The Mid-1930s Usage of the Term "Totalitarianism"

In the mid-1930s, the term “totalitarianism” was used, with some frequency, to identify not only the political systems of Mussolini and Hitler, i.e., fascist states, but that of Stalin’s Russia as well. Marxist-Leninists, predictably, took exception to the usage. They had first used the term in 1928, and thereafter applied it exclusively to what they considered fascist state systems. They had decided that totalitarianism was a by-product of the final crisis of industrial capitalism.

--A. James Gregor, introduction to Marxism, Fascism, and Totalitarianism: Chapters in the Intellectual History of Radicalism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 12.