Author: Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Year: 1970 (1962)
Publisher: Wahlström & Widstrand
Language: Swedish (translator Hans Björkegren)
"Comrade Stalin, having become Secretary-General, has unlimited authority concetrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution." These are the words of Vladimir Lenin in the testament he dictated fter a series of strokes had forced him to step down from the leadership of the Soviet Communist Party and which would ultimately lead to his death.
Turns out he qas not entierly wrong. During his reigh between 1922 and 1953, Joseph Stalin proved to be disastrous leader. The Soviet economy was shattered, famine plaged an empire that had some of the world's most fertile soil and finest conditions for food production, social progress all but stopped, communities were devastated, millions of people deported, tortured, and murdered.
One of the many tools of oppression developed bu Stalon was the Gulag system; a network of 53 labour camps at its peak. It is estimated that a total of 18 million people passed through the system before it was abolished shortly after Stalin's death. Over 1.5 million of them died as prisoners.
"En dag i Ivan Denisovitjs liv" ("A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich") by Alexander Solzhenitsyn does exactly what it says on the tin. It describes one day in the life of the fictitious Gulag-prisoner Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, from the moment he wakes up in the morning to the minute he falls asleep in the evening. Through his eyes, we get to experience in detail every second of his day. The waiting, the feeding, the freezing, the longing, the toiling, and throughout it all the mental abuse and methodical denial of privacy and identity.
The last point, of courfse, was at the core of the Gulag system and was supposed to bring free thinkers back in line. The methods were barbarous, dehumanising, and crude. Prisoners were exposed to constant pressyre, uncertainty, physical distress, and humilition. All major identity markers were targeted. Manliness, fatherhood, class, rank, religious beliefes, and memories were all subject to attacks by the government. Even the very name of the prisoner became a battleground.
But where there is pressure there is also counter-pressure. Submission needs to be enforced. There will always be resistance. Power, as Michel Foucault among others has shown, is a relationship. The opressor and the oppressed need to engage with each other. Power required agency from the Master as well as the slave.
"[A] power relationship can onluy be articulated on the basis of two elements which are each indispensable if it is really to be a power relationship: that 'the other' (the one over whom power is exercised) be thoroughly recognized and maintained to the very end as a person who acts", Foucault writes in Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. In my own research, I have shown how this power relationshiop translates into identity, both individual and collective and for both the dominant and the submissive part.
Solzhenitsyn captures these meagre but decisive areanas for power struggle in a masterful way. Having spent eight years in Gulag himself, he knows what he is talking about.
It is no coincidence that one of the main storylines follows Shukhov's unit as it is ordered to repair a wall around a defunct power station. While they work in temperatures that make the mortar freze on the trowel if the mason does not work fast enough. Shukhov, the prisoner, feels oddly energised while the government-run power station remains impotent behind the newly erected wall.
Furthermore, Shukhov, having been assigned the number S-854 by the administrators, even eight years into his prison sentence reacts to how a Ukrainian prison mate addresses him.
"Pavlo looked up. 'So they didn't put you in the guardhouse, Ivan Denisovich? All right?' he asked with a marked Ukrainian accent, rolling out the name and patronymic in the way West Ukrainians did even in prison"*
In the same vein, the prisoners typically refer to the co-convict Buinovsky as "The captain", on account of his rank before he was sent to camp.
Resistance comes in many other forms, too. Some of the prisoners receive packages from the outside. They may contain clothes, smoking utensils, or food. The guards routinely open the packages and help themselves to much of the goods and leave only residues for the intended recipient. It is generally accepted among the prisoners that this is the only way to obtain at least some crumbles from home, be it a biscuit, a bit a of a sausage, or a letter. Things like jerseys or slippers never reached their destination. Shukhov, however, asked his family to stop sending gifts. He would rather be without anything himself than feed the guards. This becomes part of the power struggle where the guards are also aware that if they loot too much from the deliveries, the inflow may stop altogether.
Still another type of resistance is all the sneaking and hiding of food, items, and tools, that the prisoners engage in to mock the rules and gain a small advantage.
Yet the most sublime form of defiance that Solzhenitsyn explores in "En dag i Ivan Denisovitjs liv" is adaptation as a way of coming to terms with one's fate.
"Why do you want freedom? In freedom your last grain of faith will be choked with weeds. You should rejoice that you!re[sic!] in prison. Here you have time to think about your soul"*
"Shukhov gazed at the ceiling in silence. Now he didn't know either whether he wanted freedom or not. At first he'd longed for it. Every night he'd counted the days of his stretch--how many had passed, how many were coming. And then he'd grown boted with counting-"*
Shukhov's prison-mate Alyosha flees into his Bible and his Baptist faith. Another detainee, the well-off and educated Tsezar, arranges for some privileges by means of carefully distributing gifts from the packages he receives from the other side of the wall.
And when all is said and done, when the makeshift wall has been built around the power station in the freezing cold, the watery soup eaten in the noisy canteen, the last humiliating inspection performed, and the final insult yelled, Shukhov lays his head down on his pillow and concludes that his day has been to his satisfaction.
This proves to be the ultimate resistance against Joseph Stalin's abuse of power. Shuknov could not be broken. He survived. And so, in the end Lenin was also not entireluy right: Comrade Stalin's authority was not unlimited after all.
*Quotes are from the E. P. Dutton 1963 edition. Translator Ralph Parker
