There is some tendency in modern western culture as to either disbelieve or overemphasize the extent to which totalitarian societies controlled their citizens. You have, on one hand, a culture based around granted liberties that ‘come naturally’; freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of religion, and so on. If such things come naturally, they ask, citizens of these countries have no defense for turning these freedoms over to state discretion. The other argument tends to lie in the more cynical logos that humans, when pressed and deceived hard enough, are capable of anything they are told to do.
This is not the case for either of them, however. Any society large enough to become a force to be reckoned with, as our two main examples of the USSR under Stalin and Nazi Germany certainly were, is large enough to have some dissent. Certainly, very little of this dissent was violent or overt, but it was just as much an affront to the regime that the Old Believers survived in Russia or that Communist posters continued to be pasted up in Hamburg until 1937. Gestapo reports themselves admitted a growing antipathy towards what was thought would be war with Czechoslovakia in 1938, and there are recorded instances of wartime criticism towards Stalin by the common people, and even within the NKVD rank-and-file itself.
That is not to say that totalitarian regimes did not exert vast powers over the lives of the ordinary citizen. They controlled the economy, the job flow, the media, the arts, the police, and the schools, usually with overlapping organizations. In practice, neither were they subject to their own rules and regulations, which, in the case of Nazi Germany especially, were often quite fussy and bureaucratic. Nor is it to say totalitarianism was guaranteed victory over the Weimer Parliamentary system or the Leninist authoritarian state; it was antipathy and apathy towards these systems that let it win.