On the Totalitarian Life

 

On the Totalitarian Life

October 31, 2024

He makes no secret of it. Donald Trump wants to destroy American democracy and replace it with a totalitarian or at least authoritarian regime with himself at its head, as an American dictator. As I write these words less than one week before the 2024 presidential election, we don’t know who will win. We do know that however the undemocratic electoral college vote comes out, around one half of the Americans who vote will vote for Donald Trump. Where they have the opportunity, they will also vote for Trump’s MAGA followers for seats in the next Congress, in the states’ governor’s mansions, and in state legislatures. We face an internal threat from American fascists unlike any we have faced before. Yes, there was a significant American fascist movement in the 1930s, but it never came even remotely close to putting on its advocates in the Oval Office; and thought it had members in Congress, it never threatened to take over that institution the way it does today.

Americans who vote for Donald Trump will be acting out of naivete and ignorance. Of that there is no doubt. There is one thing that they certainly don’t even know they don’t know. It is their complete lack of knowledge of what it is like to live under the kind of political regime that Donald Trump wants to create in our country. It’s not as though there weren’t numerous examples of what living under such a regime is like. Both history and present day reality give us lots of information on that subject. Totalitarian or at least authoritarian fascist and communist regimes (the distinctions between them being unimportant for our purposes here) exist in Russia, China, North Korea, Afghanistan, and no doubt other countries around the world. Anyone who wants to can easily find numerous sources of information about life in those countries.

I want here to examine what it was like to live in a totalitarian state that no longer exists, namely, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. I have qualifications for writing on that subject. I have a PhD in Russian history. I spent five weeks in the summer of 1968 traveling around the Soviet Union on a Russian language study tour. I was in Moscow when the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia. I lived in Soviet Russia, mostly in Moscow with some time in what was then Leningrad (now once again St. Petersburg), for the 1975-76 academic year doing research for my PhD dissertation. There certainly are scholars who know more about the Soviet Union than I do, but I certainly know more about it than most Americans do. So here’s at least some of what I know about what it meant to be a citizen of and live in the late, unlamented Soviet Union.

The Communist regime that ruled the USSR was totalitarian. It was Communist. It at least claimed to operate according to the principles of a political theory called Marxism-Leninism. That theory posited that what had actually been no more than a coup d’etat by a small group of zealots on November 7, 1917, was a popular socialist revolution. The Bolsheviks, as what became the Soviet Communist party was then known, led by Vladimir Lenin, somehow managed to win a years-long civil war against various monarchical and other opponents. By 1922, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was in complete control of most of what had been the Russian Empire.

The nature of the policies and practices of the Soviet Communists was apparent from early in their rule. One of the first things Lenin did was create what he called the Cheka, from the first letters of the Russian words for Extraordinary Committee. Most Americans know it better by one of its later names, the KGB, the initial letters of the Russian words for Committee on Government Security. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll call this institution the KGB even though it didn’t always have that name. By whatever name it went under over the course of its existence, the KGB was from its beginning a terrorist organization that the Communist Party used to suppress and eliminate all opposition from within the borders of the USSR and, actually, even beyond those borders. Its methods were brutal. They were brutal in the beginning under the leadership of Felix Dzerzhinsky, whose statue stood in front of the KGB headquarters in Moscow until the collapse of the Soviet Union as a symbol of the institution’s continuity over the decades and through its various name changes. It was at its most brutal in the 1930s under Josef Stalin. He used it to murder at least hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens on claims that they were counterrevolutionaries of one sort of another. It was much less brutal after Stalin’s death in 1953. When I was in Russia in 1968 and in the mid-1970s, the KGB was still very much there and very much active in suppressing all opposition to the Communist Party, but it had, mostly at least, stopped shooting people in the back of the head without trial like it did so often under Stalin.

The KGB was the Communist Party’s primary instrument for controlling the lives of the Soviet people. Its agents and informants permeated every institution in the country, including the Russian Orthodox Church. No one could be sure who was an undercover KGB agent. No one could be sure who, without actually being a KGB agent, would nonetheless report any slightly anti-Soviet behavior or act to the KGB. It was especially true during the Stalin years that no one could be sure that even a member of their own family would not turn them in if they made some anti-Soviet remark, turning in family members being something Soviet propaganda encouraged people to do. Especially under Stalin, it often happened that someone looking for advancement in a profession or within an institution would tell the KGB that the person up the ladder from them had said something anti-Soviet. That person would disappear, and the one who told the KGB the lie about them would get a raise. Of course, someone else might very well do the same thing to them, which must have made a lot of people very uneasy. Especially under Stalin, Soviet people lived in terror of the knock on the door in the middle of the night. The KGB, perhaps in the uniforms of the civilian police, would arrest a family member, and in many cases that family member was never seen again.

Like most totalitarian regimes, the Soviet Union was controlled by a guiding ideology; or at least it always claimed that it was. It was the ideology of Marxism-Leninism. All of the people of the Soviet Union had Marxism-Leninism pounded into their brains as the only truth there is. In many ways, Marxism-Leninism played the role that Russian Orthodox Christianity had once played for the Russian people. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union propagated the ideology of Marxism-Leninism in every way it could. There was no escaping it. The Party even put up little shrines to Lenin that mocked the shrines to some saint that Orthodox Russians often had in their homes. They pirated Christian beliefs and sayings. They said “Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will always live,” a rip off of the Christian belief in Jesus Christ if ever there was one.

Soviet life wasn’t quite as much compromised by the country’s totalitarian regime when I lived there as it had been under Stalin, but the KGB was still very much around. Here’s one story of how its presence worked. My family and I lived in a dormitory of Moscow State University while we were in Moscow. We lived in a wing of the enormous main MSU building that was many stories high. We lived on the fifth floor. Everyone, or nearly everyone, in the building knew that a man named Boris lived on the seventh floor. He, we knew, was a KGB plant. He wasn’t there to pursue university level studies. He was there to spy on the students who lived in that wing of the building and report any suspicious behavior or statement to the KGB.

My wife and I got to know a fifth year journalism student who lived in another part of the building. He apparently had connections in the Communist Party, for he could get friendly with American students without negative consequences, something very, very few Soviet people could do. Some of the things that happened while we were friends with him are quite telling about life in the Soviet Union. For example, we once asked him over to our rooms for dinner. The first thing he said in response was: “What floor do you live on?” We said: “The fifth.” Then he asked: “What floor does Boris live on?” We said: “The seventh.” So he accepted our invitation, I presume because he figured there wasn’t much chance Boris would see him hanging out with Americans, and not even this relatively privileged young Russian man wanted that to happen.

Several other things happened in my interaction with this man that illustrate what it meant to be a Soviet citizen. He was a journalism major, and once he said to me: “Everything we see is bad, but we are permitted only to write about what is good.” On another occasion he said to me: “You can come here and live in our country getting to know a good deal about us. I will never be able to go to your country to do that same thing.” Even though I am quite sure this young man was getting protection from someone in the Communist Party, he clearly felt constricted and controlled by his country’s totalitarian system.

One thing that totalitarian and authoritarian regimes always do is take control of and rewrite their country’s history. Few Americans really get the importance of history, but most Russians do. The only Russian history this friend of my would ever have heard would have been a grossly distorted account of that history propagated not to teach people actual history but as a measure of control. History had to conform to the Party’s ideology. Of course, that history really does no such thing, but as it was taught in the USSR, it did.

Near the end of our stay in Moscow, the pastor (the Rev. Mike Spangler) of the Anglo-American Church, which was attached to the American and British embassies in Moscow, gave me a book. It was by a Russian writer named Nikolai Berdyaev. It was, of course, in the original Russian. Pastor Mike gave it to me to give to any Soviet person I wanted to give it to. Early in his life, Berdyaev had been a Marxist, but he abandoned Marxism and returned to the Russian Orthodox Church. He became its leading theologian of the twentieth century. Of course, he couldn’t do that in the Soviet Union. He left that country and lived in Paris until his death. I gave the book to my Russian friend.

Now, this friend of mine was an atheist. He once asked my wife and me if we believed in God. We said that we did. He replied that belief in God was one thing about westerners that he could never understand. He was, after all, a product of the Soviet educational system and had had atheism pounded into his head for his entire life. He certainly had no source for a better understanding of Christianity or of any other faith.

Nonetheless, when I gave him Berdyaev’s book, he nearly broke down in tears. He said: “You will never know what you have done for me.” I didn’t ask him why he reacted that way, and he didn’t volunteer an explanation. I had learned that when a Soviet person didn’t volunteer an explanation of something it was best not to ask, but in this case my friend didn’t have to offer one. I am quite sure I understand why he reacted that way. He had surely heard of Berdyaev, perhaps in the course of his Soviet education or perhaps through some unofficial channel. In his education, he would have heard Berdyaev denounced as a class traitor and an enemy of the Soviet people. But one thing about him that the Soviets couldn’t conceal was that he was a Russian; and he was a Russian the Communist authorities thought they had to denounce.

My friend was an atheist, but he was a Russian. Russians love their history. Russians seek to know their history in a way few Americans seek to know theirs. Berdyaev was a major figure of what is called the Silver Age of Russian culture. That was, roughly, the ten or twelve years before the outbreak of World War I. It was a time when Russian culture truly flourished. The country produced any number of world class authors, painters, composers, and other artists. My friend would have know that much about it. He would also know, however, that what he had been told about it was badly distorted at best and an outright lie at worst. He didn’t react the way he did because Berdyaev as an Orthodox writer. He reacted that way because Berdyaev was an important Russian writer. I believe that my friend’s reaction reflected the fact that the Communists had stolen the people’s history from them and that they knew that the Communists had done it.

So what was it like to live under Soviet Communist totalitarianism? It was to live with several aspects in one’s life that were unhealthy at best and terrifying at worst. It meant first of all being constantly bombarded with an ideology that few if any people actually believed. At least, few if any people believed it in the latter years of the USSR’s existence. The Soviet Union’s “founding fathers,” that is, Lenin and most of his immediate cohorts, certainly believed in Marxism-Leninism, but it is probably true that by the 1970s only the more committed members of the Communist Party did. Nonetheless, that ideology was the only thing that gave the Soviet regime any legitimacy at all, so the Party kept saturating the country with it. The people had to mouth their acceptance of it at least in their public actions, though they certainly ignored it much of the time. Still, it was always there distorting reality in the interest of the Communist Party.

Living under Soviet totalitarianism meant that actual truth was denied, distorted, marginalized, or ignored in essentially every aspect of Soviet life. The Party told people they were the freest people in the world when in fact they were hardly free at all. It told people that the Party always acted in their interest when in fact it almost always acted only in its own interest. The Party told the people that life in the USSR was more prosperous and better in every way than life in the west when in fact the USSR was essentially a third world country with nuclear weapons and consumer goods were scarce at best and often simply not there.

One foundational example of the distortion of the truth was the way the Soviet Communists stole the people’s history from them. I gave an example of the consequences of their doing so above. Here’s another one. I wrote my PhD dissertation on the thought and policies of a man named Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev. It doesn’t matter much for our purposes here who he was. Just know that even western historians (not completely correctly) consider him to have been an arch reactionary who affected the policies of the last two tsars. I found one book about him that had been written and published in the USSR. It wasn’t actually history. It was propaganda masquerading as history. It made no attempt actually to understand the man, it only vilified and condemned him. To be an historian in the Soviet Union meant being more a propagandist than a scholar.

I fear that few Americans can understand how significant the Party’s theft of the people’s history in the USSR was. (I speak here of the Russians in the USSR. I think that what I say is also true of Ukrainians and Belarussians. I don’t know if it is true for other peoples in the Soviet empire.) One of the great shortcomings of American culture is the ignorance about and indifference of most Americans to their history. Americans tend to think that history is just things that happened in the past that don’t matter anymore. At best they would agree with the old saw that “the past is prologue.” But the past isn’t just a prologue. Indeed, as has been said, it isn’t even past. It is very much with us every day of our lives. Our past determines our present reality. It forms our nation’s institutions. It forms our nation’s culture. It forms the way people think today, not just the content of their thought but the very process of thought itself. It shapes what people think is real and how they think they know what is real.

Russian history does all of that for the Russian people, but for them there is another function of history as well. Russian history is important to them precisely because it is Russian. That means that it distinguishes them from all other people. Most importantly, it distinguishes them from the peoples of western Europe and North America, especially the people of the United States. The Russians are or at least want to be proud of their history and the culture it formed. Every people’s history is unique, but the way in which Russian history is unique matters to the Russians a lot. It is the history of a people living where Europe and Asia meet. It is a history very different from that of western Europe or the United States. It is the history of a culture that developed without developments like the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment that still so affect western culture today. It is a history of a people surviving poverty, authoritarian or totalitarian governments, and repeated foreign invasions. It is a history of nearly all of the people living, for centuries, under a system of serfdom that differed little from actual slavery. The Russian people want to know their history. The Russian people value their history highly.

And the Soviet Communists stole it from them. They turned it into a history of class struggle on the western model that simply wasn’t there, or was there in forms very different from those of western Europe, throughout the country’s history. In good Marxist fashion, the Soviet Communists turned some of the greatest minds of Russian history into mere tools of bourgeois oppression. They did the same thing to the Russian Orthodox Church, which had for centuries been one of the foundational institutions of Russian life.

The Communists distorted and even lied about their own history. They made Lenin’s coup d’état against a government that was no longer monarchical into a great people’s revolution against an unbearably oppressive tsarist regime, something that it was, at least at first, hardly at all. After about 1956, the Party suppressed the horrific truth of the Stalinist terror of the 1930s and turned the monster Stalin into nothing but a hero who defeated the Nazis. In short, no Soviet citizen could gain anything like a valid understanding of Russian history from the history the Soviet Communists taught, which was the only history they allowed to be taught. And that mattered to the Russian people a lot.

Then, most significantly, living under Soviet Communist totalitarianism meant living in oppression and fear. We Americans quite rightly value our history of the people’s civil rights. We cannot imagine living without freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, due process of law, indeed without all of the rights the US Constitution guarantees that we have. The constitution of the Soviet Union (yes, it had one) gave all of those rights to the Soviet people too, but in practice the constitution was a dead letter. No one could raise it as a defense in a criminal prosecution the way we Americans can and often do plead our constitutional rights in court. The Soviet Communists controlled all publishing, all journalism, and all broadcast media in the country. They allowed nothing that contradicted the party line to be published or broadcast. The country had a legal system that worked reasonably well in handling ordinary civil and criminal cases, but it didn’t function well at all in any case in which the KGB expressed an interest. If the Party, often through the KGB, said it wanted a criminal defendant convicted, that defendant would be convicted regardless of the facts or the law of the case. Soviet citizens could assemble publicly only in gatherings the Party had approved; and, it course, it would approve only gatherings called to exalt the Party and its policies.

I mentioned above my journalist student friend’s displeasure with the fact that he could not travel freely abroad. Some Soviet citizens did travel abroad, but the Party tightly controlled who could go abroad and where anyone could go. It was relatively easy to get permission to travel to the communist countries of central Europe that were under Moscow’s control. It was also possible to travel to Cuba. Yet whenever anyone went abroad, especially if they went to western Europe or the United States, the Party made sure they would be reluctant to defect. Usually, when a Soviet person went abroad, they had to have family members back in the USSR, a fact that made it more likely that the traveler would return home. At least under Stalin, the Party threatened to punish those family members if the traveler did not return. We Americans take freedom of travel for granted. Soviet citizens never could.

In theory, the Soviet people had freedom of religion. In practice, they had only a sort of it. At times over the course of its existence, the Soviet Communist Party tried to destroy the Russian Orthodox Church. Stalin tried to destroy it until he decided to use it as part of his effort to raise the people to fight the invading Nazis. As my late, great main PhD professor, Donald Treadgold, was found of saying, the churches and other places of worship were the only institutions in the USSR whose ultimate goals were not those of the Communist Party. The Party never succeeding in destroying the Russian Orthodox Church. There were functioning Russian Orthodox churches in the country when I was there, but attendance was very sparce. People said that only old women go to church. That may have been more or less true, but it seems there was generation after generation of old women.

Yet neither the Church nor its people were really free to practice their faith in public. It was illegal to take minors to church. It was illegal to teach the faith to them. There were three Orthodox seminaries in Soviet Russia that trained Orthodox priests, but those priests could never criticize the government or the Party. Indeed, some of them were KGB agents working undercover. The Bolsheviks restored the Moscow Patriarchate that Peter the Great had abolished, but the patriarch could never really act as a patriarch. He too had to mouth the Party line. To the extent that any Russian people valued the Russian Orthodox Church, they valued it not because it was Christian but because it was the most Russian of all the institutions in their country.

Soviet people lived under all of that oppression, but that wasn’t the worst aspect of Soviet life. The worst aspect of Soviet life was that the people lived in constant fear. The strength and depth of that fear varied depending on what the Party was doing against supposed opposition at any particular time. It was worst under Stalin. It was significantly less after him, but it was always still there. Doing anything the Party perceived as counterrevolutionary, that is, against the Party, would still get you arrested and sent to prison. Stalin’s successors didn’t murder anywhere near as many people as Stalin did, but the country still practiced capital punishment for so-called political crimes. Citizens could still report alleged counterrevolutionary acts by other citizens to the KGB.

Soviet people had to assume that they were under KGB surveillance at all times. When I was in the Soviet Union, first during the summer of 1968 and again for the 1975-76 academic year, we could safely assume that the KGB didn’t care a whit about what we said as long as there were no Soviet people present when we said it. Yet we always assumed that our dorm rooms were bugged. So were any hotel rooms we stayed in. Soviet people had to assume the same thing about their homes and their workplaces. The constant awareness that they were always under the eyes of the KGB produced a good deal of constant fear in Soviet people.

That, folks, was a good part of what it meant to live under Soviet totalitarianism. Tragically, today we have some vocal and even powerful people who want to create some version of that life here in the United States. They want the government to ban books they don’t like. They want the government to assert control over women’s bodies, and they have had an appalling amount of success at the state level in getting it to do so. They don’t want the US to become a Marxist-Leninist country of course, they just want it to be a “Christian” nation, with “Christian” understood only as they understand it. They want to take civil rights away from sexual minorities. They want systemic racism to continue to function in American institutions, and they advance its doing so by denying that it exists. They want to take true American history away from the country’s people. They don’t want actual American history taught in the public schools. They want only a whitewashed version history that ignores the unpleasant aspects of actual American history like slavery, racial discrimination, white supremacy, and our genocide of Native Americans.

Just as the Soviet government operated only in the interest of the Communist Party, these people want the American government to operate only in their interest and in the interest of the wealthy and the large corporations. Just as the Soviet Communist Party persecuted actual or perceived opponents, these Americans want the American government to persecute people they perceive as opponents. I mean, just listen to what their Dear Leader Donald Trump says about prosecuting “the enemies within,” by which he means people who don’t support him.

I don’t mean to suggest that any Americans want to recreate the Soviet Union’s Gulag, its extensive network of prisons called labor camps where much of the oppression of the Party’s actual or imagined opponents took place. They do, however, want the government to arrest millions of people who have committed the supposedly heinous crime of immigrating to the United States, to hold them in camps, and to deport them even if they have become American citizens.

In short, a significant portion of the American public wants to turn the country fascist. Not Communist, for communism is atheistic, though in practice there’s not much difference between Soviet Communism and European fascism. They want us Americans living much like the citizens of the Soviet Union lived, and, for that matter, how Russians still live under Putin. They don’t realize, or maybe they do, what that life was like. It’s not that Soviet people didn’t have a life. They did. They had families. They had places to live. They went to school. They had jobs. They had vacations. But that life was severely impacted by the totalitarian regime under which they lived. I for one do not want my life and the lives of my fellow Americans turned into anything remotely like that kind of life. Yet that is exactly what Donald Trump and his fascist minions seek to do. I write today just five days before the 2024 general election. Will Trump and his fascist voters win? I don’t know. I just hope and pray that they will not.