Live Not by Lies

discontent within the military. Widespread poverty and economic instability stirred up both the peasantry and industrial workers, who were finally listening to the radical student intellectuals. The “nationality problem”—the state’s inability to deal fairly with the many non-Russian minorities living under imperial government—raised internal conflict to a fevered pitch. Nicholas II initially responded with characteristic repression, but the scale of the anti-state violence soon compelled him to agree to certain liberal reforms, including the creation of a weak parliament.
The 1905 Revolution bought the Romanov dynasty time, but Russian monarchy’s doom was sealed with the arrival of the Great War in 1914. Russia’s humiliating defeat called down the long-prophesied apocalypse in the form of the 1917 October Revolution led by Vladimir Lenin and his Bolshevik party. Among revolutionary Russia’s far-left factions, Bolsheviks were relatively small in number, but under Lenin’s forceful leadership, they were smart, ruthless, and determined. Their victory proved that under certain conditions, a clever, dedicated minority can gain absolute power over a disorganized, leaderless, and indifferent mass.
One year after the proletarian revolution, the Bolsheviks introduced mass ideological killing, calling it the Red Terror. Thus did the radical intelligentsia, with a mustard seed of faith, move the mountain that was Russia and hurl it into a sea of blood.
It was not supposed to happen there either. Even doctrinaire European Marxists believed there was no way agrarian Russia was ready for communist revolution. But it was.
Evangelizing Russia’s Neighbors
It is true that communism came to Central Europe at the point of Soviet bayonets, but it is not the whole truth. World War I dramatically weakened civil society in those nations too, and inspired young intellectuals to embrace Marxism.
“In the 1930s, before the rise of the communist regime, there were already strong forces in the culture that paved the way for it,” says Patrik Benda, a Prague political consultant, of his native Czechoslovakia. “All the artists and intellectuals advocated communist ideas, and if you didn’t agree, you were marked for exclusion. This was almost two decades before actual communism took power.”
The even worse catastrophe of World War II strengthened the case for communism. Having endured the agonies of Nazi occupation, many Central Europeans were desperate to believe in something that would guarantee them a bright future. One Czech survivor of the Nazi death camps later wrote that she joined the Communist Party because she mistakenly assumed that it was the polar opposite of Nazism.
When local communists seized power, backed by Soviet might, there was not much left within the exhausted populations with which to resist. Writes historian Anne Applebaum, “And so, the vast majority of Eastern Europeans did not make a pact with the devil or sell their soul to become informers but rather succumbed to the constant, all-encompassing, everyday psychological and economic pressure.”5
This is how the peoples of Eastern Europe all fell under communist dictatorships propped up by Soviet power. For the people of those captive nations, totalitarianism meant the near-total destruction of any institutions independent of the state. It meant complete economic submission to the state and general material immiseration. It meant the politicization of all aspects of life, enforced by secret police, prisons, and labor camps. It meant the harsh persecution of religious believers, the crushing of free speech and expression, and the erasure of historical and cultural memory. And when some brave peoples—Hungarians in 1956, Czechs in 1968—stood up to their oppressors, Soviet and allied armed forces invaded to remind them who was the master and who were the slaves.
For over four decades, until communism’s collapse in 1989, millions of Eastern Europeans endured this police-state captivity. For the Russian people, their enslavement to communism lasted decades longer, and was even harsher. True, communists in power held on to it through sheer terror and exercising a monopoly on force. But we cannot lose sight of the fact that communism didn’t come from nowhere—that there really were people whose lives were so hard and hopeless that the utopian proclamations of Marxist zealots sounded something like salvation.
Under the right conditions, yes, it can happen here. It wouldn’t happen in the same way as in Russia and Eastern Europe—times have changed—but the totalitarian temptation presents itself with a twenty-first-century face. The parallels between a declining United States and prerevolutionary Russia are not exact, but they are unnervingly close.
The old world of classical liberalism is dying throughout the Western world, but its successor has not yet been born. Economic stagnation, indebtedness, and widening gaps between the rich and everyone else are moving to the forefront of politics—and parties are moving toward ideological extremes. This pattern is replicating itself throughout Europe as centrist parties of left and right lose voters to more radicals in the Marxist tradition, or to right-wing populists.
Aside from shared social, institutional, and economic signs of decline, to which American elites seem blind and impotent to address, the US federal government’s failure to respond effectively to the Covid-19 pandemic rhymed appallingly with the tsarist regime’s embarrassing response to the famine of the 1890s. Both natural disasters caused mass suffering and revealed systemic decay in the habits and institutions of governing authority.
Unlike the imperial Russians, we are not likely to face widespread rioting and armed insurrection. There are no Lenins in exile, waiting to return in a sealed train to America to take command of the revolution. Relatively few people could be persuaded that Karl Marx has the answer to our problems. As far as we can tell, there is no new political religion brewing in beer halls or coffeehouses.
But that doesn’t mean we aren’t ripe for a new and different form of totalitarianism. The term totalitarianism was first used by supporters of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who defined totalitarianism concisely: “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” That is to say, totalitarianism is a state in which nothing can be permitted to exist that contradicts a society’s ruling ideology.
What kind of people would be so demoralized that this—submission to a totalizing ideological program—sounds appealing? For