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None were more aware of this peril than the great totalitarians themselves. Hence Mao's desperate attempt to rekindle the flame with the Cultural Revolution. Only permanent revolution can meet the totalitarian ideal, and permanent revolution is impossible. Even tyranny needs its sleep.
What remains, then, is what Political Philosopher Michael Walzer calls "failed totalitarianism": dead, bureaucratic rule marked by exhaustion and resignation, a hollow ideology, conformity without belief. A shell of the totalitarian idea. Does this mean, then, that the famous distinction between this system and traditional authoritarianism (e.g., nonideological dictatorship like that of Somoza or Marcos) disappears? No, because one crucial difference remains: only one system continues to aspire to totality, to colonizing every nook and cranny of social life.
Totalitarianism is internal colonialism, the occupying power being the party. But, like all colonialisms, it cannot be perfect. The sun never sets on the Kremlin's empire, but things do grow in the shade: an autonomous church in Poland, small free enterprise in Hungary, even an oft-repressed "jazz section" of the musicians union in Czechoslovakia. Of course, some regimes are more total than others. For every Hungary there is a Rumania, where typewriters must be registered with the police. For every Poland, a North Korea, where the leader's cult of personality makes Stalin look retiring.
Totalitarianism remains unique, and uniquely evil, in its ambition: total control. But, as often as not, its reach exceeds its grasp. And this calls into question another of its attributes: irreversibility.
Totality and irreversibility are related. It used to be thought that totalitarianism had repealed the law of history by which power sows the seeds of its own destruction. If sheer ruthless vigilance could destroy any center of opposition, even any island of independent thought, then -- aside from external conquest, which alone destroyed Nazism -- totalitarian rule could never be reversed.
Conversely, if total control fails, what happens to single-minded direction? If totalitarianism can decay, can it not be transformed? We don't yet know. We know only that it can be modified. It can give way to a society with more space. How much? Writing 20 years ago, one of the great theorists of totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, noted a "detotalitarization" in the Soviet Union after Stalin's death. This could not be dismissed as a temporary thaw, she argued. True, the Soviet Union has never since returned to the depths of Stalinism. But it has not moved significantly in the opposite direction either. Instead, it has been subject to cycles of thaw and freeze. The relative liberalization under Khrushchev was significantly reversed under Brezhnev. The cycle may be turning again. But the range of variation is narrow.
Within that range, totalitarianism may be finding its new equilibrium: aspiration to totality but with a concession of some social space. This permits effective control of society at a level of violence and vigilance that, unlike Stalin's or Hitler's terror, is sustainable indefinitely.