![]() The state did deploy violence in order to govern, but it did so because it was fragmented and weak, not all-powerful. It became clear that while the Soviet regime may have aspired to be totalitarian-to exercise complete control over a helpless population-actually existing socialism was something else entirely. ![]() Rigby pointed out that totalitarianism had “acquired such conflicting and misleading connotations and become embedded in such dubious social attitudes that its use tends to obscure rather than to communicate the reality behind it.” Yet it was only when Soviet archives opened up in the ’90s that people began to abandon the model. The “totalitarian model” gained such a powerful grip on people’s imaginations that when, in the ’80s, a new generation of scholars began poking holes in it, they took a pummeling, accused of being Communist sympathizers or apologists for Stalin’s crimes.Īs early as 1972, the great Sovietologist T. ![]() At the height of the Cold War, in the 1950s and ’60s, Western social scientists began using it to describe the political structure of the USSR, as part of an ideological effort to equate the Soviet system in general, and Stalinism in particular, with Nazism. The word totalitarianism has an ominous ring. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |