The three phases of Arendt's theory of totalitarianism

The basic unit of Arendt's analysis in part III is not the totalitarian state, but rather what she calls the totalitarian "movement." That is a reflection of her thesis that it is best to regard the "so-called totalitarian state" as the adaptation of the "movement" itself to the circumstances of political power, and the concomitant subordination of all state institutions to its internally generated needs (that is, rather than to suppose that the "movement" at issue were simply the organized means to attain or maintain despotic state power in the usual sense). What she understands as a totalitarian "movement," then, is a concentric pattern of organization whose core is a highly disciplined party, and whose centrally directed perimeter may or may not extend to the institutions of government, depending on whether the movement is in its "pre-power" stage or the stage of "totalitarianism in power." (The stage of "total domination" occurs once the institutions of the state are fully assimilated to the movement.) Arendt takes the term "movement" itself from the Nazis' own self-description, and her application of it to that case is straightforward enough. Her use of the phrase "Bolshevik movement" is somewhat less so, and may invite confusion. Contrary to what the phrase may seem to suggest, she holds that this Bolshevik movement--as a totalitarian movement, at least--came into being only with Stalin's reorganization of the Soviet revolutionary party and state after Lenin's death (319). Even so, Arendt consistently avoids the term "Stalinism," which she evidently believed conveyed the false impression that the evil at issue concerned one man's abuse of power, rather than the comprehensive system he had set into play (which she saw no reason to believe would come to an end with Stalin's own demise). (23) Her similarly consistent preference for "Bolshevism" over "Communism" presumably derives from the fact that the former term more closely resembles "National Socialism" in its lack of any meaningful political content apart from the movement's momentary aims. In any case, the "Bolshevik movement" in Arendt's usage essentially refers to the Soviet Communist Party under Stalin, along with the state institutions and nonstate organizations under its control--not only those in the Soviet Union and its postwar satellites, but also the prewar Comintern agencies and Popular Front parties all across Europe, from the Balkans to Spain.

That last geographic qualification deserves more explicit emphasis than Arendt herself gives it in the text, for it explains how she can speak of the Bolshevik movement's "pre-power stage" even while claiming that the movement itself did not antedate Stalin's command. It also explains why her recurrent focus on the social and political conditions in Germany in the decade after the First World War does not in itself indicate any analytic bias in favor of the Nazi case. The point for Arendt is that the parties of both totalitarian movements were active in Germany in those years--not only Hitler's N.S.D.A.P., but Thalmann's (that is to say, Stalin's) K.P.D. too. (24) That one movement rather than the other successfully came to power there in a quasi-legal coup d'etat is in effect a matter of theoretical indifference to her, and hardly even enters her account. Nor does it much matter for her purposes if the Nazi or Communist party's seizure of state power in any given country may have come only on the heels of the Wehrmacht (as in Austria, say, or Holland) or the Red Army. (25) What interests her about the movement's "pre-power" stage is not how, or even whether, a totalitarian movement is able to seize state power in one country or another, but rather how such a movement recruits adherents and sustains their loyalty, whatever its absolute strength or eventual success. By the same token, her analysis of "totalitarianism in power" takes the fact of the movement's holding state power as an established fait accompli.