V and Totalitarianism

In reading the discussion of the movie V for Vendetta I found a thread in the argument over its merits, or lack thereof, that I wanted to linger over for a moment. Those who disliked the film maintain that it paints an inaccurate portrait of totalitarian societies. They claim that such societies are animated less by the personalities at the top than by the behavior of the bureaucracies underneath. A sample from The American Prospect

Naturally, his [V's] society’s sickness emerges from a single source -- the film unravels to reveal a sleek and tidy conspiracy. This is gratifying but also deeply off as a portrait of totalitarian societies, which are more often characterized by their interlocking weird bureaucracies, half-truths, and quixotic and opaque decision-making processes than a coherent plan created by one cabal of evildoers.

While it is true that totalitarian states tend to build large bureaucracies to carry out policy, and that these bureaucracies try to develop policies that please their political masters, it seems to me that the character of these regimes, and their worst crimes reflect more the interests of those at the top than those of the mid-level apparatus. The bureaucracy in Stalinist Russia, for example, did not simply run on its own, crushing Kulaks and conducting midnight arrests and political murders; it did those things because Stalin wished those things done. The population lived in fear of the bureaucracy, but the bureaucracy lived in fear of Stalin, Beria, and the secret police. According to Robert Service's biography of Stalin, survival in the bureaucracy, or in the Communist Party, required a close network of friends who could keep you safe, and the skill of knowing when and how to disassociate yourself from that network if it seemed likely that Stalin's ax would fall on it (which it sometimes did for no other reason than to demonstrate Stalin's power). The whole point of Stalinism was to destroy all competing centers of power in the country (the Communist Party included) and to assure that the only one left, the bureaucracy, was firmly in the control of Stalin.

Indeed, sometimes the regime slips right past the bureaucracy in its attempt to reconstruct society. The Cultural Revolution was not, primarily, conducted by bureaucrats. The bureaucrats were among those pushing Mao to the sidelines of power (after the catastrophic failures of the Great Leap Forward). Mao by-passed them with an appeal to the Red Guards to attack intellectuals, teachers, artists, and educated types generally (including any bureaucrats, military, or civllian law enforcement officials who stood against him). This was the Cultural Revolution, orchestrated by a cabal of vicious people who had a more or less coherent plan. Mao may not have orchestrated every action of every Red Guard organization, but without Mao's direction, the Red Guards would never have done what they did.

Now I should say that totalitarian societies that survive these sorts of upheavals with their institutions intact do tend to become a kind of dictatorship of the bureaucracy, if for no other reason than large numbers of politically active people outside bureaucratic institutions have been either killed or reduced to a state where it's unfair to expect much political bravery from them. The leadership of such nations, who were often either victims or potential victims of the previous dictator, usually try to dismantle the personality cults that enabled their predecessor to rule by fiat and restore their nation to a healthier state (without, of course, legalizing opposition political parties which might someday prove threatening to their own power and the stability of the regime). This, however, is a development that takes a long time (autocrats are amazingly long lived figures, for the most part), and the transition can be very hard to make. Deng Xiopeng navigated his way through China's transition. Khrushchev, after Stalin's death, wasn't as lucky with Russia's.

If V for Vendetta has a failing, it is not in its depiction of what looked like a very young, personality-cult-centered totalitarian regime. It was that the movie fails to acknowledge that such regimes, violent and cruel as they are, do represent the feelings of a sizeable percentage of their populations. They depend on the willingness, even eagerness, of people to turn in their neighbors and surrender their freedoms for a sense of security. Such people usually share their leaders' hatred of whatever groups are meant to be oppressed, and they generally see their victims' ruin as a means of bringing them closer to happiness. When I saw all those demonstrators in V masks who'd come to watch Parliament explode, I wondered where the counter-demonstrators were. We like to think that when a regime's lies are exposed that everyone will simply turn against it out of reflex. It's a lovely fantasy, and I thank the Wachowski brothers for making me believe it; but ultimately they underestimate the ability of people to rationalize the behavior of those they prefer to support.