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with the death of the dictator, totalitarianism seems to have evaporated.
Seen in retrospect, the value of Arendt's book was not in startling
new insights on the Soviet Union or indeed on Nazi Germany but in
having started the discussion of totalitarianism which has not ended to
this day. The reception of her book and its impact is covered in detail in
Abbot Gleason's recently published wide-ranging study,
Totalitarianism.
The Inner History of the Cold War.
A professor at Brown University,
Gleason belongs to the generation which rebelled against the
"Manichean world view" shared by his father, a well-known historian
and (temporarily) senior official in the CIA. Over the years the younger
Gleason came to realize that the cold warriors were not all wrong; in
retrospect he is glad "that Stalin's enemies on our side were ideologically
well armed," and he notes in retrospect that "most people on the Left
have been highly resistant until recently to any suggestion that the
classification of the Soviet Union as totalitarian is more than a
conservative canard."
Yet with all the good will to be fair to all sides, old prejudices die
hard, and as a result the "cold warriors" of yesterday are often described
as shrill, self-serving, fanatical, and laughable, whereas their opponents,
even if wrong, seem to have behaved in a measured, sober, and states–
man-like way. There is, for instance, Gleason's reference to the brilliant
Peter Ludz, a leading West German student of East German affairs. The
unsuspecting reader cannot possibly know that it was more owing to his
influence than to any other that the study of East Germany took a
wrong turn some twenty-five years ago. The achievements and the
rootedness of the East German regime were grossly exaggerated, and as a
result the downfall of the DDR came as a total surprise to this school of
students of East Germany.
Does Gleason's book then bear out Furet's strictures about the lack–
ing anti-totalitarian enthusiasm of the left? Only up to a point, for of
the "cold warriors" mentioned in Gleason's book, many were neither
conservatives nor neoconservatives; this is simply the old conditioned re–
flex, to classify as such the more outspoken critics of Soviet policies. But
George Orwell was not a conservative, nor was the AFL/CIO, nor was
Norman Thomas, even though he wrote in 1948 that "Communism,
whatever it was originally, is today Red fascism." One could add easily
many more names to this list.
Hannah Arendt's guru on Communism and the Soviet Union in the
early days was Waldemar Gurian, a University of Notre Dame professor,
born in St. Petersburg ofJewish parents, educated in Germany, and con-
