Totalitarian regimes maintain an ostensible façade government alongside real power structures

Evidence

The same division between a real and an ostensible government developed from very different beginnings in Soviet Russia. The ostensible government originally sprang from the All-Russian Soviet Congress, which during the civil war lost its influence and power to the Bolshevik party. This process started when the Red Army was made autonomous and the secret political police re-established as an organ of the party, and not of the Soviet Congress; it was completed in 1923, during the first year of Stalin’s General Secretaryship. From then on, the Soviets became the shadow government in whose midst, through cells formed by Bolshevik party members, functioned the representatives of real power who were appointed and responsible to the Central Committee in Moscow. The crucial point in the later development was not the conquest of the Soviets by the party, but the fact that “although it would have presented no difficulties, the Bolsheviks did not abolish the Soviets and used them as the decorative outward symbol of their authority.” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 905

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the key concept of the ‘ostensible vs. real government’ split — a foundational mechanism for how totalitarian rule functions.
• XREF: Connects to Sorel’s and later hegemony theorists’ distinction between surface institutions and real power; relevant to how Islamophobia readings treat nominal legal equality vs. actual exclusion. — connects to: Authoritarian measures can persist within nominally democratic structures via normalized crisis — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 7; Sacralized politics yields a self-sustaining power structure resistant to change — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 108; Contemporary revolutions increasingly empower warlord governments rather than consent-based regimes — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 1111