Politics of the past: the use and abuse of history - Socialists ...

2. A single mass party consisting of a relatively small percentage of
the total population (up to 10 percent) [..], such party being organized
in strictly hierarchical, oligarchic manner, usually under a single
leader [..].
3. A technologically conditioned near-complete monopoly of control
[..] of all means of effective armed combat.
4. A similar technologically conditioned near-complete monopoly
of control [..] of all means of effective mass communication, such as
the press, radio, motion pictures, and so on.
5. A system of terrorist police control [..] characteristically directed
not only against demonstrable “enemies” of the regime, but against
arbitrarily selected classes of the population [..].
6. A centrally directed economy.” 13
Friedrich and Brzezinski argued that this cluster of “intertwined and
mutually supportive” traits should only be considered together, as an
“organic” system. 14 In the spirit of the unitotalitarian theory, they also
argued that these traits characterized all fascist as well as communist
regimes, which were all “basically alike,” not “wholly alike,” yet “sufficiently
alike to class them together.” 15 Among them, the two authors
listed Soviet Russia since 1917 to the time of their writing
(1956/1965), Fascist Italy (1925-1943), Nazi Germany (1933-
1945), post-1945 Eastern European and Asian communist
regimes, etc.
This descriptive model soon became the standard view on totalitarianism,
the received wisdom of the Cold War, widely cited in
scholarly or even public discussions on totalitarian regimes. During
the time, however, the explanatory value of this analytical model was
questioned on numerous counts. The first criticism was that this
model lacks both an elaborated theoretical framework to support it,
and a “connotative” definition of totalitarianism. Defining totalitarian
regimes by means of a set of characteristics was “an attempt to
convey the meaning of an automobile solely by a description of its
13 Friedrich, Brzezinski, Totalitarian dictatorship & autocracy, 10-11.
14 nd Friedrich, Brzezinski, Totalitarian dictatorship & autocracy, 2 ed., 21.
15 Friedrich, Brzezinski, Totalitarian dictatorship & autocracy, 7.
16 For a critical comparative perspective, see Robert Burrowes, “Totalitarianism.
The Revised Standard Version,” World Politics, 21 (1969) 2, 272-294,
here 283, 288.
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