Lenin adopted one innovation from the Germans that unnerved his early supporters. After the Kaiser's government had begun to disintegrate during World War I, Gen. Erich von Ludendorff and his colleagues, frantic to mobilize every sector and energy of society for the war effort, promoted what they called ''war socialism'' - nothing less than a total absorption of society into the military effort. It was Hitler's massacre of the Brownshirt leader Ernst Roehm and his thousands of ''left'' followers in 1934 that gave Stalin the idea for the later Moscow Trials, with the consequent butchery or penal enslavement of many thousands of Bolsheviks, along with high ranking military officers and government officials whom Stalin had come to fear. Mr. Johnson notes that Hitler, during his final days, lamented that he had always been too benevolent for his own good and that he had not followed Stalin's example of killing off his generals before war began. And so comfortable was Stalin under his pact with the Nazi state that, even after Hitler had massed troops for an invasion of Russia and after Churchill and others had repeatedly warned him, Stalin refused to believe, until it was almost too late, that Hitler was going to make war on him.
Totalitarianism is but one form, the most evil to be sure, of the political state.
Nor were they forgotten during and after World War II in the democracies. Mr. Johnson stresses the fact that the first totalitarian regimes appeared in nations, including Russia and Japan, where a powerful tradition of statism had existed. We may give all the credit we like to revolutionary parties as the prime instigators of totalitarianism, but their effectiveness is intimately linked with an already existing powerful state which is accustomed to governing human minds as well as all institutions. There are 20 closely-packed chapters in the book, and I must content myself with a modest selection to convey its riches. The chapter titled ''Waiting for Hitler'' is a perceptive and knowledgeable account of the Weimar Republic and the constantly escalating tensions between the traditionalists and the modernists in it.