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#12 - JRL 8076
Date: Fri, 20 Feb 2004
From: Tony Phillips <aaphil@unimelb.edu.au>
Subject: Totalitarian v revisionists/Gessen

I know this piece is a little late (and long) but I beg indulgence since for those of us living in the southern hemisphere January and February are your July and August and I am just catching up since returning to the desktop.

I am moved to make a contribution to the revisionist/totalitarian debate in itself (JL 8045 ff) and with a sideways glance at the debate sparked by Masha Gessen in the same issue.

It seems to me that while the earlier models of totalitarianism provided useful building blocks for theorising and understanding I agree with Gentes (8050) that it is true they were far too often hostage to the cold war necessities of providing a Soviet Union that was the opposite of an idealised pluralistic and liberal United States. Us = freedom them = unfreedom etc. Suitable for the Reagans and Bushs of this world but severely compromised as academic work. Then again perhaps this is just a normal outcome in the States, flowing from scholars mixing so intimately with Presidential administrations and the MIC.

Those who extended the totalitarian view tended to overplay the role and power of ideology, to the point where communist ideas and the pursuit of them explained the entire structure. This was understandable but at its worst little more than a mirroring of crude Bolshevik dialectical materialism in Hegelian guise. The logic of the Bolshevik ideas was seen as containing the totality of the political and economic system. The best put forward "Western" version of this tendency was, in my opinion, Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism (though she knew more about Nazi Germany than the Soviet Union). Of course writers such as Victor Serge and Orwell had earlier fleshed out in literature and journalism much of the sociology of life under the rule of ideology.

The revisionists, and I would place Hough and Cohen as two of their best exponents (with genuflections to Shelia Fitzpatrick and R.W. Davies), provided a particular service by producing understandings of the Soviet Union that allowed interests and institutions, and the oppositions and unities between them, back into the picture along with contingency. Totalitarians, especially of the US variety, all too often characterised the Soviet Union as a static world. An unchanging and hierarchically unified apparatus of power. Orwell’s boot in the human face over and over for ever. Their concern, systemic abuse of human rights, was of course the most salient one of the twentieth century, especially in hindsight, but the picture was obscuring. Under the totalitarian view meaningful change just couldn’t and didn’t happen.

No better proof of this than when communism collapsed. At first Gorbachev was simply viewed as a wolf seducing the gullible liberal (revisionists) of the West. Then when real change, followed by collapse, occurred it was still completely unexpected and mostly unforecast. A possible exception was Brzezinski’s The Grand Failure (1989).

Having lived in Russia at the beginning of the 1990s, including in the late Soviet period, I feel great empathy for the views put forward by Vadim Berstein (JRL 8060) on the Gessen debate about Western media. If he coming to West in 1991 couldn't believe the Western media coverage I can say that most Western writing and journalism had done little to prepare me for the reality of Soviet life. It was far more ad hoc for a start. I was also doing some freelance journalism at the time and it was very hard as a virtual unknown to persuade any editors in the West to run copy that stated, or even intimated, that Gorbachev was finished as a politician. Yet that the system had to either break or clamp down in the near future seemed obvious from the ground. The usual reply was "that’s not what everyone else is writing". I met with similar problems when filing stories around the Sept/Oct events of 1993. These are not examples of the "framing" that Gessen noted but rather point to the way in which the media acts as a pack on the one hand, and on the other the degree to which it is frequently isolated from the local population and culture when on foreign assignment (a point Gessen is making).

I might conclude by asserting that the two best works of totalitarian interpretation come not from Anglo scholars but from Easterners.

Dictatorship over Needs (1983), by the Hungarians of the Budapest school, Feher, Heller and Markus, was a definitive exposition of the communist system, the book’s only failing being that it came close on the midnight of communism and yet painted a system they did not foresee changing!

The view from the bottom, the anthropology, was Zinoviev’s The Reality of Communism (1981) and it’s earlier literary form, The Yawning Heights. Inspired and over the top Zinoviev’s work is a searing exposition of what might be called the demoral(ity)ising effects of Soviet life. In a world where civic groups were excluded from autonomy (and thus morally powerless), and materialism was worshiped, Zinoviev was prophetic in his characterisation of Soviet man as more individualistic, acquisitive and lacking in morality or public mindedness than any capitalist of Marxist imagination.

Of course he was wrong about the bulk of Soviet citizens, who to my mind have kept a massive amount of moral fortitude and goodness about themselves whilst buried under the Soviet system for 70 odd years. However, they seemingly all tell you that everyone else is homo Sovieticus. I think this is incorrect but it certainly does appear that it is the species of homo Sovieticus who have been running the country for at least the last 12 years!

A final irony is that while the early Soviet Union had projected onto it the dreams and aspirations of the Western left and the demonology of the Western right, the post-Soviet homo Sovieticus has so embraced the fantasies and language of the Western right that the projections are now arguably reversed. Saddest of all remain the ordinary Russians, at risk of being again orientalised into an imaginary place and people by the West for its own purposes. This latter point comes through clearly in the debate sparked on Johnson’s list by Masha Gessen’s piece.

Gessen’s points seemed highly salient to me and produced a stimulating exchange, but the debate itself is in danger of becoming a series of narcissistic reflections on American power, policy, culture and ideology in the manner of the "Who lost Russia?" debate back in the 1990s. What American’s think of Russia does matter but nowhere near as much as what is happening in Russia and Russians’ minds. Whether the foreign journalists can and are conveying useful glimpses and analysis of this remains a question. My suggestion is the old saw, "they need to get out more" (perhaps while they still can).

Tony Phillips
Research Fellow
Contemporary Europe Research Centre
University of Melbourne
email: aaphil@unimelb.edu.au