Beware of the stool pigeons

‘In this “brave new normal” where we cannot meet with more than six people, and in some parts of the country, with members outside of our own household – beware of the stool pigeon.’

Across Stalinist Russia’s omnipresent and ensnaring police state, the secret police organ known as the NKVD – still unsatisfied with the suffocating surveillance state bearing down on the proletariat – often planted what the writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in his magnum opus ‘The Gulag Archipelago’, referred to as ‘stool pigeons’. Disguised as an ordinary prisoner, they were placed within jail cells to keep a watchful eye over the other inmates. The NKVD literally had eyes everywhere.

Many were of course coerced into degrading themselves into acting as stool pigeons as the job immediately turned any convicted prisoner into an outcast, making the task incredibly dangerous. Whenever a stool pigeon was unearthed by their fellow cellmates, they were often beaten and humiliated until the guards intervened with truncheons and pistols – sometimes they were too late, however, as the stool pigeon had already been killed. Such was the irredeemable price for betrayal.

Some stool pigeons, although coerced, grabbed what little privileges were rewarded to them by the NKVD. Others, whether they were coerced or not, adored this imbued authority, even taking pride in snitching on their fellow cellmates. No prisoner would ever dare whisper into their pillow, let alone coordinate a rebellion.

Stool pigeons have existed throughout all of human history, but always rear their heads when authoritarian regimes don’t wish to squeeze any more secret police goons onto its near infinite payroll. Here in the West, it was thought that stool pigeons were extinguished along with the twentieth century totalitarian systems which breathed life into them. But how wrong we were.

When Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced the lockdown in early March, the stool pigeons, collectively laying dormant, suddenly, as if they were a volcano, erupted into life. As soon as lockdown began, the police quickly became overloaded with calls from stool pigeons who had caught their neighbours breaking lockdown measures - some of the most draconian laws ever implemented in this land. Those who had dared to venture out of their homes for two walks a day should have always made sure that no stool pigeon was peering out of an upstairs window, binoculars in hand.  

Stool pigeons are the overbearing teachers who loved to discipline us for the slightest infraction, except now there is the added sense of self-righteousness that they have ‘saved granny’ from certain death by alerting the authorities to two teenagers kicking a football across a field. But have they saved our elderly from all the missed cancer diagnoses and treatments? I think not.

In this “brave new normal” where we cannot meet with more than six people, and in some parts of the country, with members outside of our own household – beware of the stool pigeon.