Although it is easy enough to see how such arguments served the interests of Western exponents of the Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s by implicitly or explicitly equating Stalin’s Russia with Hitler’s Germany, the concept of both as varieties of a single phenomenon has recently undergone something of a revival.31 And certainly there is nothing illegitimate about comparing the two regimes.32 The idea of totalitarianism as a general political phenomenon went back as far as the early 1920s.
