What Has Happened to Totalitarianism?

By Charles Krauthammer

With the approach of the 30th anniversary of the Hungarian revolution, 122 East Europeans last month signed a declaration praising the uprising, denouncing Soviet intervention and calling for democracy. Two generations after the liberation of Europe, tyranny remains the condition of its eastern half. But the fact that 122 souls in four countries felt secure enough to declare so publicly indicates something has changed.

Something has changed. After 30 years, revolutionary Hungary is now the fattest and freest of all the Soviet satellites. China has discovered the free market. Poland bends to the Roman Catholic Church. Even the Soviet Union is now in the grip of a wave of openness: vital statistics (like infantmortality rates) are being published again; a suppressed antiStalinist film is being released; plane crashes, submarine sinkings and other unsocialist occurrences are being reported.

The road from a boot in the face to what the Hungarians call goulash Communism is long. It is also challenging because it raises fundamental questions about the nature of totalitarianism. Totalitarianism is about the perfection of power, the centralization of control. In the face of imperfection and devolution, what happens to the totalitarian idea?

The term totalitarian, first used in the late '20s, was not fully developed until the late '40s and early '50s, when a classical literature arose describing a new kind of tyranny created in this century. What made totalitarianism unique was its militant, messianic ideology; its mobilization of the masses; its total control of social life (all independent "intermediate" structures -- such as churches, parties, unions -- standing between the individual and the state were to be eradicated); and its systematic use of terror to enforce that control. Totalitarian regimes were thought to be (under Hitler and Stalin they certainly were) energetic, enthusiastic in an almost religious sense, on the march. Orwell's 1984 was not a parody. It was a mild extrapolation of totalitarian reality and a clinical picture of the totalitarian ideal.

The fear was that reality would increasingly approach the ideal. Inevitable advances in the technology of control would see to that. What we have learned in the interim, however, is that, technology or not, control is more difficult and the spirit of resistance more resilient than anyone had imagined.

We learned, moreover, that resistance need not be heroic. In fact, it is the identification of resistance with heroism that made for such pessimism about the march of totalitarianism. Why? Because few are capable of heroism. And when heroism meets well-armed tyranny -- and totalitarians specialize in armament -- it loses. That was the lesson of Hungary 30 years ago.

The lesson of the 30 years since is that humanity in all its ordinariness and contrariness is more corrosive to the totalitarianism ideal than heroism. There is too much to control. Not even the technology of repression can keep up with all the private wants and longings that move people to everything from religious faith to sullen cynicism.

How to police defiance by inaction: no work, bad work, late work? How to police drink and jazz and love? For short bursts of time you can jail, even shoot, people for such crimes. But after a while you run out of bullets, jails, energy, even victims. Then the rot sets in.

None were more aware of this peril than the great totalitarians themselves. Hence Mao's desperate attempt to rekindle the flame with the Cultural Revolution. Only permanent revolution can meet the totalitarian ideal, and permanent revolution is impossible. Even tyranny needs its sleep.

What remains, then, is what Political Philosopher Michael Walzer calls "failed totalitarianism": dead, bureaucratic rule marked by exhaustion and resignation, a hollow ideology, conformity without belief. A shell of the totalitarian idea. Does this mean, then, that the famous distinction between this system and traditional authoritarianism (e.g., nonideological dictatorship like that of Somoza or Marcos) disappears? No, because one crucial difference remains: only one system continues to aspire to totality, to colonizing every nook and cranny of social life.

Totalitarianism is internal colonialism, the occupying power being the party. But, like all colonialisms, it cannot be perfect. The sun never sets on the Kremlin's empire, but things do grow in the shade: an autonomous church in Poland, small free enterprise in Hungary, even an oft-repressed "jazz section" of the musicians union in Czechoslovakia. Of course, some regimes are more total than others. For every Hungary there is a Rumania, where typewriters must be registered with the police. For every Poland, a North Korea, where the leader's cult of personality makes Stalin look retiring.

Totalitarianism remains unique, and uniquely evil, in its ambition: total control. But, as often as not, its reach exceeds its grasp. And this calls into question another of its attributes: irreversibility.

Totality and irreversibility are related. It used to be thought that totalitarianism had repealed the law of history by which power sows the seeds of its own destruction. If sheer ruthless vigilance could destroy any center of opposition, even any island of independent thought, then -- aside from external conquest, which alone destroyed Nazism -- totalitarian rule could never be reversed.

Conversely, if total control fails, what happens to single-minded direction? If totalitarianism can decay, can it not be transformed? We don't yet know. We know only that it can be modified. It can give way to a society with more space. How much? Writing 20 years ago, one of the great theorists of totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, noted a "detotalitarization" in the Soviet Union after Stalin's death. This could not be dismissed as a temporary thaw, she argued. True, the Soviet Union has never since returned to the depths of Stalinism. But it has not moved significantly in the opposite direction either. Instead, it has been subject to cycles of thaw and freeze. The relative liberalization under Khrushchev was significantly reversed under Brezhnev. The cycle may be turning again. But the range of variation is narrow.

Within that range, totalitarianism may be finding its new equilibrium: aspiration to totality but with a concession of some social space. This permits effective control of society at a level of violence and vigilance that, unlike Stalin's or Hitler's terror, is sustainable indefinitely.

Human nature will not permit a long dark night forever. What may be emerging now are totalitarian variations that perpetuate a long, somber gloom of twilight instead. But as the party has decreed, and even Hungary knows, this is not to be mistaken for dawn.