Totalitarianism. David D. Roberts

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СКАЧАТЬ 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, however, that though totalitarianism cuts across the conventional Left–Right axis, it does not replace that axis, which remains essential for certain questions.

      At the same time, we must ask how much difference the persistence of preexisting elites and institutions actually made. They could be co-opted, even caught up in synergistic relationships with genuine fascists, so that it may be misleading to assume that one side had to be winning and the other losing and that conservative elites were marginalizing genuine fascists. Even in this particular, it may be too easy to overplay differences between the fascist and the Soviet regimes.

      A second objection concerns the image that had come to surround totalitarianism, based on a “structural model” positing top-down “total domination” as the aim, whether to serve power for its own sake or to pursue some fanatical ideological vision. Though it may linger in our imaginations, that model came to be largely rejected by specialists as research showed how chaotic, messy, and ultimately out of control the putatively totalitarian regimes actually were. Thus some came to find totalitarianism singularly inappropriate, even for dealing with Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia. In his widely admired study of the two regimes, published in 2004, Richard Overy found totalitarianism almost a joke, a “political-science fantasy” presupposing “domination through fear by psychopathic tyrants” who wield “total, unlimited power.”⁹ To discuss these regimes in terms of totalitarianism seems bound to throw us off.

The brief defense against this objection is to ask who says it was all about total control in the first place? And even insofar as, for whatever reason, that was part of the aim, totalitarianism might plausibly be understood as an aspiration, a tendency, with no implication of complete realization. Could we recast the category as a novel mode of collective action that proved, in practice, to entail a particular tendency to spin out of control?

      A third objection concerns the use of totalitarianism as a differentiating principle, especially to distinguish genuinely fascist regimes from other instances of right-wing, authoritarian dictatorship, such as Franco’s Spain or Salazar’s Portugal. Many recent authorities take its use for this purpose for granted, whether explicitly or implicitly. But scholars concerned primarily with cases other than Germany and Italy have charged that the totalitarian–authoritarian dichotomy tends to overstate differences, making the real-world distinctions too neat. Moreover, it obscures the interactive relationship between the fascist regimes and those that, though not fully fascist, were eager to learn from the seeming successes of the fascist regimes. And thus they cannot be understood as merely conservative, traditionalist, or authoritarian. The problem is that totalitarianism seems to imply an either–or approach that obscures the dynamic relationships of the time and thus fails to account for the novelty of these movements and regimes.

      But even if the totalitarian–authoritarian dichotomy was long overdone, totalitarianism, appropriately nuanced, can still serve as a differentiating category. This entails simply loosening the dichotomy, making it less either–or. It remains the case that if any political formation was not seeking or moving in a totalitarian direction, it was not fascism.

      In short, though these objections force us to nuance our thinking, they do not indicate that totalitarianism has outlived its usefulness – or was misguided in the first place. However, the category has been left СКАЧАТЬ