Coercion and Coerciveness in the Politics of Cold War Ukraine and Taiwan

Abstract

The present study examines prison memoirs written by the Ukrainian writer Mykhaylo Osadchy (1936- 1994) and the Taiwanese writer Tsai Tehpen (b. 1925) from the perspective of coercion. Osadchy was a member of the Sixtiers, a group of young Ukrainian intellectuals who brought about a cultural renaissance in post-Stalin Ukraine. Their writings manifested a strong reaction against Moscow's policy of great-power chauvinism at the onset of the regime change that marked the end of Khrushchev's liberalizing campaign. Osadchy was one of the victims of the subsequent wave of arrests of dissidents in the Soviet Union, including Ukraine, in 1965. His memoir, Cataract (Bilmo, 1971) is a powerfully evocative response to trumped-up charges of subversion, anti-Soviet agitation and bourgeois nationalism, and a riveting description of life in a Mordovian labor camp, a work that posed a strong attack on official Soviet culture. The repeal of Taiwan's Sedition Law in 1991 set aside the threat of government action against any perceived criticism of the state, bringing to light memoirs from the period of the White Terror (1949- 1991) including Tsai Tehpen's Elegy for the Sweet Potatoes (1995). Tsai, like Osadchy, was a member of a generation of youth that resisted intimidation by a coercive authoritarian government. Its idealistic purposes in promoting the revitalization of Taiwanese identity and disenchantment with the corruption of the newly installed Nationalist Government led to the White Terror campaign beginning in 1949 that included crackdowns on student dissidents. In his collective portrait of Taiwanese prison life, Tsai - like his Ukrainian counterpart - depicts with great compassion and appreciation the poignant humanity of his fellow inmates and their capacity for suffering. Prison literature offers an insightful vantage point on the relationship between coercion and consent in an authoritarian regime while providing alternative descriptions of the circumstances of the brute force that seeks to intimidate while paying lip service to the notion that political power is legitimized by and should be dependent on voluntary agreement and shared values. Robert Nozick's notion of coercion as the successful swaying of attitudes and behaviour is used to assess the nature and degree of resistance of citizens to the repressive means at the State's disposal.