The Editors and Board of Trustees of the Russian Review

"Totalitarianism" in 1984
Author(s): Abbott Gleason
Source: Russian Review, Vol. 43, No. 2 (Apr., 1984), pp. 145-159
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TheRussianReview,vol. 43, 1984, pp. 145-159

in 1984*
"Totalitarianism"
ABBOTTGLEASON

The arrival of 1984 has brought us a milestone that we do not

know how to celebrate but cannot ignore. Academic organizations,
publishers, op-ed page aspirants-none of them can stay away from
Orwell and the year he made famous, although remarkablylittle has
come of it all. One reason for this is that, to a notable degree, 1984
was a generationalnightmare. We are more frightened of other things
now, so when we return to this work of Orwell's last years, we employ
various stratagemsto make it seem more relevant. We take one strand
of his subject-the political consequences of high technology, for
instance-for our theme, or we try to assimilate our actual concerns to
his categories, arguingthat the cautionarymeanings of the book may be
stretched to include advertisingand mass consumption. Sometimes we
congratulateourselves that 1984 never came (not very interesting, even
the first time) or try to persuade ourselves and others that it has
(academicperversity).
I shall adhere to this alreadyestablished traditionof occasionalism.
This year, historians of Russia and the Soviet Union are bound to
reflect on the first fifty years of U.S.-Soviet relations, and it is in that
context that I would like to consider 1984-as a product of the latter
1940s (that time of widespreaddisillusion on the Left), of the onset of
the Cold War, of the period in which the concept of "totalitarianism"
was coming into widespreaduse. If there were such a thing as an "age
of totalitarianism"(and why shouldn't there be?), 1984 would be one
of its seminal books.
One of the difficulties we have in relating to 1984, I believe, is
that we have imperceptiblyleft the age of totalitarianismfor the other
ages in which we now live. From small beginnings, in the 'twenties,
"totalitarianism" (as a category to describe the most brutal, highly
mobilized and technologicallyintrusive states the world has yet known)
grew up to dominate the consciousness of Europe and America during
the Cold War. This "totalitarian" horror-technologically and

?*Portionsof this essay are drawnfrom a paperpresentedat the EighthInternational

Symposiumof the SmithsonianInstitution,December 8, 1983.

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 146 TheRussianReview

spiritually possible in its full-blown form only in the twentieth

century-was habituallyemployed to describe the enemies of democ-
racy (and the future of all the world if they prevailed). There were no
regional or national variantsof totalitarianismeither-it was essentially
the same, presumably,in East Asia as in Orwell's London.
"Totalitarianism," then, is not merely the phenomenon
described, but also a particulargenerational perspective, a gruesome
collection of insights at which people arrivedduring a particularperiod,
having been through a particularhistoricalexperience. After the politi-
cians, journalists, and artists invented "totalitarianism," the scholars
had their way with it in the 1950s and early 1960s, but in the last
fifteen years or so they have become noticeably more reluctant to
employ the term. It also appears that ordinaryyoung people do not
worry in the way they used to about growing up to live in the civiliza-
tion Orwell described in 1984. And yet the word lives on in several
more specific contexts. Politicalconservatives, warningus about Soviet
advances, often speak of "totalitarianism." Emigres from the Soviet
Union and Eastern Europe find the word naturally on their tongues.
Even ordinary Americans or Europeans, disconcerted by the unex-
pected harshness or drabness or political control of life in the Soviet
Union may suddenly find themselves using this faintly old-fashioned
term. What can its history tell us?
Surprisingly,there has been very little written in English on the
development of the term "totalitarianism";in Germany, where the
term has been even more politicaland generationalthan in the United
States, there has been much more.1The word first emerged in the argu-
ments and polemics that followed the Fascist seizure of power in Italy.
There is a certain irony in the fact that it was first used in a positive
sense by two of the importantearly theoreticiansof Fascism, Giovanni
Gentile and Alfredo Rocco. Gentile referred sententiously to the
"totalitarianscope of [Fascist] doctrine, which concerns itself not only
with political organization and political tendency, but with the whole
will and thought and feeling of the nation." Rocco used "totalitarian-
ism" in a less grandiloquentway, meaning simply "an absolute mono-
poly of authority by the state".2 Mussolini's usage was closer to

'Two books that deal signiticantly with the origins of the term "totalitarianism" are
Ernst Nolte, Theorie1n Ober d(en Fatschismus, Cologne and Berlin, 1967, and Leonard
Schapiro, Toitaltitanis?m, New York, 1972. By far the most informative treatment of the
early uses of "totalitarianism" is Martin Janicke, TotalitaideHerrtschqfi. Soziozgische
Abhandlungen, vol. 13, Berlin, 1971, pp. 20-60. For the voluminous literature in German
see M. Greiffenhagen, Kuhnl and Muller, Totalitarislmus,Munich, 1972.
2On Rocco and totalitarianism, see Charles S. Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe,
Princeton, 1975, pp. 562-564 and Paolo Ungari, Afi/edRoooc e l'icdeologiagiuridiciadel fas-
cismno,Bari, 1963, esp., pp. 105-106, 110-117. For an example of Gentile's use of the

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 "Totalitarianism"in 1984 147

Gentile's, as in his speech of March 8, 1925, in which he spoke of

Fascism's "fierce totalitarian will."3 By 1928, Filippo Turati and other
opponents of Fascism were also calling the extravagant claims of the
Fascist state "totalitarian," and in the early 1930s the word enjoyed a
brief vogue in Germany with such pro-Nazi writers as Ernst Juenger
and Carl Schmitt.4 By the middle of the 1930s, the various meanings of
the term began to converge and to take on the broader connotations of
a radically new kind of state and society. At the same time, "totalitari-
anism" was beginning to become familiar to a larger public in the
English-speaking world, having reference not only to a state that con-
trolled the individual far more totally than had been possible prior to
the advent of modern technology, but also with specific reference to
what was similar in the Soviet, German, and Italian states and their
practice.5
Bertrand Russell referred extensively to "totalitarianism" in his
1938 book, Power: A New Social Analysis, and Orwell first discussed the
phenomenon in his review of it the following year.6 Russell did not
attempt a definition, but it is clear that he observed the archaic aspect
of totalitarianism as well as the contemporary, seeing its roots in
Roman state-worship and German nationalism. He regarded the most
striking aspect of contemporary totalitarianism as the assumption by the
state of unprecedented economic and political power. It was the tech-
nological dimension to which Russell repeatedly returned in the course

term, see "The Philosophic Basis of Fascism," Foreign Af#airs,January, 1928, p. 299. See
also Janicke's treatment of Gentile, Totalitare Herrschafi, pp. 23-29. Janicke minimizes
Rocco's contribution.
3Janicke, TotalitareHerrschaqft,pp. 20-21.
41bid., pp. 36-48. See also Hans Buchheim, Totalitarian Rule: Its Nature and Charac-
teristics, Middletown, CT, 1968, pp. 89-105 and Franz Neumann, Behemoth, New York,
1944, pp. 47-51. In the German and Italian usage between the 1920s and the 1950s,
"total" and "totalitarian" were often used interchangeably. Such usages as "the total
state" and "total mobilization" occur in English, but are less characteristic. By the
1950s, "total" instead of "totalitarian" was unusual.
5An early use of "totalitarianism" in this sense can be found in William Henry
Chamberlin's disillusioned comparison of the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany ("Russia
and Germany-Parallels and Contrasts", Atlantic Monthly, vol. 156, no. 3, September,
1935. At about the same time, the distinguished Russian emigre historian, Michael Flor-
insky, was making a number of the same points in his Fascism and National Socialism: A
Study of the Economic and Social Policies of the TotalitarianState, New York, 1936, passinm.
See also Les K. Adler and Thomas G. Patterson, "Red Fascism: The Merger of Nazi
Germany and Soviet Russia in the American Image of Totalitarianism, 1930s-1950s," The
American Historical Review, vol. 75, 1970, pp. 1046-1064, and Thomas R. Maddox, "Red
Fascism, Brown Bolshevism: The American Image of Totalitarianism in the 1930s," The
Historian, vol. 40, 1977, pp. 85-103.
6An Age Like This: The Collected Essays. Joutralism and Letters of George Orwell, vol.
1, New York, 1968, pp. 375-376.

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 148 TheRussianReview

of the book, however: how advertising, radio, films, mass education,

and the press made despotic control far more total than it could ever
have been in the past.
This implicit conflict, in Russell's account, between the traditional
and archaicaspects (or "roots" or "precursors") of totalitarianismand
the stress on the hitherto unheard-of means of control possible in the
twentieth century has never been overcome throughout the life of the
concept. Some scholars have spent a great deal of time arguing for
links between the totalitarianismof our day and repressive societies of
the past: Sparta,Calvin's Geneva, Meiji Japan. A growing number of
their more conservative colleagues, taking their original cue, perhaps,
from Meinecke,7 have seen the Enlightenment as the principalculprit,
having given the world "mass democracy"; Rousseau has often been
singled out as a particularculprit for his concept of the "general will."8
Others-Orwell would be an obvious example-insisted on the absolute
decisiveness of twentieth-century means of control and twentieth-
century ideology.
By the time Orwell began working on 1984, "totalitarianism"had
come into much more widespreaduse and denoted a society in which
political power was in the hands of a dictator or "leader" and a non-
traditionalruling elite; the mass of the populationwas not only politi-
cally powerless but deprived of all intellectual and cultural resources
save those allowed (or insisted on) by the state, as well as being terror-
ized and isolated to a hitherto unprecedented degree by the
government's enormously developed intelligence and police apparatus.
In dealing with the phenomenon of totalitarianism,novelists like
Orwell and scholars, too, laid particularstress on how it had the will
and capacity to invade and destroy hitherto unpolitical-
"unrationalized"-relationships:children's belief in their parents;close
friendships; the love between a man and a woman. This, of course,
was one of the great themes of 1984, centering on Winston Smith's
relationshipwith Julia, and it was one of the most shocking revelations
about the new states that were being described as "totalitarian." Cer-
tain stories seemed to epitomize the horrorand unnaturalnessof these
aspirations. Probablythe most celebratedwas the oft-recountedcase of
"Pavlik" (Little Paul) Morozov, who in 1932 "unmasked" his father,
who had earlier been the head of the village soviet but had fallen under
the sinister influence of kulaks. Robert Conquest's account of the
episode is characteristic: "the father was shot, and on 3 September

7FriedrichMeinecke, The GermanCatastrophe, Cambridge,1950; the German edition

appearedin 1946. See the first two chaptersespecially.
8See in particular J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, New York,
1970;the first edition appearedin 1952.

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 "Totalitarianism"in 1984 149

1932 a group of peasants, including the boy's uncle, in turn killed the
son, at the age of fourteen ... the killers were themselves all executed,
and young Morozov became, and has remained, a great hero of the
Komsomol."9 Perhaps to suggest that it is a mistake to think that such
things can no longer happen, Conquest concludes his account by noting
that as late as 1965 a statute was erected to Pavlik in the village where
he lived.
The Morozov episode is dreadful, and it surely tells us something
that it is important to know about Soviet society, especially in the
1930s. Most of the "totalitarian" accounts treat the episode as though
it were obviously illustrative of the essence of Soviet society. The much
more difficult question of whether this episode is indeed paradigmatic
or merely the most extreme possible example of a repulsive tendency is
not ordinarily discussed. Nor is the question of whether such an
episode could have occurred after the death of Stalin-and if not, what
that means.
At all events, the relationship between the evil impulse (totally to
reshape the individual in the interests of the ideology and the leader-
ship) and the technological means to accomplish it was close, if ambi-
guous. Orwell and numerous other critics of totalitarianism have been
highly suspicious of technology, if not quite willing to label it as evil.
A lesser aspect of the campaign against totalitarianism was, in fact, a
distinct increase in hostility to the idea of social engineering and scien-
tism in general.
In a totalitarian dictatorship, as it has commonly been understood,
there was a highly truncated "civil society"; the state aspired to swal-
low everything, including private life. For the analyst, the anatomizer
of totalitarian society, what was primarily to be studied was the means
of state control, its parameters, and the new kind of life its victims
were forced to lead. This insistence on the utterly atomized state of
those who had to live in totalitarian societies, along with the -entrality
of terror and coercion, was among the major foci for criticism by those
who subsequently suggested that either there was really no such thing
as "totalitarianism" or that its meaning was insufficiently precise to be
used as an analytical tool in the study of the USSR (or any other actual
society).

9RobertConquest, TheGreatTerror,London and New York, 1968, p. 502. "Pavlik"

Morozov and his family have been cited and discussed in numerous volumes, among
them: Klaus Mehnert, Soviet Man and His World,New York, 1962 (German edition,
1958); HerbertMcCloskyand John Turner, TheSovietDictatorship,New York, Toronto,
London, 1960; Allen Kassof, "Youth Organizationsand the Adjustment of Soviet
Adolescents" in The Transfbrmationof Russian Society, edited by Cyril Black, Cambridge,
1967; Adam B. Ulam, Stalin: The Man and His Era, New York, 1973.

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 150 TheRussianReview

The belief that "totalitarianism"representeda new kind of social

and politicalorganizationtook shape in the 1930s, as intellectualsof the
Left began to become disillusioned with the Soviet experiment and
then to perceive, often reluctantly and with horror, that there were
unmistakableparallelsand points of comparison between Hitler's Ger-
many and Stalin's Russia. One could not have a real totalitariantypol-
ogy until there were enough entities to study. By the mid-30s, there
were clearly three important ones: the Soviet Union, Germany, and
Italy. Many of those who spotted the parallels and first wrote about
them had a Hegelian or Marxist background;most of them had some
connection with the inter-wartorment of Easternand CentralEurope.10
The horrifyingprospectof an increasinglytotalitarianworld came origi-
nally to England and the United States in the crowd of refugees from
the Gestapo and the GPU.
Given its non-native origins, it is perhapsironical that the idea of
"totalitarianism"should have struck such deep intellectual roots in the
Anglo-American political and academic world. Americans, however,
were entering a harrowing,dreadful, but at the same time ratherexcit-
ing period in their history with the fall of France in 1940. Leaving the
cocoon of isolationism, they were ready to be enlightened by sociologi-
cal prophets, ideally speaking to them in one or another of the accents
of Central or Eastern Europe. The ready acceptance of the
phenomenon of "totalitarianism," sometimes in rather schematic
terms, by the American academicand political elite, was subtly abetted
by their consciousness of Americans' previous reluctance to take an
active part in the affairs of the world outside. And the Manichaean
feelings naturally induced by the struggle against Nazi Germany
attachedthemselves, with additionalpsychologicalpassion, to the global
rivalrywith the Soviet Union, into which the United States plunged in
the late 'forties. An understandingof the historical novelty of totali-
tarianism, as well as its sinister dynamism, was an importantaspect of
the messianic consciousness of the American establishment for the
quartercentury after the Second World War.
It was in terms of the dual experience of Nazi and Stalinistreality,
as they emerged in the 'thirties and 'forties, that Orwellwrote 1984 and
Hannah Arendt her brilliantand prolix essay, The Originsof Totalitari-
anism, which appearedat almost the same time. Soon the professoriate
entered the fray. In 1953, Merle Fainsod produced his major study,
How Russia Is Ruled, which attempted, with remarkablesuccess, to

l?This was true for most of the importanttheoreticiansand analystsof totalitarianism,

such as Arendt and FranzBorkenau,and for those of their colleagueswho retainedmuch
of their Marxistorientation-Franz Neumann, Max Horckheimer,or HerbertMarcuse.

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 in 1984
"Totalitarianism" 151

reconcile an evolutionary view of Russian history with a deep convic-

tion that the Soviet Union had to be understood as a totalitarianstate.
Fainsod's book directly shaped the thinking of American academia
about the Soviet Union for 20 years. Attempts to reduce a vision to a
blueprint-or, if one prefers, to clarify an important analytical
category-soon followed. Of these, the most important was Carl
Friedrichand Zbigniew Brzezinski's TotalitarianDictatorshipand Autoc-
racy (1956). "The basic features or traits that we suggest as generally
recognized to be common to totalitarian dictatorship," the authors
announced, "are six in number." "The 'syndrome,' or pattern of
interrelatedtraits, of the totalitariandictatorshipconsists of an ideology,
a single partytypicallyled by one man, a terroristicpolice, a communi-
cations monopoly, a weapons monopoly, and a centrallydirected econ-
omy.""l All of these characteristicshad to be present in order for an
entity to be truly totalitarian,since there was the usual mutual rein-
forcement common to organic systems. Totalitarianismthus became a
"syndrome," achieving thereby a greateracademicacceptancethan had
hitherto been possible; at the height of its influence, a few years later,
it had become "the totalitarianmodel," indicating a further rise in
status, but also presentinga better target for debunkers. By the end of
the 1950s, Japan between 1931 and 1945 was being studied as a totali-
tariansociety, as was China after 1949.12
The American audience for Orwell, Arendt, and Fainsod had a
strongly generationalcharacter. For those who when young had fought
in "the War," or grown up in the immediate postwar world, their
generation's mission was to take leave (more or less regretfully) of
American innocence and provinciality, to learn some European
languages (other than a little French or Spanish), to learn to talk with
the European refugees from Hitler and Stalin on something like equal
terms, to demonstrate that the United States had joined the modern
world. The approved cultural attitude was intellectually serious,
worldly, and more cosmopolitan (in a good way) than the American
elite had ever been before. That it was excessively moralisticand self-
confident is also hard to deny. We continue to pay a price for seeing
the world exclusively in terms of an East-West dualism in which we
fight "totalitarianism"and wear white hats.

11HarvardUniversity Press published the first edition of Totalitarian

Dictatorshipand
Autocracyin 1956. The second edition, revised by Carl J. Friedrich,appearedin 1965. 1
quote from the Praegerpaperbackof the second edition (New York, 1966), p. 21.
12Fromthe time of the KoreanWar, re-educationand thought control seemed to have
advancedeven further in Mao's China than in the Soviet Union. See RobertJay Lifton,
Thought Refbrm and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of "Brainwashing" in China, New
York, 1961.

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 152 TheRussianReview

Nevertheless, whatever the shortcomings of the vision of the

world that the American elite learned after World War II, there was a
broad, and not unrealistic agreement about the ends and even the
means of American foreign policy. From our fragmented, post-
Vietnam perspective, there seems something almost idyllic about the
earnest, privileged, missionary world of the Cold War elite. So it
appears,at least, in retrospectto someone who grew up within it.
Missionarieshave to believe their gospel, however, and large por-
tions of American society ceased to believe, in the 'sixties, that we
were a sufficiently moral society to prate to others about the evils of
Communism, or that mixed-economy capitalism was a realistic option
for most of the societies in what we now call "the third world."
Influential portions of American society discovered how racist, brutal,
and hierarchical our social world was; the "pro-American" backlash
completed the polarizationthat now afflictsus.
With the Cold War moral consensus eroding, the category of
"totalitarianism" (the "totalitarian model") came under increasing
attack from those who had to use it not in the context of ideological
struggle or missionaryefforts, but as putatively objective "social scien-
tists." The "totalitarianmodel" suggested the central importance of
terror in making the Soviet system work. By 1967, so cautious and
established a political scientist as John Armstrong of the University of
Wisconsin could write, "today a model which incorporatespersonal dic-
tatorship and mass terror as essential features is grossly out of touch
with the reality of several communist systems."13Other key aspects of
the totalitarianmodel were also coming under attack: the idea that the
essence of the Soviet experience was the extraordinarilyatomized qual-
ity of social life and that coercive mobilization of a passive population
by the government was the closest approachto what Western political
scientists call "political participation."
After the death of Stalin and the revelations of Khrushchev, ter-
ror in the Soviet Union began to decrease, or at any rate to become
more subtle and implied. Social scientists began to believe that in order
to understand Soviet political life one had to understand clientelistic
networks, patronage, and even in a muted way "issues." Very few

13Armstrong'sconcluding remarks from an important Slavic Reviewsymposium in

March 1967 issue (vol. 26, no. 1, p. 27). The discussion made Americanacademicspe-
cialists aware that all was not well with "the totalitarianmodel." See also Frederic J.
Fleron, Communist Studies and the Social Sciences, Chicago, 1969. For other early criti-
cisms of it, see A. J. Groth, "The 'Isms' in Totalitarianism,"AmericanPoliticalScience
Review,vol. 58, 1964, pp. 888-901; Robert Tucker, "Towardsa ComparativePolitics of
Movement Regimes," American Political Science Review, vol. 55, 1961, pp. 281-289; and
(although a good deal later) Tucker, "The Dictator and Totalitarianism"in The Soviet
PoliticalMind,2nd ed., New York, 1971, pp. 20-46.

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 in 1984
"Totalitarianism" 153

would go so far as to finish that sentence "... just as in the West," but
students of Soviet politics have increasinglygravitatedtowarda reliance
on the same analyticaltools that have been used to study other indus-
trial (and "developing") societies.14
These alterationsin approachwere not due entirely to the changes
that the Soviet Union underwent after the death of Stalin. With the
establishmentof academicexchanges in the course of the 1960s, Amer-
ican professors and (even more important)graduatestudents were able
to spend relatively long periods of time in the Soviet Union. They
were able to meet ordinarySoviet citizens and understandtheir lives in
ways that foreigners had found extremely difficultfor decades. Impres-
sionistic evidence suggests that, although two years in the Soviet Union
usually had a devastating effect on leftist pro-Soviet opinions, it also
undermined the totalitarianmodel. The state was surely intrusive, but
the gap between that intrusiveness and the nightmare vision of 1984
was obviously great and not diminishing. Not only had the state not
eliminated "private life," the hospitalityof Soviet citizens and the store
that they set on friendshipoften impressed Americans and on occasion
made them wonder if they were not the people who had become atom-
ized.
In a slightly different vein, the totalitarianmodel suggested that
the Party and the bureaucracyenjoyed between them a total monopoly
on power; it suggested that the most importantdecisions were made by
top people in the Party, guided by ideology, and imposed on a largely
passive population. From Fainsod on, of course, all serious students of
Soviet affairs knew that matters were not so simple as this; the point is
that only gradually did they become fully aware of how unhelpful,
perhapseven misleading, their methodologicalparadigmwas.
Thus it is not surprisingthat to many of the revisionists, groups
and their interaction seem vital to the dynamics of Soviet society, and
the "group approach"has become something of a rallyingcry. H. Gor-
don Skilling has been an important spokesman for this point of view,
and in the earliest of a series of importantarticles he clearly disassoci-
ated himself from the totalitarianmodel:

The idea that interest groups may play a significant role in communist
politics has, until recently, not been seriously entertained either by
Western political scientists or by Soviet legal specialists. The concept of
"totalitarianism" that dominated the analysis of Communism in the
West has seemed to preclude the possibility that interest groups could
challenge or affect the single ruling partyas the fount of all power. The

14Foran early and intelligent statement of the case, see Robert Sharlet, "Systematic
PoliticalScience and CommunistSystems," SlavicReview,vol. 26, no. 1, pp. 22-26.

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 154 The Russian Review

uniqueness of a totalitariansystem has been deemed to lie in the very

totality of its politicalpower, excluding, as it were by definition, any area
of autonomous behavior by groups other than the state or party,and still
more, preventing serious influence by them on the process of decision-
making.'5

We will never, thank God, know how Hitler's Germany might

have evolved had the maestro lived to die of more or less natural
causes. Although we know a good deal more about Nazi Germany now
than we did in the 'fifties (and recent scholarship seems to regard Nazi
"totalitarianism" as more rickety than earlier studies did), it is above
all the evolution of the Soviet Union since 1953 that has complicated
the task of those who would still like to maintain that a completely new
type of state came into existence in the interwar period. Despite the
importance of terror and coercion in the lives of Soviet citizens today,
despite the continuing existence in a diminuendo sort of way of the
leader cult, despite the formal preservation of Marxism-Leninism as the
official ideology, with the passage of time the Soviet Union seems more
and more understandable in terms of rather traditional categories.
Nationalism, epic insecurity, the attempt to overcome "backwardness,"
authoritarian political cultures long in the making-combinations of
these have taken center stage from the totalitarian model in providing
an analytical framework for understanding Soviet behavior.16
Many scholars who are intellectually uncomfortable when actually
confronted with the static monism of "totalitarianism" are nevertheless
reluctant to give it up altogether because it still seems to provide a

15"InterestGroups and Communist Politics," WorldPolitics,vol. 18, 1966, p. 435. It

appears,in slightly revised form, in an influentialcollectionedited by Skillingand Frank-
lyn Griffiths, InterestGroupsin SovietPolitics,Princeton, 1971. For a sense of the debate
and an effective statement of an opposing view, see William E. Odom, "A Dissenting
View on the Group Approachto Soviet Politics," WorldPolitics,vol. 28, 1976, pp. 542-
567, and, more recently, the same author's "Choice and Change in Soviet Politics,"
Problems of Communism, May-June, 1983, pp. 1-21.
16Oneof the best statements that historicalRussian insecurityhas playedan important
role in Soviet expansionismremainsLouis J. Halle, TheCold Waras History,New York,
1967. Theodore Von Laue has made a persuasivecase for the argument from "back-
wardness" in WhyLenin? WhyStalin? 2nd ed., Philadelphia,1971. See also Robert
Tucker, "Stalinism as Revolution from Above," in Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpre-
tation,edited by Robert C. Tucker, New York, 1977, pp. 77-108. The best statement of
the view that traditional Russian "political culture" was exceptionally important in
defining Soviet behavior is Stephen White, Political Culture and Soviet Politics, London,
1979. Much that is in these "explanations"does not explicitlycontradictthe view that
the Soviet Union is a "totalitarian"state in some sense. But all of them are historically
specific and lack the static quality that many critics of the "totalitarianmodel" have
noticed. And they all hone in on featuresof the Russianand Soviet experiencethat were
of secondaryimportanceto those whose premisewas Soviet totalitarianism.

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 "Totalitarianism"in 1984 155

plausible vocabulary in which to describe the horrors of high Stalinism.

It may be that some of them retain the term because to cease to do so
would seem in some complex fashion to condone, or at least to judge
less severely, the brutalities of forced collectivization and the Purges.
The most recent episodes in the history of "totalitarianism" in
academia center around the emergence of several scholars, chief among
them Sheila Fitzpatrick, who have shifted the focus of de-
totalitarianization from the post-1953 period to the time of the "Stalin
revolution" itself-the late 1920s and 1930s.17 Fitzpatrick has not really
discussed the conceptual model of totalitarianism in detail; what she has
chiefly done is to suggest a reciprocity between Stalin's policies and
groups within Soviet society that generally stood to benefit by them:
iconoclastic and radicalized youth and, above all, workers moving into
the Soviet "intelligentsia." As she observes in the preface to her Cul-
tural Revolution in Russia, 1928-1931, "instead of concentrating
exclusively on the theme of Party intervention in culture (the major
theme of previous Western studies), we [she and other contributors]
have looked at what was happening within the cultural professions and
sought to relate this to contemporary social and political changes,
including the movement for worker promotion into the intelli-
gentsia."18 Fitzpatrick's contention that Stalin's forced collectivization
and creation of the First Five-Year Plan had, as she puts it, "a genuine
proletarian component," clearly contradicts an essential aspect of the
totalitarian model-that Soviet society was wholly passive, or at the
very least unable to undertake any real initiative in defense of its
interests, and that the policies of the time were formulated and imple-
mented by the dictator and a small segment of the Party elite. In her
Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union Fitzpatrick demon-
strates that at the very least Stalin's policies had social beneficiaries,
that numerous people in the Soviet Union possessed powerful ambi-
tions, fears, and resentments, which created support for Stalin's policies

17See,in particular,Fitzpatrick'sCulturalRevolutionin Russia, 1928-1931,Bloomington,

1978; her Educationand Social Mobilityin the Soviet Union 1921-1934,Cambridge, 1979;
and her RussianRevolution,Oxford, 1982. Another example of this tendency is J. Arch
Getty, "Purge and Partyin Smolensk: 1933-1937," SlavicReview,vol. 42, 1983, pp. 60-
79. See also the ensuing discussion. Roberta Manning's unpublishedpaper, "The Col-
lective Farm Peasantryand the Local Administration: Peasant Letters of Complaintin
Belyi Raion in 1937," preparedfor the Universityof Pennsylvania'sNationalSeminarfor
the Study of Twentieth-CenturyRussian Society in January1982, appearsto be another
example. For an effective statement of the case that the totalitarianmodel'has impeded
our understandingof Soviet history in Lenin's time, see Stephen F. Cohen, "Bolshevism
and Stalinism" in Robert G. Tucker, ed., Stalinism.Cohen's brilliantessay is not cen-
trallyconcerned with the concept of totalitarianism,but with criticizingthe thesis of "an
unbrokencontinuitybetween Bolshevismand Stalinism."
18Fitzpatrick,CulturalRevolutionin Russia,p. 4.

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 156 TheRussianReview

of various kinds and to varying degrees. This is tantamount to saying

that "civil society" was never really dead, even under Stalin. And the
implication is plain: Stalin had social support for his policies, just as
Count Witte or Peter the Great did; one must understandthe nature of
that support, as well as its limitations, if one is to understandwhat hap-
pened in this crucialmoment in the history of the Soviet Union.
I have been present at many discussions of Fitzpatrick'swork, and
in my experience her actual conclusions are much less likely to be chal-
lenged than her explicit or implicit reduction of Stalin to the status of a
political figure who is not essentiallydifferent from other leaders in the
twentieth century who determined the destinies of large numbers of
people. One of the challenges, it would appear, for those who follow
her lead in studying Soviet society, will be to find a way to control
Stalin's demotion to the status of ordinarymortal, so that he will not
seem to be too ordinary, so that we will not lose our sense of the stu-
pendousness of the "Stalin Revolution," including its stupendous bru-
tality and suffering. The totalitarian model, whatever its other
deficiencies, kept those dimensions of the problem before our eyes.
Fitzpatrick,in describingthe creation of a new proletarianintelligentsia,
is fond of characterizingthe process as "affirmativeaction," and com-
paring it to American social policy during the 1960s and 1970s. No
doubt there are some similarities, but the gain in our understandingis
more than offset by what the phrase leaves out in its linking of situa-
tions that are too disparateto be so simply compared. This comparison
must inevitably have an exculpatoryring.
At the same time, the debate between the dwindling band of
explicit adherents of the "totalitarianmodel" and those who would like
to ignore it, criticize it or just quietly move their counters onto another
square has become caught up in the ideological struggles of the present
moment: one's view of the Soviet Union has in the last few years
again begun to seem indicative of more general beliefs-or so the
debate would suggest. It is not that any significant group of non-
communist European or American intellectuals has much that is posi-
tive to say about the Soviet Union. But the very attempt to "compare"
the USSR to other politicalentities in the world today seems suspicious
to conservatives like Alain Besanqonof the Ecole des hautes etudes in
Paris. He believes that the Soviet Union is not really a nation, or even
an empire, but a global ideological conspiracy. The Western powers,
writes Besancon, "... want the U.S.S.R. to enter into the concert of
powers. They are treating the U.S.S.R. as if it were just like any other
state, in the hope that it will finally behave that way." But Besanqonis
sure that the Soviet Union can never essentially modify its drive for
global domination, since that would mean giving up ideology, and con-
sequently giving up power.

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 "Totalitarianism"in 1984 157

[That ideology] strives for universality.... The earliest communists

wanted to create a new heaven and a new earth, to rebuild the social and
natural world, to make the old world give birth to a new world as the
doctrine promised. Their vision of the universe was not restrictedby any
previouslydetermined limits.... At the center of things it placedan abso-
lute knowledge that graduallyreorganized about itself the whole spec-
trum of learning.... One ambition, one divine vision. This, and this
alone, is the basis of the legitimacyof communist power. If that power
were to give up trying to dominate the universe, it would lose its right to
dominate the least little township. It is penned up within an all-or-
nothing situation that condemns it to be nothing if it does not try to be
everything.19

Besanqon's vision is no mere attempt to preserve the "totalitarian

model"; his view is clearly more akin to that of Dostoevsky than that
of Merle Fainsod, and in a complex way its articulation may also testify
to the waning force of the totalitarian point of view. But it is pro-
foundly hostile to the secular and pluralist analytical schemes that have
sprung up since the mid-'sixties. Besanqon has made no secret of his
anxieties that scholars in the United States no longer understand the
nature of the profound threat that the Soviet Union poses to our insti-
tutions; his passionately held opinions remind us that the quarrels over
the totalitarian model have a good deal to do with the political polariza-
tion produced by the politics of detente, in both Europe and the United
States, during the 1970s.
The central mistake that so many contemporary students of the
USSR make, say Besanqon and his colleagues, is to assume that it is "a
state like any other state."20 No one among the revisers of the totali-
tarian model attracts wrath from the right to the extent that Jerry
Hough does, in part because he so clearly believes that the Soviet
Union can and must be compared to "other states" and is in crucial
ways "like" them. Hough asserts that his image of the USSR

does emphasize that the Soviet Union is a repressivestate in which many

individual rights are not guaranteedand in which the Marxist ideals of
full equality have not been achieved. Yet it recognizes that a great deal
of debate is permittedon most policy questions in the Soviet Union and

19AlainBesancon, TheSovietSyndrome,New York, 1978, pp. 91-93.

20Inadditionto Besancon'swords, quoted above, see RaymondAron's introductionto
The SovietSyndrome,p. xvii. Like most slogans of this sort, this phrase is polemically
effective because it identifies one's enemy with the most extreme and undifferentiated
possible versions of his beliefs. Surely the Soviet Union is not a state like any other
state? (Are all states alike?) But are there no importantways in which the Soviet Union
is like certain other states? And Russia like other nations? And might not those tradi-
tional features bear study too?

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 158 TheRussianReview

that, within the framework of the basic authoritarianism,an increased

tendency to tolerate individualdifferences is observable.... It insists that
there is a politics in the Soviet Union, even on the most importantques-
tions, and suggests that the multiplicityof forces strugglingto shape the
Soviet Union could producechange either for the better or for the worse
from an American point of view.2'

The contrastwith Besanqoncould scarcelybe more complete.

If "totalitarianism" and the "totalitarian model" have lost so
much of their power to provide an intellectual framework for those
struggling to understand the Soviet Union (and Nazi Germany), what
should we conclude? Was Merle Fainsod's focus on the organization
and institutionalizationof "totalitarianterror" wrong? Or greatly exag-
gerated? Did the society Orwell depicted in 1984 have comparatively
little to do with Soviet (or Nazi) society?
It will not do to think so. Too many people began to see, after
1936, ways in which Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy and the Soviet
Union were alike and were historically novel for that vision not to be
rooted in reality. George Orwell, Bertrand Russell, Hannah Arendt,
Merle Fainsod-how could the perceptions of such a diverse and
talented crew be reduced to an anti-leftist crusade or poor scholarship?
The similarities between these nations at that historical moment were
real. It is one thing to criticize or reject the "totalitarianmodel." It
would be quite another if the rejecters had not already thoroughly
absorbedits insights. For them, it is a given, the wisdom of a previous
generation, the "conventional wisdom." The insights of one genera-
tion, especially the crucial ones that define its vision of the world, are
often sitting ducks for those who speak for the next generation. From
a scholarly point of view, the rejection of the idea of "totalitarianism"
may be crucial to whatever the successor generation of scholars
achieves in the way of understandingthe Soviet Union and other Com-
munist states.
To say that much, however, is not to say that the generation of
Orwell, Arendt and Fainsod was "wrong." The dreadful insight that
Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Stalinist Russia had much in common
may now not be able to guide research and further deepen our under-
standing. If that is so for the majority of the current generation of
Sovietologists, however, it is because that insight has been absorbed-
or ought to have been-into our body of knowledge of the USSR. If

21JerryHough, The Soviet Unionand Social Science Theory,Cambridge, 1977, p. viii.

Even Hough's titles seem calculatedto outrage the Right. When he was chosen to revise
Merle Fainsod's How Russia Is Ruled, he changed the title to How the Soviet Union is
and producedan erudite but uneasy blend of his views and Fainsod's.
Governed

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 "Totalitarianism"in 1984 159

scholars lose sight of what it was about the Soviet Union which made
its depiction as a "totalitarian" polity convincing to people for thirty
years, there will surely be episodes to remind even the dullest of
them-the continuing confinement of dissidents in psychiatric prisons,
for example.22
Every era has its particular nightmares and seldom appreciates
being told how compelling the nightmares of previous eras have been.
Only people of unusual sympathy and discernment can vicariously
understand the terrors of other peoples, cultures, and eras. Perhaps
our era's dominant nightmare is nuclear war, and who will claim that it
is not terrifying enough? Orwell's nightmare-and he spoke powerfully
for his generation-was the end of non-political life, private life.
Perhaps that nightmare has at present an older and more conservative
clientele than it used to, and perhaps the fear it inspired has lessened.
But future generations of young people may well dream it again.

22Theyalso need to pay attentionto writingsfrom Centraland EasternEurope. When

Czech or Polish writers employ the term "totalitarianism,"they are often indicatinga
specialexperienceof Soviet (Russian?) suppressionof their historyand culture. Particu-
larly in that sense, their experienceof Soviet-imposedCommunism is powerfullyOrwel-
lian. 1949 is much less far away in Prague than it is Washington. For example, see
Milan Kundera'spoignant"The Central EuropeanTragedy," New YorkReviewof Books,
vol. 31, April 26, 1984, pp. 33-38. East Europeansin particularoften believe that the
Soviet leaders aspireto a totalitariansystem, even if Soviet realitycannot be analyzedin
those terms.

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