ABSTRACT
The Soviet empire has fallen, the suddenness and magnitude of the collapse has befuddled Western observers as well as many Russians. Many American academics strongly oppose the term "totalitarian" with regard to the Soviet Union; they consider it a loaded, unscholarly term belonging to the realm of cold war thinking which should be discarded. But in Russia "totalitarian" has become in recent years one of the most frequently used terms in the political dictionary. There had been some rumblings even before 1987, but it was only with the coming of glasnost that revisionism faced a real crisis. The revisionists could claim that no one had anticipated the sudden fall of the Soviet system and that it was wrong to single them out for blame. There is a striking similarity between revisionism in the field of Nazi and Soviet studies. In Germany some of it comes from the extreme right, ultranationalist camp and one need not elaborate on the reasons.
