Prisoners of Conscience: Moral Vernaculars of Political Agency

5. Women of the Small Zone and a Rhetoric of Indirection

5. Women of the Small Zone and a Rhetoric of Indirection On October 9, 1986, the Soviet Union released Ukrainian poet and dissident Irina Ratushinskaya from the Mordovian labor camp at Barashevo where she was serving a seven-year sentence for her conviction under Article 70 of the KGB criminal code for “Anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.” Her release was unexpected . She had served just three-and-a-half years of her sentence, and was subject to five years exile after her release before she could return to her home in Kiev. With the Reykjavik summit between Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan to begin just two days later, speculation was that the two events were connected, perhaps as a pawn to advance negotiations over arms control (Times, October 11, 1986). It also attracted public attention to the Soviet camps and the plight of prisoners of conscience (POCs) who were incarcerated there. Two months after her release, Ratushinskaya and her husband and fellow dissident, Igor Gerashchenko, were permitted to leave the Soviet Union, and in 1989 she published her memoir of Barashevo, Grey Is the Color of Hope. The memoir attracted instant attention for the insights it offered into life in the labor camps and human rights issues, reflected in the women’s artful maneuvering to survive the camp’s systematic attempts to crush their spirits. The women’s struggle to maintain solidarity in the face of assaults on human dignity required unwavering commitment to oppositional values. Ratushinskaya’s telling of the women’s story illustrates how assertions of contested values often occur through more subtle means than direct address. Although parrhesia speaks truth directly to authority, indirection can serve as a rhetorical mechanism for speaking the truth, given how it co-opts the discursive rules in play to combat the state’s monopoly on violence. Rhetoric by Indirection Resistance often relies on the authorities to become unwitting foils. The willingness of those in power to impose their will by force can be framed in ways that expose their mendacity. Nothing is quite as effective at making the point that those in power have little in common with ordinary citizens as actions that ignore citizens’ rights and, in fact, abuse them. Resistance depends on establishing a sense of affiliation among 100 A Thick Moral Vernacular of Political Agency ordinary citizens with its opposition to the existing order, even if it cannot achieve consensus on ends. It relies on symbolic means to make sense of the state as a threatening menace and to project its vision of a transformed social order. This is to say that an important part of resistance is the rhetorical project of providing a basis for the political cohesion necessary for concerted acts of opposition. Anticolonial and civil rights movements of the last century provide ample illustrations of formal resistance rhetoric that were up to the task. Speeches and writings such as Mahatma Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (1997), Vaclav Havel’s “The Power of the Powerless” (1986), Nelson Mandela’s “The Struggle Is My Life” (1961), Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1963), and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech (1963b) were instrumental in reorienting a national consciousness to new perspectives on existing political conditions. Public declarations such as Czechoslovakia ’s opposition leaders issuing the founding statement of Charter 77 (1977) or South Africa’s Congress of the People’s “Freedom Charter” (1955) provided a platform of beliefs and commitments that allowed ongoing criticism of the government. Even public events that appeared to be acceptable public ceremonies were transformed into statements of opposition when something occurred that reflected widespread support for a cause or a person associated with dissent. At times it appears in public events that are transformed into statements of opposition—for example, the unexpected size of the crowds that spontaneously assembled during the 1979 visit of John Paul II to Poland, at the Czech rock band Plastic People of the Universe’s concerts following the Prague Spring, or more recently in the United States at the campaign speeches of Barack Obama in 2008 or, alternatively, at Tea Party rallies in 2009 and 2010. Each embodied deeply held aspirations through exuberant displays of affiliation with an individual or group associated with an alternative set of values to the state’s or the ruling political party’s. Each, in its own way, manifested the publicity principle (Luban 1996) by showing widespread support for a figure or group...