Power as Exercised in Totalitarian Regimes of the Stalinist Era

Mao Zedong, founder of the People’s Republic of China, once said that “Every communist must grasp the truth: political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” Zedong’s metaphor accurately characterizes the oppressive nature of the Communist regime of the Stalinist era. Such totalitarian systems maintain control over its citizens through the exercise of coercion, reward systems, mass media, and propaganda. This kind of totalitarian government sought to deprive its citizens of individual rights and integrate them into the system as parts of the Stalinist machine. In One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn illustrates how the Stalinist labor camps, or gulags, utilized various modes of surveillance, the constant dehumanization of political prisoners, manipulative reward systems, and frequent brutality and force to maintain control over prisoners and uphold the ideology of Stalinism. Another perspective of the Stalinist power structure is offered in Andrezej Wajda’s controversial film, Man of Marble in which a young filmmaker tries to uncover the truth about a former national icon, Birkut, who fell to obscurity and encounters frequent resistance in her attempts to do so. This film illustrates how the Stalinist government manipulated the media and censored controversial literature, film, and artwork to portray false government success and brainwash its citizens into obeying the repressive regime. This paper will analyze the different mechanisms of power employed by the Stalinist totalitarian regimes depicted in Solzhenitsyn’s novel and Man of Marble and will further evaluate how the study of power in specific historical situations enables historians to determine the motivations of those in power and the effectiveness of certain power structures to achieve its goals and provide for its citizens. In Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the labor camps are depicted as a microcosm for the totalitarian state in existence. Gulags

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