Totalitarian rule needed mass restructuring of the party itself, not just elite capture

Evidence

The seizure of the Communist parties by their conspiratory sector, however, was only the first step in their transformation into totalitarian movements. It was not enough that the secret police in Russia and its agents in the Communist parties abroad played the same role in the movement as the elite formations which the Nazis had constituted in the form of paramilitary troops. The parties themselves had to be transformed, if the rule of the secret police was to remain stable. Liquidation of factions and inner-party democracy, consequently, was accompanied in Russia by the admission of large, politically uneducated and “neutral” masses to membership, a policy which was quickly followed by the Communist parties abroad after the Popular Front policy had initiated it. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 875

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the two-stage mechanism of totalitarian transformation: conspiratorial elite seizure, then mass-party reformation.
• XREF: The ‘politically uneducated neutral masses’ admission parallels how populist movements later recruit broad, depoliticized memberships; relevant to Islamophobia movements’ mass appeal. — connects to: Reformist factions help transform a party then must be suppressed to consolidate elite control — Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming The Communist Past: The…, 406