The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

After the war, another exile, this one from Germany, published the most detailed and definitive description of totalitarianism. Hannah Arendt's three-volume The Origins of Totalitarianism was published in 1951. For Arendt, the key characteristics of a totalitarian state were ideology and state terror. The substance of the ideology, to the extent that ideology has a substance, was unimportant: any ideology could become the basis of a totalitarian system if it could be encapsulated and coupled with terror. The terror was used to enforce the ideology but also to fuel it. Whatever premise formed the basis of the ideology, be it the superiority of a particular race or of a particular class, was used to derive imagined laws of history: only a certain race or a certain class was destined to survive. The "laws of history" justified the terror ostensibly required for this survival. Arendt wrote about the subjugation of public space—in effect the disappearance of public space, which, by depriving a person of boundaries and agency, rendered him profoundly lonely. This, she wrote, was the product of the marriage of ideology and terror. In this model, Mussolini's Italy was no longer considered a totalitarian state, whatever Mussolini himself might have said. Arendt wrote about Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, though she had much more knowledge of the former.⁶ The first edition of Origins

was devoted to the roots and causes of totalitarianism, not to describing the resulting state: she wrote the last chapter, "Ideology and Terror," in 1953.⁷ That year, another German exile, Carl Joachim Friedrich, speaking at a conference on totalitarianism (at which Arendt was also a speaker), offered a concise five-point definition of totalitarian society:

1. An official ideology, consisting of an official body of doctrine covering all vital aspects of man's existence, to which everyone in that society is supposed to adhere at least passively. . . .

A single mass party consisting of a relatively small percentage of the total population (up to 10 per cent) of men and women passionately and unquestioningly dedicated to the ideology and prepared to assist in every way in promoting its general acceptance, such party being organized in strictly hierarchical, oligarchical manner, usually under a single leader and typically either superior to or completely commingled with the bureaucratic governmental organization.

A technologically conditioned near-complete monopoly of control . . . of all means of effective armed combat.

A similarly technologically conditioned near-complete monopoly of control . . . of all means of effective mass communication . . .

A system of terroristic police control, depending for its effectiveness upon points 3 and 4 and characteristically directed not only against demonstrable "enemies" of the regime, but

against arbitrarily selected classes of the population.⁸

In another three years Friedrich and his student Zbigniew Brzezinski, an exile from Poland, published Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy, a much slimmer volume than Origins,

that attempted not so much to describe as to define totalitarianism. They added a sixth point to Friedrich's earlier list: a centralized, controlled economy.⁹

Friedrich, like Arendt, stressed that the Nazi and Soviet regimes were essentially similar, which justified placing them in the same category, apart from all the other countries of the world. In the years that followed, most of the concept's critics focused on this very premise. Some, like another German exile, Herbert Marcuse, argued that all industrialized countries carried in them the seeds of a system like Germany's.¹⁰ Others, especially Western Sovietologists who hailed from the Left, argued that a model based on the study of Nazi Germany did not fit the facts of Soviet life very well, and perhaps even existed solely to discredit the Soviet regime. After the fall of the Soviet Union made it easier to study the country that had been, academics began noting how much richer private life had been in the USSR than they had once thought, how inconsistent and how widely disregarded the ideology, and how comparatively mild police

enforcement became after Stalin's death. All of this appeared to contradict the model. A group of scholars led by Australian-American historian Sheila Fitzpatrick put together a collection of papers specifically looking at the differences between Nazi and Soviet systems. They called it Beyond Totalitarianism.¹¹