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and justifies a prolonged revolution, as it baptizes the development of the
means of production to be "socialist construction." The accumulation of
capital or technical Westernization under the direction of a revolutionary
sect results in this mixture of terror and ideology characteristic of the rule
of extremists.
At the same time, socialist construction under state impetus follows
upon a Russian tradition - as Elie Halevy put it, the Communist Party is
a collective Peter the Great. It reestablished a bureaucracy that is at once
managerial and technical, far more extensive by contrast with the czarist
bureaucracy. Little by little, the Stalinist bureaucracy guarantees itself
material advantages, prestige, external signs of hierarchy, and imitations of
traditional bureaucracy. To the benefit of the Party's Secretary General,
the secular religion of revolutionary ideology ends up playing the same
role that orthodox religion did for the czars. Caesaro-papism is reborn,
and the interpreter of history becomes the pope-emperor.
The totalitarian phenomenon thus entails many interpretations be–
cause it has many causes. The method that aims at grasping its essence is
legitimate, but on the condition that it does not neglect complementary
methods. Otherwise, one cannot raise what is perhaps the most important
question: for how long a time is totalitarianism destined to last? Is it the
temporary and pathological accompaniment of certain transformations?
Or is it, despite its intrinsic absurdity, capable of prolonging itself in a
kind of permanent dehumanization of human societies? In 1984, George
Orwell suggested a sociological thesis: the single party, the authoritarian
bureaucracy, the state orthodoxy, the investment plans and privations im–
posed on
all,
the psychological conditioning of the victims - all of these
are susceptible to forging a system compatible with industrial society.
While progress in productivity would make it possible for the first time in
history for a higher culture to be founded without the misery of the
greater number, the totalitarian regime encourages war and despotism,
reserving once again the profits of civilization for the few alone. In
Orwell's thesis, totalitarianism is not be connected with a buildup phase
of industrial development or attributable to the weight of a specifically
Russian past, but it bears the politico-ideological superstructure of a mod–
ern planned economy.
In a contrary view, Isaac Deutscher decreed that Stalinist barbarity
was
the more or less inevitable method by which Russian barbarity was
dispelled and that it would not survive the process of the country's
technical Westernization. By its works, Stalinism would destroy its own
foundation. There are several objections to raise against both Deutscher's
thesis and the way he demonstrates it. Yet he has asked the decisive ques–
tion: does not the industrialization of society itself tend to erode the foun-
