Lenin. Stalin. Totalitarianism.

Editor,

Ross Terrill, in "China Is Not Just Rising, but Also Changing," incorrectly characterized Leninism as "totalitarian." Stalin co-opted and transformed the Soviet Union into a totalitarian state, as Hannah Arendt took pains to point out in her seminal book "The Origins of Totalitarianism" (1951). Because totalitarianism arose in fascist Germany and also in the USSR, the dynamic of totalitarianism as a movement and ultimately as a system does not depend, in Arendt's view, on leftist or rightist ideology. The Bolshevik revolution failed primarily because Russian markets were too weak to support it, but this has nothing to do with totalitarianism.