Totalitarian governments are the worst possible outcome.

Among all modern dictatorships, communist totalitarian regimes have cast the longest and darkest shadow on the future. One reason is their greater longevity relative to other types of dictatorships. While fascist totalitarian regimes such as Nazi Germany and Benito Mussolini’s Italy were also horribly brutal and repressive, their comparatively quick demise in a global war prevented them from totally transforming [End Page 8] their societies and consolidating totalitarian institutions. By contrast, in communist regimes that rose from internal social revolutions (rather than being imposed from without on a country), classic totalitarian rule lasted decades. In the USSR, the totalitarian era stretched from 1917 to 1953, the year Josef Stalin died. In China, the equivalent period was almost thirty years, from 1949 to the beginning of economic reform in 1978. Even in the post-totalitarian period, as terror declined, communist ideology eroded, and one-man rule ended, communist regimes in the USSR, Central and Eastern Europe, China, and Vietnam continued to rely on such core totalitarian institutions as the Leninist party-state, the state-run economy, censors, and secret police to maintain power.

Even when socioeconomic modernization comes to such countries, the legacies of totalitarianism make democratization much harder. In their unmatched brutality, communist totalitarian regimes systematically destroyed alternative centers of power and social capital.8 In China, Maoist campaigns had since the 1950s decimated religious groups, secret societies, rural elites, the urban middle classes, and the intelligentsia.9 A well-organized Leninist party-state with mass economic resources, a skilled and ruthless repressive apparat, and a wrecked civil society—all ubiquitous legacies of totalitarianism—stunt the prospects of democratization in post-totalitarian regimes.

The difficulty of democratization in totalitarian and post-totalitarian regimes has not escaped notice. Jeane Kirkpatrick pointed out in 1979 that, unlike conventional dictatorships, no communist regime had ever been democratized. Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan argued that, barring defeat in war and external imposition, a transition from totalitarian rule to democracy is all but impossible. Once outright totalitarianism ends, the opening for democracy remains narrow because civil society is weak, “political society” (that is, opposition parties) is nonexistent, the private sector is anemic, and the rule of law is nowhere to be found.10