The Prisoner: A, B and C, and Free for All

The introduction to this series of posts considering whether The Prisoner could reference Soviet Russia may be found here: https://culttvblog.substack.com/p/the-prisoner-in-the-gulag-introduction

A,B and C

I am delighted to announce that A, B and C does have some ways it can be thought to refer to the Soviet Union.

The first is the most obvious one, in that A is described as having defected about six years ago. This phrase immediately places us back in the Cold War, and obviously defect refers to the act of passing from the regime on one side of the Iron Curtain to that on the other. Remembering that The Village is situated on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain and the party takes place in Paris, A may be said to have defected to the West. To say he defected is therefore placing the action in a Soviet setting.

However given the unethical medical experimentation depicted, the more obvious Soviet reference for the episode is the Soviet love for science and experimentation. We now know that essentially if a scientific experiment is unethical and a crime against humanity, it went on in the Soviet Union. However while Soviets did genuinely attain advanced technology and do many unethical (and unrepeatable) experiments which are now the basis of modern medicine, at the time what was actually happening was not known. The knowledge available on both sides of the Iron Curtain was heavily coloured by propaganda and certainly would have suggested further progress than actually existed. So the episode is accurate in depicting frankly science fiction technology, because propaganda knew no bounds in proclaiming the achievements of the state, and so a fantastic depiction is true to what was portrayed to the West at the time.

Ultimately while there are clearly Soviet overtones in the episode, I don’t think the Soviet parallel is the best interpretation for this episode, because while it teases spies and further spies being brought to the Village, ultimately it is more about the self, kicking against the system and power.

Unrelated to Soviet Russia, in my post on The Chimes of Big Ben I commented that it had struck me that Number 6 (and us) seeing Number 8 waking up in her own bedroom felt a bit voyeuristic, and an example of one of the things the show is about, namely intrusion on people’s privacy and personhood. I get the same voyeuristic sense in this episode, in that we are invited to see Number 6’s dreams from inside his head, in a way we normally can’t. The episode therefore is another example of ultimate intrusion and betrayal, but in a way we are on the side of the Village authorities rather than Number 6 because we too are watching his dreams without his permission.

Free for All

I’d better start this part of the post with my customary ‘disclaimer’ that I am in no way equipped to write about the Soviet Union really, and only have a Wikipedia level of knowledge, so don’t place any reliance on anything I say.

‘Everybody votes for a dictator’, says Number 6 towards the beginning of this episode, and that is pretty much how I would have seen the Soviet Union before starting these posts. It turns out that there was a developed democracy earlier in the Soviet Union (I would refer you to the Wikipedia Soviet Democracy page for the full history) which became reduced to pretty much a dictatorship under Stalin. I would suggest that Free for All can be said to depict and parody the reduced and twisted pretend democracy after Stalin got hold of it.

In fact I didn’t realise that the actual word Soviet is a Russian word meaning a council which already existed before the revolution and became a series of bottom up Workers’ Soviets.

However the main subject of relevance to this episode is elections in the Soviet Union, which took place at all levels of the administration. The way in which elections in the Soviet Union most resemble this episode is at the beginning of the episode where the existing Number 2 is the only candidate for the office of Number 2, until Number 6 stands as well. Bizarrely, in the one-party state of the Soviet Union, you would be presented with a ballot paper listing only one candidate, who would have been chosen by the Communist Party and be expected to vote for this candidate by placing it blank in the box. I find this utterly bizarre, and honestly it’s exactly the sort of thing that would happen in the Village. The only way you could vote against the candidate would be to spoil the paper. I think readers will agree that this electoral system beats the one in the Village for what we might call ‘villageness’.

Apparently the reason for having a single candidate is again the most Village thing you could ever wish to hear: that the Party be seen as unified, and so that the electorate would not see multiple candidates competing. There were some independents in the Supreme Soviet, but they were also nominated by the Communist Party, which is as close to Number 1 as anyone I’ve ever seen.

I would suggest that the election in Free for All is a clear parallel with elections in the Soviet Union in that it is clearly controlled by a force behind the scenes, has a predetermined outcome and in reality there is only one candidate, the one put up by the system to win. I would suggest that this is reinforced by the way the placards (the smaller ones) the people carry in their marching are actually blank. They are marching in support of something, but it could be pretty much anything!

In fact I would suggest that the Soviet Union was actually *more* democratic than The Village. The reading I have done has suggested that the one party dictatorship we pictured from this end of Europe was never quite an accurate depiction, and it wasn’t as bad as we thought. For example, people were encouraged to complain if they weren’t happy with their representatives, and people could and did ask for the one candidate to be replaced. I have no doubt that you would get most success in this by giving party unity as your reason, but nonetheless this is better than the Village, and in fact it’s better than Britain, where you can only start a recall petition if your MP goes to prison or is suspended from parliament.

Ultimately, however, I think the real focus of Free for All is to hint on the identity of Number 6 as really being in charge, of his mixed motivations, and frankly I think a psychological explanation fits this one much better than a possible reference to the Soviet Union. So although there are tantalising similarities, I think it unlikely that this episode is deliberately a reference to the Soviet Union.

So in conclusion for both of these episodes, there are possible echoes of like in the Soviet Union, but as always with The Prisoner a single interpretation tends to fall down. I remain convinced that McGoohan intended it to have multiple meanings and probably deliberately therefore left the show’s meaning vague.

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