Totalitarian terror intensifies after all opposition has been eliminated, not before.

Evidence

Khrushchev’s explanation of the crimes he conceded—Stalin’s insane suspiciousness—concealed the most characteristic aspect of totalitarian terror, that it is let loose when all organized opposition has died down and the totalitarian ruler knows that he no longer need to be afraid. This is particularly true for the Russian development. Stalin started his gigantic purges not in 1928 when he conceded, “We have internal enemies,” and actually had still reason to be afraid—he knew that Bukharin compared him to Genghis Khan and was convinced that Stalin’s policy “was leading the country to famine, ruin, and a police regime,” as indeed it did—but in 1934, when all former opponents had “confessed their errors,” and Stalin himself, at the Seventeenth Party Congress, also called by him the “Congress of the Victors,” had declared: “At this Congress …there is nothing more to prove and, it seems, no one to fight.” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 43

Categorization

• XREF: This mechanism — terror as a product of complete victory rather than threatened defeat — connects to Arendt’s later chapters and to Foucault’s account of power operating most freely when unchallenged.
• QUESTION: Why does terror escalate precisely when the ruler faces no threat? Worth chasing Arendt’s fuller explanation in the chapters that follow.