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The coherence of the concept of totalitarianism is called into question through the contradiction between its restricted meaning (the comparison between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany) and its larger meaning, encompassing the entire history of the USSR. The coherence of the notion also suffers from the equivocal use of the concept of ideology, understood as illusion or falsehood. The popularity of the weaker (and wider) use of the concept is to be accounted for on polemical grounds, which have to do with the questionable conception of democracy which this wider and weaker conception tends to dissimulate.