Amy Tan - Brown University



Amy Tan

April 10, 2009

Response to Gulag Archipelago

In the first chapter of Gulag Archipelago entitled “Arrest,” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn paints a vivid picture of the political violence that characterized the Soviet Union and specifically how arrests worked as an induction into the prison system. Solzhenitsyn describes the different types of arrests and the pervasive lack of protest throughout the process to show the strength of the political machine in subduing the masses and the functions and mechanisms of arrest. Solzhenitsyn writes regarding arrest: “That’s what arrest is: it’s a blinding flash and a blow which shifts the present instantly into the past and the impossible into omnipotent actuality” (4). The randomness of the arrests adds to their terror, which Solzhenitsyn describes well in the first chapter, and the widely maintained belief in the “right-ness” of the state and the hope that an arrest could just be a mistake. The strength of Solzhenitsyn’s first chapter is his introduction to the political violence of arrest through personal accounts, but it is useful to bring in Bauman to explain the lack of protest from the victims and society and Agamben to think about this mechanism as a tool of the state.

Solzhenitsyn’s account of his own arrest and his description of the conduct of others in their arrests brings to the fore the general complacency with the mechanisms of state control. Solzhenitsyn writes that when arrested in public, people behaved themselves in the noblest conceivable manner and that few arrested put up a fight. He describes his own lack of public protest at his arrest and even how he aided the police in locating the prison where he would be incarcerated. Solzhenitsyn captures the psychology in the following response to a random arrest: “But as for you, you are obviously innocent! You still believe that the Organs are humanly logical institutions: they will set things straight and let you out” (12). As a result, it is best to cooperate with the state machinery for hope that they will understand and free you, even though this rarely happened.

Solzhenitsyn’s account is reminiscent of Bauman’s description of the active participation of Jews in their own oppression because of a trust in the benign nature of the state and the ever-present hope that mistakes were made. It seems as if individuals have entrusted the states with their rights, making the state ever powerful, and also with legitimation for the use of violence. It is only the state that is permitted to use violence, and the rest of society appears to agree that this use of violence is best done out of public view. Perhaps this is why Solzhenitsyn describes the victims as acting in the “noblest conceivable manner, so as to spare the living from witnessing the death of the condemned” (8). Perhaps the victims have bought into the idea that the state is the only one permitted to act with violence, but only out of the eye of the public.

At this point it is helpful to bring in Agamben to provide the theoretical background to help think about this state behavior. Agamben’s homo sacer is a person who may be killed, but not sacrificed – a person in the state of exception. The prisoners lose their rights as citizens and become mere chattel to be put to work. They are each labeled by number, but one is easily substitutable for another and none are protected by law. They would seem to be the perfect homo sacers, although Agamben might argue that everyone in Soviet society (or society in general) is already a homo sacer. And perhaps this is true, considering that the random acts of political violence were truly random and no one stood up against the regime in Solzhenitsyn’s description. However, the problem with Agamben is that he does not take into account those that do revolt. Are these people corrupt homo sacers or is the homo sacer description useful to describe societies at all? Nevertheless, the use of the state of exception described by Agamben and attributed to Carl Schmitt is a useful way to think about the gulag.

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