The study asks what totalitarian regimes such as Bolshevism, National Socialism, and Putinism have in common. All of these totalitarian systems sought to destroy the universal principles of human morality by replacing them with group (class, racial or "traditional") values. The direct result of this substitution of values in history has been class terror, the Holocaust, and brutal violence against both one's own and other peoples. The author argues that crimes against humanity are committed on the basis of group rather than universal morality.