Totalitarian seizure of power follows a staged pattern beginning with popular-front tactics

Evidence

The Bolshevization of the satellites started with popular-front tactics and a sham parliamentary system, proceeded quickly to the open establishment of one-party dictatorships in which the leaders and members of the formerly tolerated parties were liquidated, and then reached the last stage when the native Communist leaders, whom Moscow rightly or wrongly mistrusted, were brutally framed, humiliated in show trials, tortured, and killed under the rulership of the most corrupt and most despicable elements in the party, namely those who were primarily not Communists but agents of Moscow. It was as though Moscow repeated in great haste all the stages of the October Revolution up to the emergence of totalitarian dictatorship. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 53

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the sequence of totalitarian conquest — popular front, one-party dictatorship, then liquidation of native leaders by Moscow agents — a transferable mechanism.
• XREF: The staged pattern anticipates how totalitarian methods get exported to satellites, a concept the Islamophobia readings may mirror in other contexts.