This is Who made our minds? my Thursday essay probing the greatest, cruellest and most beautiful minds of the past 5,000 years, inspired by my book, The Soul: A History of the Human Mind (Penguin 2024). Coming up: God’s capitalists; Confucius: the first humanist; Pascal’s wager.
Question: What was your assessment of Stalin?
Fedorova: I had very high regard of him . . . [He] was a great man . . . He united people . . . no one could create those faces [in the Kino-Chronicle, a news service], those smiling faces, those joyful faces artificially.
Question: Weren’t the millions killed and sent to the gulags a blot on the record?
Fedorova: It was a dark stain, but I’ll repeat once more that the country was working . . . The factories were working, children were studying at schools . . . the country was growing.
Question: This terrible stain did not undermine your faith in socialism at all?
Fedorova: No it didn’t.
Question: What was the particular appeal of communism for you?
Fedorova: Unity of people, unity of action. That’s what attracts me and has always inspired me to [sic] totalitarianism . . . The thing I have always striven for . . . is my Party membership card. I still have it. That is what I have devoted my life to.
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The thoughts of this Russian woman, given in an oral survey, were typical of millions who revered Joseph Stalin. The genocidal crimes of the Soviet leader, whom George Orwell described as ‘a disgusting dictator temporarily on our side’, had little sway over their conviction that Stalin was a good and great man.
They were unaware or unconcerned by the fact that their minds had been rendered ‘totalitarian’, in the sense of being indistinguishable from the mind of the Communist Party and the will of the tyrant who controlled them.
Listen to this Russian man who helped to eradicate the kulaks, the Ukrainian farmers whose plots were forcibly collectivised between 1930 and 1933 on Stalin’s orders, resulting in famine and the forced resettlement of millions to the Soviet prison system where an estimated four million Ukrainians perished. This act of genocide is today remembered as the Holodomor:
Question: Did you think that your hopes then for a bright future stopped you seeing the suffering you and others were causing the kulaks?
Chernitzky: Everybody lived with the hope of a radiant future, everyone lived like that . . . If Stalin said, ‘Do it’, then it was necessary. Every day the Center gave reports of how many people had been de-kulakized, how many had entered the collective farms.’
The regions worst affected by the famine were the Kyiv and Dnipropetrovsk oblasts (administrative districts) and the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. Starving families were forced to eat ‘various food substitutes’, noted a mule-headed report by the deputy head of the Soviet Secret Political Department in Ukraine. He meant dried straw, rotten fruit and potato peelings, as well as cats, dogs and horses. ‘Twenty eight incidents of cannibalism have been registered,’ the report further stated.
The Kremlin blamed the Ukrainian kulaks for creating the famine. By this rancid logic, ‘counter-revolutionaries’ – that is, hungry ‘bourgeois-kulaks’ – had incited thousands of their fellow peasants to flee their villages in search of food.
In fact, Stalin had personally ordered the arrest of the Ukrainians fleeing north; everyone else was told to remain in their villages, where they continued starving.
A banal admission of Soviet responsibility for the famine appeared in a report by Comrade S.V. Kosior to the Joint Plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, in November 1933. The kulaks had been ‘liquidated’, he remarked, for inciting ‘nationalist’ feelings.
Kosior was the archetypal example of the ‘desk-killers’ of the totalitarian state, whose stupidity, as Hannah Arendt observed in The Origins of Totalitarianism, was ‘the best guarantee of their loyalty’.
‘The ideal subject of totalitarian rule,’ she wrote, ‘is not the convinced Nazi or dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.’
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All totalitarian regimes share this: the denial of the possibility of an individual. Under totalitarian rule, the conscience, the personality, the thoughts that identify the self or the soul/mind of a man or woman are redundant, surplus to requirements, scrap.
‘Totalitarianism strives not toward despotic rule over men, but toward a system in which men are superfluous,’ Arendt explained. The pure totalitarian state has no need of the individual. Individuals are its enemies and should be eliminated.
The collective mind of the Party knew best. The Soviet Communist Party believed it was the peak achievement of humankind, the culmination of history. Of what use were original minds, free thinkers, artists, innovators, educators – not to mention satirists, comics, critics, debaters – in a perfect state?
Human beings were useful only insofar as they peddled the Party line and glorified the State. Under the regimes of Stalin, Hitler and Mao, the idea of the ‘rights’ of the ‘individual’ was a dialectic cul-de-sac, an atavistic relic, a notion that should have died off after the Western Enlightenment.
There exist two types of people in the totalitarian state: loyal Party members who adhere slavishly to official doctrine (which might change at the whim of the dictator); and the enemies of the Party – not only obvious political and military opponents, but ‘objective enemies’.
The latter had not committed a crime, as we understand it. They had been born into a ‘race’ or ‘class’ that the Party deemed anathema: Jews and Slavs, under the Nazis; the bourgeois and the owners of capital, under Stalin and Mao. All were disposable. The Nazis also identified for extermination any group they considered ‘genetic asocials’, or human ‘defectives’, such as Roma and Sinti (‘gypsies’), homosexuals, transgender people and the mentally and physically handicapped.
In such a world, conventional notions of good and evil did not apply. Communism and fascism had supplanted the human conscience with the mind of the Party. If you did not learn to suppress your own mind, the state would do it for you. That meant annihilating your sense of self, snuffing out every tremor of an original thought or fleeting ‘idea’.
Bodies, however, were useful to the totalitarian state. Bodies were little machines that could be forced to fight and work. Bodies offered a source of cannon fodder and slave labour, in the factories of the Gulag and the Nazi death camps. And bodies had another use: they fetched answers under torture. Pain to the body forced the mind to confess to whatever crimes the communists or Nazis accused it of.
Totalitarian rule ruptured the link between cause and effect, which we naively assume to exist in the ‘normal’ course of our lives; for example, that we won’t be woken in a blaze of guns and dogs and bundled off to a concentration camp because of our ethnicity or ‘class’.
If there were ‘causes’ in a totalitarian state, they were created by the ruler. To try to anticipate the effects of those causes on you and your family was futile, because you were but a dispensable speck in the march of the fascist or communist state towards an ‘inevitable’ utopia.
Class war (according to Marx) and race war (according to the Nazis) were ‘natural laws’ binding the universe. There was no way around this: ordinary people were caught in the mincing machine of history, the titanic struggles of which would ‘inevitably’ produce the dictatorship of the proletariat or the master race.
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The totalitarian ruler’s grim psychic trajectory was almost invariably rooted in, if not explained by, humiliation and a sense of rejection, accompanied by an unquenchable thirst for revenge. The orphaned Adolf Hitler, having failed as an artist, spent part of his youth in hostels for the homeless. Germany’s defeat in WWI was, for Hitler, an abject humiliation that he took personally. Stalin’s father was an alcoholic cobbler who violently abused the family and kidnapped the intellectually gifted lad (from his mother’s hideout) to force him to make shoes. An exception seems to have been Mao Zedong, who enjoyed a comfortable middle-class upbringing with no obvious scars that might have helped to explain his later career as the bloodiest dictator in history.
Having consolidated his earthly power, the totalitarian ruler was dismayed to find that the ordinary people persisted in worshipping a power higher than he. Observing Russian peasants and German Volk genuflecting at the altar, pledging their troth to God, their earthly rulers wondered how they might extract such unwavering obedience. It aggrieved the tyrant to find that he had a rival in Heaven. Here, then, was a new frontier of conquest: the faith that possessed the minds of the people. If a totalitarian could not be a god, he would demand to be treated as one.
By ‘submitting’ to deification, the Roman emperors had not sought to replace the Roman gods: the deified emperors ranked themselves alongside Mars and Jupiter and the rest. That concession to modesty was an affront to the modern dictator’s ego. The totalitarian ruler was not a god among many: he would rule alone, over everyone, everywhere, forever.
A caricature of the type led the way. The leader of the first Fascist Party – Italy’s Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) – cultivated a messiah complex. In calling Mussolini ‘a man sent by Providence’, Pope Pius XI helped to sustain the popular belief that ‘God’ had sent Il Duce to save Italy from liberal decadence.
Mussolini’s performance of the Second Coming would have been comical were it not so insidious. His fascist henchmen compared their saviour to the ‘divine Caesar’, ‘another Saint Francis’, our ‘spiritual father’ and the ‘sublime redeemer in the Roman heavens’.
Like the Roman emperors, Mussolini affected an unworthiness of the purple robe of deification, even as he promoted that delusion. The fascist Italian press, reliably in line, called him ‘our divine Duce’ and the ‘incarnation of God’, and his courtiers fawned and scraped and wrote of him as though this vicious megalomaniac had in fact been deified.
Mussolini’s fascism was half-formed. It was a pit stop on the road to the real thing: the total oppression and complete mind control perfected by the Nazis, the Soviet Union and Maoist China. Mussolini himself descended into a caricature of the godlike totalitarian ruler, and in April 1945 he was caught trying to flee Italy and shot.
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That ‘real thing’ was a state of mind of fathomless hatred, brutality and terror. We enter this full-blown totalitarian psyche with great trepidation. The first thing one notices is the absence of any conventional humanity. The ‘vague, pervasive hatred of everybody and everything’ breathed through the body politic under a totalitarian state, as Arendt described with icy clarity.
It is vital to understand that the totalitarian mind initiated the dehumanisation of its people and the state of terror after it had slaughtered or imprisoned its ‘real’ enemies – that is, any armed resistance or political activists.
Then began the flushing-out and extermination – the ‘racial cleansing’ – of ‘objective enemies’, those deemed anathema to the regime because of their religion, birth, ‘race’, sexual orientation, weakness or disability.
Only after Hitler had exterminated his enemies in the Night of the Long Knives (1934) and other pogroms, and Stalin had completed the giant purges that began in 1928, and Mao had eradicated Party enemies in the early years of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), would they unleash the state of terror against innocent civilians.
At the Seventeenth Party Congress – the Congress of Victors – in 1934, Stalin declared, ‘We have nobody to fight.’ The Bolsheviks’ internal enemies were defeated; the White Army, the kulaks and the capitalists were eradicated. ‘That is when the general suppression began, when the police state showed its true nature,’ Arendt wrote. In 1936 Stalin launched the ‘super-purge’ that liquidated the existing administration and erased all traces of normal life.
When there were no open enemies left, the state preyed on its own people, because its survival depended on the perpetual ‘cleansing’ of society. The most intimate relationships were compromised, turning husbands and wives into informants on each other, children against their parents, lovers into haters. Terror and indoctrination made your dearest friend a spy for the Party.
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There is no alternative – that was the message sent by the communist and fascist states. It has all been prophesied, foreseen. The scientific laws of history ordain that our doctrines shall prevail. So we might as well get it over with and liquidate you now.
This line of thinking, the epitome of the totalitarian mind, retroactively justified the extermination of all classes or ‘races’ who opposed or delayed the inevitable coming of utopia.
‘As soon as the execution of the victims has been carried out,’ Arendt writes, ‘the “prophecy” becomes a retrospective alibi: nothing happened but what had already been predicted.’
Every thought and action would bend, or be bent, to fit that imperative. Ends and means, causes and effects were reversible, interchangeable, looping around and around. The tyrant was able to justify any action or event, no matter how barbaric, simply because it fulfilled his ‘prediction’ at any point in time.
There are many examples of totalitarian rulers announcing their political intentions in the form of prophecies. Here are two:
In 1930 Stalin spoke before the Central Committee of the Communist Party. He described those deviating from the Party as members of ‘dying classes’, whose physical liquidation would now proceed because Stalin had just prophesied that they were ‘dying out’.
And in January 1939 Hitler told the Reichstag: ‘I want today once again to make a prophecy: in case the Jewish financiers . . . succeed once more in hurling the peoples into a world war, the result will be . . . the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.’
The people were made to understand that ‘dying classes’ and ‘unfit races’ were predestined to wither and die, according to Marx’s laws of history and fascist racial theory. By bringing forward their annihilation, the state was accelerating the realisation of a foregone conclusion. By this reasoning, the death camps, the gulags, the ghettoes – all were manifestations of the prophetic power of the totalitarian mind.
Next Thursday, 12th September 2024: God’s capitalists.
Selected sources and further reading:
Applebaum, A. (2017) Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine, New York: Doubleday.
Alexievich, S. and Pevear, R. (transl.) (2017) The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II, London: Random House.
Arendt, H. (Fall 2007) ‘The Great Tradition: I. Law and Power’, Social Research, 74(3), pp. 713–26.
Arendt, H. (2017) The Origins of Totalitarianism, London: Penguin Classics.
Clendinnen, I. (2002) Reading the Holocaust, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fonseca, I. (1996) Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey, London: Vintage.
Gretton, D. (2019) I You We Them: Journeys beyond Evil: The Desk Killer in History and Today, London: William Heinemann.
Klid, B. and Motyl, A.J. (eds.) (2022) The Holodomor Reader: A Sourcebook on the Famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine, Edmonton: University of Alberta Press.
Kurlander, E. (2017) Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich, New Haven CT: Yale University Press.
Mack Smith, D. (1982) Mussolini, New York: Knopf.
Mommsen, H. (Fall 1997) ‘Hitler’s Reichstag Speech of 30 January 1939’, History and Memory, 9(1/2), pp. 147–61.
Shkandrij, M. and Bertelsen, O. (April 2015) ‘The Soviet Regime’s National Operations in Ukraine, 1929–1934’, Canadian Slavonic Papers, 55(3/4), pp. 417–47.
‘The Red Flag’, People’s Century, PBS Television [a selection of oral histories].