ABSTRACT
Cultural historians have not confined their attention to the lower orders of Soviet society. The efforts they have made to probe the minds of those in authority – Party leaders and functionaries in the main – return Marxist-Leninist ideology to centre stage, whence it was displaced by the revisionists. But in doing so, they explicitly dissociate themselves from the concept of totalitarian rule, seen as too simplistic: it assumed a polar opposition between the Stalinist Party-state and the ‘atomized’ individual, and placed too much weight on coercion as distinct from ‘a process . . . of co-optation which drew the subject to self-destruction.’1
