What is social alienation? How has it been used as an authoritarian tactic to gain power?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One of the ways the Soviet Union controlled its citizens was via social alienation\u2014conditioning them not to care about or connect with each other. This worked to repress dissident movements. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn discusses this tactic in The Gulag Archipelago<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Continue reading to learn how the Soviet government exploited social alienation in the general population as well as in the gulags.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n The legal and prison systems discouraged feelings of empathy while encouraging feelings of instability and fear. There was no logic as to who got arrested or punished and who didn\u2019t, so citizens in and outside the camps could only protect themselves by informing on, stealing from, and violently attacking one another. They became wary of offering aid to someone in need and didn\u2019t feel confident enough in other people to try to band together to stand up to their oppressors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (Shortform note: The term \u201csocial alienation\u201d is often associated with Karl Marx<\/a>, a communist philosopher and cultural icon in the Soviet Union. Marx condemned capitalist societies<\/a> for reducing people down to their labor<\/a>, treating them as mere \u201ccogs in a machine<\/a>\u201d whose feelings, relationships, and desires didn\u2019t matter and should even be repressed when they threatened to interfere with profits. Though the USSR was a communist society that ostensibly valued its workers, it was also an authoritarian state, and it too benefited from repressing its citizens\u2019 humanity in order to preserve the government\u2019s absolute power over the people.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n This alienation worked differently in the free world versus in the gulag. Solzhenitsyn describes alienation in the free world as mainly a lack of trust between people, while alienation in the gulag often involved violence. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Solzhenitsyn writes that State Security constantly recruited informers from among the general population. Officials persuaded citizens to turn against their friends and neighbors through appeals to their patriotism, offers of material rewards, or\u2014in the method Solzhenitsyn claims was most common\u2014threats.<\/strong> <\/strong>Because anti-Soviet activity and knowledge of such activity committed by another person were both crimes, security officers could seize people at random and threaten to imprison them if they didn’t provide names. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Though not everyone became an informer, the popularity of this method further encouraged citizens to mistrust each other\u2014anyone you met could be an informer<\/strong>. In addition, if someone you became close to was later arrested, your association would reflect badly on you. Therefore, it was best practice to trust no one and to assume that any person you met would sacrifice you to protect their own standing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n (Shortform note: The belief that there are informers in a community can be more dangerous and destabilizing than the informers themselves. For example, during the Troubles<\/a> in Northern Ireland in the latter half of the 20th century, the IRA (an anti-British paramilitary group) would make people suspected of being informers<\/a> for the British disappear. Some of these people were legitimate spies, but some weren\u2019t, and their murders destroyed families and deepened feelings of hostility and suspicion between Republican and Unionist neighborhoods<\/a>\u2014feelings which regularly erupted into violence<\/a>.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n Soviet citizens were also under pressure to break off certain relationships in order to prove their loyalty to the state. Failure to renounce your association with someone who\u2019d been imprisoned was considered anti-Soviet activity, no matter if they were a spouse, a parent, a sibling, or a child. Those who gave up these relationships\u2014either willingly or under duress\u2014were still often fired, denied housing, and socially ostracized by their community. In the end, there was too much to lose from association with the wrong person for the vast majority of Soviet citizens to be motivated to seek out close relationships<\/a> or to consider forming coalitions that would have allowed them to stand up to State Security and other government forces. <\/p>\n\n\n\n (Shortform note: Despite this alienation, some dissident organizations did begin to form in the USSR after Stalin\u2019s death in 1953. However, repression by the government was still severe enough that these groups either operated mostly in secret<\/a> or were gradually broken up as their members were arrested, deported<\/a>, institutionalized for alleged psychiatric illnesses<\/a>, or outright assassinated.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n Solzhenitsyn describes relationships in prison as being inherently contradictory. He writes that the friendships and even romantic connections formed between prisoners were the only things that made the years survivable, but, at the same time, the prisons were deliberately constructed to make it difficult or impossible for a prisoner to act out of anything but self-interest<\/strong>. For example, in the vast majority of gulags, there wasn\u2019t enough food, clothing, or living space for every prisoner, and prisoners would have to compete with or steal from each other in order to survive. <\/p>\n\n\n\n (Shortform note: Solzhenitsyn\u2019s claim that relationships between prisoners could be life-saving is supported by accounts from prisoners all over the world. Despite living in abusive environments<\/a> where they endured violence from staff and fellow prisoners alike, many formerly incarcerated people speak positively of the friends or loved ones they met<\/a> in prison, calling them the most significant relationships of their lives and maintaining those relationships after release<\/a>.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n Hierarchies in the gulag also contributed to the alienation. An entire class of prisoners managed to avoid general labor by emphasizing skills they\u2019d acquired outside of prison, such as mathematics, military experience, or administrative work. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Rather than serving as miners or loggers, these \u201ctrusties\u201d became cooks, record-keepers, medical assistants, foremen, and even lower-level guards. Their more privileged positions entitled them to less crowded housing and the first pick of food, which allowed them to take more than their fair share. Some were even given the authority to determine how well other prisoners were treated<\/strong>\u2014whether they received a full ration, were written up for failing to meet work quotas, were punished for breaking minor prison rules, and so on. <\/p>\n\n\n\n According to Solzhenitsyn, a large portion if not the majority of the prisoners who survived the camps were trusties. Other prisoners were inevitably ground down by the brutality of their work and lack of access to the same kinds of resources. <\/p>\n\n\n\n (Shortform note: Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl makes a similar observation to Solzhenitsyn\u2019s about trusties in Man\u2019s Search for Meaning<\/em><\/a>, his memoir of his time in a Nazi concentration camp. According to Frankl, those prisoners who held onto their morals and refused to betray one another generally died in the camps, while those who cooperated with the administration or thought only of themselves\u2014becoming kapos<\/em>, stealing from other prisoners, arranging for someone else to take their place on a transport to the gas chambers, and so on\u2014were more likely to survive. The camps were designed to make the prisoners\u2019 lives an \u201cunrelenting struggle\u201d for survival and to favor those most willing to exploit others<\/a>.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What is social alienation? How has it been used as an authoritarian tactic to gain power? One of the ways the Soviet Union controlled its citizens was via social alienation\u2014conditioning them not to care about or connect with each other. This worked to repress dissident movements. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn discusses this tactic in The Gulag Archipelago. Continue reading to learn how the Soviet government exploited social alienation in the general population as well as in the gulags.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":83504,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,9,24],"tags":[796],"class_list":["post-83501","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-history","category-psychology","category-society","tag-the-gulag-archipelago","","tg-column-two"],"yoast_head":"\nSocial Aliena<\/strong>tion<\/strong> in the Soviet Union<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Alienation in the General Population<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Alienation in the Gulag<\/h3>\n\n\n\n