which specified that in its actions (searches, arrests and executions) the Cheka was completely independent.

The open trials were undoubtedly just the tip of the terror iceberg. Severe sentences were passed by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court and Special Meetings. More than half of the sentences were handed down in absentia. Almost all of the repressed were held under Article 58 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR. So in 1937-38, 360,000 death sentences a year were passed. Starting with the trial in the case of Marshal M.N. Tukhachevsky in 1937, terror also fell upon the officer corps of the Red Army, about 40 thousand commanders were shot and put in camps. The punitive organs were also subjected to repressions, the entire administrative apparatus was cleaned out. The skating rink of terror swept not only among the intelligentsia, but also on the common people (workers, employees, housewives). Thus, Russian terror was in the nature of "Russian roulette", anyone at any moment could turn out to be an "enemy of the people."

Subsequently, Stalin physically destroyed all possible opponents, and turned the remaining workers of the apparatus into thoughtless executors of his will. Terror plunged the population into a state of prostration and turned into submissive masses. Millions of prisoners were used as free labor at all five-year construction projects.

Thus, at the turn of the 20-30s. completed the process of formation of totalitarianism in the USSR. Political power passed from the party to the nomenklatura, and then to the autocratic regime of Stalin, the Bolshevik ideology embraced not only all citizens, but all aspects of the life of society, and the state monopoly on mass communications was established. Instead of a rule of law and a market economy, large-scale violence, a monopoly on property and a command-administrative system of governance were developed, economic and socio-political life in society was militarized.

At the stage of Soviet totalitarianism, two stages are clearly visible. The first - from the Bolshevik coup in October 1917 to the end of the civil war, during these years the foundations of a totalitarian state were laid. And the second - the 20s, when, as a result of the general discontent of the people, the political and socio-economic crisis, an attempt was made to move to a state of law. However, the action of the basic principles of totalitarianism and the desire of the Bolsheviks to maintain their power based on violence led in the 30s to the establishment of Soviet totalitarianism with the regime of Stalin's personal power.

2.3 Modern totalitarian state

With all the variety of totalitarian orders in fascist Italy, Germany, the Stalinist USSR, Cuba and other countries of the world, history has given examples of three main types of totalitarianism: fascist (national socialist, Nazi), communist (Soviet) and theocratic. Each of them is distinguished by the originality of institutions, the nature and scale of repression. As mentioned above, the most historically long was the communist form of totalitarianism. And now totalitarian countries no longer play a significant role on the world stage. But is the world immune from such regimes. Friedrich and Brzezinski expressed the idea that over time totalitarianism will evolve towards greater rationality, retaining its fundamental structures for the reproduction of power and social order. The source of danger for totalitarianism was outside the system. European countries, fascist states themselves in the recent past, chose the tactics of condemning communism (Stalinism) in Soviet Russia, unequivocally equating it with Nazism, therefore they underwent changes under the influence of the defeat of Nazi Germany, the realization of their historical loss. The totalitarianism of the Europeans is rooted in the mental perception of the victory of the USSR as an insult to the unfulfilled own geopolitical projects related to Germany (if it had won a victory over the Soviet Union).

Totalitarian ideology, totalitarian systems of power, despite the recognition of the values of democracy (freedom of speech, elections, religion, press), tragic experience and realization in the 20th century continue to be a political phenomenon of our time. The search for manifestations of the totalitarian in today's democracies and its grains in non-democratic countries does not go beyond "totalitarianism-authoritarianism-democracy". There are no ideal democracies, just as there is no ideal totalitarian state.

In our opinion, problems with democracy exist in Russia, and in China, and in Iran. For example, the United States can be safely called a modern totalitarian state; today, control over modern means of communication prevails there, which allow you to control any individual person. Modern mobile phones, after the events of September 11, are required to be able to quickly find the location of the phone with its owner. The systems allow you to listen to all telephone conversations in the country and respond to keywords. Thus, total control becomes a technically accessible reality. The US media, which is completely controlled by financial and oil corporations, makes extensive use of mind-shaping technologies that are more effective than conventional technologies.

The modern world in many ways functions according to rules that are different from the rules, for example, fifty years ago. Today there is a struggle of ideologies, ideas, projects of the future world order.

Chapter 3. Advantages and disadvantages of totalitarian states

Totalitarian regimes are very unstable social formations, which in the end, no matter how long-term they are, still come to certain death. Let's look at some of the disadvantages. From the point of view of the economy, the country's closeness to the external market hinders the development of the economy, the world market is replaced by a forced division of labor and the creation of a chain of conquered states, whose economy is included in the economy of the conquering country. For example, Germany, due to the huge expenditures on the military sphere, damages the social life of the population and the development of many necessary industries, which leads to a low purchasing power of the population. With the nationalization of the economy of enterprises, management is seized by officials who are interested in their public position. Because of this, business leaders are not interested in innovation, which leads to the death of the state economy.

On the political side, the lack of ensuring the rights and freedoms of the individual in a totalitarian state covers the social and economic initiative of citizens, which is the key to the arbitrariness of state bodies. Due to the closeness of a totalitarian society, citizens do not receive complete information about the state. The most important decisions are made by an autocratic leader or the top of the elite under the influence of ideological and political considerations, subjective calculations. This shortcoming is exacerbated by the excessive centralization of power in the hands of individuals at all levels of government. Under a totalitarian regime, a new ruler comes to power through a fierce struggle that threatens the existence of the entire state or is brought to power by a party majority, so often a leader comes to power who does not reflect the interests of the country and the people, but meets the interests of the state apparatus. Totalitarian regimes are characterized by an aggressive foreign policy and a forceful method of resolving conflicts, which often provokes the likelihood of major wars.

The dominance of a single ideology always gives rise to the dogma of power, therefore, government officials often follow ideological dogmas (for example, the policy of forced collectivization). With the long-term existence of a totalitarian state, power loses the trust of society and the ideological base over time. So in the USSR the development of science and culture was banned.

As for the advantages of totalitarian states, this is, first of all, freedom of control by social institutions and public opinion, therefore totalitarian societies have the lowest crime rate, especially in comparison with all other societies and political systems, there are practically no such anti-social phenomena as drug addiction and prostitution, the number of suicides is much less. As a rule, the state pays great attention to supporting the birth rate, so the demographic situation is stable.

The most important thing is the upbringing of the patriotic spirit. In this connection, such important feelings as pride in their country, readiness for self-sacrifice are highly developed among citizens.

At critical moments, totalitarian states capable of maximum concentration of funds and efforts, in conditions of lack of resources, they are distributed with the greatest efficiency, for example, fascist Germany (rapid creation of industry) and the USSR (space exploration). In addition, totalitarianism is a way out of the crisis of mass consciousness (Germany), a way to overcome political instability (USSR). Thus, in the early stages of existence, totalitarianism stabilizes the state, which is realized by way out of deep crises.

Undoubtedly, in a totalitarian state, there is invulnerability of the state to outside influence, the impossibility of interference by other countries in its internal politics. Such features contribute to the maximum strength of the totalitarian state, its protection from both external and internal threats. It is impossible to destroy a totalitarian regime as a result of a conspiracy, insurrection or coup d'etat, unless brute military force is used. So, in order to eliminate totalitarianism in Germany, Germany itself had to be destroyed (it ceased to exist as a state for 4 years). In addition, during the war, the totalitarian state is very stable and is able to wage war both after the most severe defeats (USSR) and in conditions of extremely limited resources with an absolute preponderance of enemy forces (Third Reich).

However, all these benefits are realized only for a short time. As the totalitarian state develops, they become less and less important under the pressure of numerous shortcomings. Subsequently, the life of any totalitarian state is short, as starting resources are quickly compressed: destruction from the outside (fascist Germany); collapse (USSR) or transformation into more peaceful political regimes (PRC)

Conclusion

Summing up the above, it is necessary to draw a conclusion in this work and answer the main question: So what is the totalitarian regime that shook the 20th century? This is such a political system that has expanded its intervention in the lives of citizens. In a totalitarian state, the initiative of citizens is not needed, and freedom is dangerous, in other words, a person is fully enslaved, freedom becomes criminal and punishable.

The analysis carried out showed that corporate and totalitarian states have common features:

1. Monichesky power structure, which is characterized by the combination of the legislative power and the judiciary in one person. In this case, the most important element is "leadership"

2. A one-party political system that does not allow any other political movements. In addition, there is a unification of the state and party apparatus

3. The ideological role of totalitarianism whose main task is to justify the existing regime. The power of propaganda, the lack of sources of information, which closes access to the definition of an opinion about the benefits or harms of decisions made at the top

4. State-organized terror, which is based on violence. Suppression of any dissent among the entire population

5. Suppression of civil society institutions: families, churches, traditions

6. Tightly regulated economy, closed on the state, non-competition

7. A ban on the rights and freedoms of both the individual and the citizen (freedom of speech, press, etc.).

Totalitarianism was the most intense state regime in history. This system of power, violence, terror, brought almost to the point of national extermination, is not capable of adapting flexibly to the dynamics of complex societies. This is a closed system that moves according to the laws of self-isolation.

In the conditions of the modern world, the main source of destruction and the impossibility of reproducing totalitarian orders in the 21st century is the lack of resources to maintain the information regime of mono-ideological domination. It remains only to note that a totalitarian state is not a viable option for the functioning of society. And such a statement is connected, first of all, with the fact that the denial of the role of a person as a citizen and an actively operating unit of society can lead to the overthrow of the considered regime.

Literature

1. Monographs, textbooks, teaching aids

1.1. Werth N. History of the Soviet state 1900-1991. M., 1992

1.2. J. Zhelev Fascism (translated from Bulgarian). M., 1991.

1.3. History of the Second World War, vol. 12.

1.4. News of the Central Committee of the CPSU, 1990 No. 5

1.5. Iritsky Yu.I. Concepts of totalitarianism: lessons from many years of discussions in the West / History of the USSR, 1990 No. 6

1.6. Carr E. History of Soviet Russia, T. 1 M., 1990

1.7. Lenin V.I. Complete Works, Vol. 33

1.8. Lenin V.I. Complete Works, Vol. 37

1.9. Lenin V.I. Complete Works, Vol. 44

1.10. Melgunov S.P. Red terror in Russia

1.11. Ovchinnikova L.V. The collapse of the Weimar Republic in the bourgeois historiography of the FRG. M., 1983

1.13. Theory of state and law//Ed. N.I. Matuzova. M.: jurist, 2004

1.14. Haffner S. Suicide of the German Empire

2. Internet resources

2.1. Arendt H. Origins of totalitarianism (www.fedy-diary.ru )

2.2. Great terror. History pages (storyo.ru)

2.3. Velichko S.A. Totalitarianism as a Phenomenon of the 20th Century (istgeography.su)

2.4. W. Wolfgang European Fascism in Comparison 1922-1982 (royallib.ru)

2.5. Vengerov A.B. Theory of State and Law (ex.jure.ru)

2.6. State system of fascist Italy (urios.org.ua)

2.7. The Doctrine of Fascism by Benito Mussolini, 1932//Ed. Kudryavtseva G.G. (http:www.azglobus.net)

2.8. History of the state and law of foreign countries (www.bibliotekar.ru )

2.9. Chinese philosophy. Legalism. Dictionaries and encyclopedias at Academician (dic.academic.ru)

2.10. Constitution of the USSR (ru.wikipedia.org)

2.11. Totalitarianism. Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org)

2.12. Totalitarianism as a Political Phenomenon of the Modern World (m-antonov.chat.ru)

2.13. Totalitarianism in Germany and Italy. Militaristic Regime in Japan (school.xvatit.com)

2.14. T.T. Filatov History of Fascism (www.katyn-books.ru )

2.15. H. Linz Typology of Regimes (nashaucheba.ru)

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As a result of the Second World War, a significant part of the fascist-type totalitarian regimes (German, Italian, Japanese, military-fascist regimes in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe) was destroyed, but fascist regimes remained in Spain, Portugal and some countries of Latin America.

The most famous of these fascist regimes is the
F. Franco in Spain, which over the thirty post-war years has turned from totalitarian to authoritarian. After 1945, the role of the phalanx rapidly diminished. The fascist salute was canceled, the Falangist militia was disbanded, and the Ministry of Education was removed from the control of the Falange veterans. Many Falangists lost their places in the state apparatus and by the mid-50s. held no more than 5% of government posts. Preparations began for the restoration of the monarchy. In 1948, Juan Carlos (grandson of Alfonso XIII) became Franco's heir. Legally, this was formalized by the "Basic Law of Succession to the Head of State" of 1947, which gave the caudillo the right to appoint someone who in the future would have to "replace him as king or regent." In July 1945, a new constitution was adopted, the "Charter of the Spaniards", which proclaimed a number of political and social rights of Spanish citizens (freedom of speech, assembly, unions, the right of poor and large families to state assistance, etc.).

In 1955-1966. The "blue" period of the Francoist dictatorship ended completely, although as early as 1958 the ideas of the phalanx were proclaimed "the fundamental principles of the Spanish state." The Falange lost the role of the ruling party. In 1957, it dissolved into the broader organization "National Movement", which de facto collapsed in 1967 (de jure it existed until the second half of the 70s). In the early 60s. Falangist ministers were replaced by ministers from the Catholic sect "Opus dei" ("God's work") and their henchmen - technocrats. At this time, the Francoist government proclaimed a policy of "liberalization". In 1963, the emergency military tribunal was dissolved, in the mid-60s. weakened censorship. In 1966, a new Spanish Constitution was adopted, the "Organic Law of the State", which separated the positions of head of state and head of government (since 1938, both were occupied by Franco). 20% of the deputies of the Cortes began to be elected (heads of the family), freedom of religion was proclaimed, and the phalanx finally disappeared.
In 1969, Juan Carlos was declared Franco's official heir. However, all these reforms did not lead to the establishment of democracy in Spain and overcoming the crisis of the Francoist regime.

The authoritarian nature of the Spanish political regime continued. A powerful repressive apparatus operated, the maintenance of which took 10% of the state budget (on education - 5-6%). Franco retained great power. He was head of state, commander-in-chief of the armed forces, leader of the "National Movement", appointed deputies of the Cortes and municipalities, officers and officials, adopted decrees and laws. Key positions in the state were occupied by the leaders of the "bunker" (Spanish reaction). An example is the head of the Spanish government in 1966-1973. admiral Carrero Blanco, who was called a "cannibal" and "more Francoist than Franco himself." Repression continued in Spain. In 1967, a more severe penal code was adopted. There were arrests and executions of anti-fascists. Francoist courts gave the survivors an average of 20-30 years in prison. In 1968, 1969, 1973 and 1975 in Spain, a state of emergency was introduced (in the first half of the 60s it was introduced only twice).

The crisis of the Franco bloc deepened. Two groups formed in the Spanish elite - the "bunker" and the "evolutionists", or "civilized right" (supporters of reforms). Church, which until the 60s. was one of the strongest pillars of Francoism, split, and its "renovationist" wing launched an open criticism of the regime, supporting the demands of the anti-fascist opposition to restore democratic freedoms. There has been a crisis in the top leadership of the country. The new prime minister, Arias Navarro, who replaced the leader of the "bunker" C. Blanco in December 1973 ("the cannibal" was killed by terrorists), proclaimed a course for reforms and stated that "Franco can no longer be counted on." The social basis of the new political course, the evolution of the authoritarian Francoist regime into a democratic state, was the new Spanish bourgeoisie, which was formed during the years of the "Spanish economic miracle" of the 60-70s.

Another result of the Second World War is a sharp increase in the number of authoritarian and totalitarian states of the communist type. Before the war, there were only 2 (in the USSR and Mongolia),
by the 80s. there were about 30. At the same time, the development of communist regimes in different regions of the world had its own characteristics.

In Eastern Europe, the process of formation of these regimes was complex and controversial. As a result of the defeat of Nazi Germany and its Eastern European allies (the regimes of Salashi in Hungary, Antonescu in Romania, etc.), the anti-fascist revolutions of 1944-1947 began here, which led to the establishment of the so-called "people's democracy" in this region. Modern Russian scholars consider the states of "people's democracy" in Eastern Europe to be a democratic alternative to the Stalinist totalitarian regime.

Their arguments:

1. In Eastern European countries in 1944 - 1948. a variety of forms of ownership and a diversified economy were preserved. In Czechoslovakia, the total nationalization of private enterprises began only in 1948. In Romania in 1948, the public sector provided only 20-30% of industrial output.

2. Political pluralism and a multi-party system continued in this region, which was reflected in the results of parliamentary elections and the formation of Eastern European governments. In the parliamentary elections in Hungary in November 1945, the Party of Small Farmers received 57% of the vote, the Communist Party - 17%. In the first post-war Czechoslovak government, the communists had 9 seats, other parties - 13. In Poland and Hungary, four parties were represented in the first post-war governments, in Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Romania - five, in the Czech Republic - six. The heads of state and government in these countries were representatives of the old, pre-revolutionary elite (King Mihai, generals Sanatescu and Radescu - in Romania; President Benes -
in Czechoslovakia).

3. There was a democratization of the political system of the Eastern European countries. The state apparatus was cleared of fascists and collaborators. Pre-war electoral laws, as a result of the adoption of amendments to them, became more democratic (in Bulgaria in 1945 the voting age was reduced from 21 to 19 years). Democratic constitutions that had been abolished by dictators and German occupiers were restored (the Constitution of 1920 in Czechoslovakia, the Constitution of 1921 in Poland).

4. The national characteristics of the Eastern European countries were taken into account, and the communist parties did not copy the Soviet model.

From the point of view of modern Western scholars, the Eastern European states of "people's democracy" were authoritarian. Their arguments:

1. Countries of Eastern Europe in 1944-1945 were occupied by the Red Army and were under the strict control of the Soviet military administration and the NKVD, which began mass repressions there. From Hungary, whose entire population was
9 million people, 600 thousand people were sent to Soviet transit and labor camps, 200 thousand of them died in custody.
In East Germany, the Soviet occupation authorities executed 756 people. and threw 122 thousand people into camps and prisons, of which
46 thousand died in custody. On the territory of Poland in 1944-1947. Soviet troops operated, subordinate to the chief adviser to the NKVD under the Polish Ministry of National Security, General I. Serov (in the future - the first chairman of the KGB), including the 64th NKVD special forces division "Free Rifles", which carried out punitive operations against the anti-communist underground and the civilian population . About the activities of the NKVD officers in Poland, the commander of the Polish Army, General Z. Berling, whose army, together with the Red Army, reached Berlin, wrote: “Beria’s henchmen from the NKVD are devastating the whole country. Criminal elements from the apparatus of Radkiewicz (Minister of National Security of Poland) assist them. During legal and illegal searches, people's belongings disappear, completely innocent people are deported or thrown into prison, they are shot like dogs, ... no one knows what he is accused of, who is arresting him and for what, and what he intends to do with him.

2. Immediately after the overthrow of the fascist regimes and the expulsion of the German occupiers, mass extrajudicial reprisals against the defeated and groups of the population began in many countries of Eastern Europe. In Yugoslavia, without trial or investigation, they were shot
30 thousand people issued to the communists by the British command (they surrendered to the British troops in Italy in the last days of the war): officers, soldiers, policemen and officials of the Croatian state, fighters of the Slovenian White Guard, Montenegrin Chetniks and members of their families. In Bulgaria, at the end of 1944, 30-40 thousand people became victims of extrajudicial reprisals. (local politicians, teachers, priests, businessmen, etc.). In the Czech Republic, Czech nationalists in the summer of 1945 killed several thousand German civilians. In Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, Jewish pogroms were organized.

3. A powerful repressive apparatus was created, led by the communists, with the help of which they were already in 1944-1945. mass repressions began. The Communists were ministers of the interior in the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania, ministers of justice in Bulgaria and Romania, headed the state security agencies in Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria. In Poland, the Ministry of National Security had more than 20,000 employees, and its subordinate internal security corps had 30,000 soldiers and officers. Army units were also used to fight the partisan movement. As a result, in Poland in 1945-1948. about 9 thousand opponents of the communist regime were killed. In Bulgaria, the people's militia, the state security organs and the "people's tribunals" (extraordinary courts), created in October 1944, became the instruments of mass terror. By March
In 1945, 2138 people were shot according to their sentences. - generals, policemen, judges, industrialists, etc., including members of the regency council and the younger brother of Boris III, the Bulgarian tsar in 1943-1944. At the same time, the victims of communist terror were not only fascists and collaborators, but also members of the resistance movement. During the occupation of Poland by Soviet troops, they, together with SMERSH and NKVD units and with the support of the Polish internal security corps, interned more than 30 thousand soldiers and officers of the Home Army (Polish underground army subordinate to the London Polish government in exile). In March 1945, the entire AK command was arrested, including its commander, General Leopold Okulitsky, who died in a Soviet prison in December 1946. In Yugoslavia, the leader of the Serbian Chetniks (non-communist resistance fighters who began an armed struggle against the German occupiers two months earlier than the Yugoslav communists) and officers of his headquarters were executed. There were reprisals against the allies of the communist parties in the popular fronts. For example, in Bulgaria before the elections in October 1946, 24 activists of the Bulgarian Agricultural People's Union (party of the Bulgarian peasantry) were killed and its leader Nikola Petkov, who was executed by a verdict of a communist court in September 1947, was arrested. At the same time, 15 members of the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Socialist Democratic Party. The main weapon of all these repressions was the state security apparatus, which already instilled fear even in the leaders of the Eastern European communist parties. One of them, a prominent figure in the Polish communist movement, W. Gomulka, wrote in May 1945: “The security agencies are turning into a state within a state. They carry out their own policy, in which no one can interfere. In our prisons, prisoners are treated like animals.”

Thus, in the mid-40s. in Eastern European countries, authoritarian political regimes were formed that combined anti-fascist features with numerous elements of communist totalitarianism. This created the conditions for the complete elimination of democracy and the transition from authoritarianism to totalitarianism in 1947-1948. Reasons for this transition:

1. The strongest pressure of the Stalinist regime.

2. Features of the historical development of the countries of Eastern Europe (in the first half of the 20th century, in all Eastern European countries, except for Czechoslovakia, there was no democracy, and authoritarian regimes dominated).

3. The broad socio-political base of the communist regimes is the lumpenized sections of the population and the strong communist parties of the Stalinist model that expressed their interests.

4. General economic backwardness of most countries of Eastern Europe and economic ruin - the result of the Second World War.

5. The inability of the capitalist world at the end of the 40s. to oppose the socialist system with an attractive alternative (it appeared only in the 70-80s).

Installed in 1947-1948. in Eastern Europe, the communist regimes went through two stages in their development:

1. Stalinist totalitarian regimes (1948-1956).

2. Softer totalitarian regimes, gradually turning into authoritarian ones (1956-1989).

The peculiarity of the first stage was the apogee of communist terror associated with copying the Soviet system of the last years of the Stalin era and preparing the "socialist camp" for the Third World War (Stalin planned to start it in 1953).
In Poland, the membership of the political party almost doubled (in 1945 it had 20,000 members, in 1952, 34,000), and repressions intensified sharply. 5200 thousand people were included in the lists of "suspicious elements". (1/3 of adult Poles), about 140 thousand people were thrown into the camps, the number of political prisoners in 1952 amounted to about 50 thousand people. In Czechoslovakia, for 12.6 million inhabitants in 1948-1954. there were 200 thousand political prisoners. In Hungary
in 1948-1953 about 800 thousand people (10% of the population) were convicted. Massacres began against the allies of the communists and grandiose purges in the communist parties themselves. In 1948, the leaders of the Social Democratic parties in Bulgaria and Romania were arrested and convicted (the goal was to force the Social Democrats to join the communists). In 1947, the Party of Small Farmers in Hungary and the "historical" parties in Romania were crushed. Their leaders were arrested. Bela Kovacs, general secretary of the Central Committee of the PMSH, who was arrested in 1947, was imprisoned in the Soviet Union until 1952. Leader of the National Tsaranist Party in Romania. Maniu - sentenced to life imprisonment in 1947, died in a camp in 1952 at the age of 75. In Czechoslovakia, the Slovak Democratic Party was banned in 1948, and the Czech National Socialist, Social Democratic and People's Parties were banned in 1950. In Yugoslavia, after Tito's break with Stalin, more than 30,000 communists oriented towards the USSR were repressed. In Bulgaria, the first secretary of the Central Committee of the BKP was arrested and executed, and four other leaders of the Communist Party were sentenced to life imprisonment. In the Czech Republic in 1952, the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia Rudolf Slansky, two of his deputies and eight other members of the top party leadership were executed, and three more, including the future leader of socialist Czechoslovakia Gustav Husak, were sentenced to life imprisonment.

After 1956, in all countries of Eastern Europe, except for Romania and Albania, the reduction of the repressive apparatus began (in Poland, the number of political police was reduced to 9 thousand people, and advisers from the MGB returned to the USSR), mass repressions ceased, and social liberalization began. - economic, political and spiritual life. However, individual outbreaks of communist terror took place at this time as well. More than 100 thousand people suffered from communist terror in Hungary after the suppression of the national revolution of 1956. (229 people were executed, 35 thousand were thrown into prisons and camps, several thousand were deported to the USSR), 200 thousand Hungarians emigrated. In the Czech Republic, after the death of the "Prague Spring" of 1968 (Czechoslovak "Thaw"), strict censorship was restored, about 70 democratic organizations were banned, tens of thousands of people emigrated.

By the 80s. the features of the Eastern European communist regimes finally manifested themselves:

1. Copying the Soviet model, including in countries hostile to the USSR.

2. The same type of political system (the dictatorship of the Communist Party, the regime of personal power, the absence of democratic freedoms, a powerful repressive apparatus).

3. Some features compared to the USSR: “pocket” multi-party system (in the GDR, in addition to the ruling SED, there were the Democratic Peasant Party, the National Democratic Party, the Christian Democratic Union and the Liberal Democratic Party of Germany), the institution of the presidency, a higher standard of living and a wider spread of opposition among the clergy, intellectuals, and youth.

At the same time, different Eastern European states had their own peculiarities in the formation and development of communist regimes. The most brutal totalitarian regime was created in Albania. In April 1939 it was occupied by Italian troops, in September 1943 by German troops. The resistance to the invaders was led by the Communist Party of Albania (CPA), founded in November 1941, led by K. Dzodze. Enver Hoxha became his deputy and commander of the CPA partisan army (since July 1943, the national liberation army), and M. Shehu, Hoxha's close assistant, became his chief of the communist staff. In November 1944, the PLA completely liberated Albania from the German occupiers and established control of the Communist Party over the entire territory of the country.

In December 1945, elections to the Constituent Assembly were held in Albania, which were won by the Democratic Front created by the communists. In January 1946, the Constituent Assembly proclaimed Albania a People's Republic (Albania was a monarchy before the occupation), and in March it adopted its constitution. De jure, a democratic republic of the "people's democratic" type was established in Albania, but de facto - the dictatorship of the leader of the CPA
E. Hodzhi. From October 1944 he was head of the Albanian government and minister of foreign affairs, from 1947 he was first secretary of the CPA Central Committee. All the old leadership of the party, including K. Xoxe, was shot. The criminal code of 1948 became the legal basis for communist repressions, which provided for the death penalty for political crimes (in Albania at that time they were even shot for jokes about Hoxha and Stalin) or 30 years in prison.

The main feature of the Hoxha regime is the cult of personality of Stalin, brought to the limit. In 1959 in Albania, in honor of the 80th anniversary of the "leader of the peoples", the Order of Stalin was established, and the main political slogan after the beginning of the "thaw" in the USSR was the slogan: "We will destroy the enemies of socialism, we will defend the cause of Lenin-Stalin!". Hoxha invited Vasily Stalin to Albania (as a result he was arrested) and members of the anti-Khrushchev Molotov-Malenkov group. The result of this was a sharp aggravation of Soviet-Albanian relations. In 1960, Albania and the USSR severed all relations, even diplomatic ones, in 1963 Khrushchev was preparing an invasion of Albania by Soviet troops (it failed due to Tito's refusal to let them through the territory of Yugoslavia).

Another result of the construction of Stalinist socialism is the creation of the most brutal totalitarian regime in Europe. Hoxha tried to completely destroy religion in Albania. All Muslim and Catholic clergy were destroyed in the country (out of two Catholic archbishops, one died under house arrest, the other was sentenced to 30 years of forced labor and died from the effects of torture; more than 100 Catholic priests were shot or died in custody), all mosques and churches. In 1967, Albania was proclaimed "the first atheistic state in the world." 19 camps and prisons were created in the country (for 3 million inhabitants), petty regulation of the whole life of Albanians was introduced (it was forbidden to have cars and summer cottages, wear jeans, use "hostile" cosmetics, listen to jazz and rock, have radios). At the same time, barracks socialism also affected the Albanian elite. In 1958, Hoxha ordered all executives and other members of the elite (scientists, artists, diplomats, etc.) to work for two months a year for free in factories or in agricultural cooperatives (the dictator himself worked as well). Since the mid 80s. in Albania, the wages of workers in the party and state apparatus were reduced, and the savings were used to increase the wages of workers and employees.

After the death of Khoja (April 1985), the new Albanian leader Remiz Aliya, who held the posts of the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Albanian Party of Labor (the CPA was renamed the PLA in 1948) and the chairman of the People's Assembly of Albania, began the liberalization of the political regime in the country. Diplomatic relations with the USSR and the USA were restored, the creation of private and joint ventures was allowed, a law on a multi-party system was adopted, and free parliamentary elections were held.

A communist regime close to the Albanian one was created in Romania. A feature of its formation was the longer than in other Eastern European countries, the coexistence of the remnants of pre-communist statehood and a tough communist dictatorship. On the one hand, the communists failed to establish a one-party system in Romania for more than three years. Until December 1947, the country maintained a monarchy, until March 1945 - the government of the old elite, headed by Antonescu's associates, Generals Sanatescu and Radesko. In 1945-1947. coalition governments operated in Romania, headed by Petru Groza, a large landowner and capitalist, in the 20-30s. - Member of the Romanian Parliament and Minister in the government of Carol II, from the mid-40s. collaborating with the communists. However, in his government, the latter were in the minority. On the other hand, the communists already in these years used all methods to establish their dictatorship: already in the first Romanian government formed after the overthrow of Antonescu, they received the posts of ministers of justice, internal affairs and communications. In February 1945, the old local authorities were liquidated, and a month later, activists of the pro-communist National Democratic Front became prefects in 52 counties out of 60. A Soviet agent was placed at the head of the Romanian political police. After the victory of the one-party system (1948), the formation of a totalitarian regime began in Romania. In the Romanian camps in the early 50s. there were 180 thousand prisoners, and a unique regime was established for their "re-education" with the help of other prisoners. The authors of this experiment were one of the leaders of the Romanian political police, communist Alexander Nikolsky and a prisoner with a fascist past (former legionnaire) Eugen Turkanu. The latter created the “Organization of prisoners with communist beliefs” in the prison, whose task was to “re-educate” prisoners by studying communist literature, combined with physical and moral torture (victims were brutally killed, burned their bodies with cigarettes, dipped headlong into a vat full of urine and excrement etc.). Such torture continued from one week to two months. However, the victims of the repressions of this time were not only "enemies of the dictatorship of the proletariat" (students, people from the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois strata of the population, priests, etc.), but also the communists themselves. In 1946, members of the Romanian political police killed the former general secretary of the Central Committee of the RCP Stefan Forcia (he held this post until 1944. ), and then his old mother, who tried to find her missing son (her corpse with heavy stones tied to her neck was found in the river).

After the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Romania (1958), a change in foreign policy began in the country - from complete subjugation of the USSR to confrontation with it. As a result, a group of nationalists led by Nicolae Ceausescu, who in March 1965 was elected First Secretary of the Central Committee of the RCP, came to the leadership of the Romanian Communist Party. The Ceausescu regime quickly turned into a brutal totalitarian dictatorship. In Romania, mass repressions began, which were no longer in other Eastern European countries. For a quarter of a century of the dictatorship of the new Romanian leader, 60 thousand people died. In December 1967, a decision was made to combine party and state posts. Ceausescu, retaining the post of first secretary of the Central Committee of the RCP, became chairman of the State Council (the highest executive body), the first secretaries of the county party committees became chairmen of the executive committees of county people's councils (an analogue of the Soviet district executive committees). All public organizations united in the Front of Socialist Unity, whose chairman was Ceausescu. There were constant purges of the party and state apparatus in the country (Romanian generals were shot for "connection with the Soviet military attaché", etc.). A powerful system of police control was created. Surveillance was carried out on all members of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the RCP. Special centers were set up to listen to telephone conversations and read mail. The number of police informants grew. The Securitate (secret political police) service became the main pillar of the regime.

The power of Ceausescu was unlimited. In 1974 he became president. His relatives (about forty people) occupied the highest government and party positions. One brother Ceausescu was the Deputy Minister of Defense and the head of the Supreme Political Council of the Army, the other was the head of the Romanian State Planning Committee. The dictator's wife, Elena Ceausescu, became First Deputy Prime Minister, Chairman of the National Council for Science and Education, Academician and Director of the Central Institute of Chemical Research, although she did not know the simplest chemical formulas, as she had completed only four years of high school (this did not prevent her from being declared " scientists of world renown). Brother Ceausescu was the first secretary of the Bucharest party committee. The Ceausescu family owned 40 residences,
21 palaces and 20 hunting houses. She took 8 billion dollars out of Romania (only N. Ceausescu's personal account in Swiss banks had 427 million dollars).

At the same time, ordinary citizens of Romania were deprived of the most necessary. Gas and hot water were supplied to the apartments for several hours a day. There was a campaign for the most severe energy savings (in an apartment, regardless of the number of rooms, it was allowed to have only one lamp with a power of 15 watts; shops worked only in daylight, street lighting was turned off at night). In Romania, a card system was introduced. A system of brutal totalitarian control of the entire life of society was created. Prices were regulated in the peasant market, and personal plots were cut. Abortions were banned. The soldiers were sent to agricultural work, construction sites and mines. Officials had to live in the area in which they worked.

A milder communist regime was established in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). By decision of the Yalta Conference (February 1945), Germany was divided into four occupation zones - Soviet, American, British and French, the boundaries of which were finally determined at the Potsdam Conference (June 1945). The Soviet zone of occupation included the eastern regions of Germany with a population of about
20 million people Until 1949, the power in this territory belonged to the Soviet military administration in Germany (SVAG). Therefore, the German communists, unlike the communist parties of other Eastern European countries, did not pursue a policy of repression (this was done by the Soviet occupation administration). The main victims of repression in East Germany were the German Social Democrats. In 1945-1950. Soviet and East German courts sentenced 5,000 Social Democrats to various terms of imprisonment, 400 of them died in prison. This allowed the communists to break the resistance of part of the leadership of the SPD to the unification of this party with the KPD into the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (April 1946). Despite the numerical superiority of the former Social Democrats (there were 680,000 of them, the Communists - 620,000), the leadership of the new party ended up in the hands of the Communists, which facilitated the creation of a pro-Soviet totalitarian regime in East Germany. De jure, it was formalized by the formation of the GDR (October 1949).

The main feature of East German totalitarianism is a high (compared to other socialist countries) standard of living, combined with a brutal police regime in the political sphere, which finally took shape after Erich Honecker, who played the role of dictator in the GDR, became the first secretary of the SED Central Committee in 1971 almost twenty years. The Soviet historian A. I. Savchenko described the results of his reign as follows: “... the social system that dominated the GDR over the past twenty years in the “Honecker era”, I would call a refined version of Stalinism. ... the recent history of the GDR is the apogee of the possibilities of the Stalinist system. ... thirty varieties of sausages and beer without a queue - this was offered to a resident of the GDR in exchange for his position as a "cog" in absolutely all areas.

During the forty years of the existence of the communist regime in East Germany, 4.5 million people. were forced to flee the country (as a result, its population decreased from 20 million to 17 million people in 1945‒1971), 1 million lost their property, 340,000 were illegally arrested, 90,000 of them died in custody, over 100 thousand died from its consequences, more than 1 thousand people were killed.

The communist regimes of Asia, created in the second half of the twentieth century, had their own characteristics:

1. In Asia, unlike Eastern Europe, there was no single bloc of socialist states, so the death of socialism in the USSR did not lead to the automatic death of the Asian communist regimes.

2. Here, much stronger than in Europe, there were nationalist sentiments.

3. Much more successfully than in Eastern Europe and Russia, the ideas of the leadership of the communist parties were imposed on the entire society.

At the same time, the communist regimes in different Asian countries differed markedly from each other. The most powerful communist regime in history was created in China. He won the final victory over the Kuomintang regime of Chiang Kai-shek during the civil war of 1946-1949. At first it was unsuccessful for the communists. In July-October 1946, Chiang Kai-shek's troops captured about 100 cities in the territory controlled by the CCP, including the capital of the "special region" Yan'an, but by the end of 1947, the strategic initiative passed to the communist army, called the People's Liberation Army of China (PLA ). In the spring of 1948, she recaptured Yan'an from the Kuomintang, and then in the battle on the Huang He River (November 1948 - January 1949) defeated the main forces of Chiang Kai-shek, who lost a quarter of his army in this battle. After the PLA took both Chinese capitals, Beijing and Nanjing, the remnants of the Kuomintang troops fled to about. Taiwan, and the entire mainland China came under the rule of the CCP and its leader Mao Zedong.

The formation of a new, communist regime began in China already during the civil war of 1946-1949. In the provinces occupied by the PLA, the military control committees (VCC) became the main form of power, to which all other local authorities were subordinate. The VKK liquidated the old Kuomintang administration and created new provincial authorities - local people's governments (executive authorities) and conferences of people's representatives (analogous to the Russian congresses of councils of 1917-1936). In June 1949, the Congress of the Left Chinese Parties (CPC, Revolutionary Kuomintang, Democratic League, etc.) began its work - a preparatory committee for convening a political advisory council (the new Chinese parliament). The People's Political Consultative Council (PPCC) formed at this congress, de facto - the Chinese Constituent Assembly - began its work in September 1949. It proclaimed the creation of a new state - the People's Republic of China
(October 1, 1949) and adopted the General Program of the CPP (de facto, the constitution of the PRC). The PPCC itself took over the functions of the National People's Congress (NPC) and became its first session, at which the supreme body of power of the PRC, the Central People's Government Council (CNPC), was elected. He formed other central state bodies - the State Administrative Council (the highest executive body, an analogue of the Soviet Council of People's Commissars), the People's Revolutionary Military Council (PLA command), the Supreme People's Court and the Supreme People's Prosecutor's Office. Together with the TsNPS, all these bodies constituted the Central People's Government of the People's Republic of China. Thus, the de jure democratic structure of the new Chinese state was created. It featured various parties and organizations united in the Popular Front. The People's Republic of China in the General Program of the CPP was proclaimed a "state of people's democracy" based "on an alliance of workers and peasants and uniting all the democratic classes of the country", etc. But de facto in China in 1949 a totalitarian communist regime was established.

Many principles of democracy did not operate in the PRC - the separation of powers (the Administrative Council was not only an executive body, but also a legislative body; "people's courts", the creation of which began in 1951, were included in the structure of local governments), representative democracy (the first elections to the NPC were held only in 1953-1954 and not in all regions of the PRC, assemblies of people's representatives were not convened locally).

Huge power was concentrated in the hands of Mao Zedong, chairman of the CPC Central Committee, who in 1949 also took over the posts of chairman of the Central People's Government, chairman of the People's Revolutionary Military Council, and head of the Central People's Party. As a result, Mao's dictatorship was de facto established in China.

The Mao regime began a policy of mass repression as early as the years of the civil war, which continued into the 1950s. Hundreds of thousands of captured Kuomintang became the first prisoners of laogai (corrective labor camps that combined the "re-education" of prisoners and their isolation from society). During the agrarian reform of the early 50s. about 5 million Chinese peasants were killed, and about 6 million were sent to the Laogai. In 1949-1952. 2 million "bandits" (criminal elements associated with prostitution, gambling, opium sales, etc.) were destroyed and more
2 million thrown into prisons and camps. A super-violent regime was created in laogai. Torture and on-the-spot killings were widely used (in one camp, a prisoner-priest died after 102 hours of continuous torture; in other camps, the head of the camp personally killed or ordered to be buried alive 1,320 people). There was a very high death rate among prisoners (in the 1950s, up to 50% of prisoners in Chinese camps died within six months). The uprisings of prisoners were brutally suppressed (in November 1949, 1 thousand people out of 5 thousand who participated in the uprising in one of the camps were buried alive in the ground). The minimum sentence was 8 years, but the average sentence was 20 years in prison. By 1957, as a result of a grandiose purge in the city and in the countryside, 4 million "counter-revolutionaries" (opponents of the communist regime) were destroyed. Suicide among those under investigation and convicts took on a mass character (in the 1950s, there were 700,000 of them; in Canton, up to 50 people committed suicide a day). As a result of the Hundred Flowers Campaign (its slogan was Mao's words: "Let hundreds of flowers bloom, let thousands of schools compete") in 1957, the Chinese intelligentsia was defeated, which did not recognize the dominance of communist ideology and the dictatorship of the CPC. About 700 thousand people. (10% of the Chinese scientific and technical intelligentsia) received 20 years in the camps, millions were temporarily or permanently sent to certain areas for "introduction to rural labor."

The instrument of terror was a powerful repressive apparatus - the security forces (1.2 million people) and the police (5.5 million people). In China, the most powerful prison-camp system in the history of mankind was created - about 1 thousand large camps and tens of thousands of medium and small ones. Through them until the mid-80s. 50 million people passed through, 20 million of them died in custody. In 1955, 80% of prisoners were political prisoners, in the early 60s. their number has dropped to 50%. It was almost impossible to get out of prison under Mao. Persons under investigation were kept in detention centers (pre-trial detention centers) for a very long time (up to 10 years), while short sentences (up to 2 years) were served here. Most of the prisoners were sent to the laogai camps, where they were broken up according to the army principle (into divisions, battalions, etc.). They were disenfranchised, worked for free, and very rarely received family visits. In the laojiao camp, the regime was more lenient - without fixed terms, with the preservation of civil rights and salaries (but the main part was deducted for food). The jue camp contained "free workers" (twice a year they received short-term leave, they had the right to live in the camp with their families). In this category until the early 60s. 95% of prisoners released from camps of other categories fell into this category. Thus, in China in the 50s. any term automatically became life.

The entire population of China was divided into two groups - "red" (workers, poor peasants, PLA soldiers and "martyr revolutionaries" - persons who suffered under the Chiang Kai-shek regime) and "black" (landowners, wealthy peasants, counter-revolutionaries "," harmful elements", "Right deviators", etc.). In 1957, "blacks" were forbidden to be admitted to the CCP and other communist organizations, to universities. They were the first victims of any purge. Thus, the "equality of citizens before the law" proclaimed by the 1954 PRC Constitution was a fiction.

Until the mid 60s. Chinese totalitarianism was masked by "democratic" institutions. In January 1953, the Central People's Congress adopted a resolution on the convening of the National People's Congress and local people's congresses.
In May 1953, the first general elections in Chinese history began, which dragged on until August 1954. At the first session of the new NPC (September 1954), the First Constitution of the PRC was adopted. It proclaimed the task of building socialism (this task was not set in the "General Program" of 1949), consolidated certain democratic freedoms (equality of citizens before the law, national equality, etc.), and introduced some changes in the political system of the PRC. The post of Chairman of the People's Republic of China (head of state) was introduced with broad powers (command of the armed forces, development of proposals "on important state issues", etc.). The Administrative Council was transformed into the State Council (the highest body of central government).

However, by the end of the 1950s Chinese "democracy" is beginning to collapse. The influence of the party-state apparatus is strengthened at the expense of representative bodies of power. The legislative functions of the NPC were transferred to its Standing Committee (Chinese government), the powers of local people's congresses were transferred to people's committees (analogous to the Soviet executive committees), the composition of which completely coincided with the composition of the provincial, city and county committees of the CCP. Party committees replaced the court and the prosecutor's office, and their secretaries - judges. In 1964, the campaign "Learn the style of work from the PLA" began, during which the establishment of barracks order in all spheres of public life began (according to Mao's formula "All the people are soldiers"). The militia was subordinated to the army, since 1964 army patrols and posts appeared on the streets of cities and in villages.

Thus, by the mid-60s. In China, the foundation was laid for the military-bureaucratic dictatorship of Mao, but for its complete victory, he had to carry out a "cultural revolution" of 1966-1976. Its main goal was to strengthen the regime of Mao's personal power, shaken as a result of the failure of the "Great Leap Forward" in 1958. In the early 60s. under pressure from the right, moderate wing of the CCP, Mao had to abandon his economic utopias. The peasants were returned part of their property, requisitioned during the "agrarian reform" of the 50s. (livestock, agricultural implements, etc.) and personal plots. The principles of material interest were restored at industrial enterprises. The post of Chairman of the People's Republic of China was taken by the leader of the right, Liu Shaoqi, and the General Secretary of the CPC Central Committee, his associate Deng Xiaoping.

The instrument of Mao's reprisal against the Liu and Deng group was first the Chinese youth, then the army. At the same time, the nature of the "cultural revolution" was contradictory, since it combined the struggle for power within the Chinese elite, an anarchist revolt of the marginal layers of Chinese cities (in this regard, the French historian J.-L. Margolin called the events of 1966-1976. in China by "anarchist totalitarianism") and a military coup.

The "cultural revolution" began in May 1966, when Mao announced the resignation of a number of top leaders of the party, government and army at an enlarged meeting of the Politburo of the CPC Central Committee, and the "cultural revolution" headquarters, the "cultural revolution" group (GCR) was created. , which included Mao's inner circle: his wife Jiang Qing, Mao's secretary Chen Boda, secretary of the Shanghai CPC city committee Zhang Chunqiao, secretary of the CPC Central Committee in charge of state security organs, Kang Sheng and others. Gradually, the GKR replaced the Politburo and the Secretariat of the CPC Central Committee and became the only real power in the PRC.

Immediately after that, detachments of hungweipings ("red guards") were created in Chinese schools and universities, in December 1966 - detachments of zaofans ("rebels"), consisting mainly of young unskilled workers. A significant part of them were “blacks”, embittered by discrimination and striving to improve their status in Chinese society (in Canton, 45% of the “rebels” were children of the intelligentsia, whose representatives in the PRC were considered second-class people). Fulfilling Mao's call "Fire at headquarters!" (made at the Plenum of the CPC Central Committee in August 1966), they, with the help of the army (its units suppressed resistance to the "rebels", controlled communications, prisons, warehouses, banks, etc.), defeated the party and state apparatus of the PRC. 60% of personnel managers, participants of the "Long March" were removed from their posts
1934-1936, including many senior officials - Chinese President Liu Shaoqi (he died in prison in 1969), Foreign Minister Chen Yi, State Security Minister Luo Ruiqing and others. The party leadership has changed radically. General Secretary of the CPC Central Committee Deng Xiaoping and four out of five vice-chairmen of the CPC Central Committee were dismissed from their posts (Mao's only deputy, defense minister Lin Biao, devoted to him, remained). The state apparatus was paralyzed (with the exception of the army, which did not interfere in events until Mao's order). As a result, China was dominated by the Red Guards and Zaofans. They dealt with impunity with everyone they considered "class enemies" - the intelligentsia (142 thousand teachers of schools and universities, 53 thousand scientific and technical workers, 2,600 writers and other cultural figures, 500 professors of medicine), officials, " black”, etc. 10 thousand people. were killed, there were mass searches and arrests. In total, during the years of the “cultural revolution”, 4 million members of the CCP were arrested out of 18 million and 400 thousand military. Gross interference in the privacy of citizens has become commonplace. It was forbidden to celebrate the Chinese New Year, wear modern clothes and Western-style shoes, etc. In Shanghai, the Red Guards cut off braids and shaved dyed hair for women, tore tight trousers, and broke shoes with high heels and narrow noses. At the same time, the attempts of the “rebels” to create a new state (their detachments actually turned into a “parallel communist party”, in schools, in administrative buildings they created their own judicial and investigative system - chambers, torture rooms) failed. The result was chaos in China. The old party-state apparatus was destroyed, a new one was not created. There was a civil war - "rebels" with "conservatives" - defenders of the pre-revolutionary state (in Shanghai for a whole week they repulsed the assaults of the city party committee by the Red Guards), various groups of "rebels" with each other, etc.

Under these conditions, Mao in 1967 tried to normalize the situation by creating new authorities - revolutionary committees based on the "Three in One" formula (revolutionary committees included representatives of the old state-party apparatus, "rebels" and the army). However, this attempt to reach a compromise between the "rebels", "conservatives" and the "neutral" army failed. In a number of provinces, the army united with the "conservatives" and inflicted a heavy defeat on the "rebels" (their detachments were defeated, the emissaries of the GKR were arrested), in other regions the "rebels" began an escalation of violence, which reached its climax in the first half of 1968. Shops and banks were looted. "Rebels" captured army warehouses (only on May 27, 1968, it was stolen from the military arsenals
80 thousand firearms), in the battles between their units, artillery and tanks were used (they were assembled by order of the Zaofans at military factories).

Therefore, Mao had to use his last reserve - the army. In June 1968, the army units easily broke the resistance of the "rebels", and in September their detachments and organizations were disbanded. In the autumn of 1968, the first groups of Red Guards (1 million people) were exiled to remote provinces, by 1976 the number of exiled "rebels" had grown to 20 million. Attempts to resist were brutally suppressed. In Wuzhou, troops used artillery and napalm against the "rebels", hundreds of thousands of "rebels" died in other provinces of South China (in Guangxi - Zhuang Autonomous Region - 100 thousand people, in Guangdong - 40 thousand, in Yun'an -30 thousand). At the same time, the army and the police, cracking down on the "rebels", continued the reprisals against their opponents. 3 million dismissed officials were sent to "re-education centers" (camps and prisons), the number of prisoners in laogai, even after the amnesties of 1966 and 1976 reached 2 million. In Inner Mongolia, 346 thousand people were arrested. in the case of the People's Party of Inner Mongolia (merged into the CPC in 1947, but its members continued their illegal activities), as a result
16 thousand people were killed and 87 thousand maimed. In South China, during the suppression of unrest of national minorities, 14 thousand people were executed. Repressions continued in the first half of the 1970s. After the death of Lin Biao (according to the official version, he tried to organize a military coup and after its failure he died in a plane crash over the territory of Mongolia in September 1971), a purge began in the PLA, during which tens of thousands of Chinese generals and officers were repressed. The purge was also taking place in other departments - ministries (out of 2 thousand employees of the PRC Foreign Ministry, they were repressed
600 thousand), universities, enterprises, etc. As a result, the total number of victims during the years of the “cultural revolution” amounted to
100 million people, including 1 million dead

Other results of the "cultural revolution":

1. The defeat of the right, moderate wing of the CCP, the seizure of power by the ultra-left group of Mao Zedong and his wife Jiang Qing.

2. The creation in China of a model of barracks socialism, the features of which are the complete rejection of economic methods of management (planting "people's communes", cruel administration, equalization of wages, rejection of material incentives, etc.), total state control over the social sphere ( identical clothes and shoes, the desire for maximum equality among members of society), the utmost militarization of the entire life of the country, an aggressive foreign policy, etc.

3. Organizational and legal formalization of the results of the “cultural revolution” by the 9th Congress of the CPC (April 1969), the 10th Congress of the CPC (August 1973) and the new Constitution of the PRC (January 1975), which was a complex and contradictory process. On the one hand, the party-state apparatus destroyed by the “cultural revolution” (the Politburo and the Central Committee of the CPC, provincial party committees, primary organizations of the CPC, the Komsomol, trade unions, etc.) was restored, to which some officials who were repressed during the years of the “cultural revolution” returned. , including right-wing leader Deng Xiaoping. On the other hand, Mao's faction consolidated the fruits of its victory in the "cultural revolution". Almost all of its headquarters (GKR) became part of the Politburo of the CPC Central Committee. Revolutionary committees were declared the political foundation of the PRC (in the Constitution of the PRC of 1975). Liu Shaoqi, Lin Biao and other opponents of Mao were condemned. This inconsistency was especially clearly manifested in the 1975 Constitution of the People's Republic of China, which dealt a heavy blow to the system of Chinese representative bodies of power (revolutionary committees were de jure declared permanent bodies of local people's congresses, de facto they replaced them, since people's congresses all the years of the "cultural revolution" were not convened, and their powers were transferred to the revolutionary committees, the deputies of the NPC were not elected, but appointed; the powers of the NPC and its Standing Committee were sharply narrowed) and other elements of Chinese "democracy" (the post of chairman of the PRC was liquidated, and his powers were transferred to the chairman of the CPC Central Committee, the prosecutor's office and autonomous regions were abolished, articles on national equality and equality of citizens before the law disappeared, etc.), but at the same time legally secured some concessions to the right (the right of commune members to household plots, recognition as the main unit agricultural production not a commune, but a brigade, a declaration of the principle of payment according to work, etc. .p.), although in practice the system of barracks socialism was preserved and strengthened. During the new political campaign "studying the theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat", which began immediately after the adoption of the new Constitution of the PRC, there was a struggle against the right (Deng was again removed from all posts in early 1976), and their demands (distribution according to work, the right of peasants to household plots, the development of commodity-money relations, etc.) were declared a "bourgeois right", which must be limited. This led to the destruction in China of the last elements of a market economy and the victory of the administrative-command system. In the PRC, financial incentives and personal plots were abolished, and overtime work became commonplace. This led to an aggravation of the socio-political situation in the country (strike and demonstrations began in China).

Thus, by the mid-1970s Mao's dictatorship was finally formed, and a cruel totalitarian regime was established in China. However, the apogee of Mao's dictatorship was short-lived. In the mid 70s. In China, the struggle between two groups in the country's top leadership intensified: the radicals led by Jiang Qing and the pragmatists led by the head of the Chinese government Zhou Enlai and Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China Deng Xiaoping. Zhou's death (January 8, 1976) weakened the position of the pragmatists and led to a temporary victory for Jiang Qing's leftist faction. At a meeting of the Politburo of the CPC Central Committee in April 1976, a decision was made to resign Deng Xiaoping from all posts and exile him.

However, the death of Mao (September 9, 1976) and the arrest of radical leaders Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan and Wang Hongwen, whom the pragmatists called the "gang of four" (October 6, 1976), led to fundamental changes in the alignment of political forces in China and a decisive change in the course of its leadership. The leader of the pragmatists was elected vice chairman of the CPC Central Committee, but de facto his role in post-Maoist China was higher than that of the official leaders of the PRC, the chairman of the CPC Central Committee and the chairman of the PRC; It is no coincidence that the new political course was called the “Deng Xiaoping Line”.

Under the leadership of Deng, a series of radical socio-economic reforms were carried out in China, which led to the replacement of the military-communist-type economy with a multi-layered market economy, a sharp acceleration in the pace of economic development (the average growth rate of the Chinese economy in the 1980s and 1990s was 10% per year). year, in some years - up to 14%) and a significant increase in the standard of living of its population.

In agriculture, administrative methods of management were replaced by economic ones. The land of communes and brigades was divided among peasant families, who received the right to freely dispose of the products of their farms. As a result, in 1979-1984. the volume of agricultural production and the average income of a peasant household doubled, crop yields increased sharply (the grain harvest in 1984 exceeded 400 million tons, 2 times more than in 1958, and 1.5 times more than in 1975) , and for the first time in the history of China, the food problem was solved. At the same time, the main role in the rise of agriculture was played by the private sector (independent peasant farms), and in the public sector in the 80s. only 10% of the Chinese peasantry remained.

In industry, the creation of free economic zones began (they allowed the investment of foreign capital and the operation of the civil and labor laws of capitalist states, guaranteed the export of profits and higher wages), joint and other foreign enterprises, and individual labor activity was allowed. As a result, a modern highly developed industry was created in China, the products of which in the 80s. conquered the global consumer market.

In the social sphere, the Chinese leadership abandoned the policy of equality in poverty and the violent suppression of the wealthy sections of the population (Deng put forward the slogan: “Being rich is not a crime”), and the formation of new social strata began - the bourgeoisie, the wealthy peasantry, etc.

The democratization of the Chinese state and law began.
In 1978, an amnesty was announced for 100,000 prisoners.
Two-thirds of the exiles from the era of the "cultural revolution" returned to the cities, the rehabilitation of its victims and the payment of compensation to them for each year spent in prison or in exile began. The mass repressions have stopped. Among the new court cases, political cases accounted for only 5%. As a result, the number of prisoners in China in 1976-1986. decreased from 10 million to 5 million (0.5% of the population of China, the same as in the United States, and less than in the USSR in 1990). The situation of the prisoners improved markedly. The administration of labor camps was transferred from the Ministry of State Security to the Ministry of Justice. In 1984, ideological indoctrination in prisons and camps (in the 1950s it took at least 2 hours a day for the entire period, sometimes it continued continuously from one day to three months) was replaced by vocational training. Guaranteed return to the family at the end of the term. It was forbidden to take into account the class affiliation of prisoners (when determining the term and regime of imprisonment). Early release (for exemplary behavior) was envisaged. The judiciary was taken out of party control. In 1983, the competence of the MGB was limited. The prosecutor's office received the right to cancel illegal arrests and consider complaints about illegal actions of the police. Number of lawyers in China in 1990-1996 has doubled. In 1996, the maximum penalty for administrative offenses was one month in prison, while the maximum in laojiao was three years.

Legally, the softening of the political regime was formalized by the Constitutions of the People's Republic of China in 1978 and 1982. In the Constitution of 1978, the provisions of the Constitution of 1954 on national equality, guarantees of civil rights and the prosecutor's office were restored (in this regard, it was restored), but revolutionary committees were preserved (they were liquidated in the early 80s). The Constitution of 1982 eliminated all the institutions born of the "cultural revolution" and restored the state system formalized by the PRC Constitution of 1954. the right to convene the Supreme State Conference), the rights of the PC of the NPC and the State Council of the PRC were expanded. The 1982 constitution also legally fixed the multistructural nature of the Chinese economy, based on state, state-capitalist and private property. On the edge
80-90s a number of amendments were made to the PRC Constitution that consolidated the results of Deng's reforms: on private peasant farms, land inheritance, a multi-party system, a "social market economy", etc.

The overall result of all these changes in Chinese society in the last quarter of the 20th century. aptly expressed by a simple Chinese, who, in a conversation with a foreign journalist, said: “I used to eat cabbage, listen to the radio and keep quiet. Today I watch color TV, chew a chicken leg and talk about problems.”

At the same time, the dismantling of the totalitarian system in China was not completed. The PRC retains a one-party system: according to the PRC Constitution of 1982, the Chinese parties operate according to the formula of "multi-party cooperation under the leadership of the CPC." Its leaders occupy all the highest state posts - the chairmen of the People's Republic of China, the State Council, the National People's Congress, and others. Opposition to the communist regime is brutally suppressed. Chinese Democratic leader Wei Jingsheng, who claimed that Maoism was the source of totalitarianism and tried to create a social democratic movement in China, was arrested and convicted twice.
In 1979 he was sentenced to 15 years in prison for passing secret information to a foreigner (contact with a foreign journalist), in 1995 to 10 years in prison for "actions aimed at overthrowing the government." Student unrest under anti-communist slogans in 1989 on Tiananmen Square was suppressed with the help of the army. More than 1,000 people died in Beijing, and tens of thousands were injured and arrested. More than 30 thousand people were arrested in the province, hundreds were shot without trial or investigation. Thousands of participants in the democratic movement were convicted, and its organizers received up to 13 years in prison. China retains 100,000 political prisoners, including 1,000 dissidents.

Thus, Chinese totalitarianism at the end of the 20th century. turned not into democracy, but into authoritarianism (de jure, according to the Chinese Constitution of 1982, into a “democratic dictatorship”).

A kind of communist regime ("hermit state") was created in the second half of the forties in North Korea. In 1910-1945. Korea was a Japanese colony.
In August 1945, North Korea (north of the 38th parallel) was occupied by Soviet troops, South American. In the Soviet zone, with the help of the USSR, a communist regime of the Stalinist type was established, the leader of which was Kim Il Sung (until 1945 - the commander of a small partisan detachment that fought against the Japanese in Manchuria). Kim's rivals, the leaders of the Korean Communist Party, were destroyed.

The totalitarian nature of the regime of Kim Il Sung (1945-1994) was masked by "democracy" of the Soviet or Eastern European type. In 1946, elections were held to provincial, city, and district people's committees (analogous to Russian soviets), and in 1947, to village and volost people's committees. In 1948, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) was proclaimed and its Supreme People's Assembly (North Korean Parliament) was elected, which in 1949 adopted the Constitution of the DPRK.

However, there was no de facto democracy in North Korea, and mass repression began. 1.5 million people died in the camps
100 thousand - in the course of party purges. 1.3 million people died in the Korean War unleashed by the Kim regime of 1950-1953. Thus, over half a century, about 3 million people became victims of the communist regime in North Korea (the entire population of the DPRK is 23 million people).

The organs of state security became an instrument of communist terror. In 1945, the Department of Public Security (political police) was created in North Korea, later transformed into the Ministry of National Security (since the 90s - the National Security Agency). The employees of these special services created a system of total control over the entire population of North Korea, from the elite to ordinary citizens. All Koreans once a week are “invited” to political classes and “results of life” (sessions of criticism and self-criticism, in which you need to convict yourself of political misconduct at least once and your comrades at least twice). All conversations of the North Korean bureaucracy are tapped, their audio and video cassettes are constantly monitored by NSA employees who act under the guise of plumbers, electricians, gas workers, etc. Any travel requires an agreement from the place of work and permission from local authorities. There are about 200,000 prisoners in North Korean camps. Of these, about 40,000 die each year.

In the second half of the 40s. citizens of the DPRK were divided into 51 categories, on which their career and financial situation depended. In the 80s. The number of these categories has been reduced to three:

1. "Core of society" or "center" (citizens loyal to the regime).

The victims of the genocide in North Korea were physically handicapped people (disabled people, dwarfs, etc.). The new North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il, son of Kim Il Sung, declared: "The dwarf breed must disappear!" As a result, the latter were forbidden to have offspring and were sent to camps. Disabled people are evicted from large cities and exiled to remote areas of the country (to the mountains, islands, etc.).

The totalitarian regime has a huge impact on North Korean law. The Criminal Code of the DPRK names 47 offenses punishable by death. In North Korea, people are executed not only for political crimes (high treason, rebellion, etc.), but also for criminal ones (murder, rape, prostitution). Executions in North Korea are public and often turn into lynchings. The nature of the punishment is determined by belonging to one of the three categories (citizens of the “central” category are not executed for rape). Lawyers are appointed by party bodies. Legal proceedings in North Korea are simplified to the limit.

Simultaneously with the North Korean regime, a communist regime arose in Vietnam. In the first half of the twentieth century. it was a French colony. In 1941, it was occupied by Japanese troops, but as a result of the August Revolution of 1945 (a communist-led uprising against the Japanese occupiers), the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) was proclaimed. The power in it belonged to the Viet Minh organization (full name - the League of Struggle for the Independence of Vietnam), which was the Vietnamese analogue of the European Popular Fronts. The main role in it was played by the Communists, the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV). From the first days of its existence, this party pursued a policy of communist terror. In 1931, when creating Chinese-style soviets, the communists massacred local landowners by the hundreds. Immediately after the August Revolution of 1945, the extermination of members of other Vietnamese parties that actively participated in the struggle against the Japanese invaders (Nationalists, Trotskyists, etc.) began in Vietnam. The Soviet-style state security organs and the “Committee of Assault and Destruction” (an analogue of Hitler’s assault detachments) became an instrument of repression, whose members, mostly urban lumpen, staged a French pogrom in Saigon on September 25, 1945, during which hundreds of French citizens were killed.

After the invasion of Vietnam by French, British and Chinese (Kuomintang) troops (autumn 1945), the protracted Indochinese War of 1945-1954 began, during which repression in the territory controlled by the communists intensified. Only in August - September 1945, thousands of Vietnamese were killed, tens of thousands were arrested. In July 1946, the physical extermination of members of all Vietnamese parties, except for the CPIK, began, including those that actively participated in the national liberation movement. In December 1946, in North Vietnam (the south of the country was occupied by French troops at that time), political police and camps for enemies of the communist regime were created. Two thousand French prisoners of war out of 20 thousand taken prisoner in 1954 died in these camps (reasons - brutal beatings, torture, hunger, lack of medicines and hygiene products). In July 1954, the Geneva Accords were concluded, according to which French troops were withdrawn from Indochina, but until the general elections were held (they were scheduled for 1956, but were never held), only North Vietnam (north of 17th parallel).

Here began the construction of a socialist state. In 1946, the People's Parliament and the government of the republic were created in North Vietnam, and the Constitution of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam was adopted, according to which the president, endowed with broad powers, became the head of state. This post was taken by the leader of the CPIK, Ho Chi Minh, de facto North Vietnamese dictator. Under his leadership, mass repression began in North Vietnam. During the agrarian reform of 1953-1956. about 5% of Vietnamese peasants were repressed. Some of them died, others lost their property and were thrown into camps. Torture was widely used in the FER. In 1956, the most grandiose purge of the party and state apparatus in the entire history of Vietnam of the socialist era began here.

In order to preserve its own power, the Kremlin is depriving Russia of the future, dooming it to exist as a raw materials appendage, in which there is no elite, but only the top.

Before our very eyes, neo-totalitarianism of the 21st century is acquiring final features. Neo-totalitarian regimes and ideologies are quite different from their totalitarian predecessors.

All the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, and primarily the Stalinist USSR, proceeded from the idea of their absolute superiority over the West and were determined to conquer it.

The neototalitarian regimes of the beginning of the 21st century exist on the fact that they export raw materials to the West and import everything else. Accordingly, they are not going to conquer the West. Otherwise, they will have nowhere to buy iPhones and no one will finish their toilet bowls with gold. Their warlike rhetoric is not a preparation for war, but simply a way to plunge their people into an abyss of paranoia.

Accordingly, all these states, para-states and ideologies, whether it be Venezuela, Iran, the "Congress of Islamic Courts", Salafists or "Nashists", do not proclaim technological dominance over the West. They proclaim their moral superiority over him. They don't say, "Our science and economics are better." They say: "They are richer, but we are more spiritual."

This is a psychologically more stable position. When a person living in Khrushchev is shown an American house and told: “Our system is more progressive,” he experiences cognitive dissonance. When an alcoholic who beats his wife and regularly rapes his stepdaughter is told: “But you are more spiritual,” he does not experience any cognitive dissonance. There is nothing an alcoholic, loser, or sociopath wants more than to feel "highly spiritual and misunderstood."

If the totalitarian ideology was the ideology of the winners, then the neototalitarian ideology is the ideology of the losers. "These infidels blow themselves up to compromise our peaceful Islam." "All the troubles of our Zimbabwe come from the fact that the colonialists again dream of bringing her to her knees." “Russia is surrounded by fascists, and self-defense forces are operating in Crimea,” is the psychology of losers and sociopaths. Any sociopaths consider themselves skilled manipulators and those who are not amenable to manipulation are considered as enemies.

The old totalitarian regimes forbade emigration. They needed brains inside the country to create new technologies. Neo-totalitarian regimes encourage emigration. To everyone who is afraid that the Kremlin will close the borders now, don't be afraid, they won't. The more thinking people leave Russia, the better for the Kremlin. The neo-totalitarian regime works like a giant rectification column - the light, intellectual fractions of the population fly away abroad, viscous black fuel oil collects below: lumpen, officials and security forces, the support of the regime - those who firmly believe that there are enemies around.

Classical totalitarian regimes relied on the most powerful repressive apparatus. Neototalitarian regimes rely on democratic majority.

This is a fundamental difference. In Soviet times, dissidents (and the KGB) believed that it was enough to convey the truth to the majority and the regime would collapse. If everyone reads The Gulag Archipelago, then everyone will.

The neo-totalitarian authorities understood a simple truth. In today's society, just like a thousand years ago, only a minority is free, alas.

If you tell the majority on TV that the sun revolves around the Earth, then the majority will believe it. Moreover, even without any TV, 36% of Russians think so. If the majority is told on TV that genes are found only in genetically modified products, and there are no genes in ordinary products, then the majority will also believe this, especially since the same 36% of the population think so even without TV. If we hire the Goreslavskys and Dmitry Kiselevs to say that Putin personally stopped the sun, and, accordingly, those who say that this is impossible and that the Earth revolves around the sun are agents of the damned West, then the majority of the population without any coercion and violence believe in it.

Do you want democracy? Did you want universal suffrage? Do you want to hear the voice of the people? Please sign for receipt. So what if the Gulag Archipelago is freely available if majority never read it?

We cannot yet predict the degree of stability of neo-totalitarian regimes. The old totalitarian regimes ended up being unsustainable because they needed a highly educated elite to function, who saw that ideology was at odds with reality. I draw your attention to the fact that it was the elite who saw it. A worker at a worsted factory in Ivanovo knew from TV that blacks were being lynched in the United States, and she did not experience any cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance arose among the elite.

Neototalitarian regimes are characterized primarily by the fact that they do not have an elite. They have a top. They have friends of the leader. These are people of an extremely low intellectual level who, through chance acquaintances or negative selection, have gained access to the administrative resource and the golden loaf, and who profess the same values that they teach to the lumpen. They don't have cognitive dissonance.

As a consequence, neo-totalitarian regimes can be extremely resilient. For example, Robert Mugabe has ruled Zimbabwe for 23 years. During this time, the country's GDP fell three and a half times (and this despite the fact that the population grew from 7 million to 12), but nothing threatens Mugabe's power: in 2013, he really won the next election. The elite has left, and those who have remained know very well that all their troubles stem from the intrigues of the accursed West, from the enslavement of which only the leader and teacher Mugabe saves the country.

Neototalitarian ideology is aimed primarily at washing out the elite from society. Anyone - scientific, entrepreneurial, intellectual, managerial, because the elite are those who need to think.

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