Here, as in other instances, Stalin concentrated his attacks on Trotsky’s half-forgotten slogan precisely because he had decided to use this technique. In the Soviet Union, at any rate, revolutions, in the form of general purges, became a permanent institution of the Stalin regime after 1934.

Only the term itself suggests “permanency” with all its semi-anarchistic implications, and is, strictly speaking, a misnomer yet even Lenin was more impressed by the term than by its theoretical content. The form of government the two movements developed, or, rather, which almost automatically developed from their double claim to total domination and global rule, is best characterised by Trotsky’s slogan of “permanent revolution” although Trotsky’s theory was no more than a socialist forecast of a series of revolutions, from the anti-feudal bourgeois to the antibourgeois proletarian, which would spread from one country to the other. To a totalitarian movement, both dangers are equally deadly: a development toward absolutism would put an end to the movement’s interior drive, and a development toward nationalism would frustrate its exterior expansion, without which the movement cannot survive.

At the time it seized power the danger to the movement lay in the fact that, on one hand, it might become “ossified” by taking over the state machine and frozen into a form of absolute government, and that, on the other hand, its freedom of movement might be limited by the borders of the territory in which it came to power. This transformation never occurred in the totalitarian, the Bolshevik and the Nazi movements. In other words, when the time came for the socialist movements to seize power in their respective countries, they had already been transformed into national parties. The socialist movement was spared this crisis, first, because the national question-and that meant the strategical problem involved in the revolution-had been curiously neglected by Marx and Engels, and, secondly, because it faced governmental problems only after the first World War had divested the Second International of its authority over the national members, which everywhere had accepted the primacy of national sentiments over international solidarity as an unalterable fact. When a movement, international in organisation, all-comprehensive in its ideological scope, and global in its political aspiration, seizes power in one country, it obviously puts itself in a paradoxical situation.

Arendt origins of totalitarianism