In the American movie Enemy of the State, one character tells the other: “You are either incredibly smart or incredibly stupid!” The same can be said of the authors of the term post-totalitarianism, and, just like in the movie, we are about to find out which it is, with a different outcome here, however.
The term post-totalitarianism was developed fairly recently by the distinguished Spanish political scientist Juan Linz and the American politologist Alfred Stepan to describe post-Stalinist USSR as a distinctive type of social organization formed right after a previous experience of totalitarianism. It has been subsequently applied to other nations of post-communist Eastern and Central Europe, particularly to East Germany after her attainment of independence from the USSR and reunification with West Germany, apparently not very organic and satisfying, according to the authors of this particular application.
Considering how many post-WWII and pre-Soviet collapse states used to be considered totalitarian, but not anymore, the term “post-totalitarian” seems like a very handy political science concept, to cover the field of former Soviet dependencies, satellites, clients, and other captive nations. The only problem with this is that while the prefix “post-” may signify something, the use of the principal: “totalitarian” exposes the problem of bad definitions, which we have talked about at some length already, and intend to be talking about still, for a while.
Equating post-Stalinism in the USSR with post-totalitarianism misses the point of what totalitarianism is. It goes without saying that the author of de-Stalinization Nikita Khrushchev had no intention of liberating the USSR from the totalitarian grip, and of course it was not up to him to do so. Khrushchev’s attack on Stalin was his weapon in a fierce power struggle within the Soviet leadership, and the reader is strongly advised at this point to read through my Khrushchev subsection of the History section, where this subject is treated at length.
By thus attacking one of the three whales of totalitarianism: the leader principle, Khrushchev dealt a severe blow to the totalitarian cohesiveness of Soviet society, but never quite destroyed it. Ever since Khrushchev delivered that blow, Soviet society was ailing, but it was never “de-totalitarianized.” In fact, totalitarianism has survived in Russia, first weakened by a gradual decay of Soviet statist social mentality, but then receiving the electric shock of Yeltsin’s 1990's, and thus revived into Putin’s Russia. Totalitarianism is still recovering in Russia today, but the totalitarian spirit, the national pursuit of the totalitarian ideal, is robust, and on the rapidly ascending line.
Thus, my chief objection to the term “post-totalitarianism,” as it was originally applied to Soviet Russia, is its emptiness of substance. Totalitarianism in real terms is an application of the ‘totalitarian ideal’ to social life and practice. To talk about post-totalitarianism is essentially the same as talking about post-democracy, or post-liberalism, or post-conservatism, etc. Granted, several totalitarian states have fallen, conspicuously, those were Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany, but they were defeated militarily, and a new social code was imposed on them by the victors. As for East Germany during her forced membership in the Soviet bloc of nations, being effectively an occupied territory, it cannot be called totalitarian, because the totalitarian spirit is always home-grown, and never imported from the outside.
To summarize what I have been trying to say above, totalitarianism is always a native germ dwelling in all societies. When it triumphs, the social organization of such society becomes a reflection of this triumph. It is necessary for political science to approach this subject in a manner appropriate for the task. Nobody in America would ever call the George W. Bush years as “post-Clintonism,” or “post-Democratism.” Nor will it be wise to refer to the Obama years as “post-Bushism,” or “post-Republicanism.” It is not that such terms are wrong, but they are clearly fake concepts, and my advice to the political scientists is to avoid them at all costs, while finding more meaningful tags for the different national-historical periods which they have thus mislabeled.
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