In the "War Against Fascism," the Soviet Union Is Portrayed as an Incipient Democracy

With the coming of the Second World War, “totalitarianism” was used almost exclusively to refer to the Axis powers. The Soviet Union, by that time an ally in the “war against fascism,” was generally exempt, with the often unspoken suggestion that Stalin’s Russia was some sort of incipient democracy. Those sympathetic to Stalin, Marxists of one or another degree of commitment, given their identification of fascism and monopoly capitalism, insisted that “totalitarianism” could only refer to fascist systems—with fascism representing the pathological reaction of capitalism in decline.

--A. James Gregor, introduction to Marxism, Fascism, and Totalitarianism: Chapters in the Intellectual History of Radicalism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 13.