The general perspective of the Soviet Union was that the country was a dictatorship, specifically an oppressive, brutal, top-down autocracy that guided every aspect of its people's lives . From grocery stores having fixed quantities of goods, purchasable only by ration card, to strict and fixed working hours and rest hours, to the censored press, the Soviet Union was indeed a dictatorial state. However, residents of the Soviet Union did not simply conform to the established rules of society: they kept diaries, they wrote down their opinions about the government or their work, they wrote detailed memoirs of their life in the USSR. The people of the Soviet Union enjoyed a certain amount of freedom, and this was even codified in the 1936 Constitution. Yet scholars and most people in general still largely accept the idea that the Soviet Union was a totalitarian dictatorship. The question then arises: why did the Soviet people have the freedom, otherwise known as sociological "agency", to denounce others or write their opinions about society, if the country was perhaps one of the most most totalitarian and dictatorial in the history of humanity. ? By analyzing totalitarianism as researchers perceive it, as well as the Soviet system, with examples from the people of the USSR, we will be able to realize that totalitarianism set the rules of society within the Soviet Union and provided his people with a distribution of income. power, which was used by those who understood the system and could act within the system. Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski note in “Totalitarianism as a Unique Type of Society” that totalitarian societies have six qualities that distinguish them from others. These six qualities range from having an effective middle of paper ...... and Brzezinski, Zbigniew. “Totalitarianism is a unique type of society. » In Mason, Paul T., ed. Totalitarianism: temporary madness or permanent danger? Problems of European civilization. Boston: DC Heath, 1967. Kalinin, Mikhail, Letter (response to GS Onishchenko). January 1934. In Siegelbaum, Lewis H., AK Sokolov, L. Kosheleva and Sergeæi Zhuravlev, eds. Stalinism as a way of life: a narrative in documents. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. Mochulsky, Fyodor Vasilevich. Gulag Boss: A Soviet Memoir edited and translated by Deborah Kaple. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Onishchenko, Soviet President of GS Town, Letter to Politburo Member Mikhail Kalinin. October 1933. In Siegelbaum, Lewis H., AK Sokolov, L. Kosheleva and Sergeæi Zhuravlev, eds. Stalinism as a way of life: a narrative in documents. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.