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• 1 2020-10-29T12:11:22-04:00 Sofia Petrovna: The Blood of the Revolution is Thicker than the Water of the Womb 13 plain 2020-12-13T20:56:28-05:00 Vir Shetty
  
  Lydia Chukovskaya’s Sofia Petrovna is a poignant, semi-autobiographical account of Joseph Stalin’s Great Terror in the Soviet Union. Unlike many other memoirs of this and other similar eras, such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago (1973) and Margarete Buber-Neumann’s Under Two Dictators (1952), this novella focuses on the experiences of the still nominally free loved ones of those imprisoned. Furthermore, this novel provides a fascinating insight into the prevailing mentality of the Terror, i.e., that “nothing can happen to an honest man” (Chukovskaya 37) in the USSR and that Comrade Stalin only arrested “poisoners, spies and murderers” (60) but that any of their loved ones getting arrested was a “monstrous misunderstanding” (45). Exploring this mentality, I will closely analyze my selected paragraph (the last paragraph of page 60) and argue that this perspective made the Soviet Union a very effective Panopticon, i.e. a prison whose prisoners are under constant surveillance by guards, in which even the prisoners eventually became guards. 
      
  The Soviet Union had many guards, but not nearly enough to singlehandedly surveil the entire population. Therefore, the citizens doubled as guards. The first step in this process was for the citizens to distance themselves from each other. Sofia Petrovna starts by distancing herself from “her neighbors in the lines”: when she reads about the “crimes” committed by those in prison, i.e., the falsehoods that the accused were tortured into confessing to, she is “as indignant as the prosecutor” (60). Sofia Petrovna immediately identifying with the prosecutor as opposed to the accused despite her own son being one of the accused shows that the Soviet government has successfully converted the USSR into a giant Panopticon in which the citizens are all each other’s guards: everyone is watched at all times and from every direction. Sofia Petrovna does not explicitly side against the relatives of the accused — “she was sorry for them, of course, as human beings” (60) — but the fact that she is able to judge them without, for a single second, realizing the irony shows that she trusts the same government that imprisoned her son for no good reason over millions of other men and women in the exact same predicament as she.
      
  A key part of the dissociation process in this paragraph is rationalization. One can be a guard or a prisoner, but not both. This paragraph shows Sofia Petrovna’s inner conflict: Is she the mother of a wrongdoer, which would also make her a prisoner, or are she and her son Kolya in the right, which would make her a guard? Therefore, Sofia Petrovna convinces herself that she, unlike the other women, is not a wrongdoer, i.e., a prisoner. The language of this paragraph, with words like “No," “of course,” and “but still” (60) inserted into Sofia Petrovna’s arguments, shows that she is convincing herself that she is not a prisoner. However, the very fact that she is having this argument with herself shows that she is unsure of her own morality. This is exactly how the Soviet Union controlled people – by making them question themselves and thereby try to dissociate themselves from the “criminals," which is what Sofia Petrovna is doing in this paragraph. She proceeds to think to herself that “an honest person had to remember that all these women were the wives and mothers of poisoners, spies and murderers." (60) This sentence is deeply ironic: Sofia Petrovna invokes honesty, whatever that means in the Stalinist Soviet Union, to separate herself from a group that she has been made a part of due to the Soviet government’s dishonesty. As far as the law is concerned, Sofia Petrovna is the mother of a saboteur and if she is so “honest” and trusting of the law of the land, then her thinking that she is not one of the “neighbors” she thinks she is “quite right to keep aloof from” (60) is logically inconsistent.
  
  Thus, Sofia Petrovna depicts the terrifying reality of the world’s largest Panopticon. Sofia Petrovna, its prisoner, thinks of herself as a guard even though her son is being abused by the “real,” i.e., uniformed, guards. Eventually, the Panopticon wins out: by the end of the book, Sofia Petrovna burns her own son’s plea for help either because she does not believe it, or because she is scared of the consequences of keeping or acting upon it. Either way, the Panopticon has managed to override parental love and shown itself to be the ruler of Soviet minds.
  
  Bibliography
  
  Chukovskaya, Lydia. Sofia Petrovna. Translated by Aline Werth and Emended by Eliza Kellogg Klose, Northwestern University Press, 1988.