From the November 2024 IBDP History Paper 2 exam
Example I:
The assertion that "authoritarian control was complete" in certain 20th-century states encapsulates a profound historical truth, yet its absoluteness warrants scrutiny. Two regimes that exemplify the zenith of authoritarian control are Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler (1933-1945) and Stalinist Russia under Joseph Stalin (1922-1953). In both states, the ruling apparatus achieved an unprecedented level of domination over society, politics, economy, and individual lives, seemingly validating the claim of "complete" control. However, a closer examination reveals that while both regimes attained extraordinary levels of authority, their control was neither monolithic nor entirely unchallenged. The dynamics of power in these states were characterised by a constant negotiation between the regime's totalitarian ambitions and the resilience of societal structures, individual dissent, and even internal fissures within the ruling elite itself. Heath, in his analysis on tracesofevil.com, posits that the very notion of "complete control" is itself a myth propagated by authoritarian regimes to legitimise their own narratives of omnipotence; he argues that it was precisely the illusion of total control that allowed both Hitler and Stalin to maintain power, even as pockets of resistance and systemic inefficiencies undermined their regimes from within (Heath, "The Paradox of Totalitarianism"). This perspective is crucial, as it shifts the focus from whether control was "complete" in an absolute sense to how the *perception* of completeness was manufactured and sustained.
The Nazi regime in Germany, particularly from the mid-1930s onwards, presents a paradigmatic case of authoritarian control that appears, at first glance, to have been all-encompassing. Hitler's consolidation of power began with the destruction of Weimar Republic's democratic institutions, accelerated by the Reichstag Fire Decree of 1933, which suspended civil liberties and enabled the arrest of political opponents, particularly communists and social democrats. The Enabling Act of March 1933 effectively granted Hitler dictatorial powers, allowing him to bypass the Reichstag entirely (Shirer, 194). By 1934, the Night of the Long Knives had eliminated the SA leadership, consolidating the SS and Gestapo as the central instruments of state terror, while the death of President Hindenburg in August 1934 allowed Hitler to merge the offices of Chancellor and President, assuming the title of Führer. The propaganda machinery, controlled by Goebbels, propagated an image of Hitler as the infallible leader, fostering a cult of personality that permeated every level of society. Kershaw notes that this personalisation of power was not merely a top-down imposition but a symbiotic relationship between Hitler's charismatic authority and the popular acclaim he received from large sections of the German populace, who saw in him a restorer of national pride and economic stability (Kershaw, 110). The Hitler Youth, the German Labour Front (DAF), and compulsory military service ensured that nearly every German citizen was institutionally enmeshed within the regime's organisational framework by the late 1930s. Moreover, the Nazi coordination (Gleichschaltung) of local governments, trade unions, churches, and cultural organisations dismantled autonomous spaces, replacing them with party-controlled entities. For instance, the Reich Chamber of Culture, established in 1933, regulated all artistic production, ensuring that literature, film, music, and visual arts conformed strictly to völkisch ideals (Spotts, 67).
In this environment, terror and surveillance became normalised. The Gestapo, though numerically small (approximately 32,000 agents for a population of 65 million by 1939), was highly effective because it relied on a vast network of informants—ordinary citizens who denounced neighbours, colleagues, and even family members for perceived disloyalty (Gellately, 122). The concentration camp system, initiated in 1933 with Dachau, expanded rapidly to house political prisoners, Jews, Romani people, homosexuals, and other "undesirables," subjecting them to forced labour, torture, and systematic dehumanisation. By 1939, over 20,000 Germans were imprisoned for Rassenschande (racial defilement), the crime of having sexual relations with Jews, underscoring how deeply racial ideology had been internalised and enforced (Friedlander, 210). These mechanisms suggest an almost hermetic sealing of society under Nazi rule. Yet, even within this seemingly impenetrable apparatus, resistances existed that complicate the narrative of total control. The White Rose movement, a small group of university students in Munich led by Sophie and Hans Scholl, distributed anti-Nazi leaflets calling for passive resistance and moral revolt between 1942 and 1943 until their capture and execution (Scholl, 89). More significantly, the July 20th plot of 1944, orchestrated by high-ranking military officers such as Claus von Stauffenberg, revealed fractures within the elite itself; although the assassination attempt on Hitler failed, it demonstrated that not all segments of the German state or army were uniformly loyal (Mommsen, 234). Heath astutely observes that these acts of defiance, though isolated and ultimately unsuccessful, exposed the regime's Achilles' heel: the need to constantly manufacture consent through propaganda and repression, precisely because control was never as absolute as its rhetoric claimed (Heath, "Resistance in the Totalitarian State"). The very existence of these rebellions, however marginal, indicates that authoritarian control, even at its zenith, remained contingent on the active suppression of dissent rather than its eradication.
The dynamics of control in Stalinist Russia present both parallels and contrasts to the Nazi case. Stalin's ascent to power in the Soviet Union was slower and more brutal, rooted in the intra-party struggles of the 1920s. By the late 1920s, he had eliminated rivals like Trotsky, Kamenev, and Zinoviev, and by 1928, he had consolidated control over the Communist Party apparatus. The First Five-Year Plan (1928-1932) and forced collectivisation transformed the economy and annihilated the kulak class, leading to the Ukrainian famine (Holodomor) of 1932-33, in which an estimated 3-5 million people died (Conquest, 210). The Great Terror of 1936-1938, orchestrated through show trials, secret police (NKVD) operations, and the gulag system, purged the party, military, and intelligentsia of perceived enemies, executing approximately 600,000-1.2 million individuals (Khlevniuk, 148). Stalin's regime was characterised by an even more pervasive surveillance state than Nazi Germany, with informants (stukachi) numbering in the millions, fostering an atmosphere of paranoia where neighbours denounced neighbours for suspected disloyalty (Fitzpatrick, 194). The regime's ideological grip was reinforced through socialist realism in arts and literature, compulsory Marxism-Leninism in education, and the cult of Stalin as the infallible Vozhd (Leader). Yet, Fitzpatrick argues that beneath this façade of monolithic control, Soviet society was marked by what she terms "everyday Stalinism": a complex negotiation between regime demands and individual survival strategies, where ordinary citizens adapted, conformed, and occasionally subverted official norms to navigate the shortages, queues, and bureaucratic inefficiencies of the planned economy (Fitzpatrick, 218).
The Smolensk Archive, a cache of Soviet documents captured by German troops in 1941 and later analysed by Western scholars, reveals the dysfunctional reality behind the totalitarian façade. Local party officials often falsified production reports to meet centrally imposed quotas, while collective farm workers maintained private plots to supplement meagre state rations—activities technically illegal but tolerated because they kept the system functioning (Merl, 145). Moreover, the purges themselves created administrative chaos, with each wave of arrests decimating the very managerial and technical cadres needed to run the economy, leading to production bottlenecks and industrial slowdowns (Siegelbaum, 102). Thurston notes that even within the NKVD, there existed internal rivalries and power struggles that occasionally surfaced as denunciations and counter-denunciations among secret police officials themselves, undermining the image of a monolithic security apparatus (Thurston, 172). The case of Yuri Piatakov, a high-ranking Bolshevik who confessed to treason during the 1937 show trials only to be shot shortly after, exemplifies how terror was used not just to eliminate opponents but to maintain an atmosphere of perpetual fear, ensuring that even loyalists lived under constant pressure to prove their orthodoxy (Getty, 134). Stalin's control, like Hitler's, was thus less a static condition of "completeness" than a dynamic process of constant coercion, legitimation, and recalibration. As Kotkin observes, Stalinism worked through what he calls "managing chaos": the regime's capacity to generate, contain, and redirect crises in ways that perpetuated its own survival, even if that meant tolerating pockets of inefficiency and dissent (Kotkin, 256). Heath's argument that both Nazi and Stalinist regimes relied on a performative display of power—public executions, mass rallies, propaganda spectacles—to mask the intrinsic instabilities of their systems is borne out by these examples (Heath, "The Theatre of Power").
Continuing the analysis of Stalinist control, it becomes evident that the regime's very excesses often produced counterproductive outcomes. The mass arrests during the Great Terror left millions of families bereft of breadwinners, exacerbating housing shortages and economic dislocation in cities like Moscow and Leningrad (Andrews, 201). The labour camps, intended as instruments of re-education, became instead schools for criminality and hardened dissent; by the late 1940s, former gulag inmates like Lev Kopelev would emerge as vocal critics of the regime (Kopelev, 142). Furthermore, the Soviet war effort during World War II—particularly the catastrophic early defeats against Nazi invaders in 1941—laid bare the weaknesses of Stalin's pre-war purges of the Red Army officer corps, which had decapitated the military of its most competent leaders (Glantz, 89). The regime's response was to temporarily relax ideological controls, allowing a revival of Russian nationalism and Orthodox religiosity as mobilisational tools; the creation of the Soviet Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in 1941 was one such attempt to harness minority loyalties for the war effort (Slezkine, 278). These concessions, however minor, underscore that even at the height of Stalinism, the state's grip was adaptive and situational rather than absolute. The post-war re-ideologisation, marked by renewed anti-Semitic campaigns (the Doctors' Plot of 1953) and crackdowns on literary dissent (attack on Akhmatova and Zoshchenko), merely re-tightened the screws without eliminating the underlying tensions. By the time of Stalin's death in 1953, the Soviet system was a hypertrophied bureaucracy riddled with inefficiencies, corruption, and latent dissent—hardly a model of "complete" control. Service argues that Stalin's successors, particularly Khrushchev, would later exploit these systemic weaknesses to dismantle the cult of personality and initiate de-Stalinisation from within, precisely because the totalitarian edifice had always rested on fragile foundations (Service, 314). Thus, both Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia exemplify regimes where authoritarian control approached an extraordinary degree of dominance but never achieved the hermetic seal implied by the phrase "complete control".
The comparative lens through which Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia are often viewed tends to emphasise their similarities: both were totalitarian, both employed mass terror, both sought total control over society and the individual. Yet, a deeper analysis reveals structural differences in how control was exercised, which further complicates the notion of its "completeness". In Nazi Germany, the regime's ideological core was rooted in racial biology and imperial expansion; the extermination of European Jewry, the sterilisation laws, and the eugenics programmes were not mere adjuncts but central to Hitler's vision of a racially purified Volksgemeinschaft (Burleigh, 124). The regime's relationship with capitalism was one of instrumentalisation rather than abolition; big business and the Wehrmacht collaborated closely with the Nazi state, benefiting from Aryanisation policies and slave labour in the concentration camps (Tooze, 238). By contrast, Stalin's Soviet Union was founded on an ideological commitment to the eradication of private property and class warfare, even if that ideology had long since degenerated into bureaucratic despotism by the 1930s. The Soviet state's relationship with its own population was mediated through the promise of social mobility via education, industrialisation, and party membership—a promise that millions of upwardly mobile workers and peasants, the vydvizhentsy, eagerly grasped (Siegelbaum, 158). While Nazi terror was overwhelmingly directed at racial and political enemies (Jews, Roma, communists, homosexuals), Stalinist repression targeted putative class enemies (kulaks, nepmen, Trotskyists), with the crucial difference that the Soviet regime periodically rehabilitated and re-integrated former victims into society, as seen in the post-1953 de-Stalinisation (Alexopoulos, 192). This distinction matters because it highlights how control in Nazi Germany was predicated on exclusion and annihilation, whereas in Stalinist Russia, it operated through a combination of inclusion (via party membership and socialist welfare policies) and exclusion (gulag sentences and executions).
The economic systems of both regimes also illustrate divergent paths to control. Nazi Germany, despite its rhetorical anti-capitalism, presided over a state-capitalist hybrid where industrial giants like IG Farben and Krupp collaborated with the regime to maximise production for war, even using slave labour in Auschwitz-Monowitz (Hayes, 214). The Four-Year Plan of 1936, orchestrated by Göring, aimed at autarky and rearmament, subordinating economic rationality to militaristic goals. In contrast, Stalin's Five-Year Plans were centrally planned in a far more literal sense, with Gosplan diktats setting production quotas for every factory and collective farm, often with disastrous results, as seen in the collapse of agricultural output during the collectivisation drive (Davies, 175). Yet, both systems shared a common feature: the annihilation of independent civil society. In Germany, the destruction of the pre-1933 labour movement (trade unions, SPD, KPD) eliminated any organised opposition, while in Russia, the crushing of the Kronstadt rebellion in 1921 and the later dissolution of the Soviet intelligentsia's autonomous spaces (writers' unions, artistic collectives) achieved the same end (Pipes, 146). Hobsbawm argues that this destruction of intermediary institutions between state and individual was the defining feature of 20th-century totalitarianism, creating societies where atomised citizens faced the regime alone, without the buffers of family, church, or community that had historically mitigated state power (Hobsbawm, 392).
The role of ideology in sustaining control also merits attention. Nazi ideology, with its pseudo-scientific racial theories and myth of the Aryan master race, was remarkably simplistic yet explosively effective, tapping into deep-seated German resentments over Versailles and economic crisis (Evans, 109). Stalinism, by contrast, clothed its terror in the far more complex and abstract language of Marxism-Leninism, requiring a level of ideological literacy (or obfuscation) that turned even high-ranking officials like Bukharin into unwitting accomplices (Bukharin, 101). This ideological density made Soviet control more brittle; when Khrushchev denounced Stalin's cult of personality in 1956, the entire legitimation structure began to unravel, revealing the emperor's nakedness (Khrushchev, 204). In Nazi Germany, by contrast, the Führerprinzip was so deeply personalised around Hitler that his death in 1945 left a vacuum no successor could fill. Neumann's concept of the "Behemoth"—a non-state, anarchic system where party, army, and industry competed for power under Hitler's supreme arbitration—captures this uniquely polycratic nature of Nazi rule, distinct from the more monolithic party-state apparatus in Stalin's Russia (Neumann, 259).
The final sections of this analysis must consider the human cost and legacy of these regimes, for it is here that the meaning of "complete control" is most starkly revealed. Both Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia left landscapes of devastation: 6 million Jews dead in the Holocaust, 20-30 million Soviet citizens perished under Stalin's rule, including gulag inmates, famine victims, and execution victims (Snyder, 310). Yet, even amidst such horror, acts of solidarity, resistance, and survival persisted. The Bielski partisans in occupied Belarus, a Jewish family-led guerrilla unit that fought Nazis in the forests, exemplify how human beings refused to be reduced to mere objects of control (Tec, 221). In the Soviet gulags, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's own survival and literary output stand as testament to the indomitable human spirit that no regime could entirely crush (Solzhenitsyn, 187). These stories matter because they puncture the myth of total control; regimes may have sought omnipotence, but societies always retained a residual capacity for autonomy, however submerged. As Arendt noted, totalitarian systems worked by creating conditions where human spontaneity—the capacity for new beginnings and unpredictable action—was systematically extinguished, yet never entirely eliminated (Arendt, 278). Heath's conclusion that the very extremity of authoritarian control sowed the seeds of its own delegitimation is borne out by the collapse of both regimes: Nazi Germany in 1945, Soviet Russia in 1991 (Heath, "The Limits of Power").
In both cases, it was not external pressure alone (Allied victory, Cold War) that brought about their downfall but internal decay—the accumulated contradictions, inefficiencies, and human resistances that no amount of propaganda or terror could permanently suppress. Kershaw's observation about Nazi Germany—that its control was "working towards the Führer" in a constant dynamic of radicalisation—applies equally to Stalin's Russia: both regimes were systems in perpetual motion, driven by ideological imperatives and power preservation, never static states of complete domination (Kershaw, 130). The statement "authoritarian control was complete" thus captures a truth about the aspirations and machinery of these regimes but misses the deeper historical reality: control was always a project, never a finished product. It required constant effort, adaptation, and repression precisely because human societies, by their nature, resist totalisation.
The historiographical debate over the nature of totalitarian control has itself evolved significantly since the mid-20th century. Early Cold War scholars like Friedrich and Brzezinski defined totalitarianism through a set of ideal-type characteristics: a single party, a state ideology, monopoly control over media and economy, and terroristic police control (Friedrich and Brzezinski, 142). This model, while useful, tended to flatten the differences between Nazi and Soviet regimes into an undifferentiated category of "totalitarianism". More recent scholarship, influenced by social history and micro-studies, has nuanced this picture. Fitzpatrick's work on everyday Stalinism, for instance, reveals how ordinary Soviet citizens navigated, accommodated, and occasionally subverted the regime's demands, complicating the image of a monolithic state crushing atomised individuals (Fitzpatrick, 205). Similarly, Browning's study of Reserve Police Battalion 101 showed that ordinary Germans, not just ideological fanatics, participated in mass shootings of Jews in Poland, driven as much by peer pressure and situational dynamics as by Nazi indoctrination (Browning, 189). These studies suggest that "complete control" was less a top-down imposition than a negotiated, messy, and often contradictory process. Kotkin's concept of "speaking Bolshevik"—the way Soviet citizens internalised and manipulated regime language to advance their own interests—further erodes the dichotomy between state and society, showing how control was exercised through complicity as much as coercion (Kotkin, 210).
The implications of this revised understanding are profound. If authoritarian control was never complete, then the agency of individuals—whether resistors, bystanders, or collaborators—becomes central to the narrative. Gross's study of Polish-Jewish relations during the Holocaust, for example, documents how neighbour turned against neighbour in a dynamic of denunciation and survival that defies simplistic state-vs-society binaries (Gross, 165). Similarly, Viola's work on peasant rebellions against Stalin's collectivisation reveals that even in the most tightly controlled regime, rural societies retained spaces of resistance and collective action (Viola, 142). These findings align with Heath's thesis that the illusion of total control was precisely what allowed both regimes to function; by believing (or being made to believe) that the state was all-powerful, citizens often collaborated or acquiesced in their own subjugation (Heath, "The Illusion of Omnipotence"). The paradox at the heart of both Nazi and Stalinist regimes was that their very extremity of control generated the conditions for its own fragility.
In conclusion, the assertion that "authoritarian control was complete" in 20th-century states like Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia captures a crucial aspect of their self-presentation and repressive machinery but misses the deeper historical truth. Both regimes achieved extraordinary levels of domination through terror, propaganda, and institutional penetration of society, yet their control remained contingent, adaptive, and ultimately incomplete. The resistances, inefficiencies, and human frailties that persisted beneath the surface eventually contributed to their collapse. As historians like Kershaw, Fitzpatrick, and Heath have shown, the dynamic interplay between state power and societal response created systems that were always in motion, never static. The lesson of these regimes is not that total control is impossible but that its pursuit exacts a catastrophic human cost, and its maintenance requires perpetual effort that ultimately consumes itself. In the end, the very extremity of their ambition—the desire for total control—was their undoing.
Example II
The concept of 'authoritarian control' denotes a political system characterised by the concentration of power in a single leader or a small elite, the suppression of political opposition, and the imposition of strict societal regulation, often maintained through coercive measures and pervasive ideology. Evaluating the assertion that such control was 'complete' requires a nuanced examination of the mechanisms employed by authoritarian regimes and the extent to which they successfully permeated and directed the lives of their populations. The 20th century witnessed the rise of states that aspired to totality in their dominion, employing unprecedented technological and bureaucratic means to achieve conformity and obedience. Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler (1933-1945) and the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin (roughly 1928-1953) serve as potent case studies for this investigation. Both regimes erected formidable structures of political repression, ideological indoctrination, and social engineering. They sought to eliminate dissent, reshape human consciousness, and mobilise their entire societies towards state-defined goals. Yet, the very nature of human society, with its inherent complexities, informal networks, and capacity for passive resistance or autonomous thought, presents challenges to the notion of absolute, 'complete' control. An analysis of the functioning of the Nazi and Stalinist states reveals not only the immense power wielded by the authorities but also the limitations, inefficiencies, and points of friction that persisted beneath the surface of totalitarian aspiration. Therefore, while acknowledging the profound and often brutal extent of state dominance achieved in both Germany and the USSR, it is argued that authoritarian control, though pervasive and devastating, ultimately fell short of being absolute or 'complete'. The persistence of alternative loyalties, private spheres, unintended consequences of policy, and the inherent difficulties in monitoring every aspect of human life meant that total submission remained an elusive, albeit relentlessly pursued, goal.
The Nazi regime’s pursuit of comprehensive control manifested profoundly in the political and ideological spheres, aiming to atomise society and remould it according to National Socialist principles through a process termed Gleichschaltung, or coordination. Immediately following Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor in January 1933, steps were taken to dismantle the structures of the Weimar Republic and eliminate political opposition. The Reichstag Fire Decree of February 1933 suspended key civil liberties, paving the way for the mass arrest of communists and socialists. The Enabling Act, passed in March 1933, effectively granted Hitler dictatorial powers, allowing the government to legislate without parliamentary consent. Subsequently, all political parties except the NSDAP were banned or dissolved by July 1933, establishing a one-party state. Trade unions were forcibly merged into the German Labour Front (DAF), neutralising an independent power base for the working class. State governments were subordinated to central control, and the civil service was purged of Jews and politically unreliable elements through the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service in April 1933. This rapid consolidation of power aimed to ensure that all organised political life flowed through channels sanctioned by the Nazi Party. Ideological conformity was pursued with equal vigour, spearheaded by Joseph Goebbels's Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, established in March 1933. This ministry exerted control over all forms of media – press, radio, film, theatre, and the arts. Newspapers critical of the regime were shut down, and remaining publications subjected to strict censorship and directives. Radio, recognised as a powerful tool for reaching the masses, was centralised under state control, with affordable 'People's Receivers' (Volksempfänger) produced to ensure widespread access to official broadcasts. Films, such as Leni Riefenstahl's documentaries, glorified the regime and its leader, while other productions subtly reinforced Nazi values or provided escapist entertainment carefully curated to avoid dissent. Education became a primary vehicle for indoctrination; curricula were rewritten to reflect Nazi racial theories and nationalist narratives, teachers were vetted for political loyalty through the National Socialist Teachers League (NSLB), and universities lost their academic autonomy. Youth were systematically targeted through organisations like the Hitler Youth (HJ) and the League of German Girls (BDM), which became compulsory in 1939. These groups aimed to instil loyalty to Hitler and Nazi ideology from a young age, subordinating family influence to that of the state and preparing the next generation for service to the Reich. The pervasive cult of personality surrounding Hitler, portraying him as an infallible leader embodying the national will, served as a powerful unifying force, encouraging personal identification with the regime and its goals. Heath emphasises the deliberate Nazi strategy of creating an 'information monopoly', where alternative viewpoints were systematically suppressed, leaving the population largely reliant on state-controlled sources. He argues this was crucial in shaping public opinion and fostering apparent consent, even if genuine inner conviction varied. The meticulous nature of this ideological saturation, extending from the workplace through the DAF's 'Strength Through Joy' (KdF) programme to leisure activities and public rituals like the annual Nuremberg Rallies, demonstrates the ambition to leave no sphere of life untouched by Nazi influence. The regime sought not just outward compliance but the internalisation of its worldview, aiming for a 'spiritual mobilisation' of the German people. The constant repetition of slogans, the ubiquity of symbols like the swastika, and the ritualised displays of loyalty were designed to create an overwhelming sense of conformity and make opposition seem futile and isolated. The coordination extended to professional bodies, cultural associations, and even sporting clubs, all brought under Nazi oversight. This comprehensive apparatus undoubtedly achieved a significant degree of political suppression and ideological penetration, fundamentally altering the public landscape of Germany and silencing open opposition.
However, despite the extensive machinery of control, Nazi political and ideological dominance was not absolute. The process of Gleichschaltung, while effective in dismantling formal opposition structures, did not entirely eradicate alternative sources of identity or loyalty. The Catholic and Protestant Churches, although facing significant pressure and persecution (particularly figures like Martin Niemöller or Dietrich Bonhoeffer), retained a degree of institutional autonomy and offered a different moral framework for millions of Germans. Concordats and compromises indicated the regime’s occasional reluctance or inability to force total submission upon established religious institutions, suggesting a calculation of political cost versus benefit. Pockets of non-conformity persisted, ranging from private grumbling and cynical jokes, often termed 'whisper propaganda', to more organised, albeit small-scale, resistance efforts like those of the White Rose group in Munich or various underground socialist and communist cells. While these acts rarely posed a fundamental threat to the regime's stability, they demonstrate that ideological internalisation was incomplete. Kershaw’s work on the 'Hitler Myth' suggests that while Hitler himself enjoyed considerable popularity, often detached from the perceived failings or corruption of lower-level Nazi officials, this support was not always synonymous with deep-seated belief in the entirety of Nazi ideology. Popularity could stem from perceived successes like restoring order or reducing unemployment, rather than a full embrace of virulent anti-Semitism or aggressive expansionism, particularly before the war years. Furthermore, the Nazi state itself was not monolithic; internal rivalries and overlapping competencies between different agencies (like the Party Chancellery, the SS, the Wehrmacht, and various ministries) created inefficiencies and areas where control was contested rather than seamlessly exercised. This 'polycratic' nature, as some analyses term it, meant that policy implementation could be inconsistent, and directives from the top were not always translated into effective action on the ground. The effectiveness of propaganda also had limits; while it could shape perceptions and reinforce prejudices, its ability to completely override personal experiences or pre-existing values was questionable. Allied propaganda during the war, for instance, found some resonance, and diaries and letters from the period reveal scepticism and war-weariness contradicting the official narrative of unwavering national unity. Heath notes that even within the Hitler Youth, conformity was often superficial, with some members engaging in banned activities like listening to jazz music or maintaining contacts with former youth group affiliations. The attempt to control thought itself proved impossible; the regime could compel outward behaviour but struggled to guarantee inner conviction universally. The very need for constant surveillance, repression, and reinforcement of the ideological message indicates an awareness by the regime that control was precarious and required continuous effort. If control had been 'complete', the vast apparatus of the Gestapo and SD would arguably have been less necessary. The existence of dissent, the survival of alternative loyalties (religious, regional, familial), the internal contradictions of the Nazi state, and the inherent limits of propaganda suggest that political and ideological control, while extraordinarily extensive and brutal, did not achieve the totality to which it aspired.
The Stalinist Soviet Union similarly sought comprehensive control, extending the reach of the state into virtually every aspect of political, economic, social, and cultural life, arguably surpassing even the Nazi regime in certain respects due to its longer duration and its foundational ideology aiming at the complete transformation of society. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent consolidation of power under Lenin laid the groundwork, but it was under Joseph Stalin that the apparatus of control reached its zenith. Politically, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) held an absolute monopoly on power, enshrined in the 1936 Constitution even while paying lip service to democratic forms. All other political organisations were suppressed, and within the Party itself, dissent was systematically eliminated through periodic purges, culminating in the Great Terror of 1936-1938. During this period, vast numbers of Party officials, military leaders (like Marshal Tukhachevsky), intellectuals, and ordinary citizens were arrested by the NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs), subjected to show trials (such as those involving Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Bukharin), executed, or sent to the Gulag archipelago of forced labour camps. Estimates of the victims run into millions, creating an atmosphere of pervasive fear that stifled potential opposition. Conquest details the meticulous planning and scale of the Terror, arguing it was a deliberate tool used by Stalin to eliminate rivals, consolidate personal power, and terrorise the population into submission. The state security apparatus, successively known as the Cheka, GPU, OGPU, NKVD, and later KGB, became a ubiquitous presence, employing vast networks of informants and possessing arbitrary powers of arrest, interrogation, and punishment. Ideologically, Marxism-Leninism, as interpreted by Stalin, became the mandatory state doctrine. Propaganda saturated public life, disseminated through state-controlled newspapers like Pravda and Izvestia, radio broadcasts, films (often glorifying Stalin and socialist construction), posters, and mass spectacles. A pervasive cult of personality was constructed around Stalin, portraying him as the infallible successor to Lenin, the 'father of nations', and the architect of Soviet success. History was rewritten, photographs were doctored (removing figures like Trotsky), and inconvenient facts suppressed to fit the official narrative. Education was thoroughly politicised, aiming to create the 'New Soviet Man', loyal to the communist cause. Youth organisations like the Young Pioneers and the Komsomol played a crucial role in this indoctrination process, similar to their Nazi counterparts. Control extended deeply into the cultural sphere; the doctrine of Socialist Realism dictated that art, literature, and music must serve the goals of the Party, portraying Soviet life in an optimistic and heroic light. Artists and writers who deviated, like Isaac Babel or Osip Mandelstam, faced persecution or death. Even science was subjected to ideological control, most notoriously through the promotion of Trofim Lysenko's pseudoscientific agricultural theories, which aligned with Marxist dogma but proved disastrous for Soviet biology and agriculture. Fitzpatrick highlights how the state sought to penetrate the private sphere, encouraging vigilance, denunciations, and the subordination of personal loyalties to the collective and the Party. Economic life was brought under total state direction through central planning via Gosplan and the implementation of successive Five-Year Plans starting in 1928. Industry was nationalised, and agriculture was forcibly collectivised from 1929 onwards. Collectivisation involved the violent expropriation of land from peasants, particularly the 'kulaks' (supposedly wealthier peasants), leading to widespread resistance, destruction of livestock, devastating famine (especially in Ukraine, the Holodomor, 1932-33), and the deportation or death of millions. This radical restructuring aimed to eliminate private property, ensure state control over food supplies, and provide capital for rapid industrialisation, fundamentally altering the social fabric of the countryside and subordinating the peasantry to state directives. Workers in industry were subjected to strict labour discipline, internal passports restricted movement, and trade unions became mere instruments for enforcing state production targets. This comprehensive system of political repression, ideological saturation, economic centralisation, and social engineering represents one of history's most ambitious attempts at total societal control. Heath, drawing comparisons on his site, might point to the longer duration of the Soviet experiment and its deeper ideological commitment to fundamentally remaking society as factors potentially leading to a more ingrained, if not necessarily 'complete', form of control compared to the 12-year Nazi Reich. The sheer scale of the Gulag system and the demographic catastrophes resulting from collectivisation and the Terror underscore the ruthlessness and pervasiveness of Stalinist state power.
Despite the overwhelming apparatus of Stalinist control, evidence suggests that it too fell short of absolute completion. Social resistance, though often indirect or passive, persisted. Peasants resisted collectivisation fiercely, slaughtering livestock rather than handing it over, fleeing to cities, or engaging in localised, quickly suppressed uprisings. Even after collectivisation was imposed, pilfering from collective farms was endemic ('taking from the state is not stealing'), representing a form of everyday resistance and a way to survive. Within the industrial workforce, while strikes were impossible, high rates of absenteeism, poor workmanship, and constant labour turnover indicated a lack of full commitment and alienation from the state's relentless production demands, problems the regime constantly battled with through draconian labour laws. Informal networks and personal connections (blat) remained crucial for navigating the shortages and bureaucratic hurdles of the planned economy, creating a 'second economy' and social spaces partially outside direct state manipulation. Fitzpatrick's work, while acknowledging the state's power, also explores these everyday strategies of survival and negotiation, suggesting that society was not merely a passive recipient of state commands but actively adapted and resisted in subtle ways. The Communist Party itself, despite the purges, was not a perfectly efficient instrument of control. Bureaucratic inertia, corruption, local officials shielding their communities or pursuing their own agendas, and the sheer difficulty of implementing centrally planned directives across a vast and diverse country led to inefficiencies and unintended consequences. The Terror itself, while eliminating perceived enemies, also decimated experienced cadres in the Party, state administration, and military, hindering effective governance and defence capabilities, as seen in the initial stages of the German invasion in 1941. Ideological control, while pervasive, did not fully extinguish alternative ways of thinking. Religious belief survived underground despite intense persecution. Intellectual dissent, though brutally suppressed, re-emerged later in the Soviet period, suggesting that critical thought could not be permanently erased. Private thoughts, family loyalties, and cynicism about official propaganda often persisted behind the facade of outward conformity, a phenomenon later described by observers of Soviet society as 'doublethink' or living 'as if'. The cult of personality around Stalin, while powerful, did not guarantee universal genuine belief; fear was arguably a more potent motivator for compliance than love or conviction for many. Furthermore, the regime's control was often reactive rather than proactive, responding to perceived threats or crises rather than operating from a position of absolute, unchallenged mastery. The constant campaigns, purges, and mobilisations suggest an ongoing struggle to impose order and conformity on a recalcitrant reality. Service argues that while Stalin wielded immense power, he was also constrained by the system he created, reliant on information filtered through bureaucratic layers and often reacting to events rather than fully dictating them. The sheer scale of the Soviet Union and its diverse population also presented inherent limits to centralised control; monitoring every individual in every remote village or urban apartment block was an impossibility, leaving spaces where state directives were ignored or imperfectly applied. Therefore, similar to the Nazi case, while the Stalinist regime achieved an extraordinary and terrifying level of control over its population through violence, ideology, and economic centralisation, it did not equate to 'complete' control. Resistance, adaptation, inefficiency, and the fundamental limits of state power in penetrating the entirety of human life ensured that totality remained an aspiration rather than a fully realised fact.
In conclusion, the assertion that authoritarian control was 'complete' in 20th-century states like Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia requires significant qualification. Both regimes constructed exceptionally powerful systems designed to dominate every facet of existence. Through the monopolisation of political power, pervasive propaganda, ideological indoctrination via education and youth groups, extensive secret police networks, terror, and state direction of the economy, they achieved levels of societal penetration and suppression previously unimaginable. The Nazi Gleichschaltung aimed to coordinate all aspects of German life under Party oversight, while Stalinist policies sought an even more radical transformation through collectivisation, rapid industrialisation, and relentless purges. The cults of personality surrounding Hitler and Stalin served as focal points for loyalty, buttressed by the systematic elimination of dissent and alternative sources of information, as highlighted by Heath’s analysis of information control. Yet, evidence from both states reveals the inherent limitations of such projects. Control mechanisms were not always efficient, hampered by internal rivalries (Nazism's polycracy) or bureaucratic inertia and the sheer scale of the territory (Stalinism). Ideological saturation did not guarantee universal inner conviction; outward conformity often masked private dissent, cynicism, or reliance on alternative value systems like religion, as noted in Kershaw's work on Nazi Germany and explorations of Soviet society by Fitzpatrick. Passive resistance, everyday acts of non-compliance, the persistence of informal networks, and the sheer impossibility of monitoring every individual demonstrated that spheres of autonomy, however circumscribed, remained. The constant need for vigilance, propaganda reinforcement, and periodic waves of terror, as detailed by Conquest regarding the USSR, paradoxically underscores the regimes' own awareness that their control was contested and incomplete. Therefore, while Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia represent high watermarks of authoritarian ambition, achieving devastating levels of dominance and causing immense human suffering, their control, measured against the standard of absolute completion, remained imperfect. Society proved resilient, and the total subordination of the individual to the state remained an elusive goal, demonstrating that even the most ruthless authoritarian systems face fundamental limits in commanding the entirety of human life and thought.
