The Prisoner in the Gulag: Arrival Part 1
The introduction to this series of posts considering whether The Prisoner could reference Soviet Russia may be found here:
I had better preface this post with my ‘disclaimer’ that I am in no way qualified to write about the Soviet Union, am not a historian, am too young to remember how it was portrayed in the West in the 1960s and only have knowledge at a Wikipedia level, so am absolutely certain to make endless howlers in these posts so please be gentle with me if you comment to correct my mistakes.
The possible references to life under the Communist Party in the Soviet Union begin even before the episode starts. We see Number 6 arguing with his boss and walking out: an action which would have been doubly unacceptable in the Soviet Union. Clearly he is a very individualistic person which would have been unacceptable in the communal society there and I suspect that in a country which always aspired to 100% employment, walking out of your job would have been suspect at best.
Then when Number 6 returns to his home to depart on his holiday, we see the surrounding street scene of towering skyscrapers. These could be intended to represent the world of the City, commerce, and indeed capitalism itself. This is in contrast to the small world of The Village, and I would suggest that we are intended to make the contrast in as full a way as possible.
The other parallel with the Soviet Union is that, particularly under Stalin, it was notorious for people just disappearing. Anyone who was considered intellectual, independent or antisocial in any way would be taken off and either subjected to torture, or to forced labour, prison, or psychiatric treatment. Some of these people continue not to be accounted for, and there is a movement in Moscow to place plaques on the last known addresses of people who have disappeared. Number 6 is exactly the sort of person who would have been suspected of all sorts of things and disappeared from society. In fact the parallel is so clear that I think this opening sequence is very capable of being compared to the Soviet Union and the Communist regime.
After waking up in his cottage and encountering The Village for this first time, Number 6 picks up the phone in an information booth, only to be frustrated in his attempt to call outside The Village. He also looks at the information station with buttons. To my delight I have discovered that pre-internet, the Soviet Union had exactly these sort of information booths, which also functioned as telephone directories. The picture illustrating this post is of an information booth about the first Five Year Plan. Just as in The Village, of course the information you could get in the Soviet Union was distinctly limited in scope, fulfilling the propaganda needs to the Party. This is strikingly like The Village.
The taxi ride Number 6 takes is a significant event, the significance of which is only explained when he goes to the shop and the shopkeeper tells him that there are no private cars in The Village. This is communism all over: under the First Five Year Plan agriculture was made collective and public machinery and tractors were created where peasants could rent these things rather than having individuals own them: exactly the arrangement in The Village. By coincidence Number 6 refers to the thing the electrician drives as ‘tractors’, which I would love to be a deliberate reference to public tractors in the USSR.
Of course Number 6’s attempts to get an objective map of where he is are frustrated by the propaganda-based maps the shop-keeper offers him, giving no hint of where he actually is but only the information The Village want him to have.
The arrangement of jobs in The Village where some of the residents have distinctly servile roles may detract from the Communist interpretation of the show. You could also interpret it as paralleling the full employment required by the Party in the USSR. The interpretation Number 6 puts on being given a maid, that the KGB is spying on him, is actually of course the most Soviet interpretation you could wish for.
I can only repeat that I think the situation around the changing Number 2s and invisible Number 1 also militates against an interpretation of the show as referencing the Soviet Union, because it means The Village isn’t driven by ideology as the Soviet Union was. However in the interview with Number 2 I am sure the amount of information he has on Number 6 can only parallel the likely intelligence the KGB would get on dissidents. Whatever political system you want the show to represent, I still think Number 6’s reaction a plot weakness: surely anyone taking on a top secret intelligence job would be startlingly naive not to expect the government to know pretty much everything about you.
To be continued...
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