Roland Pean

Prof. Rober Kunath

HI 292

21 April 2024

Havel discusses a system of post totalitarian dictatorship, a system which while aiming

for total control could not use the same brutal tactics of a totalitarian state. Although the methods

differ from the means used by the Nazis’ I would both agree and disagree with Havel by Hannah

Arendt’s statements on the goal of a Totalitarian system, “Total domination, which strives to

organize, which strives to organize the infinite plurality and differentiation of human beings as if

all humanity were just one individual, is possible only if each and every person can be reduced to

a never changing identity of reactions, so that each of these bundles of reactions can be

exchanged at random for any other.(Arendt 119). This is the goal of even the ‘post totalitarian’

Warsaw pact described by Havel, and as I will show not as far removed from the Nazi

methodology as would be suggested by cursory glance. The goal of this paper is to show that

while Havel is correct to say the regime has ceased its early brutality he is wrong to say that the

Communist government is not a totalitarian state.

There are Three texts which deal with the minutea of totalitarian systems, Power of the

Powerless, The rise of Totalitarianism, and Eichmann in Jerusalem. Havel’s Power of the

Powerless is about the innate power of the smallest cogs of any system, the average person. In it

there is evidence that the Communist party truly feared the union of common citizens and so

divided them. The key quote is, “They leave it up to each individual to decide what he will or

will not take from their experience and work. … It’s response, however, is always limited to two
dimensions: repression and adaptation”.(Havel 198) This because the truth of the matter was that

the Soviet system of governance had failed and relied upon layers of deception to keep the

populace from gathering en masse and overthrowing them by preventing even the whisper of a

change from the hardline Soviet system being beneficial as shown by the intervention in

Czechoslovakia. The McKay text has this excerpt to point at for specifics, “In January 1968, the

reform elements of the Czechoslovak Communist party gained majority and voted out the

longtime Stalinist leader in favor of Alexander Dubec (1921-1992), whose new government

launched dramatic reforms. … The reform program was ended, and the Czechoslovak

experiment in humanizing communism came to an end.”(McKay 1006-1007). So this means in

most cases only has opposition carefully managed by the local Communist leadership, this was

the case in the DDR (Deutsch Demokratisch Republik) and Czechoslovakia where no matter

who wins they follow the Soviet Premieres’ lead with exceptions being swiftly and brutally

crushed.

I would like to call back to the opening paragraph in the quote by Arendt about the true

goal of Totalitarianism, to reduce everything to an easily predicted and replaceable series of

reactions and albeit through bureaucracy rather than death squads was done in Czechoslovakia.

As Havel stated in establishing ‘post totalitarian’ characteristics on 129 of Power of the

Powerless, “One legacy of the original ‘correct’ understanding is a third peculiarity that makes

our system different from other modern dictatorships: it commands an incomparably more

precise, logically structured, generally comprehensible and, in essence, extremely flexible

ideology that, in its elaborateness and completeness, is almost a secularized religion.”(Havel

129). This is correct in differentiating it from historical dictatorships of the time, however it does

not truly depart from the totalitarian ethos of complete control, or as close as can be achieved,
indeed this bureaucracy is itself the method of control similar to how the structure of Nazi

Bureaucracy was used to control the moral process of Eichmann as in this excerpt. “He merely,

to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing. … The expression

‘Administrative massacres’ seems better to fill the bill.”(Arendt 379-380). Havel points at

bureaucracy and its steep intertwined nature with everything as one of the key points where the

‘post totalitarian’ system differs the Soviet Union and other dictatorships and makes it a

supposedly post totalitarian system, however here with Eichmann there is a clear commonality

by drawing upon the knowledge of just how extensive and bureaucratized the Nazi regime was in

order to carry out its many crimes.

This is because Societies tend to reorganize themselves as times and needs change, and

this why there was so much repression in the Soviet system. The Communist Ideology would

hold that they already possess a perfect system for the workers of the world and maintained it by

various forms of indoctrination and intimidation. “Or another example: the single, monolithic,

youth organization run by the state as a typical post-totalitarian ‘transmission belt’ disintegrates

under the pressure of real needs into a number of more or less independent organizations such as

the Union of University Students, the Union of Secondary School Students, the Organization of

Working Youths, and so on.). (Havel 200). This leads to why the Soviet Government and their

various Puppets kept such a close hold on organizations forming and existing whenever possible,

because they would evolve as the situations of its members evolved, because the organizations

would if unchecked would develop more independent thought beyond State control.

This ties further back into the repressive totalitarian Warsaw Pact needing to keep such a

stranglehold on culture because of how the Bolsheviks formed and seized power from a political

organization upset about the Absolute rule of the Tsars’ and Duma made mostly of Nobility and
its effects of the masses. This again calls back to a McKay quote on the early days of Stalinism,

“Culture lost it’s autonomy in the 1930’s and became thoroughly publicized through constant

propaganda and indoctrination. … Stalin seldom appeared in public, but his presence was

everywhere – in portraits, statues, books, and quotations from his ‘sacred’ writings.” (McKay

963). The Communist State tried to make all culture an apparatus of thought control making

there repression and intimidation both tragically ironic and self-perpetuating due to the various

opponents it produced to their rule being used to justify crackdowns.

The Soviet Union and its satellites such as Czechoslovakia were a totalitarian system

hidden behind the window dressing of bureaucracy and political theatre. This can be seen also,

though Havel doesn’t see it that way, in the excerpts of The Power of the Powerless, Life of a

Public Enemy as well as Total Domination, “Fourth, the technique of exercising power in

dictatorship contains a necessary element of improvisation. … At the same time, let us not forget

the system is made significantly mor effective by state ownership and central direction of all the

means of production.” (Havel 130-131). To me this does not exclude the Soviet Union from

being a totalitarian system, I state this because it relied even in Havel’s time on both grand

displays of power as well as improvisation as shown with the Plastic People, the system imposed

on Czechoslovakia was merely a well-developed totalitarian system of 60 years driven ostensibly

by a collectivist ideology rather than the 15 year old Nazi form of totalitarianism driven by

hatred.

The Plastic People show the ability of the Soviet totalitarian system in the fact that they

were forced to be lenient after making these people into public enemies. “His hair was down to

his shoulders, other long haired people would come and go, and he talked and talked and

explained to me how everything was. … I also knew it wouldn’t be easy to gain some kind of
wider support for these boys.” (Havel 7-8). Havel then goes on to say how these scapegoats for

society’s ills and were made to be reviled by the people to set precedent, a precedent serving to

further reach the goal of Totalitarianism. The ability to completely break people down into

equally replaceable parts in the machine of the system by making the prosecution of those who

provoked independent thoughts without any true harm into a matter of course. “Just as the

stability of the totalitarian regime depends on the isolation of the fictitious world of the

movement from the outside world, so the experiment of total domination in the concentration

camps depends on sealing off the latter against the world of all others, the world of the living in

general, even against the outside world of a country under totalitarian rule.” (Arendt 120). The

world outside the camps was not as openly regimented and uniform in cruelty and dominance as

Nazi Germany made it inside the camps, but it was still very much a totalitarian system. The

Czech wing of the Soviet Union may not have been carrying out Stalinist mass murders but they

were still working to strangle truly independent thought to continue dominance over the people

of Czechoslovakia.

This system relied upon propaganda rather than brute force by the time of Havel’s Power

of the Powerless to continue its rule while maintaining an image of care for its citizens but the

other large totalitarian system also relied heavily upon propaganda as much as force. This

excerpt from Eichmann in Jerusalem is applicable to broader propaganda for totalitarian

systems, “The member of the Nazi hierarchy most gifted at solving problems of conscience was

Himmler He coined slogans, like the famous watchword of the S.S, taken from a Hitler speech

before the S.S in 1931, ‘My Honor is my Loyalty’”. (Arendt 338). The most brutal members of

the Nazi party in charge organizing max exterminations still required the usage of propaganda

meaning even the heaviest handed of totalitarian systems need active propaganda to continue the
social conditioning for absolute control through self implications of breaking the bywords such

as ‘My Honour is my Loyalty’ by breaking away from the party line. This especially applies to

the propaganda in Czechoslovakia as shown in Power of the Powerless, “The manager of a fruit-

and-vegetable shop places in his window, among the onions and carrots, the slogan; ‘Workers of

the world, unite!’ … The slogan is really a sign, and as such it contains a subliminal but very

definite message.”(Havel 132-133). In the Nazi system going against the propaganda without

truly fermenting rebellion such as, Eichmann not wanting to work in the Death Camps, at best

would cost you a chance at promotion and further benefits, for the Communist regime it takes

away what few benefits really exist for the individual, or their associates, could have and there is

a reason for this difference in execution, because the very existence of the Communist

totalitarianism is an economic and cultural philosophy of collectivism.

The Nazi regime was built upon a Nationalist, Xenophobic, and Racist ideology used to

support each other component, the Communist ideology is by the nature a system that in concept

transcends nation and racial background and when combined with the totalitarian goal of utter

control makes even the slightest deviation from ‘society’ an offense in need of correction. This

excerpt from Total Domination I believe ties in well to the commonalities as to how various acts

were responded too, “The radicalism of measures to treat people as if they had never existed and

to make them disappear in the literal sense of the word is frequently not apparent at first glance,

because both the German and Russian system are not uniform but consist of a series of categories

in which people are treated very differently.” (Arendt 124). In this case continuing from the

above manager in the category of having committed a small but still noticeable rebellion by

forgetting to place a sign and is punished not for forgetting, but for breaking the broader message

established by being able to mandate such action from every level. That message is “we control
what you see, what you have in your head and any disagreement with us is a betrayal of all

working people and such traitors must be corrected or removed’, such as how they removed

Havel to try and end the Charter 73 movement by removing Havel from society for the crime of

pointing out the regime failing to live up to its founding ideology.

This is reinforced further in Havel’s’ exploration of why the Communist regime reacted

as it did in this excerpt from Power of the Powerless, “This system serves people only to the

extent necessary to ensure that people will serve it. Anything beyond this, that is to say, anything

that leads people to overstep their predetermined roles is regarded by the system as an attack

upon itself.”(Havel 135). The system is built upon an ideology which at the end of the day served

only to keep those who had risen to power in power by means of perpetuating the regimes

dominance through the lens of a moral and cultural guide. This in turn creates not just a system

which extorts the people in perpetuating the slogans and propaganda, it also creates an

environment in which even those who don’t understand are unwilling or afraid to ask questions

both about the ideology and those who determine how it is maintained. I see something similar in

how the cultural conditioning of the Nazi party made people like Eichmann unwilling to openly

ask questions of any sort even as they arranged unspeakable evil as in this excerpt from Eichman

in Jerusalem, “The aim of the conference was to coordinate all efforts towards the

implementation of the final solution. … Well he was neither the first not the last to be ruined by

modesty.” (Arendt 344-346). The means may have been different, but that aside from the

foundational ideology of Communist totalitarianism, could be because at that point the system of

indoctrination had had more than three times what the Nazis did to shape the psyche of the

populace into mechanically supporting the system and burying their heads in the sand about what

happens to those who either chose not to or simply forgot to do the same.
 The last great commonality with the Nazi regimes version of totalitarianism is related to

both an earlier quote from Power of the Powerless on page 133 just after the last excerpt ended

where it was mentioned the grocer puts up the signs so as to not be informed on to the state

police. To me this creates another psychological aspect used to further achieve the totalitarian

goal control, complete and utter control over the people “The post-totalitarian system touches

people at every step, but it does so with it’s ideological gloves on.”(Havel 135). It may not be

with firing squads and jackboots as it was during the days of Stalinism, but the Communist

government was still enforcing control at every level of society albeit through social pressure and

‘soft coercion’. The totalitarian system is based at its core on a lie used to gain and maintain

control, “Because the regime is captive to it’s own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the

past. It falsifies the present and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to

possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It

pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing, it pretends to pretend nothing.” (Havel

136). The Communist system as established wants total control, total control is an unnatural

thing so it must be maintained through force, lies and misdirection of the populace just as other

totalitarian regimes have done albeit to far less success.

Havel may say this is not a totalitarian system for lacking the same rampant purges of

Stalin, but when looking at Hannah Arendt and her description of how the Nazis were able to

have such total control to be able to commit one of if not the darkest crime in history. I find a lot

of similarities in methods and societal mechanisms and in turn even the goal of complete control

in common. I acknowledge Havel’s belief in there being a difference between pure Stalinist and

the post Stalin Communist government and find some truth, but I reject his position of the Czech
government as well as any other in the eastern bloc being ‘post’ totalitarian when their desperate

clinging to control was extended through every level of Society. Czechoslovakia was a

totalitarian regime that, like the rest of the Soviet Union had, was based on a Ideology and

governance older and more widespread than the Nazi ideology was. The systems of control more

polished, and the longevity far greater but still a totalitarian system.