Word: stalinize
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...diplomatic career that spanned the first four decades of Soviet history, Molotov earned the sobriquets "Old Stone Bottom" and "Mr. Iron Pants" from those who witnessed his legendary staying power at the negotiating table. Before his death at age 96, the loyal lieutenant and unquestioning henchman of Joseph Stalin had managed to hold out long enough to enjoy a bittersweet official rehabilitation in 1984 as one of the last survivors of the band of revolutionaries who created the world's first Communist state...
...mobilization of the masses; its total control of social life (all independent "intermediate" structures -- such as churches, parties, unions -- standing between the individual and the state were to be eradicated); and its systematic use of terror to enforce that control. Totalitarian regimes were thought to be (under Hitler and Stalin they certainly were) energetic, enthusiastic in an almost religious sense, on the march. Orwell's 1984 was not a parody. It was a mild extrapolation of totalitarian reality and a clinical picture of the totalitarian ideal...
...repressed "jazz section" of the musicians union in Czechoslovakia. Of course, some regimes are more total than others. For every Hungary there is a Rumania, where typewriters must be registered with the police. For every Poland, a North Korea, where the leader's cult of personality makes Stalin look retiring...
...transformed? We don't yet know. We know only that it can be modified. It can give way to a society with more space. How much? Writing 20 years ago, one of the great theorists of totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, noted a "detotalitarization" in the Soviet Union after Stalin's death. This could not be dismissed as a temporary thaw, she argued. True, the Soviet Union has never since returned to the depths of Stalinism. But it has not moved significantly in the opposite direction either. Instead, it has been subject to cycles of thaw and freeze. The relative liberalization under...
Within that range, totalitarianism may be finding its new equilibrium: aspiration to totality but with a concession of some social space. This permits effective control of society at a level of violence and vigilance that, unlike Stalin's or Hitler's terror, is sustainable indefinitely...