Verkhovensky’s conceptualized society of universal spying in Demons foreshadows the Gulag system in which people uphold the regime because their participation in informing traps them in obedience.
During a conversation with Nikolay Stavrogin, Pyotr Verkhovensky expresses his ideal political vision almost as if in a state of delirium. “He’s got spying. He’s got each member of society watching the others and obliged to inform. Each belongs to all, and all to each. They’re all slaves and equal in their slavery. Slander and murder in extreme cases, but above all–equality”(417). Verkhovensky’s words highlight how he is actually not devoted to socialist ideologies or helping people find freedom. Instead, he exploits revolutionary rhetoric as a mask for personal power. His dream is absolute control where everyone is constantly under mutual surveillance. Furthermore, the threat of informing erodes all shared bonds and any solidarity where equality is redefined as shared enslavement. Pyotr critically recognizes that a society where citizens are weaponized as informants to the regime is much easier to dominate than one controlled by an external force. If everyone is obliged to inform then everyone is vulnerable to some automatized power ultimately strengthening the power of the regime.
Pyotr’s logic foreshadows the system described by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago. “Beyond the purpose of weakening ties between people, there was another purpose as well. Any person who had let himself be recruited would, out of fear of public exposure, be very much interested in the continuing stability of the regime” (p. 323). Solzhenitsyn articulates how the incentivization to protect oneself ultimately strengthens the regime to protect themselves. Once someone informed even once, the fear of being uncovered garnered absolute compliance, and they were suddenly tied to the system. Thus, informing not only became a mechanism of surveillance but of psychological domination.
Both texts highlight how totalitarian control is contingent on incriminating individuals in the systems they fear. The power of informing extends beyond just gathering information. It also erodes relationships. As surveillance dismantles trust among individuals, they become more isolated and ultimately more dependent on a regime that seeks to oppress them. Eventually, the state no longer needs to exert visible force as control operates from within. Dostoevsky, writing decades before the rise of Soviet totalitarianism, anticipates the psychology of repression that Solzhenitsyn later chronicles from lived experience. Pyotr’s imagined future of a society in which “slaves equal in their slavery”(417) finds its grim fulfillment in the world Solzhenitsyn describes, in which informers help sustain the system not out of conviction but because complicity makes rebellion impossible.
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