COMMUNISM NOW
525
nism to be restored? Are the peasants to be relieved, once and for
all, of the fear that they will be driven into collectives? What is left
of Stalinism if these steps are taken-and if Stalinism is repudiated
in toto
and not just on paper and for the benefit of the ruling elite,
how much is left of
Leninism?
These are questions that no Commu–
nist party has yet dared to face. They will have to be faced if the
"thaw" is not to give way to another ice age.
IRVING HOWE
So much has by now been written about the Twentieth
Congress of the Russian Communist Party that, to avoid repeating
what someone else is likely to say, I shall confine myself to a few re–
marks concerning the analytical difficulties created by the new events:
1. During the past two decades most Western liberals and
socialists have tried to grapple with the problem of Russian society
by constructing a model of a unique phenomenon called totalitarian–
ism. Naturally, the best political analysts have focused on what
seemed unprecedented in Russian and German totalitarianism: the
role of terror as an integral element of this new society; the terrify–
ing power of ideology as both the mental equivalent of terror and
a means for dominating the total life of man; the extreme atomization
of social life, so that classes tend to become pulverized into a passive
and anonymous mass; the consolidation of a ruling elite which ap–
propriates to itself not merely a variety of goods or a monopoly of
power but the very possession of the state and of its citizens.
Now, if we take as typical of this approach Hannah Arendt's
Origins oj Totalitarianism
and Orwell's 1984, we see that both books,
whatever their faults and "exaggerations," did us an immense moral
and intellectual service by insisting that totalitarianism was not merely
an extension of monopoly capitalism, Russian expansionism, Leninist
dictatorship, man's inherent sinfulness, or anything else. To one or
another extent, such elements were present in the totalitarian re–
gimes, but what made them so powerful and frightening was their
break with old traditions, be they good or bad traditions; precisely,
