Editing Totalitarianism (section)

=== Leninism and the October Revolution ===
{{main|October Revolution#Historiography}}
Since the 1980s, there has been a debate  over the nature of the [[October Revolution]] between the traditionalists and the revisionists as well as a debate about the nature of the government of [[Vladimir Lenin]]. Traditionalist scholars believe that the government of Vladimir Lenin was a totalitarian dictatorship but revisionist scholars do not; the core argument of the traditionalists was based on their belief that the Revolution was a violent act which was carried out "from above" by a small group of intellectuals with brute force.<ref name="mawdsley"/> Such traditionalist historians as [[Richard Pipes]] claimed that [[History of Soviet Russia and the Soviet Union (1917–1927)|Soviet Russia of 1917–1924]] was as totalitarian as the [[History of the Soviet Union (1927–1953)|Soviet Union under Stalin]] was, and they also claim that [[Stalinism|Stalinist totalitarianism]] was a mere continuation of Lenin's policies because Stalinism was prefigured by [[Leninism|Lenin's ideology]],<ref name="lenin1"/><ref name="ryan">{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=xxGttzFXqaYC | isbn=978-0-415-67396-9 | title=Lenin's Terror: The Ideological Origins of Early Soviet State Violence | date=2012 | publisher=Routledge }}</ref> thar Lenin was the "inventor" (Riley) of totalitarianism, and that further totalitarian regimes just implemented the policies already invented:<ref name="riley"/> for example, Pipes compared Lenin to Hitler and stated that "The Stalinist and Nazi [[holocaust]]s" stemmed from Lenin's [[Red Terror]] and had "much greater decorum" than the latter.<ref name="suny"/> The revisionists, on the contrary, stressed the genuinely 'popular' nature of the 1917 Revolution, and tended to see a discontinuity between Leninism and Stalinism;<ref name="mawdsley"/> a revisionist historian [[Ronald Suny]] cites Hannah Arendt who distinguished Lenin's terror of the [[Russian Civil War]], "a means to exterminate and frighten opponents", from totalitarian terror aimed not at specific enemies but at fulfilling ideological goals, solving the problem of inequality and poverty, "an instrument to rule masses who are perfectly obedient."<ref name="suny"/> It was also noted that Stalin became an uncontested dictator after a period of "authoritarian pluralism",<ref name="san"/> while the one-party dictatorship and mass violence (the Red Terror) were interpreted not as a result not of Lenin's totalitarian "blueprint", but rather of reactions (yet justified by the ideology) to current events and external factors, including wartime conditions and the struggle for survival,<ref name="ryan"/><ref name="suny"/> some historians highlighted the initial attempts of the Bolsheviks to form a coalition government.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Carr |first1=Edward Hallett |author-link1=E. H. Carr|title=The Bolshevik revolution 1917 – 1923. Vol. 1 |date=1977 |publisher=Penguin books |isbn=978-0-14-020749-1 |pages=111–112 |edition=Reprinted}}</ref>

[[Martin Malia]] noted that the debates on history were politically significant: if the 'traditionalists' were right, "[[Communism]]" "must be abolished", but if they were not, it could be reformed.<ref name="suny"/> Understanding of relationship of Lenin and Stalin as a continuity of the totalitarian regime was consensual for a major period; the first revisionists of the 1960s, social historians, also believed it to be a continuity, but as a continuity of policies of modernisation, not as a continuity of totalitarianism; starting from the end of the 1960s, availability of new Soviet materials allowed to dispute the continuity for such historians as [[Moshe Lewin]] and break the consensus.<ref>{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=sJGoHCNBoOQC | title=Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation | publisher=Transaction Publishers | isbn=978-1-4128-3502-2 }}</ref> According to [[Evan Mawdsley]], "the 'revisionist’ school had been dominant from the 1970s", and achieved "some success" in challenging the traditionalists.<ref name="mawdsley"/>