This contrasted with earlier totalitarian states that were imposed on the people;[2] "every aspect of the Soviet Union's political, economic, cultural, and intellectual life came to be regulated by the Communist Party in a strict and regimented fashion that would tolerate no opposition".
"[4] This view is echoed by Igor Krupnik (1995), "The era of 'social engineering' in the Soviet Union ended with the death of Stalin in 1953 or soon after; and that was the close of the totalitarian regime itself.
[11] The "revisionists" opposed such claims and put an emphasis on history "from below" and on the genuinely "popular" nature of the 1917 Revolution, paid much more attention to social history as opposed to the "traditional" approach which centres on politics, ideology and personalities of the leaders, and they tended to see a discontinuity between Leninism and Stalinism, with the worst excesses of the latter being explained by the economic experiments of the late 1920s, by the threat of war with Nazi Germany and by the personality of Stalin.
[12] The Franco regime was commonly defined as totalitarian and as a Spanish variation of Fascism until 1964, when Juan Linz challenged this model and instead described Francoism as "authoritarian" because of its "limited degree of political pluralism" caused by struggle between 'Francoist families' (Falangists, Carlists, etc.)
within the sole legal party FET y de las JONS and the Movimiento Nacional and by other such features as lack of 'totalitarian' ideology.
"[15] Julián Sanz Hoya refutes Linz's model of "limited pluralism" as "lame" and "practically inherent to all political systems" and writes that "considering the totalitarian vocation, it is more than evident that Franco's regime in the first twenty years had totalizing pretensions in relation to social control (including private life, morality and customs), the monopoly of politics and public space, and even the control of the economy (think of the strong interventionism of autarky)".