I'm there with you, I'm all hands to restrain certain freedoms in order to safeguard "greater goods", such as life, dignity, etc. Freedom is a lie, the existence of law restrains us from being free, because human freedom would lead to conflicts that would eventually make it hard to live in society, so we settle for the "fake freedom", which is, basically: imagine a circle surrounding you, within that circle lies everything you can do, which means everything not prohibited by law, even then, however, you cannot forcefully infiltrate someone else's "circle", that would be a restraint of their freedom, and would be a declaration of conflict. The law exists to keep those circles intact and people at "respectful distance" from each other's freedoms...
The Dark Side: the biggest horrors in most totalitarian countries are often perpetrate with LEGAL authority, a total disregard for Natural Law while elevating Positive Law to god-like status, obviously, since the Positive Law only requires a source to make it legal, in those countries that source is the very power-that-be without any (valid) representation of the people. This can lead, as it did in the III Reich and Soviet Union, to an almost absolute inversion of values to satisfy the needs of one single group, that can turn out to be a megalomaniac Führer. Russia nowadays, Putin or no Putin, is NOT a totalitarian country, as a matter of fact, since the III Reich and Soviet Union, totalitarianism has not been heard of; we had many types of dictatorships, but none deserving of said title, the most extreme countries in the middle-east are heavily based on natural law, according to their own religious beliefs and local culture, thus, no totalitarianism there either...
Russian modern history "HOLY SHIT! The Berlin Wall fell! Our beloved communism ain't holding it together, dude we're fucked!" after the obliteration of communism: "yeah well, now it's all about the money right? So here's what it's gonna be, we have EVERYTHING you want if you wanna pay for it, and forget about complex laws and whatnot, let's live life and have some fun"