Paul Goble
Staunton, November 2 – Some in the Duma are pushing legislation that would criminalize any comparison of Hitler and Stalin, but no such laws can obscure the fact that the regimes the two created were remarkably similar, according to Russian commentator Aleksandr Skobov.
“Both regimes were criminal in equal degree by the amount of crimes they carried out. Both deprives millions of people of their freedom and even lives, he continues. And while one was sometimes ahead of the other, they often seemed to be competing over who could be the most evil (graniru.org/opinion/skobov/m.280303.html).
Indeed, Skobov argues, “the two regimes were as similar to one another as twins.” Soviets who visited Nazi Germany at the time of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact found a system whose key features they recognized as being just like their own. Indeed, in his book, Notes on the Third Reich, TASS correspondent Ivan Filippov admitted as much.
This isn’t surprising because these “two regimes had identical means, mechanisms, means and methods of organizing power.” They were a special kind of system, one that Western scholars called totalitarian to set them apart from democracies and authoritarian ones on the basis of the difference in the relationship between the people and the powers.
“In a democratic regime, power depends on society and is controlled by it,” Skobov explains. It can be changed via elections as a result of legal competition of various political factions, candidates and programs.”
“In an authoritarian regime, power doesn’t depend on society and is not controlled by it, but it leaves beyond its direct control and interference a whole range of non-political (private) spheres of life.”
But “a totalitarian regime is not only not subject to the control of society but strives for all-encompassing (total) control over all spheres of its life. It does not leave people ‘a private sphere’ where they might remain untouched by its interference.”
At the end of Soviet times, some in the West known as “revisionists” pointed out that no regime had been completely totalitarian and insisted on replacing it with the more nebulous and less offensive term “mobilization society.” They falsified history in order to show that under the supposedly totalitarian Soviet regime, there were key enclaves of private activity.
Under Putin, as long ago as 15 years, teachers were encouraged to stop using the term “totalitarianism” lest it lead to comparisons between Hitler and Stalin and to use instead the term “a society of heightened mobilization.” But changing terms did not change the fundamental situation as mass political mobilization is a key feature of totalitarianism.
Totalitarian regimes like those of Hitler and Stalin aren’t satisfied with passive obedience. They want active enthusiasm. And while for authoritarians, the basic principle is that “he who is not against us is with us;” for totalitarians, it is instead, “he who is not with us is against us.”
In such a system, Skobov continues, “the control by the punitive organs and secret policy is an important but not decisive feature.” Instead, the system creates a set of institutions, including a special kind of political party, ideology, and mass communications system to ensure that everyone believes the same thing and those who don’t are cast as enemies.
“A party in a totalitarian society is not simply the power which controls everything … it is the bearer and preserver of the Ideology,” a set of ideas which defines what is good and what is not and ensures that everyone will work toward “a Great Goal.” It “bears a universal, global and messianic character” and seeks to be the only true explanation for everything.
This ideology penetrates everywhere. Of course, ideologies exist in authoritarian regimes but there they only define what is not permitted. Under totalitarian regimes, the ideology is much more restrictive, defining not only what isn’t permitted but specifying all that is acceptable and opening the way to censorship and suppression.
According to the Moscow commentator, “the post-Stalinist history of the USSR showed that totalitarianism could exist for quite a long time without mass terror and even become more attractive than some purely authoritarian Latin American military junta.” But it couldn’t do without an ideology as the core of the system, and when that was lost, the system collapsed.
These similarities between the systems Hitler and Stalin put in place do not mean that there weren’t differences and that which side won in World War II didn’t matter, Skobov says. Had Hitler won, humanity would have been thrown back to the middle ages. But Stalin, by being forced to cooperate with the US and the UK, allowed the world to improve after 1945.
That reality justifies the sacrifices that the Soviet people made in the war, “but it does not justify the evil actions of the Stalinist regime or justify the deeply criminal nature of the Soviet system.” And trying to prevent everyone from seeing that by some law isn’t going to work for most.
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