Bolshevism’s conspiracy fictions shifted with need yet were never dispensable.

Evidence

The Nazi development may be more logical, more consistent in itself, but the history of the Bolshevik party offers a better illustration of the essentially fictitious character of totalitarianism, precisely because the fictitious global conspiracies against and according to which the Bolshevik conspiracy is supposedly organized have not been ideologically fixed. They have changed—from the Trotskyites to the 300 families, then to various “imperialisms” and recently to “rootless cosmopolitanism”—and were adjusted to passing needs; yet at no moment and under none of the most various circumstances has it been possible for Bolshevism to do without some such fiction. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 873

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes that the central conspiracy fiction is adjustable in content yet structurally indispensable for totalitarian discipline.
• XREF: The endlessly re-targetable enemy fiction parallels the shifting scapegoat mechanism the reader will meet in Islamophobia readings—how an Other is constructed and refilled as needed.