Editing Marxists Behaving Badly (section)

==== 1. Totalitarianism ====
“Totalitarian” is defined in the ''[https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=377BAB4A59FF5928D6C4882CE4C06D0F Oxford English Dictionary (OED)]'' as follows: <blockquote>Of or pertaining to a system of government which tolerates only one political party, '''to which all other institutions are subordinated''', and which usually demands '''the complete subservience of the individual to the State'''.</blockquote>The OED quotations show that it has been applied to Christianity, to Italian fascism, and to “total” war.  But  it  has  also  long been used  by  anticommunists  to  claim  that  communism  is  similar  to fascism. Yuri Fel’shtinsky and George Cherniavsky, very pro-Trotsky writers and very hostile to Stalin, are the authors of the latest comprehensive Russian-language biography of Trotsky in five volumes. According to them, Trotsky was the first to use the term “totalitarian” about Stalin.<blockquote>Trotsky ... became the first author to include the Stalin period under the general theme  of  totalitarianism,  and,  unprecedented  for  a  communist,  went  so  far  as  to compare three dictators: the Bolshevik leader Stalin with the fascist Duce Mussolini and the national socialist Fuhrer Hitler.

...  in  the  vocabulary  of  Trotsky  and  in  the  book  “Stalin”  the  term  “totalitarian power” was entered to denote the nature of Stalin’s political rule.<ref>Iurii Fel’shtinskii, Georgii Cherniavskii, Lev Trotskii. Vrag No. 1 1929-1940. Moscow: Tsentropoligraf, 2013, 380, 383.</ref></blockquote>In political language since Trotsky the term has been used to yoke the Soviet Union together with Nazi Germany, thus to efface the fact that Hitler was a capitalist, imperialist, and anticommunist more similar to the Western Allies than different from them.

And here is the Trotskyist [https://www.marxists.org/admin/intro/index.htm Marxists.org]: <blockquote>“'''Stalin’s regime is probably the most effective totalitarian regime in history'''....”<ref>At [https://www.marxists.orgglossary/terms/t/o.htm <https://www.marxists.orgglossary/terms/t/o.htm>].</ref></blockquote>