Under the imperatives of the American government's apprehension about Soviet expansionism, a profession of'sovietologists' began to form, primarily in the United States. In 1946 the first American centre of Russian studies, the Russian Institute, was founded at Columbia University, soon to be followed by the Russian Research Center at Harvard (1948). The first 'area studies' centres in the United States became prototypes for a new direction in social science research, bringing together various disciplines to look intensively at a particular society and culture. A generation of scholars, many of whom had had wartime experience in the military or intelligence work, worked closely with governmental agencies and on official projects sponsored by the CIA or the military. Most importantly the air force funded the Harvard Interview Project, questioning thousands of Soviet emigres and producing valuable information on daily life and thought in the USSR, as well as guides for target selection and psychological warfare. In 1950 the Institute for the Study of the USSR was founded in Munich. Secretly funded by the CIA until it was closed in 1971, the Institute produced numerous volumes and journals by emigre writers that confirmed the worst expectations of Western readers. More interesting to scholars was the American government-sponsored journal Problems of Communism, edited from 1952 to 1970 by a sceptical scion of the Polish Jewish Bund, Abraham Brumberg, which managed to condemn the Soviet Union as a totalitarian tyranny while avoiding the worst excesses of anti-communist hysteria.
American scholars, particularly political scientists and sociologists, were caught in a schizophrenic tension between their disciplinary identity as detached scientists and their political commitment to (and often financial dependency on) the American state. Challenged by McCarthyism, historians and political scientists sought shelter behind their claims to objectivity, even as they joined in the general anti-communist patriotism of the day. Across the social sciences 'Marxwas replaced by Freud; the word "capitalism" dropped out of social theory; and class became stratification'.[54] A group of social scientists at the University ofChicago deliberately chose the term 'behavioural sciences' to describe their endeavour, trying to appear neutral and not scare off congressional funders who 'might confound social science with socialism'.[55] The benefits of working in tandem with the interests of the state were enormous; the dangers of non-conformity were omnipresent. Two of the founders of Columbia's Russian Institute, Soviet legal expert John N. Hazard and Soviet literature specialist Ernest J. Simmons, were named by Senator McCarthy in 1953 as members of the 'Communist conspiracy'.[56] The intellectual historian H. Stuart Hughes was dismissed as associate director of Harvard's Russian Research Center when a trustee ofthe Carnegie Corporation, a major funder of the Center, complained that Hughes supported the i948 Henry Wallace presidential campaign.[57] In Britain the most prominent historian of Russia, E. H. Carr, reported in i950 that 'It had become very difficult . . . to speak dispassionately about Russia except in a "very woolly Christian kind of way" without endangering, if not your bread and butter, then your legitimate hopes of advancement', and the Marxist historian Eric J. Hobsbawm affirmed that 'there is no question that the principle of freedom of expression did not apply to communist and Marxist views, at least in the official media'.[58]
The totalitarian model
With the collapse of the Grand Alliance, the more sympathetic renderings of Stalin's USSR popular during the war gave way to the powerful image of 'Red Fascism' that melded the practices of Nazi Germany with the Soviet Union. In order to conceptualise these terror-based one-party ideological regimes, political scientists elaborated the concept of 'totalitarianism'. Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski formulated the classic definition of totalitarianism with its six systemic characteristics: a ruling ideology, a single party typically led by one man, a terroristic police, a communications monopoly, a weapons monopoly and a centrally directed economy.[59] Such states, with their mass manipulation, suppression of voluntary associations, violence and expansionism, were contrasted with liberal democratic, pluralistic societies. Because such systems were able to suppress effectively internal dissension, many theorists concluded, they would never change unless overthrown from outside.
The T-model dominated scholarship, particularly in political science, through the 1950s well into the 1960s, a time when the academy was intimately involved in the global struggle that pitted the West against the Soviet Union, its 'satellite' states and anti-colonial nationalism. The model of a gargantuan prison state, 'a huge reformatory in which the primary difference between the forced labour camps and the rest of the Soviet Union is that inside the camps the regimen is much more brutal and humiliating', was compelling both because high Stalinism matched much of the image of a degenerated autocracy and because Soviet restrictions and censorship eliminated most other sources, like travellers, journalists and scholars with in-country experience.65 The image of an imperialist totalitarianism, spreading its red grip over the globe, was at one and the same time the product of Western anxieties and the producer of inflated fears. George Orwell, already well known for his satire on Soviet politics, Animal Farm (1945), produced the most effective literary vision of totalitarianism in his popular novel Nineteen Eighty-four (1949). Its hero, Winston Smith, tries futilely to revolt against the totally administered society presided over by Big Brother, but by novel's end he has been ground into submission and spouts the doublespeak slogans of the regime. The political philosopher Hannah Arendt, a refugee from Nazism, provided the most sophisticated and subtle interpretation of The Origins ofTotalitarianism which she connected to anti-Semitism, nationalism, imperialism and the replacement of class politics by mass politics.66
Scholars explained the origins and spread of totalitarianism in various ways. Arendt linked totalitarianism with the coming of mass democracy; Waldemar Gurian saw the source in the utopian ambitions of Leftist politicians; Stefan Possony tied it to the personality of Lenin, Robert C. Tucker to the personality of Stalin; and Nathan Leites employed psychoanalytic concepts to write about the psychopathology of the Bolshevik elite, distinguished primarily by paranoia. The anthropologists Geoffrey Gorer and Margaret Mead reverted to
Praeger, 1966), p. 22. See also Carl J. Friedrich (ed.), Totalitarianism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954; New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964).
54
Thomas Bender, 'Politics, Intellect, and the American University, 1945-1995', in Thomas Bender and Carl E. Schorske (eds.),
55
John G. Gunnell,
56
Stephen F. Cohen,
57
Charles Thomas O'Connell, 'Social Structure and Science: Soviet Studies at Harvard', Ph.D. diss, UCLA, 1990; Martin Oppenheimer, 'Social Scientists and War Criminals',
58
Both citations are from Eric Hobsbawm,
59
CarlJ. Friedrich and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski,