The concept of totalitarianism has a convoluted, complicated, even uncanny history. Used first by the Mensheviks, by the Italian anti-Fascists, and by refugees from Hitler’s Germany as well as occupied Austria, it had a poignantly powerful explanatory force. Later, during the Cold War, it became politically instrumentalized, for better or for worse. Mention should be made of its illuminating use in the writings of Hannah Arendt, Raymond Aron, Karl-Dietrich Bracher, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Robert C. Tucker. In the 1970s and 1980s, as Aviezer Tucker shows, Central European critical intellectuals such as Václav Havel, Ágnes Heller, Leszek Kołakowski, Jacek Kuroń, and Adam Michnik, rehabilitated its political and moral relevance.

Now, a few reflections on its meanings. Totalitarianism was based on direct or indirect terror, and the secret police were the instrument bound to maintain the population in a state of universal fear, distrust, and suspicion. Totalitarian regimes yearned for the establishment of “perfect societies” and engaged in endless campaigns to achieve their goals. Totalitarian states were ideological laboratories. Both communism and fascism created their own fanatical bureaucracies that supervised, oriented, and regimented the masses. Ideological activities were regarded as a chain of warfare operations, a “front” with officers, soldiers, allies, and enemies. The Leader was not simply a traditional ruler, a despot in the classical sense, but rather the custodian of truth, a Messiah-like prophet and charismatic guide.¹ Magic, miracle, and mysticism blended in the apparently scientifically founded totalitarian doctrines. These were ideologies shrouded in rationalistic disguise, political religions based on their own sense of original sin, fall, historical torments, and final salvation.

Totalitarianism is seen as a new way of life, the result of an obsessed Leader and Party, backed by the enthusiasm, silence, apathy, and fear of the population. In the absence of ideology, these regimes would have remained traditional tyrannies.² These states were a new way of combating modernity and the perceived cruelty of the liberal world through exclusion, terror, extermination, control, and eternal unity. They waged a crusade meant to totally destroy the ideologically dehumanized enemy.³ Social engineering was directly connected to the principle of creating a new and better civilization based on ideological precepts. This ideological drive to purify humanity was rooted in the scientistic cult of technology and the firm belief that History (always capitalized) had endowed the revolutionary elites (of extreme left or extreme right) with the mission to get rid of the “superfluous populations” (Hannah Arendt’s term). Communist and fascist regimes permanently tried to excise the segments of the society that it designated as potentially inimical to their realization of Utopia.

The crux of the matter was that in totalitarianism, the population was organized on criteria of exclusion and disenfranchisement according to the ideological imperatives. These states celebrated their system of terror—complete censorship, a fluid exclusion or inclusion of every citizen, concentration camps, imperialism, and genocide. As Leszek Kołakowski put it, totalitarianism is the work of the Devil in History: “the devil . . . invented ideological states, that is to say, states whose legitimacy is grounded in the fact that their owners are owners of truth. If you oppose such a state or its system, you are an enemy of truth.”⁴

Both Leninism and fascism presented themselves as revolutionary breakthroughs to a new sense of life. They preconditioned reconstruction by unleashing destruction. Herein lies the essence of the totalitarian experience of the twentieth century: “the complete rejection of all barriers and all restraints that politics, civilization, morality, religion, natural feelings of compassion, and universal ideas of fraternity have constructed in order to moderate, repress, or sublimate the human potential for individual and collective violence.”⁵

Finally, Lenin, Hitler, and Stalin would not have been able to achieve their goals had they not known how to regiment, mobilize, and include large social strata in their efforts. As 1989 shows, totalitarianism cannot exist without the people’s consent. Under Lenin, Hitler, and Stalin people were terrorized. But they were mostly convinced, not coerced. Mass mobilization and fear were not mutually exclusive, and millions of ordinary citizens became involved in the bloody dramaturgy of hysteria and persecution.⁶ Their legitimacy was based upon a synthesis between coercion and consent. In this sense, totalitarianism was embodied by the masses, who “gave life and direction to it.”⁷ Their project of modernization was inherently one of “homogenizing unambiguity” (according to Jörg Baberowski and Anselm Doering-Manteuffel). Society was structured according to categories such as class, race, nationality, and gender, each of them with specific consequences on the axis of inclusion–exclusion for the individuals to whom they were attributed. Socialization turned into political practice, into the effort to bridge “what one does with what s/he thinks and says about what s/he does.” ^{Footnote 8}

Was totalitarianism the ultimate objective of these fanatics’ cataclysmic revolution? Because of the execrating and denouncing of liberalism and frantic espousal of the concept of Utopia, it could even be argued that totalitarianism was exactly what the Communists and Fascists were aiming for. Kill and silence, so that the remaining human subjects will be equal, united, enthusiastic, and the same forever. Totalitarianism was, in fact, not a means but the end. This brings me back to Aviezer Tucker’s important book. Post-totalitarianism, a concept initially developed by Havel and other East European dissidents, cannot be properly understood without a full realization of what the Bolshevik experiments really represented. In other words, Tucker is right: These are legacies that the new democracies (new to some extent, because soon they will be 30 years old) have been wrestling with: social, cultural, economic, legal, and moral. The ongoing authoritarian wave, which has reached alarming proportions in Hungary and Poland, cannot be disassociated from these legacies, even if its proponents proclaim themselves hard-core, indomitable, pure, and purifying anti-Communists. The anti-Utopian and anti-ideological initial impetus has subsided in favor of new fantasies of redemption that Tucker luminously explores.

As I write these lines, I cannot avoid a sense of deep melancholy reading the telltale title of Tucker’s conclusion: “Only Dissidents Can Save Us.” In more than one way, at this critical juncture in the history of the liberal democratic or, if you wish, the Enlightenment’s project, all friends of an open society have become dissidents. And The Legacies of Totalitarianism, with its insightful conceptual framework and admirable historical analyses, definitely helps us realize that words like “truth” and “love” can and ought to be potent political weapons.