ABSTRACT
Soviet Totalitarianism lays greater initial claim on democratic sympathies than does fascism. Its hopes and ideals appear to be in an intelligible humanitarian tradition; and the harshness of its methods seemed almost justified by the magnitude of its problems, the unpreparedness of the Russian people and the implacability of the reactionary opposition. In the figure of Lenin, the Soviet Revolution had a leader whose combination of will and selflessness made him appears the embodiment of the inevitabilities of history. Yet Lenin’s revision of Marxism laid the foundations upon which Stalinist absolutism rests. Lenin’s policy of concentrating all authority and wisdom in the Party leadership and smashing all opposition thus made “Stalinism” inevitable. Soviet apologists have made much of the great capitalist encirclement as the cause for the policies of totalitarianism. Everything in a totalitarian state is eventually sucked into the vortex where totalitarian man interminably revindicates himself.
