Stalinist Historiography

Studies in East European Thought

The article explains why Soviet dissidents and the reformers of the Gorbachev era chose to characterize the Soviet system as totalitarian. The dissidents and the reformers strongly disagreed among themselves about the origins of Soviet totalitarianism. But both groups stressed the effects of totalitarianism on the individual personality; in doing so, they revealed themselves to be the heirs of the tsarist intelligentsia. Although the concept of totalitarianism probably obscures more than it clarifies when it is applied to regimes like the Nazi and the Soviet, the decision of the dissidents and the reformers to use the term enabled them to clarify their own values and the reasons they felt compelled to criticize the Soviet Union and to call for its radical reform.

The Evolution of Totalitarianism: From Stalin to Putin, 2013

The Soviet Union is commonly cited as "totalitarian." But just how totalitarian was the Soviet Union? The modern Russian Federation? There is an ongoing debate in Georgia about the Soviet past, the role of Stalin in Georgian history, an importance of Soviet legacies in shaping the nationalist discourse after independence and etc. Various roundtables and conferences reflecting on the historical, political and sociological contexts of the Soviet occupation are held in Georgian academic institutions and universities. On a discursive level, it is taken as a given that the „Evil Empire‟ was indeed totalitarian – brutally repressive, all-encompassing, and terrorizing. The term "totalitarian" embodies a multitude of concepts which we will try to discuss in a historical perspective, testing the extent of applicability and relevance of this term to modern-day Russia.

Perspectives on Politics, 2017

The concept of totalitarianism emerged between the two world wars in twentieth-century Europe to become a central concept of Cold War social science designed to highlight similarities between the Nazi and Soviet regimes and implicitly to contrast these forms of dictatorship with liberal democracy. While in the 1960s and 1970s many critics challenged the concept’s Cold War uses as an ideology of “the West,” the idea of totalitarianism and later “post-totalitarianism” played important roles in East Central Europe, where they helped dissident intellectuals, academics, and activists both to understand and to challenge Soviet-style communism. The concept of “totalitarianism” remains heavily contested. But whatever one thinks about the concept’s social scientific validity, there can be no doubt that it played a crucial role in both the scholarship of communism and the public intellectual debates about the possibilities of post-communism. Aviezer Tucker’s The Legacies of Totalitarianism: A...

(Cızık, C. 2019. Analysis of Totalitarianism in Hannah Arendt's Views, Ankara) In this study, based on the views of Hannah Arent, the place of totalitarianism in the historical scene, the factors that prepare totalitarianism and the elements that provide dominance of totalitarianism are discussed. The aim of the study is to present Arendt's thoughts on totalitarism with a general evaluation. In accordance with first of all, the place of the concepts of antisemitism and imperialism in the preparation stage for totalitarianism is tried to be examined and the meaning of these concepts for Arendt is examined. In the following parts, the elements such as mass, terror, secret police, propaganda and organization which are considered as elements of totalitarianism are tried to be explained. Those examples are considered as tools of totalitarianism and with those tools as an unique and modern phenomenon, absolute domination of totalitarianism is discussed.

How did The Origin of Totalitarianism (Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism 1951) become a seminal work, how was it received by the broader culture, and how it does it continue to be relevant within the modern political science and political philosophy zeitgeist? While Arendt’s work is thoughtfully written in prose and structure, one can note a mixture of passion and anger. In elucidating the same masses that were either actively or silently complicit in the rise of authoritarian states across the globe, she is careful to highlight the threats that their veiled anti-semitism had in the formulation and execution of the authoritarian states of the now vanquished Nazi Germany and still ascendant Soviet Union. She strove to illustrate how something as accepted, even mildly, as the dehumanization or othering of a sector of the people could be spun into and out into a spasm of domination and fear. In this striving, she succeeded.

Europe-Asia Studies

APSA 2012 Annual Meeting Paper, 2012

Abstract: This paper attempts to show how the widespread illusion of Soviet-type regimes as totalitarian systematically blinded scholars, policy-makers, and the broader public, to processes of change that had begun to work even before Stalin ’s death. It also takes the totalitarian illusion as a concrete example of a more general blinding influence of essentialistic methodology and thought on social science research, and suggests ways of breaking out of this essentialist trap. The ssentialist methodology dominating Soviet ...

2000

Postmodern Openings, 2015

The concept of totalitarianism is, undoubtedly, one of the most disputed terms in political language. This article investigates the conflict between the classical interpretations of totalitarian system that was frequently seen from the monolithic and revisionist perspective which offered some pluralistic models of Soviet and Nazi systems. The main purpose of the article is to show that, in this frame of the debates, the monolithic understanding of totalitarianism was inaccurate, therefore damaging the concept itself.