This book deals only with the strictly European colonial imperialism whose end came with the liquidation of British rule in India. It tells the story of the disintegration of the nation-state that proved to contain nearly all the elements necessary for the subsequent rise of totalitarian movements and governments. Before the imperialist era, there was no such thing as world politics, and without it, the totalitarian claim to global rule would not have made sense. During this period, the nation-state system proved incapable of either devising new rules for the handling of foreign affairs that had become global affairs or enforcing a Pax Romana on the rest of the world. Its political narrowness and shortsightedness ended in the disaster of totalitarianism, whose unprecedented horrors have overshadowed the ominous events and the even more ominous mentality of the preceding period. Scholarly inquiry has almost exclusively concentrated on Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia at the expense of their less harmful predecessors. Imperialist rule, except for the purpose of name-calling, seems half-forgotten, and the chief reason why this is deplorable is that its relevance for contemporary events has become rather obvious in recent years. Thus, the controversy about the United States’ undeclared war in Vietnam has been conducted from both sides in terms of analogies with Munich or other examples drawn from the thirties when indeed totalitarian rule was the only clear and present, all-too present, danger, but the threats of today’s policies in deeds and words bear a much more portentous resemblance to the deeds and verbal justifications that preceded the outbreak of World War I, when a spark in a peripheral region of minor interest to all concerned could start a world-wide conflagration.
To stress the unhappy relevance of this half-forgotten period for contemporary events does not mean, of course, either that the die is cast and we are entering a new period of imperialist policies or that imperialism under all circumstances must end in the disasters of totalitarianism. No matter how much we may be capable of learning from the past, it will not enable us to know the future.
Hannah Arendt
July 1967
Preface to Part Three: Totalitarianism
1
THE ORIGINAL manuscript of The Origins of Totalitarianism was finished in autumn 1949, more than four years after the defeat of Hitler Germany, less than four years before Stalin’s death. The first edition of the book appeared in 1951. In retrospect, the years I spent writing it, from 1945 onwards, appear like the first period of relative calm after decades of turmoil, confusion, and plain horror—the revolutions after the First World War, the rise of totalitarian movements and the undermining of parliamentary government, followed by all sorts of new tyrannies, Fascist and semi-Fascist, one-party and military dictatorships, finally the seemingly firm establishment of totalitarian governments resting on mass support:1 in Russia in 1929, the year of what now is often called the “second revolution,” and in Germany in 1933.
With the defeat of Nazi Germany, part of the story had come to an end. This seemed the first appropriate moment to look upon contemporary events with the backward-directed glance of the historian and the analytical zeal of the political scientist, the first chance to try to tell and to understand what had happened, not yet sine ira et studio, still in grief and sorrow and, hence, with a tendency to lament, but no longer in speechless outrage and impotent horror. (I left my original Preface in the present edition in order to indicate the mood of those years.) It was, at any rate, the first possible moment to articulate and tö elaborate the questions with which my generation had been forced to live for the better part of its adult life: What happened? Why did it happen? How could it have happened? For out of the German defeat, which left behind a country in ruins and a nation that felt it had arrived at “point zero” of its history, mountains of paper had emerged virtually intact, a superabundance of documentary material on every aspect of the twelve years that Hitler’s Tausendjähriges Reich had managed to last. The first generous selections from this embarras de richesses, which even today are by no means adequately published and investigated, began to appear in connection with the Nuremberg Trial of the Major War Criminals in 1946, in the twelve volumes of Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression.2
Much more documentary and other material, however, bearing on the Nazi regime, had become available in libraries and archives when the second (paperback) edition appeared in 1958. What I then learned was interesting enough, but it hardly required substantial changes in either the analysis or the argument of my original presentation. Numerous additions and replacements of quotations in the footnotes seemed advisable, and the text was considerably enlarged. But these changes were all of a technical nature. In 1949, the Nuremberg documents were known only in part and in English translations, and a great number of books, pamphlets, and magazines published in Germany between 1933 and 1945 had not been available. Also, in a number of additions I took into account some of the more important events after Stalin’s death—the successor crisis and Khrushchev’s speech at the Twentieth Party Congress—as well as new information on the Stalin regime from recent publications. Thus I revised Part III and the last chapter of Part II, whereas Part I on Antisemitism and the first four chapters on Imperialism have remained unchanged. Moreover, there were certain insights of a strictly theoretical nature, closely connected with my analysis of the elements of total domination, which I did not possess when I finished the original manuscript that ended with rather inconclusive “Concluding Remarks.” The last chapter of this edition, “Ideology and Terror,” replaced these “Remarks,” which, to the extent that they still seemed valid, were shifted to other chapters. To the second edition, I had added an Epilogue where I discussed briefly the introduction of the Russian system into the satellite countries and the Hungarian Revolution. This discussion, written much later, was different in tone since it dealt with contemporary events and has become obsolete in many details. I have now eliminated it, and this is the only substantial change of this edition as compared with the second (paperback) edition.
Obviously, the end of the war did not spell the end of totalitarian government in Russia. On the contrary, it was followed by the Bolshevization of Eastern Europe, that is, the spread of totalitarian government, and peace offered no more than a significant turning point from which to analyze the similarities and differences in methods and institutions of the two totalitarian regimes. Not the end of the war but Stalin’s death eight years later was decisive. In retrospect, it seems that this death was not merely followed by a successor crisis and a temporary “thaw” until a new leader had asserted himself, but by an authentic, though never unequivocal, process of detotalitarization. Hence, from the viewpoint of events, there was no reason to bring this part of my story up to date now; and as far as our knowledge of the period in question is concerned, it has not changed drastically enough to require extensive revisions and additions. In contrast to Germany, where Hitler used his war consciously to develop and, as it were, perfect totalitarian government, the war period in Russia was a time of temporary suspense of total domination. For my purposes, the years from 1929 to 1941 and then again from 1945 down to 1953 are of central interest, and for these periods our sources are as scarce and of the same nature as they were in 1958 or even in 1949. Nothing has happened, or is likely to happen in the future, to present us with the same unequivocal end of the story or the same horribly neat and irrefutable evidence to document it as was the case for Nazi Germany.
The only important addition to our knowledge, the contents of the Smolensk Archive (published in 1958 by Merle Fainsod) have demonstrated to what an extent dearth of the most elementary documentary and statistical material will remain the decisive handicap for all inquiries into this period of Russian history. For although the archives (discovered at party headquarters in Smolensk by German intelligence and then captured by the American occupation force in Germany) contain some 200,000 pages of documents and are virtually intact for the period from 1917 to 1938, the amount of information they fail to give us is truly amazing. Even with “
an almost unmanageable abundance of material on the purges” from 1929 to 1937, they contain no indication of the number of victims or any other vital statistical data. Wherever figures are given, they are hopelessly contradictory, the various organizations all giving different sets, and all we learn beyond doubt is that many of them, if they ever existed, were withheld at the source by order of the government.3 Also, the Archive contains no information on the relations between the various branches of authority, “between Party, the military and NKVD,” or between party and government, and it is silent about the channels of communication and command. In short, we learn nothing about the organizational structure of the regime, of which we are so well informed with respect to Nazi Germany.4 In other words, while it has always been known that official Soviet publications served propaganda purposes and were utterly unreliable, it now appears that reliable source and statistical material probably never existed anywhere.
A much more serious question is whether a study of totalitarianism can afford to ignore what has happened, and is still happening, in China. Here our knowledge is even less secure than it was for Russia in the thirties, partly because the country has succeeded in isolating itself against foreigners after the successful revolution much more radically, and partly because defectors from the higher ranks of the Chinese Communist Party have not yet come to our aid—which, of course, in itself is significant enough. For seventeen years, the little we knew beyond doubt pointed to very relevant differences: after an initial period of considerable bloodshed—the number of victims during the first years of dictatorship is plausibly estimated at fifteen million, about three percent of the population in 1949 and, in terms of percentage, considerably less than the population losses due to Stalin’s “second revolution”—and after the disappearance of organized opposition, there was no increase in terror, no massacres of innocent people, no category of “objective enemies,” no show trials, though a great deal of public confession and “self-criticism,” and no outright crimes. Mao’s famous speech in 1957, “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People,” usually known under the misleading title “Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom,” was certainly no plea for freedom, but it did recognize non-antagonistic contradictions between classes and, more importantly, between the people and the government even under a Communist dictatorship. The way to deal with opponents was “rectification of thought,” an elaborate procedure of constant molding and remolding of the minds, to which more or less the whole population seemed subject. We never knew very well how this worked in everyday life, who was exempt from it—that is, who did the “remolding”—and we had no inkling of the results of the “brainwashing,” whether it was lasting and actually produced personality changes. If one were to trust the present announcements of the Chinese leadership, all it produced was hypocrisy on a gigantic scale, the “breeding grounds for counter-revolution.” If this was terror, as it most certainly was, it was terror of a different kind, and whatever its results, it did not decimate the population. It clearly recognized national interest, it permitted the country to develop peacefully, to use the competence of the descendants of the formerly ruling classes, and to uphold academic and professional standards. In brief, it was obvious that Mao Tse-tung’s “thought” did not run along the lines laid down by Stalin (or Hitler, for that matter), that he was not a killer by instinct, and that nationalist sentiment, so prominent in all revolutionary upheavals in formerly colonial countries, was strong enough to impose limits upon total domination. All this seemed to contradict certain fears expressed in this book ([>]).
On the other hand, the Chinese Communist Party after its victory had at once aimed at being “international in organization, all-comprehensive in its ideological scope, and global in its political aspiration” ([>]), that is, its totalitarian traits have been manifest from the beginning. These traits became more prominent with the development of the Sino-Soviet conflict, although the conflict itself might well have been touched off by national rather than ideological issues. The insistence of the Chinese on rehabilitating Stalin and denouncing the Russian attempts at detotalitarization as “revisionist” deviation was ominous enough, and, to make matters worse, it was accompanied by an utterly ruthless, though thus far unsuccessful, international policy which aimed at infiltrating all revolutionary movements with Chinese agents and at reviving the Comintern under Peking’s leadership. All these developments are difficult to judge at the present moment, partly because we don’t know enough and partly because everything is still in a state of flux. To these uncertainties, which are in the nature of the situation, we unhappily have added our own self-created handicaps. For it does not facilitate matters in either theory or practice that we have inherited from the cold-war period an official “counter-ideology,” anti-Communism, which also tends to become global in aspiration and tempts us into constructing a fiction of our own, so that we refuse on principle to distinguish the various Communist one-party dictatorships, with which we are confronted in reality, from authentic totalitarian government as it may develop, albeit in different forms, in China. The point, of course, is not that Communist China is different from Communist Russia, or that Stalin’s Russia was different from Hitler’s Germany. Drunkenness and incompetence, which loom so large in any description of Russia in the twenties and thirties and are still widespread today, played no role whatsoever in the story of Nazi Germany, while the unspeakable gratuitous cruelty in the German concentration and extermination camps seems to have been largely absent from the Russian camps, where the prisoners died of neglect rather than of torture. Corruption, the curse of the Russian administration from the beginning, was also present during the last years of the Nazi regime but apparently has been entirely absent from China after the revolution. Differences of this sort could be multiplied; they are of great significance and part and parcel of the national history of the respective countries, but they have no direct bearing on the form of government. Absolute monarchy, no doubt, was a very different affair in Spain, in France, in England, in Prussia; still it was everywhere the same form of government. Decisive in our context is that totalitarian government is different from dictatorships and tyrannies; the ability to distinguish between them is by no means an academic issue which could be safely left to the “theoreticians,” for total domination is the only form of government with which coexistence is not possible. Hence, we have every reason to use the word “totalitarian” sparingly and prudently.
In stark contrast to the scarcity and uncertainty of new sources for factual knowledge with respect to totalitarian government, we find an enormous increase in studies of all the varieties of new dictatorships, be they totalitarian or not, during the last fifteen years. This is of course particularly true for Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. There exist now many works which are indeed indispensable for further inquiry and study of the subject, and I have tried my best to supplement my old bibliography accordingly. (The second [paperback] edition carried no bibliography.) The only kind of literature which, with few exceptions, I left out on purpose are the numerous memoirs published by former Nazi generals and high functionaries after the end of the war. (That this sort of apologetics does not shine with honesty is understandable enough and should not rule it out of our consideration. But the lack of comprehension these reminiscences display of what actually happened and of the roles the authors themselves played in the course of events is truly astonishing and deprives them of all but a certain psychological interest.) I also added the relatively few new items of importance to the reading lists pertaining to Parts I and II. Finally, for reasons of convenience, the bibliography like the book itself is now divided into three separate parts.
II
AS FAR AS evidence is concerned, the early date this book was conceived and written has proved to be less of a handicap than might reasonably be assumed, and this is true of the material on both the Nazi and the Bolshevik variety of totalitarianism. It is one of the oddities of the literature on totalitarianism that v
ery early attempts by contemporaries at writing its “history,” which according to all academic rules were bound to founder on the lack of impeccable source material and emotional overcommitment, have stood the test of time remarkably well. Konrad Heiden’s biography of Hitler and Boris Souvarine’s biography of Stalin, both written and published in the thirties, are in some respects more accurate and in almost all respects more relevant than the standard biographies by Alan Bullock and Isaac Deutscher respectively. This may have many reasons, but one of them certainly is the simple fact that documentary material in both cases has tended to confirm and to add to what had been known all along from prominent defectors and other eye-witness accounts.
To put it somewhat drastically: We did not need Khrushchev’s Secret Speech to know that Stalin had committed crimes, or that this allegedly “insanely suspicious” man had decided to put his trust in Hitler. As to the latter, nothing indeed proves better than this trust that Stalin was not insane; he was justifiably suspicious with respect to all people he wished or prepared to eliminate, and these included practically everybody in the higher echelons of party and government; he naturally trusted Hitler because he did not wish him ill. As to the former, Khrushchev’s startling admissions, which—for the obvious reason that his audience and he himself were totally involved in the true story—concealed considerably more than they revealed, had the unfortunate result that in the eyes of many (and also, of course, of scholars with their professional love of official sources) they minimized the gigantic criminality of the Stalin regime which, after all, did not consist merely in the slander and murder of a few hundred or thousand prominent political and literary figures, whom one may “rehabilitate” posthumously, but in the extermination of literally untold millions of people whom no one, not even Stalin, could have suspected of “counter-revolutionary” activities. It was precisely by conceding some crimes that Khrushchev concealed the criminality of the regime as a whole, and it is precisely against this camouflage and the hypocrisy of the present Russian rulers—all of them trained and promoted under Stalin—that the younger generation of Russian intellectuals is now in an almost open rebellion. For they know everything there is to know about “mass purges, and the deportation and annihilation of entire peoples.” 5 Moreover, Khrushchev’s explanation of the crimes he conceded—Stalin’s insane suspiciousness—concealed the most characteristic aspect of totalitarian terror, that it is let loose when all organized opposition has died down and the totalitarian ruler knows that he no longer need to be afraid. This is particularly true for the Russian development. Stalin started his gigantic purges not in 1928 when he conceded, “We have internal enemies,” and actually had still reason to be afraid—he knew that Bukharin compared him to Genghis Khan and was convinced that Stalin’s policy “was leading the country to famine, ruin, and a police regime,”6 as indeed it did—but in 1934, when all former opponents had “confessed their errors,” and Stalin himself, at the Seventeenth Party Congress, also called by him the “Congress of the Victors,” had declared: “At this Congress ...there is nothing more to prove and, it seems, no one to fight.”7 Neither the sensational character nor the decisive political importance of the Twentieth Party Congress for Soviet Russia and the Communist movement at large are in doubt. But the importance is political; the light official sources of the post-Stalin period shed on what had happened before should not be mistaken for the light of truth.