Here is the more relevant quote on the big lie and repetition in Arendt. It occurs in the development of the idea that some section of the elite and the mob concurred in post-WWI Germany on the destruction of bourgeois respectability (from A Classless Society):
``To this aversion of the intellectual elite for official historiography, to its conviction that history, which was a forgery anyway, might as well be the playground of crackpots, must be added the terrible, demoralizing fascination in the possibility that gigantic lies and monstrous falsehoods can eventually be established as unquestioned facts, that man may be free to change his own past at will, and that difference between truth and falsehood may cease to be objective and become a mere matter of power and cleverness, of `pressure and infinite repetition.'(59) Not Stalin's and Hitler's skill in the art of lying but the fact that they were able to organize the masses into a collective unit to back up their lies with impressive magnificence, exerted the fascination. Simple forgeries from the viewpoint of scholarship appeared to receive the sanction of history itself when the whole marching reality of the movements stood behind them and pretended to draw from them the necessary inspiration for action...'' (326p, Origins of Totalitarianism)
Sounds familiar doesn't it?
Anyway the footnote (59) references On the falsification of history, Kravchenko, pp 304. Victor Kravchenko, I Choose Freedom, The Personal and Political Life of a Soviet Official, New York, 1946. According to a translated web page
(http://mapage.noos.fr/gcazenave/autres/textes/kravchenko.htm),
Kravchenko defected to the US in April of 1944 as a member of the Soviet delegation in Wash DC. He changed his name to Peter Martins. The publication in France created an uproar, with a consequent smearing of K by the french PCF as a US agent paid to produce the book, etc, etc...
Since Kravchenko's work was deeply embedded in all the duplicities of the Cold War, I have no idea what is distortion and what is fact.
The larger point Arendt was making, is that dumping down and trivialization of tolerant, liberal intellectual activities that give credibility to academic (bourgeois) respectability was performed by both a ruling elite and its drummed up mob supporters and was part of a pretotalitarian climate. Obviously that sort of climate was maintained and vastly sophisticated through the cold war period.
Of course all that has been given more than a new lease on life, a vertible heart-lung-brain transplant by the US rightwing and all the religious crack pots (aka fundamentalists) of the earth that they seem to attract like stink on shit.
Chuck Grimes