Al Peterson

2017-05-12 09:26:36 -0400

All of this should strike a familiar chord. Solzhenitysn wrote of arrests and their affect in the Gulag Archipelago:



“The kind of night arrest described is, in fact, a favorite, because it has important advantages.

Everyone living in the apartment is thrown into a state of terror by the first knock at the door. The

arrested person is torn from the warmth of his bed. He is in a daze, half-asleep, helpless, and his

judgment is befogged. In a night arrest the State Security men have a superiority in numbers; there

are many of them, armed, against one person who hasn’t even finished buttoning his trousers. During

the arrest and search it is highly improbable that a crowd of potential supporters will gather at the

entrance. The unhurried, step-by-step visits, first to one apartment, then to another, tomorrow to a

third and a fourth, provide an opportunity for the Security operations personnel to be deployed with

the maximum efficiency and to imprison many more citizens of a given town than the police force

itself numbers.



In addition, there’s an advantage to night arrests in that neither the people in neighboring apartment

houses nor those on the city streets can see how many have been taken away. Arrests which frighten

the closest neighbors are no event at all to those farther away. It’s as if they had not taken place.

Along that same asphalt ribbon on which the Black Marias scurry at night, a tribe of youngsters

strides by day with banners, flowers, and gay, untroubled songs.



But those who take, whose work consists solely of arrests, for whom the horror is boringly repetitive,

have a much broader understanding of how arrests operate. They operate according to a large body

of theory, and innocence must not lead one to ignore this. The science of arrest is an important

segment of the course on general penology and has been propped up with a substantial body of social

theory. Arrests are classified according to various criteria: nighttime and daytime; at home, at work,

during a journey; first-time arrests and repeats; individual and group arrests. Arrests are

distinguished by the degree of surprise required, the amount of resistance expected (even though in

tens of millions of cases no resistance was expected and in fact there was none). Arrests are also

differentiated by the thoroughness of the required search;by instructions either to make out or not to

make out an inventory of confiscated property or seal a room or apartment; to arrest the wife after

the husband and send the children to an orphanage, or to send the rest of the family into exile, or to

send the old folks to a labor camp too. "



His thoughts on the proper response to it is instructive as well:



“[And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every

Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he

would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for

example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there

in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the

staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs

hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?

After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And

you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the

Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur — what if it had been driven off

or its tires spiked? The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport

and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!”

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