Editing Totalitarianism (section)

=== Revisionists on Stalinism ===
[[File:PropagandaStudy 6.jpg|thumb|A document from the collection of [[Henri Max Corwin]], equating [[Nazism]] with [[Stalinism]].]]
The death of Stalin in 1953 voided the simplistic ''totalitarian model'' of the police-state USSR as the epitome of ''the totalitarian state''.<ref name="Laqueur, Walter pages 225-227">{{cite book |last=Laqueur |first=Walter |author-link=Walter Laqueur |date=1987 |title=The Fate of the Revolution: Interpretations of Soviet History from 1917 to the Present |location=New York |publisher=Scribner's |pages=225–227 |isbn=978-0684189031}}</ref> Starting from the 1970s, the 'revisionist' historians,<ref name="ahor"/> described as those who "insisted that the old image of the Soviet Union as a totalitarian state bent on world domination was oversimplified or just plain wrong" and focused not on typology of power, but social history,<ref>{{cite journal|last=Lenoe|first=Matt|title=Did Stalin Kill Kirov and Does It Matter?|journal=The Journal of Modern History|volume=74|issue=2|year=2002|pages=352–380|issn=0022-2801|doi=10.1086/343411|s2cid=142829949}}</ref><ref name="trav2"/> such as [[Sheila Fitzpatrick]] began challenging the totalitarian paradigm; without denying the state violence by the regime, these scholars argued that the Stalinist system could not and did not rule only through coercion and terror, and pointed to support within the population for many of Stalin's policies and argued that the party and state were often responsive to people's desires and values.<ref name="ahor">{{Cite book |last1=Riasanovsky |first1=Nicholas Valentine |author-link1=Nicholas V. Riasanovsky |url=https://archive.org/details/historyofrussia0000rias_l2q3 |title=A History of Russia |last2=Steinberg |first2=Mark D. |author-link2=Mark D. Steinberg |date=2011 |publisher=[[Oxford University Press]] |isbn=978-0-1953-4197-3 |edition=8th |location=New York Oxford |page=468}}</ref> More to it, they examined the substantial differences of Stalinist and Nazi violence that inevitably put into question the attempt to gather Stalin's and Hitler's regimes into a single category which was presented by the concept of totalitarianism.<ref name="trav2"/> In 1999 the sociologists [[Randall Collins]] and [[David Waller]] grouped the concept of totalitarianism among the "theories that were completely wrong"; in ''Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared'' (2008), Fitzpatrick and [[Michael Geyer]] critically examined the concept of totalitarianism and made a very detailed comparison of similarities and substantial differences between Hitler and Stalin and made conclusion in agreement with the point of Collins and Waller.<ref>{{cite journal | url=https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/8/article/460844/pdf | title=Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared (Review) | journal=Holocaust and Genocide Studies | date=2011 | volume=25 | issue=3 | pages=457–459 | last1=Orlow | first1=Dietrich | doi=10.1093/hgs/dcr052 }}</ref>

Some historians who did not align themselves with the 'revisionist school' later openly stated that Stalinist system cannot be regarded as totalitarian. For example, the historian [[Robert Service (historian)|Robert Service]] in his biography of Stalin wrote that "this was not a totalitarian dictatorship as conventionally defined because Stalin lacked the capacity, even at the height of his power, to secure automatic universal compliance with his wishes."<ref>{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=hSWK6Dh4wRgC | isbn=978-0-674-01697-2 | title=Stalin: A Biography | date=2005 | publisher=Harvard University Press }}</ref> [[Eric Hobsbawm]] wrote that although Stalin indeed wanted to achieve total control of the population, he did not establish an actual totalitarian system, what, as he said, "throws considerable doubt on the usefulness of the term."<ref>{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ktcvDwAAQBAJ | isbn=978-963-386-130-1 | title=Totalitarian Societies and Democratic Transition: Essays in memory of Victor Zaslavsky | date=10 July 2017 | publisher=Central European University Press }}</ref>

According to Fitzpatrick, "totalitarian-model scholarship" - the USSR as a "top-down entity," a monolithic party grounded on ideology and ruling by terror over a passive society – "was in effect a mirror image of the Soviet self-representation, but with the moral signs reversed (instead of the party being always right, it was always wrong)."<ref name="trav2"/> A fact common to the revisionist-school interpretations of the [[History of the Soviet Union (1927–1953)|reign of Stalin]] (1927–1953) was that the USSR was a country with weak social institutions, and that [[state terrorism]] against Soviet citizens indicated the political illegitimacy of Stalin's government:<ref name="Laqueur, Walter pages 225-227"/> to critics of totalitarian model state terror was a mark of a weak regime, and [[J. Arch Getty]] wrote of a "technically weak and politically divided party whose organisational relationships seem more primitive than totalitarian", commenting the [[Smolensk Archive]], and so, the criticism of accepted model began with labelling Stalinism as "inefficient totalitarianism", where the dictator had to rely on "shock methods" to counter the resistance of local autonomies and administrations and political factionalism within the apparatus (including its highest levels);<ref name="san"/> the citizens of the USSR were not devoid of [[Agency (sociology)|personal agency]] or of material resources for living, nor were Soviet citizens [[Social alienation|psychologically atomised]] by the totalist ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union<ref name="Fitzpatrick 1999">{{cite book |last=Fitzpatrick |first=Sheila |author-link=Sheila Fitzpatrick |date=1999 |title=[[Everyday Stalinism|Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s]] |location=New York |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=978-0195050004}}</ref>—because "the Soviet political system was chaotic, that [[Bureaucracy|institutions]] often escaped the control of the centre, and that Stalin's leadership consisted, to a considerable extent, in responding, on an ''ad hoc'' basis, to political crises as they arose",<ref>{{cite book|last1=Davies|first1=Sarah|last2=Harris|first2=James|title=Stalin: A New History|chapter=Joseph Stalin: Power and Ideas|date=8 September 2005|publisher=Cambridge University Press|isbn=978-1-139-44663-1|pages=4–5}}</ref> and many purges and forced collectivisations were local or even "popular initiatives which Stalin and his henchmen' could not control", while the people collectively resisted by such methods as refusing to work efficiently and migrating by the millions.<ref name="san"/> That the [[legitimacy (political)|legitimacy]] of Stalin's régime of government relied upon the popular support of the Soviet citizenry as much as Stalin relied upon state terrorism for their support. That by politically purging Soviet society of anti–Soviet people Stalin created employment and upward [[social mobility]] for the post–War generation of working class citizens for whom such socio-economic progress was unavailable before the [[Russian Revolution]] (1917–1924). That the people who benefited from Stalin's social engineering became [[Stalinism|Stalinists]] loyal to the USSR; thus, the Revolution had fulfilled her promise to those Stalinist citizens and they supported Stalin because of the state terrorism.<ref name="Fitzpatrick 1999"/> 

The revisionists also conducted new comparative studies of the Third Reich and the USSR, but stressed substantial differences between them. Thus, fascisms lasted much shorter, but experienced cumulative radicalization until their collapse, while Stalinism arose in stabilized and pacified country and fell apart due to an internal crisis after a post-totalitarian period; fascism maintained traditional elites, while Stalinism was a result of revolution and radical social transformation; their ideologies were antipodal; totalitarian model likened "[[charismatic authority|charismatic authorities]]" of Stalin and Hitler and Mussolini, but they were different: Hitler and Mussolini were popular figures of "providential men" who needed an almost physical contact with the followers and exemplified the totalitarian "New Man" with their bodies and behaviour, while Stalin's cult is described as "afar", purely artificial and much more distant, and Stalin never merged with the people, always staying "hidden from his followers". Mass state violence was also different: Soviet violence was primarily internal, while the one of the Nazis primarily external; the former was an ineffective and irrational means of a rational goal, modernization, while Nazis sought extremely irrational goals with rational industrial means; the efficiency of Soviet [[forced labour camps]] ([[Gulag]]s) was measured by the authorities by practical results, like building train tracks, which would eventually lay a basis of modernity, while Nazism mobilized industry for extermination, and the efficiency of [[extermination camps]] was measured by the number of deaths. Thus, the revisionists have argued, both regimes committed inhumane mass violence, but their internal logic was fundamentally different.<ref name="trav2"/>

In the case of [[East Germany]], Eli Rubin posited that East Germany was not a totalitarian state but rather a society shaped by the confluence of unique economic and political circumstances interacting with the concerns of ordinary citizens.<ref>{{cite book |last=Rubin |first=Eli |date=2008 |title=Synthetic Socialism: Plastics & Dictatorship in the German Democratic Republic |location=Chapel Hill |publisher=University of North Carolina Press |isbn=978-1469606774}}</ref>