Red Flag Unfurled. Ronald Grigor Suny

dependency on) the American state. The benefits of working in tandem with the interests of the state were enormous; the dangers of non-conformity were omnipresent. Two of the founders of Columbia’s Russian Institute, Soviet legal expert John N. Hazard and Soviet literature specialist Ernest J. Simmons, were named by Senator McCarthy in 1953 as members of the “Communist conspiracy.”⁶⁵ The intellectual historian H. Stuart Hughes was dismissed as associate director of Harvard’s Russian Research Center when a trustee of the Carnegie Corporation, a major funder of the Center, complained that Hughes supported the 1948 Henry Wallace presidential campaign.⁶⁶ In Britain, the most prominent historian of Russia, E. H. Carr, reported in 1950 that “it had become very difficult … to speak dispassionately about Russia except in a ‘very woolly Christian kind of way’ without endangering, if not your bread and butter, then your legitimate hopes of advancement,” and the Marxist historian Eric J. Hobsbawm affirmed that “there is no question that the principle of freedom of expression did not apply to communist and Marxist views, at least in the official media.”⁶⁷

       The Totalitarian Model

      With the collapse of the Grand Alliance, the more sympathetic renderings of Stalin’s USSR, popular during the war, gave way to the powerful image of “Red Fascism” that melded the practices of Nazi Germany with those of the Soviet Union.⁶⁸ In order to conceptualize these terror-based, one-party ideological regimes, political scientists elaborated the concept of “totalitarianism.” Carl Friedrich (1901–1984) and Zbigniew Brzezinski formulated the classic definition of totalitarianism, with its six systemic characteristics: a ruling ideology, a single party typically led by one man, a terroristic police, a communications monopoly, a weapons monopoly, and a centrally directed economy.⁶⁹ Such states, with their mass manipulation, suppression of voluntary associations, violence, and expansionism, were contrasted with liberal democratic, pluralistic societies. Because such systems were able so effectively to suppress internal dissension, many theorists concluded they would never change unless overthrown from outside.

      The T-model dominated scholarship, particularly in political science, through the 1950s and well into the 1960s, a time when the academy was intimately involved in the global struggle that pitted the West against the Soviet Union, its “satellite” states, and anti-colonial nationalism. The model of a gargantuan prison state, “a huge reformatory in which the primary difference between the forced labor camps and the rest of the Soviet Union is that inside the camps the regimen is much more brutal and humiliating,” was compelling—both because high Stalinism matched much of the image of a degenerated autocracy, and because Soviet restrictions and censorship eliminated most other sources, like travelers, journalists, and scholars with in-country experience.⁷⁰ The image of an imperialist totalitarianism, spreading its red grip over the globe, was at one and the same time the product of Western anxieties and the producer of inflated fears. George Orwell (1903–1950), already well-known for his satire on Soviet politics, Animal Farm (1945), produced the most effective literary vision of totalitarianism in his popular novel 1984 (1949). Its hero, Winston Smith, tries valiantly to revolt against the totally administered society presided over by Big Brother, but by novel’s end he has been ground into submission and spouts the doublespeak slogans of the regime. The political philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), a refugee from Nazism, provided the most sophisticated and subtle interpretation of The Origins of Totalitarianism, which she connected to anti-Semitism, nationalism, pan-national movements, imperialism, and the replacement of class politics by mass politics.⁷¹

      Scholars explained the origins and spread of totalitarianism in various ways. Arendt linked totalitarianism with the coming of mass democracy; Waldemar Gurian saw the source in the utopian ambitions of leftist politicians; Stefan Possony tied it to the personality of Lenin; Robert C. Tucker to the personality of Stalin; and Nathan Leites employed psychoanalytic concepts to write about the psychopathology of the Bolshevik elite, distinguished primarily by paranoia. The anthropologists Geoffrey Gorer and Margaret Mead reverted to the ever-handy notion of national character, in this case patterns of inbred submissiveness to authority caused by the peasant practice of swaddling Russian infants.⁷² In 1947 Mead, then the most famous anthropologist in the United States,

      secured funding from the Air Force’s new think tank, the Rand Corporation, to set up a Studies in Soviet Culture Project, recruiting Gorer [her lover at the time] to run it. Gorer had never been to Russia and didn’t speak the language, but ignorance only made his work easier. He quickly discovered the key that would unlock the Russian psyche: swaddling. Russian children, bound and swaddled in infancy, would naturally turn into paranoid and authoritarian adults, with repressed longings for warm-water harbors.⁷³

      Russians, it was concluded in one study, were not quite like other human beings. “They endure physical suffering with great stoicism and are indifferent about the physical sufferings of others … [Therefore] No techniques are yet available for eradicating the all-pervasive suspicion which Great Russians, leaders and led alike, feel towards the rest of the world. This suspicion springs from unconscious and therefore irrational sources and will not be calmed, more than momentarily, by rational actions.”⁷⁴

      The positive vision of “civic education” put forth in the 1920s gave way to the image of “brain-washing.” In 1949 George Counts (1907–1974), who eighteen years earlier had written The Soviet Challenge to America (1931), now co-authored with Nucia Lodge The Country of the Blind: The Soviet System of Mind Control (1949). The totalitarian approach turned an apt if not wholly accurate description into a model, complete with predictions of future trajectories. The concept exaggerated similarities and underestimated differences between quite distinct regimes, ignoring the contrast between an egalitarian, internationalist doctrine (Marxism) that the Soviet regime failed to realize and the inegalitarian, racist and imperialist ideology (fascism) that the Nazis implemented only too well. Little was said about the different dynamics in a state capitalist system with private ownership of property (Nazi Germany), and those operating in a completely state-dominated economy with almost no production for the market (Stalin’s USSR); or about how an advanced industrial economy geared essentially to war and territorial expansion (Nazi Germany) differed from a program for modernizing a backward, peasant society and transforming it into an industrial, urban one (Stalinist Soviet Union). The T-model led many political scientists and historians to deal almost exclusively with the state, the center and the top of the political pyramid, and make deductions from a supposedly fixed ideology, while largely ignoring social dynamics and the shifts and improvisations that characterized both Soviet and Nazi policies. Even more pernicious were the predictive parallels: since Nazi Germany had acted in an expansionist, aggressive way, it could be expected that another totalitarian regime would also be aggressive and expansionist. Indeed, during the Cold War, Western media and governments fostered the notion that the USSR was poised and ready to invade Western Europe. Any concessions to Soviet communism were labeled “appeasement,” a direct analogy to Western negotiations with the Nazis in the 1930s.

      Ironically, not only changing reality but the findings of specific studies belied the model. The most influential text, Merle Fainsod’s How Russia Is Ruled, the key text in the field for over a decade, appeared within months of Stalin’s death and saw little evidence that the Soviet system would change. Yet later when Fainsod (1907–1972) used an extraordinary cache of Soviet archives captured by the German invaders to write a ground-breaking study, Smolensk Under Soviet Rule (1958), he exposed a level of complexity that made “generalizing processes” like “urbanisation, industrialisation, collectivisation, secularisation, bureaucratisation, and totalitarianisation … seem rather pallid and abstract.”⁷⁵ His younger colleague, Barrington Moore, Jr. (1913–2005), asked the important question regarding the relationship between Leninist ideology and the actual policies and products of the Soviet regime under Stalin, and concluded that the Bolshevik ideology of ends—greater equality, empowerment of working people, internationalism—had been trumped by the Bolshevik ideology of means—“the need for authority and discipline.” The “means have swallowed up and distorted the original ends.” Instead of “humane anarchism,” the very elasticity of Communist doctrine allowed for the entry of nationalism, pragmatism, and inequalities that ultimately used anti-authoritarian ideas to justify and support an authoritarian