Movement, Formation, and Maintenance in the Soviet Union
Movement, Formation, and Maintenance in the Soviet Union

Victor Zaslavsky’s Challenge to the Arendtian Theory of Totalitarianism

Author(s): Peter Baehr
Subject(s): History, Political Theory, Governance
Published by: Central European University Press
Keywords: totalitarianism;Soviet Union;
Summary/Abstract: A perusal of Victor Zaslavsky’s bibliography shows that his studies of the Soviet Union passed through three discernible phases; although none are severed from the others, each possesses a unique emphasis. The writings collected in The Neo-Stalinist State (1982) are primarily devoted to the USSR during the Brezhnev era, a time of uneasy consolidation or “system-maintenance.” The days of mass terror and ideological fervor were over. Soviet society was undergoing the steady routinization of the founders’ charisma. A kind of quotidian normality existed. But having described this society and Gorbachev’s reforms in detail, and then, in a brief second phase, having explained how it could unwind so quickly along ethnic and national lines), Zaslavsky made a sharp about-face and returned to the time that Arendt made her specialty: the age of Hitler and Stalin’s preeminence. It was not her work that persuaded him to reconsider the concept of totalitarianism. It was new information available in recently opened official archives, coupled to his own scholarly reorientation to the Soviet Union’s most sanguinary period. “For the first time,” he remarked, “comprehensive data concerning the functioning of [the Soviet Union’s] coercive apparatus, the scope of terror and deportations, and, perhaps most important, the true extent of the militarization of [the] Soviet economy and society is available.” It says much about Victor Zaslavsky’s intellectual honesty and wide and deep knowledge of the Soviet Union that he felt compelled to reevaluate his qualms about totalitarianism when new facts called on him to do so.

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