Reflections on the Gulag Archipelago: Arrest
I’ve always believed the prison camp gulags of the Soviet Union were for political enemies, traitors, and those who committed crime — minor or otherwise. I was wrong. The prisons and gulags were for anyone and everyone for any reason, even if that reason was none. After all, State Security personnel had quotas to meet, prisons to fill. Their jobs were solely to arrest and prosecute people and carry them off into the labor camps and they did their jobs exceedingly well.
But of course, there’s no evidence that most employed by State Security liked doing it. They preferred to do it at night in the cover of darkness, but weren’t against doing it in daylight, in public. They had scripts on how to do it most efficiently, to have the least amount of trouble. They were given instructions on what to confiscate and who to leave behind and whether the children should be sent to orphanages and the grandparents, too, to the gulags.
In the case of Irma Mendel, who invited one, Mr. Klegel, to the theatre for a show — they sat affectionately in the front-row as lovers might. After the curtains came down, he took her straight to KGB headquarters for arrest.
Compliance came on both sides. Almost none of the arrested threw up any resistance. Not a solitary scream for help, no last stand with guns blazing. Merely a simple, “Me? What for?” and a hurried scan of their memory for what they might have done wrong as ordinary men carried them away to prison for their predetermined verdict and fate.
Some were even thankful to be arrested, living for years under the imaginary threat of arrest concocted solely in their heads. Like a child ordered to go get a switch for his own whipping, these people lived in the agony of uncertainty, often for years in anticipation of their arrest. When Father Irakly was finally arrested in 1942, he sang church hymns, thanking and praising God that his moment finally came.
Reading this, one might react with horror. “That’s awful! I would never be complicit in something like that!” they’ll say. But that’s not true. Not even in the slightest. No one complained. Everyone, prisoner or guard, was complicit. Many guards even prided themselves on doing a good job and making the system more efficient. While many prisoners behaved their best, believing that good behavior might lighten their sentences or be treated better by their captors. But their fates are all common knowledge now.
We all have in us the predilection to cause great harm to others and ourselves. And this monster within all of us can be grown exponentially when combined as a unit. And this quite often occurs whether you want it to or not. If you were a German teen or older in the years leading up to World War II — odds are, you were part of the Nazi army. There wasn’t a choice, this was just how things were. And you accepted it. The guards, soldiers, and strategists all played their roles. Efficiently. Often with relish.
Now, you too, might say “No way! I would have rather died!” but history tells us this is simply not true. I want to think that we’re all better than the prisoners and the guards of the gulags. But the odds are greatly in support that we would have carried out those heinous atrocities ourselves, had we been born in a not-so-distant time, in a not-so-distant past.
This is an uncomfortable thought for many. And our natural inclination is to suppress it and pretend it never happened. But maybe it’s wiser to understand what happened and accept that we ourselves are capable of it and master these raw, unfriendly emotions. It’s preferable to be the wielder of fire, rather than one who’s afraid of it.
A person who is not inwardly prepared for the use of violence against him is always weaker than the person committing the violence.
