Fully Totalitarian Regimes ‘Impossible for Long in Modernized Societies,’ Belanovsky Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Nov. 6 – Fully totalitarian regimes are “impossible in modernized societies” and when such regimes do appear in them, they are far more likely to collapse than in countries where modernization has not proceeded as far as in others, according to Russian sociologist Sergey Belanovsky.

            Belanovsky who rose to fame for his accurate predictions about the emergence of the protest movement in Russia in 2011-2012 bases his new conclusion on findings from a study carried out by Boris Grushin in the 1970s (newizv.ru/comment/sergey-belanovskiy/04-11-2022/podlinnye-totalitarnye-rezhimy-nevozmozhny-v-modernizirovannyh-obschestvah).

            The prominent Soviet Russian sociologist, Belanovsky points out, established that “the basic mass of the Soviet population did not understand the language used in newspapers” and argued that the only way out was to improve the enlightenment of the population, the only conclusion he could offer then.

            But now, “we can make a similar conclusion,” his successor sociologist says. The meaning of terms like imperialism and NATO apparently remains uncertain for most respondents. All they know is that “these are something evil, dangerous, and aggressive,” an emotional rather than a rational response.

            Those regimes which aspire to totalitarianism thus must turn to terror, but ones like North Korea of Maoist China achieve that end because they emerged in overwhelmingly peasant countries and were formed under conditions of civil war when terror was an entirely normal part of life.

            (Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy are partial exceptions requiring special discussion, the sociologist says.)

            On the basis of that, Belanovsky argues that “the formation of genuine totalitarian regimes in contemporary modernized societies is impossible, while those at an earlier stage of modernization can do so only for a time as is the case in Iran.” That is because “the more modernized the society, the more strongly propaganda will be eroded.”

            And that means something else, the sociologist argues. Regimes which try to establish totalitarianism in more modernized places will only be able to maintain them for a relatively brief time. “I hope that I am not mistaken,” Belanovsky says.