Thought Censorship under Totalitarianism: A Precarious Relationship between Thought and Voice in Mandelstam

“Brain-washing” technology became known for the first time during the Korean War. In the Chinese hospital where war captives were held, attempts at “thought reform” were regularly performed. Many of them had been converted to communism, which alerted American society. This led to an investigation and findings concerning “communist mind control.” Studies have been made, of which Brain-Washing in Red China: The Calculated Destruction of Men’s Minds by Edward Hunter, which popularized the term “brainwashing,” is probably best known.

Although it was the Chinese military service that gave the practice its name of “brain-washing,” the prototype of the technique had been developed in Soviet Russia in the 1930s. Let me quickly note, though, that it has been debated whether the science of brainwashing had been studied and developed in Communist Russia, which subsequently transmitted the knowledge to China, or whether China developed its technique independently. The historical relationship has never been sufficiently established.

It is, however, largely acknowledged that the trial procedures used by the Stalin regime were essentially what one might call “mind control” or “brain-washing” in the broad sense from today’s standpoint, and so was the tradition introduced by the secret police of the post-Stalin Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe. The psychologist Lifton argues in his book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism:

The Russian Communist contribution to thought reform is immediately apparent in much of the content and many of the forms of the process: the allegedly scientific Marxist-Leninist doctrine; the stress upon criticism, and confession as features of ‘ideological struggle’; the organizational techniques of iron discipline; the demands for purity of belief and absolute obedience; and the practice of informing upon others in the service of the party. Certainly, many of the pressures used to extract confessions in penal thought reform [in China] closely resemble techniques used by the Russians during the great Soviet purge trials of the late 1930’s....Eastern European Communist nations have employed similar confession methods.

(389)¹

The difference between Russia and China is that while the Soviet totalitarian regime was interested in deleting thought and memory from a “culprit” and coaxing “confession,” China went further. China wanted to transform human personality completely with new beliefs, ideas, logic, etc. The purpose of this paper, however, is to explore the nature of thought and non-thought vis-à-vis language through the life and works of Osip Mandelstam in his confrontation with Soviet mind control and in relation to the psychologist/linguist Lev Vygotsky. I will limit my scope of analysis of brainwashing to its Soviet version, but not to the Chinese.

Lifton in the above-mentioned book lists the fundamental principles of the techniques of “brain-washing.” The first stage is termed a “struggle,” in which a captive is confined to a small cell and is under constant and disturbing interrogation that combines “hint, threat, and promise.” The threat often concerns people who are close to the “convict”: family members, relatives, close friends, and so on. Isolation is an important part of the technique. It is accompanied with humiliating treatment in the prison cell, normally in solitary confinement, often without a guard, which gives a greater sense of isolation, and with the deprivation of sleep. In this process of “struggle,” the interrogated can wipe out his/her own pre-existing thought and become a tabula rasa, into which any new memory or doctrine can be overwritten. Thus, the whole procedure may lead to a wild confession, not based on any fact.

Mandelstam was one of the victims of the interrogation of Liubianka during the Great Terror. On the very early morning of May 16, 1934, the officers of the GPU (Joint State Political Directorate; formerly Cheka, the Central Committee) visited him and after a lengthy house search that lasted for six hours, Mandelstam was arrested.² The charge was for his composing a satirical poem referring to Stalin, a copy of which was in the possession of the authorities. The poem reads:

We live, not feeling the ground under our feet...