The Stalin regime treated facts disagreeing with official fiction as non-facts

Evidence

With respect to the period of Stalin’s undisputed rule from 1929 onward, the Smolensk Archive tends to confirm what we knew before from less irrefutable sources. This is even true for some of its odd lacunae, especially those concerning statistical data. For this lack proves merely that, in this as in other respects, the Stalin regime was ruthlessly consistent: all facts that did not agree, or were likely to disagree, with the official fiction—data on crop-yields, criminality, true incidences of “counter-revolutionary” activities as distinguished from the later conspiracy fictions—were treated as non-facts. It was indeed quite in line with the totalitarian contempt for facts and reality that all such data, instead of being collected in Moscow from the four corners of the immense territory, were first made known to the respective localities through publication in Pravda, Izvestia, or some other official organ in Moscow, so that every region and every district of the Soviet Union received its official, fictitious statistical data in much the same way it received the no less fictitious norms allotted to them by the Five Year Plans. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 46

Categorization

• XREF: Totalitarian contempt for facts and the fabrication of statistical reality connects to Foucault’s biopolitics and the constructedness-of-the-Other theme central to the reader’s Islamophobia module.
• SEED: A possible essay angle: how statistical fabrication in totalitarian governance anticipates contemporary ‘post-truth’ regimes and how official fictions shape populations through distributed publication rather than centralized collection.