of these societies the regime was unable to achieve the full expectation of the totalitarian model, that is, the absolute and total control over the whole of society and the atomization of the population. What was truly totalitarian in Stalinism or Nazism were the intentions and aspirations of rulers like Hitler or Stalin, who may have had ambitions to create a society in which the party and the people were one, and in which the interests of all were harmonized and all dissent destroyed. But the control of so-called totalitarian states was never so total as to turn the people into “little screws” (vintiki, Stalin’s word) to do the bidding of the state. Despite all the limitations of the model, scholars writing in this tradition illuminated anomalous aspects of the Stalinist and post-Stalinist regimes that contradicted the fundaments of the totalitarianism paradigm. At the same time, though less widely regarded, critics of liberalism and market society, from the Marxists of the Frankfurt School to post-modernist cultural theorists, took note of the “totalitarian” effects of modernity more generally—of technology, industrialism, commercialism, and capitalism—which were excluded from the original model.85
The Modernization Paradigm
The Cold War American academy celebrated the achievements of American society and politics, which had reached an unprecedented level of stability and prosperity. Historians of the “consensus school” held that Americans were united by their shared fundamental values; political scientists compared the pluralistic, democratic norm of the United States to other societies, usually unfavorably. America was “the good society itself in operation,” “with the most developed set of political and class relations,” “the image of the European future,” a model for the rest of the globe.86 Western social science worked from an assumed Western master narrative brought to bear on non-Western societies: they too were expected to evolve as had Western Europe from theocratic to secular values, from status to contract, from more restricted to freer capitalist economies, from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, in a word, from tradition to modernity.
Elaborating ideas from the classical social theorists Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, modernization theory proposed that societies would progressively assume greater control over nature and human suffering through developments in science, technology, mass education, economic growth, and urbanization. While Marxism may also be understood as a theory of modernization, complete with its own theory of history that reached beyond capitalism to socialism, what might be called “liberal modernization theory” was elaborated in opposition to Marxism and claimed that the best road to modernity lay through capitalism (though not necessarily through democracy as well), with no necessary transcendence to a post-capitalist socialism.87 Since the modern was usually construed to be American liberal capitalist democracy, this powerful, evolving discourse of development and democracy legitimized a new post-colonial role for the developed world vis-à-vis the underdeveloped. The West would lead the less fortunate into prosperity and modernity, stability and progress, and the South (and later the East) would follow.
Modernizationists divided between optimists, who held that all people had the capacity to reach Western norms if they had the will or managed the transition properly, and pessimists, who believed that not all non-Western cultures were able to modernize and reach democracy. For an optimist like Gabriel Almond (1911–2002), one of the most prominent comparative politics scholars of his generation, human history was generally seen to be progressive, leading upward, inevitably, to something that looked like the developed West.88 Classic works such as Seymour Martin Lipset’s Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (1960) and Almond and Sidney Verba’s The Civic Culture (1963) considered a democratic political culture with civic values of trust and tolerance, crucial prerequisites for democracy that would somehow have to be instilled in modernizing societies. Democracy, development, and anti-communism were values that went together. As in the years following World War I, so during the Cold War, poverty was not only undesirable but a positive danger, precisely because it enflamed minds and could potentially lead to communism.
The Soviet Union presented the modernizationists with an anomalous example of a perverse road to modernity that looked very seductive to anti-imperialist revolutionaries. With American scholarship intimately linked to the global struggle against Soviet communism, the modernization paradigm both provided an argument for the universal developmental pattern from traditional society to modern, a path that the Third World was fated to follow, and touted the superiority and more complete modernity of capitalist democracy American-style. A team of researchers and writers at MIT’s Center for International Studies (CENIS) worked in the modernization mode, developing analyses of the deviant Soviet road. CENIS, a conduit between the university community and the national government, had been established with CIA funding and was directed by Max Millikan, former assistant director of the intelligence agency. No specialist on the Soviet Union, the MIT economic historian Walt Whitman Rostow (1916–2003) published The Dynamics of Soviet Society (1952), in which he and his team argued that Soviet politics and society were driven by the “priority of power.” Where ideology came into conflict with the pursuit of power, ideology lost out.89 After being turned over to the CIA and the State Department, and vetted by Philip E. Mosley (1905–1972) of Columbia’s Russian Institute and others before it was declassified and published, Rostow’s study was released to the public as a work of independent scholarship.90
In his later and much more influential book, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (1960), Rostow proposed that peoples moved from traditional society through the preconditions for take-off, to take-off, on to the drive to maturity, and finally to the age of high mass-consumption. He trumpeted that Russia, “as a great nation, well endowed by nature and history to create a modern economy and a modern society,” was in fact developing parallel to the West.91 But traditional society gave way slowly in Russia, and its take-off came only in the mid-1890s, thirty years after the United States, and its drive to maturity in the first five-year plans. Its growth was remarkable, but there was no need for alarm in the West, for its growth was built on under-consumption. Communism, which for Rostow was “a disease of the transition,” “is likely to wither in the age of high mass-consumption.”92
Most Sovietologists shared the general assumptions of modernization theory, and the most fervent adherents of the totalitarian concept made valiant attempts to preserve the T-model in the face of the challenge from the more dynamic modernization paradigm, or to reconcile the two. In a 1961 discussion, Brzezinski distinguished between the “totalitarian breakthrough” of Stalinism that destroyed the old order and created the framework for the new and the post-terror totalitarianism of the Khrushchev period.93 The latter looked much more like the corporate system described by John Armstrong (1922–2010) in his study of Ukrainian bureaucrats, managed by the “Red Executives” analyzed by David Granick (1926–1990) and Joseph Berliner (1921–2001).94 Brzezinski pointed out that Soviet ideology was no longer about revolution but the link that legitimized the rule of the party by tying it to the project of technical and economic modernization. Whereas Brzezinski argued that “indoctrination has replaced terror as the most distinctive feature of the system,” Alfred G. Meyer (1920–1998) went further: “acceptance and internalization of the central principles of the ideology have replaced both terror and frenetic indoctrination.” In what he called “spontaneous totalitarianism,” Meyer noted that “Soviet citizens have become more satisfied, loyal, and co-operative.”95 The USSR was simply a giant “company town” in which all of life is organized by the company.
The two models, however, differed fundamentally. The T-model was based on sharp differences between communist and liberal societies, while the modernization paradigm proposed a universal and shared development. For many writing in the modernization mode, the Soviet Union appeared as less aberrant than in the earlier model, a somewhat rougher alternative program of social and economic development. While some writers expected that the outcome of modernization would be democratic, more conservative authors were willing to settle for stability and order rather than representation of the popular will. For Samuel P. Huntington (1927–2008), a critic of liberal modernization theory, Communists were not
