The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

by Masha Gessen

That year, another German exile, Carl Joachim Friedrich, speaking at a conference on totalitarianism (at which Arendt was also a speaker), offered a concise five-point definition of totalitarian society: An official ideology, consisting of an official body of doctrine covering all vital aspects of man’s existence, to which everyone in that society is supposed to adhere at least passively. . . . A single mass party consisting of a relatively small percentage of the total population (up to 10 per cent) of men and women passionately and unquestioningly dedicated to the ideology and prepared to assist in every way in promoting its general acceptance, such party being organized in strictly hierarchical, oligarchical manner, usually under a single leader and typically either superior to or completely commingled with the bureaucratic governmental organization. A technologically conditioned near-complete monopoly of control . . . of all means of effective armed combat. A similarly technologically conditioned near-complete monopoly of control . . . of all means of effective mass communication . . . A system of terroristic police control, depending for its effectiveness upon points 3 and 4 and characteristically directed not only against demonstrable “enemies” of the regime, but against arbitrarily selected classes of the population.