totalitarian

3 articles tagged with totalitarian were found.

Traveling through the German historical landscape A talk with Mary Fulbrook

In her book on the East German experiment, The People’s State, Fulbrook launched a concept that owes a lot to her life-long preoccupation with Max Weber’s theories of Herrschaft. She calls it “participatory dictatorship”. An unbelievably large proportion of the population — roughly one in six, she calculated — took an active part in activities that had to be carried out to uphold the political system as such.

By Anders Björnsson April 29, 2014

The human hunt that nearly paralyzed the party. A microstudy of Soviet mass terror

Wendy Z. Goldman, Inventing the Enemy, Denunciation and Terror in Stalin’s Russia, Cambridge et al.Cambridge University Press 2011, 320 pages

By Anders Björnsson April 12, 2012

SILENCE AND SURVEILLANCE a history of culture and communication

The history and sociology of the telephone in Russian society have only slowly become the object of serious study. The scope of this essay is limited to the following two topics: first, the forms of use, in pre-revolutionary Russia and the Soviet Union, of the telephone as a means of communication, potentially universally available and “horizontal” but actually restricted by “vertical” forces; and second, the symbolism that accumulated around this means of communication in Russian and Soviet culture.

By Lars Kleberg April 10, 2012