as a "political-religious totalitarian regime". The quasi-state held significant territory in Iraq and Syria during the course of the War in Iraq and the Syrian civil war from 2013 to 2019 under the dictatorship of its first Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who imposed an extreme form of Sharia law. The city of Geneva under John Calvin's leadership has been described as totalitarian by some scholars. Views on totalitarianism by historians of the Soviet Union since the 1970s Most modern Western historians of the Soviet Union now consider the concept of totalitarianism to be an oversimplification that does not accurately reflect the reality of life in the Soviet Union. The idea was first challenged by a generation of historians who came to prominence in the 1970s, and whose perspectives came to be known as the "revisionist school". Some of whose more prominent members were Sheila Fitzpatrick, J. Arch Getty, Jerry F. Hough, William McCagg, and Robert W. Thurston. Although their individual interpretations differ, the revisionists say that the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin was in many ways institutionally weak, and that terror reflected the weaknesses rather than the strengths of the Soviet state. They argue that Soviet citizens were not totally devoid of agency or resources and atomised by ideology as the totalitarian perspective implies. Rather, they successfully developed practices that helped them to navigate everyday life at a time of considerable danger and multiple shortages. For example, Arch Getty claims that "the Soviet political system was chaotic, that institutions often escaped the control of the centre, and that Stalin’s leadership consisted to a considerable extent in responding, on an ad hoc basis, to political crises as they arose.". In addition, scholars such as Fitzpatrick have stressed that the regime relied on the popular support for legitimation as much as it did on terror. By purging society of groups deemed 'anti-Soviet', new job opportunities opened up for an entire cohort of young, working class citizens, who saw dramatic, upward social mobility that they could scarcely have dreamed of before the revolution. These "beneficiaries" of the violence became fiercely loyal to Stalin and the Soviet regime. To them, it appeared the promise of the revolution had been fulfilled. They became willing to defend and support Stalin not in spite of terror, but because of it. In the case of East Germany, Eli Rubin posited that East Germany was not a totalitarian state