Totalitarian rule required first destroying all intermediate communal institutions

Evidence

All these new classes and nationalities were in Stalin’s way when he began to prepare the country for totalitarian government. In order to fabricate an atomized and structureless mass, he had first to liquidate the remnants of power in the Soviets which, as the chief organ of national representation, still played a certain role and prevented absolute rule by the party hierarchy. Therefore he first undermined the national Soviets through the introduction of Bolshevik cells from which alone the higher functionaries to the central committees were appointed. By 1930, the last traces of former communal institutions had disappeared and had been replaced by a firmly centralized party bureaucracy whose tendencies toward Russification were not too different from those of the Czarist regime, except that the new bureaucrats were no longer afraid of literacy. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 763

Categorization

• DEFINE: Illustrates the core definitional mechanism of ‘atomized and structureless mass’ — totalitarianism requires destroying all communal/representative structures as a precondition.
• XREF: Connects to Arendt’s atomization theme and parallels the mass-society analysis in later Islamophobia readings about how racism erodes intermediate institutions. — connects to: The New Right openly aimed to destroy rather than reform existing institutions — Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers: Inside the…, 237