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 regime.76 In a second book, Moore shifted from a language of authority to the then current vocabulary of totalitarianism and elaborated a set of possible scenarios for the USSR, ranging from a rationalist technocracy to a traditionalist despotism. The Soviet state would continue to require terror, however, if it meant to remain a dynamic regime.77
As the Cold War consensus of the 1950s gave way to a growing discomfort with American policy, especially when containment of the Soviet threat turned into the military intervention in Vietnam, the Soviet Union itself was evolving away from Stalinism. Nikita Khrushchev ended the indiscriminate mass terror, loosened the state’s hold on the population, and opened small windows to the West. Increasingly, the regime attempted to govern through material satisfaction of popular needs and encouraged popular initiative. Persuasion and delivering material goods replaced the punishing terror of Stalinism. The monolithic Soviet empire in Eastern Europe showed signs of what was called “polycentrism,” a variety of “roads to socialism,” with somewhat increased autonomy, if not real independence, from the Kremlin. And, after nearly two decades of T-model dominance, the first serious critiques of totalitarianism appeared, first from political scientists and later from historians.
In 1965, Princeton political scientist and former diplomat Robert C. Tucker attempted to refine the concept of totalitarianism by analyzing the personalities of the dictators. He concluded that the system of totalitarianism was not the cause of the massive violence of the late 1930s, rather, terror was in large part an expression of the needs of the dictatorial personality of Stalin.78 In a more radical vein, Herbert J. Spiro and Benjamin R. Barber claimed that the concept of totalitarianism was the foundation of “American Counter-Ideology” in the Cold War years. Totalitarianism theory had played an important role in the reorientation of American foreign policy by helping “to explain away German and Japanese behavior under the wartime regimes and thereby to justify the radical reversal of alliances after the war.” A purported “logic of totalitarianism” provided an all-encompassing explanation of Communist behavior, which led to suspicion of liberation movements in Third World, a sense that international law and organizations were insufficiently strong to thwart totalitarian movements, and a justification of “the consequent necessity of considering the use of force—even thermonuclear force—in the settlement of world issues.”79 Totalitarian theory was a deployed ideological construction of the world that denied its own ideological nature, at a time when leading American thinkers proclaimed “the end of ideology.”80
Scholars had to shift their views or jigger with the model. For Merle Fainsod in 1953, terror had been the “linchpin of modern totalitarianism,” but ten years after Stalin’s death he revised that sentence to read: “Every totalitarian regime makes some place for terror in its system of controls.” In 1956, Brzezinski wrote that terror is “the most universal characteristic of totalitarianism.”81 But, in 1962, he reconsidered: terror is no longer essential; the USSR is now a “voluntarist totalitarian system” in which “persuasion, indoctrination, and social control can work more effectively.”82 Yet, in that same year, Harvard political scientist Adam B. Ulam insisted that “the essence of the Soviet political system” lies not in “transient aberrations arising out of willful and illegal acts of individuals,” but is, rather, “imposed by the logic of totalitarianism.” Given the immutable laws that follow from that logic, “in a totalitarian state terror can never be abolished entirely.”83 When the evidence of the waning of terror appeared to undermine that argument, Ulam spoke of a “sane pattern of totalitarianism, in contrast to the extreme of Stalin’s despotism” and “claimed that terror was “interfering with the objectives of totalitarianism itself.”84 But since Stalinism itself had earlier been seen as the archetype of totalitarianism, and terror its essence, Ulam inadvertently laid bare the fundamental confusion and contradictions of the concept.
From the mid-1960s, a younger generation of historians, many of them excited by the possibilities of a “social history” that looked beyond the state to examine society, were traveling to the Soviet Union through expanded academic exchange programs. The luckiest among them were privileged to work in heavily restricted archives, but all of them saw firsthand the intricacies, complexities, and contradictions of everyday Soviet life that fit poorly with the totalitarian image of ubiquitous fear and rigid conformity. Stimulated by the idea of a “history from below,” social historians pointed out that by concentrating on the political
