Totalitarianism. David D. Roberts

in 1919, other communist parties in Europe and beyond were founded under the Comintern umbrella. Among them was the Chinese Communist Party, launched in 1921. In adopting the communist label, they distinguished themselves from the socialist parties of the earlier Second International and committed to following the communist model under the tutelage of Russia (which became the Soviet Union in 1922). Entailing centralized discipline and control, the communist direction was arguably totalitarian precisely as the mainstream socialist direction was not.

      Totalitarianism has also been used to characterize tendencies even in liberal democracies. Critics on both the Left and the Right have sometimes claimed to discern a disturbing totalitarian potential inherent in secular modernity itself. The Left points to the modern reliance on instrumental reason and the use of knowledge for power and domination. Critiques from the libertarian Right often ran parallel as they lamented the seemingly relentless expansion of the modern state, assuming ever more powers and responsibilities, arguably at the expense of individual freedom.

      From either direction, that totalitarian potential might be considerably enhanced by new methods of government surveillance through social media and the internet, or of societal manipulation through genetic profiling and engineering. But is the totalitarianism category, which was, and to some extent remains, intertwined with the era of fascism and Stalinism, sufficiently flexible to illuminate such contemporary phenomena or, with all its baggage by this point, is it more likely to throw us off?

We must keep in mind, to be sure, that our key categories inevitably evolve or even “grow” with historical experience, as the trajectory of other key concepts in political theory, such as revolution, freedom, and sovereignty, make clear. Studying more recent instances might add to what we mean or understand by totalitarianism. But though the range is not delimited in some predetermined way, such concepts may get diluted, losing analytical power, as they are stretched to encompass ever more cases. So how much can the totalitarianism category grow with new experience?

      Quite apart from the question of flexibility, a tendency toward careless usage, resulting from overfamiliarity, has threatened to make the category flabby. Even in scholarly discourse, totalitarianism is often used in a largely unexamined way, and in general discussion, usage sometimes veers from dilution to over-the-top sci fi fantasy.

      In a television documentary on Evelyn Cameron, a pioneering English-born photographer who settled in remote eastern Montana in the late 1890s, a British photography expert refers to her “almost totalitarian feel for the image.”⁴ Filmmakers, especially, have sometimes been accused of seeking total control in order to manipulate the audience. But totalitarian? Such casual usage surely waters down the category unduly.

      More plausible is Anna Burns’s use of the category in a recent novel to characterize the tense, oppressive, tightly controlled environment on the local level during the recent sectarian struggles in Northern Ireland.⁵ All aspects of life had become intensely politicized, with no escape. But though her narrator memorably conveys the sense of stifling oppressiveness, Burns too is stretching the category because there is no totalitarian intention or system but simply the atmosphere that has resulted from the sectarian struggle itself.

Masha Gessen, a highly regarded American journalist with a Soviet background, uses “totalitarianism” more conventionally to characterize a full-scale political regime in the subtitle of her recent book The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. However, she invokes the category in a casual, unthinking way, seemingly because authoritarianism, autocracy, or dictatorship would not have had the same critical bite.⁶ She displays little sense of why most observers have seen Putin’s Russia as merely authoritarian instead. But perhaps that consensus reflects a delimited understanding of totalitarianism. And Gessen may be onto something, despite her too casual usage. We will return to the issue when considering Putin’s Russia in chapter 5.

Grounds for doubt about the category

      Although “totalitarianism” continues to be widely used, some observers have come to feel that it obscures more than it illuminates. By the 1970s, it was widely charged that totalitarianism had become a mere Cold War propaganda tool to discredit the Soviet Union through association with Nazi Germany. With the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the end of the Cold War, such concerns have diminished, but they have by no means disappeared altogether.

      In any case, the Cold War objection points to a more general question concerning the legitimacy of lumping fascism and communism as instances of totalitarianism when they seem so radically different, even diametrically opposed, in origin, ideology, and initial purpose. Moreover, the communists eliminated most forms of private property while the fascists did not. Both fascist regimes, though especially the Italian, rested on compromise with preexisting elites and institutions. The Soviets did away with the old regime far more systematically. Even if totalitarianism might account for certain common features, lumping fascist and communist regimes under the one category might seem inherently to be glossing over too much.

In their important co-edited volume, provocatively entitled Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared, Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick do not object to the category on the grounds of its political valences. Rather, they worry that, as applied to the Nazi and Soviet cases, it has led to an overemphasis on commonalities at the expense of deeper differences, as indicated, they argue, by the innovative new research, conducted without the prism of totalitarianism, conveyed in their volume.⁷ In a similar vein, Michael David-Fox, introducing a book treating Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany as entangled histories, writes that since 1997 “many scholars have begun to search for new ways of looking at the two fields that challenge or go beyond the older comparisons written in the vein of totalitarianism theory.”⁸ Like Geyer and Fitzpatrick, he takes it for granted that, even if it might have been useful earlier, the totalitarianism approach must be left behind if we are to develop fresh insights.

      Use of the totalitarianism category surely did reflect Cold War hostility to the Soviet Union on occasion, but resistance to the category on the part of those relatively sympathetic to the Soviet experiment also reflected Cold War pressures. In any case, the possibility of misuse does not in itself undermine the utility of the category, either as an analytical and comparative tool or as a way of characterizing aspirations and dynamics in practice. Put differently, the fact that it could serve Cold War purposes does not mean that this was the primary purpose, or that it did so in every case.

      But I noted that doubts about lumping together fascism and communism cut deeper. Few would deny that some combination of similarities and differences was at work, but those objecting to lumping may not do justice to the real-world dynamic bringing the particular fascist and communist regimes at issue closer together than an abstract consideration might recognize.

      The difference in originating aspirations does not rule out such commonalities, especially in light of the Leninist break from orthodox Marxism and the Stalinist break from within Leninism. Once the Soviets began pursuing “socialism in one country,” their Marxist underpinnings, which might seem especially to differentiate them from fascism, became ever more tenuous, even mythical. It remains the case that the Soviets made an anti-capitalist revolution as the fascists did not, but the Soviets and fascists were moving in a common statist, or arguably totalitarian, direction as an alternative to free market capitalism.

The fascists had concluded that the problem was not capitalism or private property but the wider liberal culture, which seemed responsible for what was most objectionable about capitalism. A change in political culture might yield a qualitatively superior relationship between the political and economic spheres even if major aspects of private property remained. For their part, the Soviets concluded that socialism in one country required crash industrialization based on forced collectivization in agriculture – a process very much directed from the top. Whether the break came with Lenin or with Stalin, the actual Soviet regime ended up sufficiently overlapping with the fascist regimes that not only can it be compared with them but it can fruitfully be considered together with them as instances of totalitarianism. It must be emphasized,