“Socialism leads not to an assault on the specific abuses of ‘capitalism’ but to an assault on reality tout court”

“Socialism leads not to an assault on the specific abuses of ‘capitalism’ but to an assault on reality tout court” is Martin Malia’s formulation, quoted by Emmanuel Carrère to explain the surreal quality of Soviet experience. Its force lies in the contrast it draws: the target is not merely a set of injustices within an existing world, but the real world against which ideological claims could be tested. Carrère connects that assault to the Soviet effort to make people not only repeat that black is white, but eventually believe it.

The quotation and its argument

Carrère introduces Malia’s words after describing Soviet totalitarianism as an attempt to impose a contradiction on perception. The statement then expands the claim: an assault on reality cannot succeed permanently, but it can last long enough to produce a surreal social order. In the continuation of the quotation, Malia names the paradox at its center: inefficiency, poverty, and brutality can be officially presented as the highest good of society. The phrase “reality tout court” therefore marks the breadth of the attack; it is not confined to a particular policy or abuse, but reaches the standards by which society might recognize what is happening to it.

Carrère places this formulation in a literary as well as political context. He describes the fantastical, monstrous, and monstrously comic quality of Soviet experience, and notes its illumination in underground literature. The unreal is not presented as simple fantasy: it grows out of a system in which official language demands belief in what contradicts lived conditions. Malia’s sentence supplies a compact explanation for that disorienting combination of absurdity and coercion.

Memory as the mechanism

The surrounding passage makes the suppression of reality concrete through the suppression of memory. Carrère recalls that after Beria’s execution, subscribers to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia were instructed to remove the article praising him and replace it with one about the Bering Strait. The alphabetical order remained intact while the person was made, in effect, never to have existed. Carrère also recounts the removal of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich from old copies of Novy mir after Khrushchev’s fall. These examples show historical revision operating not only through new declarations, but through the alteration of records that might preserve evidence of what had happened.

That erasure reaches into private life. Carrère describes children who knew that officials had taken their fathers away, yet also learned that speaking about it was dangerous and that it was safer to behave as though it had never occurred. The result, as he presents it, was collective silence: people acted as if events had not happened and learned history through Stalin’s official account. The quotation’s assault on reality thus has an intimate consequence. It asks people to mistrust not only public records but also what they and their families remember.

A surreal order with real consequences

Carrère stresses that the system’s unreality did not make its effects imaginary. The official presentation of poverty, inefficiency, and brutality as social virtues coexists with the deaths and deportations that the state’s account suppresses. The gap between lived experience and prescribed belief is the source of the passage’s dark comedy, but it is also a form of power: the demand is not merely to repeat a falsehood, but to make that falsehood govern what can be said and remembered.

By quoting Malia within this account, Carrère moves from specific acts of deletion to a general diagnosis of Soviet totalitarianism. The encyclopedia’s replacement article and the excised novel are particular instances; the expression names the larger operation that connects them. Its significance is therefore both explanatory and ethical: it describes how a political system can try to invalidate reality, while insisting that the real world it seeks to suppress continues to exist beneath the official story.