Abstract
In 1918, Lenin affirmed that the « Soviet power is a new type of state, in which there is no bureaucracy, no police, no standing army, and in which bourgeois democracy is replaced by a new democracy - a democracy which brings to the forefront the vanguard of the toiling masses, turning them into legislators, executives and a military guard, and which creates an apparatus capable of re-educating the masses ». Later, Stalin refused to qualify the Soviet system as a totalitarian one. The idea of a « new democracy » created obviously a sharp contrast with the studies -all along the XXth century- categorizing USSR in the dictatorial regimes.
Professors Carl Joachim Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote a main piece of work in 1956 - Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy - supporting that USSR did belong to the authoritarian state. Their definition of totalitarianism was the following: « a system of revolution which seeks to destroy the existing political order so that it can subsequently be revolutionized economically, socially and culturally ». Yet the definition of a totalitarian regime is the exact contrary of the democracy: in the first, the political ruler isn't subordinate to the rule he creates.
The purpose of Friedrich and Brzezinski's work was to provide « a descriptive theory of a novel form of government ». Indeed, they ask in their introduction: « What is a totalitarian dictatorship and how does it fit into the general framework of our knowledge of government and politics? »
