Vol. 43 No. 3 1976 - page 454

454
PARTISAN REVIEW
not political prisoners; they are common criminals. " Now, as a matter of
fact, the Soviet vice-minister ofJustice has said that the notion of political
imprisonment does not even exist in his country. The only ones who may
be prosecuted are those who seek to weaken the social order and the state
itself by means of high treason, espionage, terrorism, vilifying propagan–
da, or the dissemination of misinformation. In short, he defines as non–
political precisely those acts which the rest of the world considers political.
The Soviet definition is at once logical and bizarre . The obliteration of
the distinction between political and nonpolitical offenses in the Soviet
Union would be a logical development. But at that point, it seems to me ,
all offenses become political. In a socialist state, any breach of the law–
robbery, the most petty of thefts-is not a crime against private property,
but against the property of the people , against society itself, socialist pro–
duction, and the body politic. I would understand
if
the Soviet authorities
had said that there were no longer any nonpolitical prisoners because all
crime is by definition political. As it is, we must not only accuse the vice–
minister of lying (because he knows there are political prisoners in the
Soviet Union), but also ask him how after sixty years of socialism they still
have a criminal code for nonpolitical crimes.
However,
if
we define criminality in purely political terms , we necessar–
ily forego the traditional contempt for " common" criminals that is an es–
sential element of the penal system itself. And if we consider all crime to
be political, then our response to it must be equally political . But in fact,
the guard towers, police dogs , and endless gray barracks are only' 'poli–
tical" in so far as they are sinister evocations of Hitler and Stalin, who
used them to dispose of their enemies . The penal methods themselves–
incarceration, deprivation, forced labor, brutality, humiliation-are not
far removed from those invented by eighteenth-century Europe. Those
who break the laws of the Soviet Union are subject to bourgeois penal
techniques some two hundred years old . And far from changing these
techniques, the Soviets have made them more atrocious and carried them
to their logical extreme. What so moved those who saw the Riga docu–
mentary was not only the specter of Dachau, but beyond it, the endless
procession of human beings condemned
to
penal servitude-a two-hun–
dred-year-old spectacle used by those in power for the purpose of instill–
ing fear.
Int;
I think the explanation of these paradoxes lies in the fact that the
Soviet Union claims
to
be a socialist state but is in reality not at all social–
ist. The hypocrisy of Soviet leaders and the incoherence of their official
statements follows logically from this fact.
It
has been evident for some
time now that if the Soviet Union has been unable
to
evolve along lines
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