Stalin adopted the Nazi fantasy of a Jewish world conspiracy as totalitarian ideology.

Evidence

The most dramatic new element in this last purge, which Stalin planned in the last years of his life, was a decisive shift in ideology, the introduction of a Jewish world conspiracy. … In these preparatory measures, high party officials were singled out because of their “Jewish bourgeois” origins and accused of Zionism; this accusation was gradually changed to implicate notoriously non-Zionist agencies (especially the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee), in order to indicate that all Jews were Zionists and all Zionist groups “hirelings of American imperialism.” There was of course nothing new in the “crime” of Zionism, but as the campaign progressed and began to center on Jews in the Soviet Union, another significant change took place: Jews now stood accused of “cosmopolitanism” rather than Zionism, and the pattern of accusations that developed out of this slogan followed ever more closely the Nazi pattern of a Jewish world conspiracy in the sense of the Elders of Zion. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 55

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to how fabricated enemies and global conspiracies underwrite claims to world domination — a mechanism the Islamophobia readings will trace in the construction of ‘the Other’.
• QUESTION: Why did Stalin find a fictional ‘Jewish world conspiracy’ ideologically better suited to totalitarian claims to world rule than capitalism or imperialism? Worth chasing how the imagined enemy scales to planetary scope.