Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has revived the use of a word that had long been out of fashion – totalitarianism. Given the battle for Ukraine is frequently described as “Putin’s War,” we are under the impression that the Russian president is acting alone. That he alone made the decision to invade Ukraine, and that he alone is carrying out the war in Ukraine.
The word “totalitarian” was in fashion for about thirty years, from the 1950s through the 1980s. It grew out of the history of German Naziism and Soviet Communism, especially though not exclusively during the years that Stalin was still in power. (He died in 1953.) Most famous was philosopher Hannah Arendt’s book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, especially part three titled, simply, Totalitarianism.
To Arendt, writing in the 1950s, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin were the templates for what a totalitarian leader looks like. As the word itself suggests, the implication is the totalitarian leader has total control not just of the state but of the people. Total control of everything and everyone. Moreover, totalitarian leaders are never satisfied with what they have. Invariably, inevitably, they want more. Arendt wrote:
The struggle for total domination of the total population of the earth, the elimination of every competing nontotalitarian reality, is inherent in totalitarian regimes themselves. If they do not pursue total control as their ultimate goal, they are only too likely to lose whatever power they already seized.
Sound familiar? Sound like Putin who could not be satisfied with what he had, who needed, craved, lusted for more?
In the 1980s the widely esteemed, Polish-born political scientist and, under President Jimmy Carter, national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, similarly described Hitler and Stalin as prototypes of totalitarian leaders. In his book – Brzezinski was also a prolific author – titled The Grand Failure, he wrote:
Both elevated the State into the highest organ of collective action, both used brutal terror as the means of exacting social obedience, and both engaged in mass murders without parallel in human history. Both also organized their social control by similar means, ranging from youth groups to neighborhood informers to centralized and totally censored means of mass communication. And, finally, both asserted that they were engaged in constructing all-powerful “socialist” states.
But before we fall into the trap of thinking that these men acted alone, let’s be clear. They did not. Of course, they did not, they could not. Like all leaders they relied on legions of others, on their followers, to do the heavy lifting. Concentration camps were not, only, Hitler’s concentration camps. The Gulag was not, only, Stalin’s gulag. Ukraine is not, only, Putin’s War.
Arendt understood the role of the leader – the totalitarian leader – in a totalitarian system. She understood that though he was all-powerful, he was not alone nor did he act alone.
In the center of the movement, as the motor that swings it into motion, sits the Leader. He is separated from the elite formation by an inner circle of the initiated who spread around him an aura of impenetrable mystery which corresponds to his “intangible preponderance.” His position within this intimate circle depends on his ability to spin intrigues among its members and upon his skill in constantly changing its personnel. He owes his rise to leadership to an extreme ability to handle inner party struggles for power.
Is Vladimir Putin a totalitarian leader? History will decide. For now, suffice to say that even Hitler and Stalin had help.
Here’s how Simon Sebag Montefiore put it in his book, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar.
The temptation has been to blame all the crimes on one man, Stalin. There is an obsession in the West today with the cult of villainy: a macabre but inane competition between Stalin and Hitler to find the “world’s most evil dictator” by counting their supposed victims. This is demonology not history. It has the effect of merely indicting one madman and offers us no lesson about either the danger of utopian ideas and systems, or the responsibility of individuals.