Totalitarian States:

While totalitarianism had "many faces," a common theme among all forms was centralized control of state power under one leader or party.

In Japan during the first decades of the twentieth century, power evolved from civilian to military authorities. (edit)

In Italy, it was not a revolution, but a leader and ideological movement, that brought a totalitarian stateItalian fascism, organized and instituted by the charasmatic leader, Benito Mussolini, developed a totalitarian state in Italy between 1922 and 1943.

Read a more detailed analysis of Italian totalitarianism here.

In Russia, revolution brought new authorities to power and set that nation on the path to totalitarian rule. The Russian Revolution of 1917 and later the Civil War of 1918-21, created the condition for the unchallenged rule of the Bolshevik Party over the newly established Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R. or Soviet Union). After the death of Vladmir Lenin (hero of the Russian Revolution and leader of the Bolshevik Party) in 1924, Joseph Stalin took the reigns of government. Between 1924 and 1936, Stalin increasingly centralized state power around his personal rule and that of the Communist Party. After a disastorous attempt at forced collectivization of agriculture in 1932-33 that resulted in the death of some estimated two to ten million people in the Ukraine, Stalin further consolidated power through a series of purges of his real and imagined "enemies" in the government, military and civil society.

Source: "The Foreign Office and the famine : British documents on Ukraine and the Great Famine of 1932-1933 / edited by Marco Carynnyk, Lubomyr Y. Luciuk and Bohdan S. Kordan ; with a foreword by Michael R. Marrus. Kingston, Ont. ; Vestal, N.Y. : Limestone Press, 1988. lxi, 493 p. ; 24 cm. ISBN 0919642314

By 1936 at the latest, Stalin had consolidated control of most of the political, social, economic and cultural aspects of the U.S.S.R. A combination of centralized economic planning, single-party political control, intensive and extensive police surveillance and imprisonment and Stalin's own "cult of personality," created the a socialist totalitarian system that would dominate the history of much of the twentieth century. Read a more detailed summary of Soviet totalitarianism here.