memory

This text is a thought piece designed to reflect on the word "totalitarianism" as both a heuristic and an existential category. In addition to critiquing the category through a narrative of its genesis and its relationship to the category of "modernity," this text goes on to suggest that the category is fundamentally counterproductive to the scholarly and moral concerns evident particularly in the work of Hannah Arendt.

Negotiations focused on full diplomatic recognition of the USSR by Czechoslovakia, which was the main task of Alexandr J. Arosev (head of the soviet mission to Prague from 1929-1933), required intense and friendly contacts with local political, economic and cultural elites. On the other hand, these contradicted the expectations of the local Communist community, which was relying on the production of an image of the USSR as the "homeland of all proletarians" and as their protector from alien bourgeois regimes.