Totalitarian Regimes

📋 Course Outline

1. Defining Totalitarianism
2. The Rise of Totalitarian Regimes
3. Political Control and Leadership
4. Society, Economy and Violence
5. Totalitarianism and War
6. Democratic Weaknesses and Limits

📅 Key Dates

1. 25 October 1917The Bolsheviks seized power under Lenin’s leadership
2. 30 January 1933Adolf Hitler was appointed German chancellor by President Hindenburg
3. 1936The Spanish Civil War began when Franco attacked the Spanish Republic
4. 1938Britain and France accepted Germany’s annexation of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia
5. 23 August 1939Germany and the USSR signed the German-Soviet Pact

📖 1. Defining Totalitarianism

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Totalitarian regime : a political system that completely controls the individual through an encompassing ideology, the suppression of individual freedoms in the name of the state, and mass terror using violence

• In 1951, Hannah Arendt compared Nazi Germany and Stalin’s USSR in The Origins of Totalitarianism, while excluding Fascist Italy because she considered it less repressive.