"Totalitarianism" in 1984

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"Totalitarianism" in 1984Author(s): Abbott GleasonSource: Russian Review, Vol. 43, No. 2 (Apr., 1984), pp. 145-159Published by: Wiley on behalf of The Editors and Board of Trustees of the Russian ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/129750 .

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The Russian Review, vol. 43, 1984, pp. 145-159

"Totalitarianism" in 1984*

ABBOTT GLEASON

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 remarkably little has come of it all. One reason for this is that, to a notable degree, 1984 was a generational nightmare. We are more frightened of other things now, so when we return to this work of Orwell's last years, we employ various stratagems to 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, arguing that the cautionary meanings of the book may be stretched to include advertising and mass consumption. Sometimes we congratulate ourselves that 1984 never came (not very interesting, even the first time) or try to persuade ourselves and others that it has (academic perversity).

I shall adhere to this already established tradition of 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 widespread disillusion on the Left), of the onset of the Cold War, of the period in which the concept of "totalitarianism" was coming into widespread use. 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 imperceptibly left the age of totalitarianism for 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 technologically intrusive 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

?*Portions of this essay are drawn from a paper presented at the Eighth International Symposium of the Smithsonian Institution, December 8, 1983.



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spiritually possible in its full-blown form only in the twentieth century-was habitually employed to describe the enemies of democracy (and the future of all the world if they prevailed). There were no regional or national variants of totalitarianism either-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 particular generational perspective, a gruesome collection of insights at which people arrived during a particular period, having been through a particular historical experience. 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 ordinary young 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. Political conservatives, warning us 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 political and generational than in the United States, there has been much more.1 The 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 important early theoreticians of Fascism, Giovanni Gentile and Alfredo Rocco. Gentile referred sententiously to the "totalitarian scope 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 "totalitarianism" in a less grandiloquent way, meaning simply "an absolute monopoly 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, Totalitaide Herrtschqfi. 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/ed Roo oc e l'icdeologia giuridicia del fas- cismno, Bari, 1963, esp., pp. 105-106, 110-117. For an example of Gentile's use of the

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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, "totalitarianism" 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 technological 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, Totalitare Herrschaqft, 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 Totalitarian State, 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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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 archaic aspects (or "roots" or "precursors") of totalitarianism and 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 totalitarianism of 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 principal culprit, having given the world "mass democracy"; Rousseau has often been singled out as a particular culprit 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 widespread use and denoted a society in which political power was in the hands of a dictator or "leader" and a non- traditional ruling elite; the mass of the population was 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 particular stress 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 relationship with 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 horror and unnaturalness of these aspirations. Probably the most celebrated was the oft-recounted case 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

7Friedrich Meinecke, The German Catastrophe, Cambridge, 1950; the German edition appeared in 1946. See the first two chapters especially.

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

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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).

9Robert Conquest, The Great Terror, 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); Herbert McClosky and John Turner, The Soviet Dictatorship, New York, Toronto, London, 1960; Allen Kassof, "Youth Organizations and the Adjustment of Soviet Adolescents" in The Transfbrmation of Russian Society, edited by Cyril Black, Cambridge, 1967; Adam B. Ulam, Stalin: The Man and His Era, New York, 1973.

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The belief that "totalitarianism" represented a new kind of social and political organization took shape in the 1930s, as intellectuals of the Left began to become disillusioned with the Soviet experiment and then to perceive, often reluctantly and with horror, that there were unmistakable parallels and points of comparison between Hitler's Ger- many and Stalin's Russia. One could not have a real totalitarian typol- 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-war torment of Eastern and Central Europe.10 The horrifying prospect of an increasingly totalitarian world 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 perhaps ironical 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 rather excit- 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 academic and 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 attached themselves, with additional psychological passion, to the global rivalry with the Soviet Union, into which the United States plunged in the late 'forties. An understanding of the historical novelty of totalitarianism, as well as its sinister dynamism, was an important aspect of the messianic consciousness of the American establishment for the quarter century after the Second World War.

It was in terms of the dual experience of Nazi and Stalinist reality, as they emerged in the 'thirties and 'forties, that Orwell wrote 1984 and Hannah Arendt her brilliant and prolix essay, The Origins of Totalitari- anism, which appeared at 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 remarkable success, to

l?This was true for most of the important theoreticians and analysts of totalitarianism, such as Arendt and Franz Borkenau, and for those of their colleagues who retained much of their Marxist orientation-Franz Neumann, Max Horckheimer, or Herbert Marcuse.

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reconcile an evolutionary view of Russian history with a deep convic- tion that the Soviet Union had to be understood as a totalitarian state. 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 Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski's Totalitarian Dictatorship and 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 interrelated traits, of the totalitarian dictatorship consists of an ideology, a single party typically led by one man, a terroristic police, a communi- cations monopoly, a weapons monopoly, and a centrally directed economy.""l All of these characteristics had to be present in order for an entity to be truly totalitarian, since there was the usual mutual rein- forcement common to organic systems. Totalitarianism thus became a "syndrome," achieving thereby a greater academic acceptance than had hitherto been possible; at the height of its influence, a few years later, it had become "the totalitarian model," indicating a further rise in status, but also presenting a better target for debunkers. By the end of the 1950s, Japan between 1931 and 1945 was being studied as a totalitarian society, as was China after 1949.12

The American audience for Orwell, Arendt, and Fainsod had a strongly generational character. 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 moralistic and 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.

11Harvard University Press published the first edition of Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy in 1956. The second edition, revised by Carl J. Friedrich, appeared in 1965. 1 quote from the Praeger paperback of the second edition (New York, 1966), p. 21.

12From the time of the Korean War, re-education and thought control seemed to have advanced even further in Mao's China than in the Soviet Union. See Robert Jay Lifton, Thought Refbrm and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of "Brainwashing" in China, New York, 1961.

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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 retrospect to someone who grew up within it.

Missionaries have to believe their gospel, however, and large portions 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 polarization that now afflicts us.

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 missionary efforts, but as putatively objective "social scientists." The "totalitarian model" 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 incorporates personal dictatorship and mass terror as essential features is grossly out of touch with the reality of several communist systems."13 Other key aspects of the totalitarian model were also coming under attack: the idea that the essence of the Soviet experience was the extraordinarily atomized quality of social life and that coercive mobilization of a passive population by the government was the closest approach to what Western political scientists call "political participation."

After the death of Stalin and the revelations of Khrushchev, terror 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's concluding remarks from an important Slavic Review symposium in March 1967 issue (vol. 26, no. 1, p. 27). The discussion made American academic specialists aware that all was not well with "the totalitarian model." 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," American Political Science Review, vol. 58, 1964, pp. 888-901; Robert Tucker, "Towards a Comparative Politics 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 Political Mind, 2nd ed., New York, 1971, pp. 20-46.

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would go so far as to finish that sentence "... just as in the West," but students of Soviet politics have increasingly gravitated toward a reliance on the same analytical tools that have been used to study other indus- trial (and "developing") societies.14

These alterations in approach were not due entirely to the changes that the Soviet Union underwent after the death of Stalin. With the establishment of academic exchanges in the course of the 1960s, Amer- ican professors and (even more important) graduate students were able to spend relatively long periods of time in the Soviet Union. They were able to meet ordinary Soviet citizens and understand their lives in ways that foreigners had found extremely difficult for 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 totalitarian model. 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 hospitality of Soviet citizens and the store that they set on friendship often impressed Americans and on occasion made them wonder if they were not the people who had become atomized.

In a slightly different vein, the totalitarian model suggested that the Party and the bureaucracy enjoyed between them a total monopoly on power; it suggested that the most important decisions 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, perhaps even misleading, their methodological paradigm was.

Thus it is not surprising that 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 rallying cry. H. Gor- don Skilling has been an important spokesman for this point of view, and in the earliest of a series of important articles he clearly disassoci- ated himself from the totalitarian model:

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 party as the fount of all power. The

14For an early and intelligent statement of the case, see Robert Sharlet, "Systematic Political Science and Communist Systems," Slavic Review, vol. 26, no. 1, pp. 22-26.

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uniqueness of a totalitarian system has been deemed to lie in the very totality of its political power, 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"Interest Groups and Communist Politics," World Politics, vol. 18, 1966, p. 435. It appears, in slightly revised form, in an influential collection edited by Skilling and Frank- lyn Griffiths, Interest Groups in Soviet Politics, 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 Approach to Soviet Politics," World Politics, 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.

16One of the best statements that historical Russian insecurity has played an important role in Soviet expansionism remains Louis J. Halle, The Cold War as History, New York, 1967. Theodore Von Laue has made a persuasive case for the argument from "backwardness" in Why Lenin? Why Stalin? 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 explicitly contradict the 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 "totalitarian model" have noticed. And they all hone in on features of the Russian and Soviet experience that were of secondary importance to those whose premise was Soviet totalitarianism.

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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 intelligentsia."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's Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928-1931, Bloomington, 1978; her Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union 1921-1934, Cambridge, 1979; and her Russian Revolution, Oxford, 1982. Another example of this tendency is J. Arch Getty, "Purge and Party in Smolensk: 1933-1937," Slavic Review, vol. 42, 1983, pp. 60- 79. See also the ensuing discussion. Roberta Manning's unpublished paper, "The Col- lective Farm Peasantry and the Local Administration: Peasant Letters of Complaint in Belyi Raion in 1937," prepared for the University of Pennsylvania's National Seminar for the Study of Twentieth-Century Russian Society in January 1982, appears to be another example. For an effective statement of the case that the totalitarian model'has impeded our understanding of Soviet history in Lenin's time, see Stephen F. Cohen, "Bolshevism and Stalinism" in Robert G. Tucker, ed., Stalinism. Cohen's brilliant essay is not centrally concerned with the concept of totalitarianism, but with criticizing the thesis of "an unbroken continuity between Bolshevism and Stalinism."

18Fitzpatrick, Cultural Revolution in Russia, p. 4.

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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 understand the nature of that support, as well as its limitations, if one is to understand what hap- pened in this crucial moment in the history of the Soviet Union.

I have been present at many discussions of Fitzpatrick's work, 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 essentially different 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 ordinary mortal, 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 describing the creation of a new proletarian intelligentsia, is fond of characterizing the process as "affirmative action," and com- paring it to American social policy during the 1960s and 1970s. No doubt there are some similarities, but the gain in our understanding is more than offset by what the phrase leaves out in its linking of situa- tions that are too disparate to be so simply compared. This comparison must inevitably have an exculpatory ring.

At the same time, the debate between the dwindling band of explicit adherents of the "totalitarian model" 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 positive to say about the Soviet Union. But the very attempt to "compare" the USSR to other political entities in the world today seems suspicious to conservatives like Alain Besanqon of 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 Besanqon is 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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[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 restricted by any previously determined limits.... At the center of things it placed an absolute knowledge that gradually reorganized about itself the whole spec- trum of learning.... One ambition, one divine vision. This, and this alone, is the basis of the legitimacy of 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 polarization 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 totalitarian 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 repressive state in which many individual rights are not guaranteed and in which the Marxist ideals of full equality have not been achieved. Yet it recognizes that a great deal of debate is permitted on most policy questions in the Soviet Union and

19Alain Besancon, The Soviet Syndrome, New York, 1978, pp. 91-93. 20In addition to Besancon's words, quoted above, see Raymond Aron's introduction to

The Soviet Syndrome, 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 important ways in which the Soviet Union is like certain other states? And Russia like other nations? And might not those traditional features bear study too?

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The Russian Review

that, within the framework of the basic authoritarianism, an increased tendency to tolerate individual differences is observable.... It insists that there is a politics in the Soviet Union, even on the most important questions, and suggests that the multiplicity of forces struggling to shape the Soviet Union could produce change either for the better or for the worse from an American point of view.2'

The contrast with Besanqon could scarcely be 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 institutionalization of "totalitarian terror" 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 "totalitarian model." It would be quite another if the rejecters had not already thoroughly absorbed its insights. For them, it is a given, the wisdom of a previous generation, the "conventional wisdom." The insights of one generation, 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 understanding the 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 understanding. 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

21Jerry Hough, The Soviet Union and Social Science Theory, Cambridge, 1977, p. viii. Even Hough's titles seem calculated to 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 Governed and produced an erudite but uneasy blend of his views and Fainsod's.

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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.

22They also need to pay attention to writings from Central and Eastern Europe. When Czech or Polish writers employ the term "totalitarianism," they are often indicating a special experience of Soviet (Russian?) suppression of their history and culture. Particu- larly in that sense, their experience of Soviet-imposed Communism is powerfully Orwel- lian. 1949 is much less far away in Prague than it is Washington. For example, see Milan Kundera's poignant "The Central European Tragedy," New York Review of Books, vol. 31, April 26, 1984, pp. 33-38. East Europeans in particular often believe that the Soviet leaders aspire to a totalitarian system, even if Soviet reality cannot be analyzed in those terms.

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"Totalitarianism" in 1984

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