As far as our knowledge of the Stalin era is concerned, Fainsod’s publication of the Smolensk Archive, which I mentioned before, has remained by far the most important publication, and it is deplorable that this first random selection has not yet been followed up by a more extensive publication of the material. To judge from Fainsod’s book, there is much to learn for the period of Stalin’s struggle for power in the mid-twenties: We now know how precarious the position of the party was,8 not only because a mood of outright opposition prevailed in the country but because it was riddled with corruption and drunkenness; that outspoken antisemitism accompanied nearly all demands for liberalization;9 that the drive for collectivization and dekulakization from 1928 onward actually interrupted the NEP, Lenin’s new economic policy, and with it a beginning reconciliation between the people and its government;10 how fiercely these measures were resisted by the solidarity of the whole peasant class, which decided that “it’s better not to be born than to join the kolkhoz”11 and refused to be split up into rich, middle, and poor peasants in order to rise against the kulaks12—“there sits somebody who is worse than these kulaks and who is only planning how to hunt people down”;13 and that the situation was not much better in the cities, where the workers refused to co-operate with the party-controlled trade unions and addressed the management as “well-fed devils,” “hypocritical walleyes,” and the like.14
Fainsod rightly points out that these documents clearly show not only “wide-spread mass discontent” but also the lack of any “sufficiently organized opposition” against the regime as a whole. What he fails to see, and what in my opinion is equally supported by the evidence, is that there existed an obvious alternative to Stalin’s seizure of power and transformation of the one-party dictatorship into total domination, and this was the pursuance of the NEP policy as it had been initiated by Lenin.15 Moreover, the measures taken by Stalin with the introduction of the First Five Year Plan in 1928, when his control of the party was almost complete, prove that transformation of classes into masses and the concomitant elimination of all group solidarity are the condition sine qua non of total domination.
With respect to the period of Stalin’s undisputed rule from 1929 onward, the Smolensk Archive tends to confirm what we knew before from less irrefutable sources. This is even true for some of its odd lacunae, especially those concerning statistical data. For this lack proves merely that, in this as in other respects, the Stalin regime was ruthlessly consistent: all facts that did not agree, or were likely to disagree, with the official fiction—data on crop-yields, criminality, true incidences of “counter-revolutionary” activities as distinguished from the later conspiracy fictions—were treated as non-facts. It was indeed quite in line with the totalitarian contempt for facts and reality that all such data, instead of being collected in Moscow from the four corners of the immense territory, were first made known to the respective localities through publication in Pravda, Izvestia, or some other official organ in Moscow, so that every region and every district of the Soviet Union received its official, fictitious statistical data in much the same way it received the no less fictitious norms allotted to them by the Five Year Plans.16
I shall briefly enumerate a few of the more striking points, which could only be guessed at before and which are now supported by documentary evidence. We always suspected, but we now know that the regime was never “monolithic” but “consciously constructed around overlapping, duplicating, and parallel functions,” and that this grotesquely amorphous structure was kept together by the same Führer-principle—the so-called “personality cult”—we find in Nazi Germany;17 that the executive branch of this particular government was not the party but the police, whose “operational activities were not regulated through party channels”; 18that the entirely innocent people whom the regime liquidated by the millions, the “objective enemies” in Bolshevik language, knew that they were “criminals without a crime”;19 that it was precisely this new category, as distinguished from the earlier true foes of the regime—assassins of government officials, arsonists, or bandits—that reacted with the same “complete passivity”20 we know so well from the behavior patterns of the victims of Nazi terror. There was never any doubt that the “flood of mutual denunciations” during the Great Purge was as disastrous for the economic and social well-being of the country as it was effective in strengthening the totalitarian ruler, but we know only now how deliberately Stalin set this “ominous chain of denunciations in motion,”21 when he proclaimed officially on July 29, 1936: “The inalienable quality of every Bolshevik under present conditions should be the ability to recognize an enemy of the Party no matter how well he may be masked.”22 (Italics added.) For just as Hitler’s “Final Solution” actually meant to make the command “Thou shalt kill” binding for the elite of the Nazi party, Stalin’s pronouncement prescribed: “Thou shalt bear false testimony,” as a guiding rule for the conduct of all members of the Bolshevik party. Finally, all doubts one still might have nourished about the amount of truth in the current theory, according to which the terror of the late twenties and thirties was “the high price in suffering” exacted by industrialization and economic progress, are laid at rest by this first glimpse into the actual state of affairs and the course of events in one particular region.23 Terror produced nothing of the sort. The best documented resuit of dekulakization, collectivization, and the Great Purge was neither progress nor rapid industrialization but famine, chaotic conditions in the production of food, and depopulation. The consequences have been a perpetual crisis in agriculture, an interruption of population growth, and the failure to develop and colonize the Siberian hinterland. Moreover, as the Smolensk Archive spells out in detail, Stalin’s methods of rule succeeded in destroying whatever measure of competence and technical know-how the country had acquired after the October Revolution. And all this together was indeed an incredibly “high price,” not just in suffering, exacted for the opening of careers in the party and government bureaucracies to sections of the population which often were not merely “politically illiterate.”24 The truth is that the price of totalitarian rule was so high that in neither Germany nor Russia has it yet been paid in full.
III
I MENTIONED before the detotalitarization process which followed upon Stalin’s death. In 1958, I was not yet sure that the “thaw” was more than a temporary relaxation, a kind of emergency measure due to the successor crisis and not unlike the considerable loosening of totalitarian controls during the Second World War. Even today we cannot know if this process is final and irreversible, but it surely can no longer be called temporary or provisional. For however one may read the often bewildering zigzag line of Soviet policies since 1953, it is undeniable that the huge police empire was liquidated, that most of the concentration camps were dissolved, that no new purges against “objective enemies” have been introduced, and that conflicts between members of the new “collective leadership” are now being resolved by demotion and exile from Moscow rather than by show trials, confessions, and assassinations. No doubt, the methods used by the new rulers in the years after Stalin’s death still followed closely the pattern set by Stalin after Lenin’s death: there emerged again a triumvirate called “collective leadership,” a term coined by Stalin in 1925, and after four years of intrigues and contest for power, there was a repetition of Stalin’s coup d’état in 1929, namely, Khrushchev’s seizure of power in 1957. Technically speaking, Khrushchev’s coup followed the methods of his dead and denounced master very closely. He too needed an outside force in order to win power in the party hierarchy, and he used the support of Marshal Zhukov and the army exactly the same way Stalin had used his relationships to the secret police in the succession struggle of thirty years ago.25 Just as in the case of Stalin, in which the supreme power after the coup continued to reside in the party, not in the police, so in Khrushchev’s case “by the end of 1957 the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had attained a place of undisputed supremacy in all aspec
ts of Soviet life”;26 for just as Stalin had never hesitated to purge his police cadres and liquidate their chief, so Khrushchev had followed up his inner-party maneuvers by removing Zhukov from the Presidium and Central Committee of the party, to which he had been elected after the coup, as well as from his post as highest commander of the army.
To be sure, when Khrushchev appealed to Zhukov for support, the army’s ascendancy over the police was an accomplished fact in the Soviet Union. This had been one of the automatic consequences of the breaking up of the police empire whose rule over a huge part of Soviet industries, mines, and real estate had been inherited by the managerial group, who suddenly found themselves rid of their most serious economic competitor. The automatic ascendancy of the army even more decisive; it now held a clear monopoly of the instruments of violence with which to decide inner-party conflicts. It speaks for Khrushchev’s shrewdness that he grasped these consequences of what they presumably had done together more rapidly than his colleagues. But whatever his motives, the consequences of this shift of emphasis from the police to the military in the power game were of great consequence. It is true, ascendancy of the secret police over the military apparatus is the hallmark of many tyrannies, and not only the totalitarian; however, in the case of totalitarian government the preponderance of the police not merely answers the need for suppressing the population at home but fits the ideological claim to global rule. For it is evident that those who regard the whole earth as their future territory will stress the organ of domestic violence and will rule conquered territory with police methods and personnel rather than with the army. Thus, the Nazis used their SS troops, essentially a police force, for the rule and even the conquest of foreign territories, with the ultimate aim of an amalgamation of the army and the police under the leadership of the SS.
Moreover, the significance of this change in the balance of power had been manifest before, at the occasion of the suppression by force of the Hungarian Revolution. The bloody crushing of the revolution, terrible and effective as it was, had been accomplished by regular army units and not by police troops, and the consequence was that it did by no means represent a typically Stalinist solution. Although the military operation was followed by the execution of the leaders and the imprisonment of thousands, there was no wholesale deportation of the people; in fact, no attempt at depopulating the country was made. And since this was a military operation and not a police action, the Soviets could afford sending enough aid to the defeated country to prevent mass starvation and to stave off a complete collapse of the economy in the year following the revolution. Nothing, surely, would have been farther from Stalin’s mind under similar circumstances.
The clearest sign that the Soviet Union can no longer be called totalitarian in the strict sense of the term is, of course, the amazingly swift and rich recovery of the arts during the last decade. To be sure, efforts to rehabilitate Stalin and to curtail the increasingly vocal demands for freedom of speech and thought among students, writers, and artists recur again and again, but none of them has been very successful or is likely to be successful without a full-fledged re-establishment of terror and police rule. No doubt, the people of the Soviet Union are denied all forms of political freedom, not only freedom of association but also freedom of thought, opinion and public expression. It looks as though nothing has changed, while in fact everything has changed. When Stalin died the drawers of writers and artists were empty; today there exists a whole literature that circulates in manuscript and all kinds of modern painting are tried out in the painters’ studios and become known even though they are not exhibited. This is not to minimize the difference between tyrannical censorship and freedom of the arts, it is only to stress the fact that the difference between a clandestine literature and no literature equals the difference between one and zero.
Furthermore, the very fact that members of the intellectual opposition can have a trial (though not an open one), can make themselves heard in the courtroom and count upon support outside it, do not confess to anything but plead not guilty, demonstrates that we deal here no longer with total domination. What happened to Sinyavsky and Daniel, the two writers who in February 1966 were tried for having published works abroad which could not have been published in the Soviet Union and who were sentenced to seven and five years of hard labor respectively, was certainly outrageous by all standards of justice in constitutional government; but what they had to say was heard around the world and is not likely to be forgotten. They did not disappear in the hole of oblivion which totalitarian rulers prepare for their opponents. Less well known but perhaps even more convincing is that Khrushchev’s own and most ambitious attempt at reversing the process of detotalitarization turned into a complete failure. In 1957, he introduced a new “law against social parasites,” which would have enabled the regime to reintroduce mass deportations, re-establish slave labor on a large scale, and—most importantly for total domination—to let loose another flood of mass denunciations; for “parasites” were supposed to be selected by the people themselves in mass meetings. The “law,” however, met with the opposition of Soviet jurists and was dropped before it could even be tried out.27 In other words, the people of the Soviet Union have emerged from the nightmare of totalitarian rule to the manifold hardships, dangers, and injustices of one-party dictatorship; and while it is entirely true that this modern form of tyranny offers none of the guarantees of constitutional government, that “even accepting the presuppositions of Communist ideology, all power in the USSR is ultimately illegitimate,”28 and that the country therefore can relapse into totalitarianism between one day and another without major upheavals, it is also true that the most horrible of all new forms of government, whose elements and historical origins I set out to analyze, came no less to an end in Russia with the death of Stalin than totalitarianism came to an end in Germany with the death of Hitler.
This book deals with totalitarianism, its origins and its elements, whereas its aftermath in either Germany or Russia is pertinent to its considerations only insofar as it is likely to throw light on what happened before. Hence, not the period after Stalin’s death but rather the postwar era of his rule is of relevance in our context. And these eight years, from 1945 to 1953, confirm and spin out, they don’t either contradict or add new elements to what had been manifest since the middle thirties. The events that followed upon victory, the measures taken to reaffirm total domination after the temporary relaxation of the war period in the Soviet Union as well as those by which totalitarian rule was introduced in the satellite countries, were all in accord with the rules of the game as we had come to know it. The Bolshevization of the satellites started with popular-front tactics and a sham parliamentary system, proceeded quickly to the open establishment of one-party dictatorships in which the leaders and members of the formerly tolerated parties were liquidated, and then reached the last stage when the native Communist leaders, whom Moscow rightly or wrongly mistrusted, were brutally framed, humiliated in show trials, tortured, and killed under the rulership of the most corrupt and most despicable elements in the party, namely those who were primarily not Communists but agents of Moscow. It was as though Moscow repeated in great haste all the stages of the October Revolution up to the emergence of totalitarian dictatorship. The story therefore, while unspeakably horrible, is without much interest of its own and varies little: what happened in one satellite country happened at almost the same moment in all others from the Baltic Sea down to the Adriatic. Events differed in regions which were not included into the satellite system. The Baltic states were directly incorporated into the Soviet Union and fared considerably worse than the satellites: more than half a million people were deported from the three small countries and an “enormous influx of Russian settlers” began to threaten the native populations with minority status in their own countries.29 East Germany, on the other hand, is only now, after the erection of the Berlin Wall, slowly being incorporated into the satellite system, having been treated before ra
ther as occupied territory with a Quisling government.
The Origins of Totalitarianism Page 4