Totalitarian Experience and How to Survive It: A Guide to the Mindset, Symptoms, and Methods of Totalitarianism, Past, Present and Future

For a contemporary young Czech, let alone a young American, it is exceedingly hard to comprehend what life was like under the communist rule in the Soviet-dominated part of Europe. It is not only that they miss the direct experience of the place and times. Their parents' experience cannot be of much help either because it differed so radically from that of their contemporaries on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain. History books cannot fully convey the totalitarian experience which was unlike anything people in the West encountered in their everyday lives. What made the totalitarian system unique was its holistic nature. It was not a world that was in some respects different from the normal world; it was a world that was different in practically every respect. And yet it was a world in which people managed to have lives, families, friendships and loves like in any other world. Thanks to the ordinary people it was a world that kept refusing to become what it was intended to be. In its later incarnations it was called the world of “real socialism” and there was really something real in its dreary ugliness. At the same time it was a world of total fiction, absurdity and make believe.

The proposed course is designed to reflect this contrast. While it was being conceived, the topic has acquired more than just a historical relevance. The Russian aggression in Ukraine has revealed the long-hidden totalitarian tendencies in Russian politics and society. Without accounting for them, it is impossible to explain either the seemingly universal support for the aggressive war or the astonishing indifference to human suffering, wholesale destruction and, worst of all, disregard for the value of human life. By the same token, however, past experience would suggest that underneath the totalitarian monolith there continue to exist seeds of humanity, resistance and aspirations for freedom and dignity. We shall attempt to apply the lessons of the totalitarian experience, both in its most brutal form and in the period of “real” socialism, to hypothesize about the limits, the durability and the eventual vulnerability of the Putin regime or for that matter, any other regime of this kind.