Power as Exercised in Totalitarian Regimes of the Stalinist Era

Mao Zedong, founder of the Peoples Republic of China, once said that Every communist must discernment the truth political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. Zedongs metaphor accurately characterizes the oppressive nature of the Communist governance of the Stalinist era. Such totalistic corpses maintain keep over its citizens through the lick of coercion, reward systems, mass media, and propaganda. This kind of totalitarian establishment sought to despoil its citizens of individual rights and integrate them into the system as social functions of the Stalinist railcar.In One Day in the spiritedness of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn illustrates how the Stalinist intentness camps, or gulags, utilized various modes of surveillance, the constant dehumanization of political prisoners, artful reward systems, and frequent barbarism and force to maintain comptroller over prisoners and uphold the ideology of Stalinism. Another perspective of the Stalinist power t wist is offered in Andrezej Wajdas controversial rent, Man of Marble in which a young filmmaker tries to uncover the truth about a causation national icon, Birkut, who fell to obscurity and encounters frequent resistance in her attempts to do so.This film illustrates how the Stalinist political sympathies manipulated the media and censored controversial literature, film, and art wager to award false government success and brainwash its citizens into obeying the repressive regime. This paper pull up stakes analyze the different mechanisms of power employed by the Stalinist totalitarian regimes depicted in Solzhenitsyns impertinent and Man of Marble and allow further evaluate how the study of power in specific diachronic situations enables historians to determine the motivations of those in power and the effectiveness of certain power structures to get hold of its goals and provide for its citizens.In Solzhenitsyns One Day in the career of Ivan Denisovich, the labor camps a re depicted as a microcosm for the totalitarian allege in existence. Gulags became the Soviet governments method of trans urinateing individuals under its control into obedient workers existing simply to physically construct the Soviet asseverate and strengthen the economy while embodying the ideology of the Stalinist system. The prisoners were forced to work in severe weather conditions, consume very little food, fool very little clothing, and were encouraged to spy on one another(prenominal) to improve their individual situations.The majority of the prisoners in the cap are incapacitated victims who should not even be imprisoned the Soviet authorities consume unjustly punished them for they provide free labor. At the camp, many of the officials pleasance in treating the prisoners with excessive cruelty. The Captain is sentenced to ten days of solitary sweat because he has worn an unauthorized jersey under his uniform in order to stay warm. They also think nothing of stealin g part of the meager rations of the prisoners so that they can have more for themselves.The prisoners cannot receive comme il faut medical care for the rule of the hospital is to postulate scarce cardinal people a day no head how many whitethorn be sick. Consider for example, the exchange between Buynovsky, who jokingly announces the Soviet decree, and Shukhov which shows the fuddled pompousness of the Soviet government Since then its been decreed that the fair weather is highest at one oclock, Shukhov replies, Who said that? and Buynovsky replies The Soviet government. () For the characters laws are both unavoidable and arbitrary. The Soviet people have little to say in their government and they do what it tells them to do.Buynovskys joke reveals the Soviet regimes delusion of grandeur. Shukhovs forced false confession to existence a traitor to his ground also exemplifies the way in which the Soviet government tailors the truth to fits its needs. The Soviet regime imagin es itself stronger than not only the sun notwithstanding also reality itself. Furthermore, Volkovoys differing responses to Buynovskys charges exemplify the hypocrisy in which the entire Stalinist state thrives. He ignores Buynovskys assertion that air searching in subzero temperatures outdoors violates an article of the Soviet Criminal Code, show his lack of concern for right and wrong.He is altogether indifferent to others opinions of state-sponsored actions. however when Buynovsky goes a step further and accuses Volkovoy of being a bad Soviet citizen, Volkovoy becomes violently indignant. He knowingly violates Soviet law and is thus, in a way, a bad Soviet citizen, but he is unwilling to admit as much. He cares much more about making himself human face good than making his coun punish look good. Though he disrespects his countrys laws with his action, he wants, hypocritically, to be seen as an ideal Soviet citizen. The labor camp also attacks its prisoners spiritually.By rep lacing their names with a crew of letters and numbers, the camp erased all traces of individuality. For example, the camp guards refer to Shukhov as Shcha-854. This excretion of names represents the bureaucratic destruction of individual personalities. In Man of Marble, Andrezej Wajda attempts to discover how propaganda, through national icons, was used to present a false de key outation of rectify success and how these national icons were removed and fell to obscurity when they offered the slightest jotting of discontentment with the norm.The film begins by showing propaganda films that praise Birkut as a devout worker who slaves away at brick defineing for the officials. Then, Agniezka proceeds to oppugn the director, who was hired by the government. He tells her about the reality of making the film such as how Birkut was given more food and water una same(p) the other bricklayers. This is an example of reward power in which the government manipulated Birkut, fantastic h im to the precondition of national icon, and gave him additional food and water to take care that he would continue to work hard for them in that locationby sustaining that glorified workers image common to the Stalinist ideology.Wajda uses these two scenes to deconstruct the false imagination that propaganda gives to its viewers. He illustrates how officials manipulate these kinds of situations to their own political good. The character of Agniezka, the young filmmaker, resists this form of government economic consumption of film and art by embarking on an reach to uncover the truth about a once great Polish national icon that fell into obscurity, Birkut. She encounters frequent resistance from others regarding the subject matter of her film but despite the controversy, she continues her work and unleashes the truth about Stalinism.Moreover, Birkut is essentially erased from memory because he refused to change with the existing political system that was overwhelmed with corr uption, manipulation, and exploitation. Birkut r against that system and essentially the Stalinist government of Poland at this time, erased aspects of the nations collective memory in order to control its citizens. This kind of expunction from memory appeared to be the standard penalty for those who refused to conform. Consider the scene in which Birkut is trying to defend Witek who has been accused of treason.The bureaucrat informs Birkut to dont try to take things into your own hands. Leave it to us. Trust the peoples Justice. This program line reveals how the government attempted to integrate its citizens to fully that their existence became that of automatic obedience, the think in the Soviet regime would be so solidified that there would surely be little resistance or defiance and the verbalise submission to their power. At a brotherhood meeting where Birkut again tries to take aim the question of Witek, he shouts that a horrid injustice has been committed.Trade union officials then turn off his microphone and a chorus begins communism will prevail by force of example, onward stout workers This line is quite possibly the most important in the film for it exemplifies how the Soviet regime would glorify workers like Birkut and broadcast his intense labor and a glorified image of him through the mass media to encourage citizens to abide by the socialist ideology. However, later on as the film reveals, Birkut becomes demoralized and turns to drinking. His manners is now in ruins. Birkut originally came to prominence for supposedly breaking the single(a) shift brick-laying record.However, the newsreel director who recorded the event confides to Agnieszka how he manipulated and outright sham aspects of the episode for propaganda purposes. Yet poor guileless Birkut originally accepts everything he is told at face value. As a result, when he falls out of favor with the Party for championing workers rights, it is wrenchingly difficult for him to adj ust to life when essentially persona non grata. at that place mere difficulty that Agniezka experiences in her quest to finish her film exemplifies how the government employs censorship to hide the truth.The propaganda newsreel claiming to chart Birkuts life only demonstrates the parading of his image, as he acts out the role of labor hero, admires his marble stature, and the endless posters, which set out his form, and appears before the public as a crowd-pleasing vision of physical glamour. The proliferation and repetition of images of the idealized citizen were designed to eclipse any suggestion that the state whitethorn have no other basis for authority other than the manipulation of these icons.The power of the state to appear to dissolve the individual into the mass is disturbingly echoed twenty years later in exchanges between Agonies and two women who belonged to the coevals of the 1950s the television editor tells Agniezka that, Ive selected everything to do with Birkut although the rest is fine much the same, while Agonies, attempting to divert suspicion as to wherefore she is particularly interested in Birkuts statue in the museum when, as the museum guide on points out, there are so many others like it, says, I like this onealthough its all the same. Implicit in this proliferation of idealized effigies of sample citizens and leaders is the constant presence of state ideology. The collective memory that she unearths crumbles the unlined portrait of Birkut though revealing the painful, lived-through process of molding his image, which the opening newsreel only parades as a finished product.In flashbacks, Birkut is shown to be force-fed for weeks before the event, shaved, and groomed, when to smile, and cautiously directed by Burski who ironically tells him to act more like a worker, and quickly turns his camera away when Birkut collapses, bleeding from the hands, upon completion of the task. Agniezkas investigation of the manipulation of Wite k and Birkut is synonymous with the excavation of the very foundations of the communist system itself, which claimed ordinary support upon the basis of the patronage of the worker.Her disinterment of the hidden infrastructure of totalitarian power reveals its construction on baseless myths and rituals. Better to growl and submit. If you were stubborn, they skint you. (41) This quote exemplifies how the Stalinist regime used brutality and force to ensure obedience. Throughout history, individuals and groups have exercised various forms of power in order to control others and their surroundings. It is important to analyze how power is exercised, constituted, and contested in specific diachronic situations because the world will learn how to use power to produce the great results in a given situation.In a totalitarian regime as those depicted in One Day in the liveness of Ivan Denisovich and Man of Marble, the individual operates as part of a social machine on the principle of aut omatic obedience. This is the highest level of the institution of power, the creation of an effectual mechanism in which individuals act predictably on the principle of let the cat out of the bag submission. The oppressive nature of the Stalinist regimes depicted in the aforementioned novel and film illustrate how the coercive power employed by the system was most ineffective because it builds resentment and resistance from the people who experience it. He was a newcomer.He was unused to the hard life of the zeks. Though he didnt know it, moments like this were particularly important to him, for they were transforming him from an eager, confident naval police officer with a ringing voice into an inert, though wary, zek. And only in that inertness lay the chance of surviving the twenty-five years of imprisonment hed been sentenced to. (65) This quotation exemplifies how the gulag change once proud individuals with fulfilling lives into components of the Stalinist machine and ill ustrates how the basic need to go was motivation enough for the prisoners to obey those in power.A man that at was formerly a distinguished Naval officer was now being integrated into the masses and stripped of his individuality and identity to join the Soviets source of free labor. The passage suggests that by submitting to the hopeless status of a zed without resistance, one would almost surely survive the brutality of the camp. Works Cited Man of Marble. Dir. Andrezej Wajda. Poland 1977 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander . One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. New York Farrar, Straus, and Giroux Inc, 1991. The Definition of Totalitarian. www. dictionary. reference. com/browse/totalitarian