What do they mean “foresaw”? He lived in Tsarist Russia. That was about as totalitarian as any nation got before the
Bolsheviks made it even worse.
It was an autocracy.
But it was not as bad it was under Communism.
Reform was coming gradually to Russia but radicals did not have the time or patience for it.
And they made things far worse instead of better. That was Dostoevsky’s prescient insight.
Changing things too fast is as bad as not changing them at all.
There is a difference between totalitarianism and autocracy.
Before the 20th century, there were few if any totalitarian states.
There were lots and lots of autocrats, and if you got on the wrong side of the autocrat you were utterly screwed. But the vast majority of the people who lived under the autocrats were not directly impacted by their rule for the simple reason that the mechanisms to enforce that rule down to the neighborhood, family and individual level had not yet been invented.
Caligula, Henry VIII, Suleiman the Magnificent or Ivan the Terrible might, possibly, have wanted to stomp all over their people in the way Stalin and Mao did. But they didn’t have a Gestapo, KGB or Stasi to do it for them. So for 99% of the people they ruled the crimes of the ruler were a spectator sport directly affecting only the court and nobility.
Totalitarianism is absolute power plus mechanisms adequate to impose that power effectively on all the people all the time.