Structurless mass society made the October Revolution easy to win but hard to consolidate

Evidence

When Lenin said that nowhere in the world would it have been so easy to win power and so difficult to keep it, he was aware not only of the weakness of the Russian working class, but of anarchic social conditions in general, which favored sudden changes. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 762

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the scaffolding concept that a ‘structureless mass population’ is the pre-condition for sudden totalitarian seizure of power — a key mechanism Arendt will deploy across the book.