The Unofficial Hunger Games Companion

by Lois H. Gresh

  Beetee, the inventor, creates a tiny musical chip that holds hours of songs; clearly, the people of District 12 will never stroll around while listening to hours of music, so perhaps the chip is intended for citizens in the Capitol. These lucky few have music, design, fashion, and art; they live for entertainment. But the oppressed masses have nothing.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is yet another classic tale of dystopian fiction, except in this case, it drew upon the real experiences of the author and exposed the repressive Stalin regime for what it was: this was no far-in-the-future post-apocalyptic scenario; rather, it was drawn from real life. If we compare basic elements of The Hunger Games and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the world of the former becomes even more terrifying because we start realizing that it could happen someday if we’re not careful to encourage and maintain civil liberties, human freedom, and culture. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is a fictionalized portrait of an era in which the government controlled and harassed citizens, civil liberties and privacy were ignored, torture and extreme punishments were doled out to those who dared to voice opinions, and people were dehumanized. We’ll walk through a few parallels between One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Hunger Games, keeping in mind that Ivan reflects an all-too-real time period in Soviet history, and then we’ll take a hard look at that time period to bring the The Hunger Games world into sharp focus.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born in 1918 and fought in the Red Army against the Nazis, who had invaded Russia. In the Battle of Leningrad, he served as a captain, but when in 1945 (at the age of twenty-seven), he criticized Stalin in letters to a friend, the Soviets arrested and sentenced him to eight years of hard labor and exile in a correctional labor camp. Refusing to cooperate with the secret police, he ended up in a labor camp in Siberia, where he decided to write a novel about his experiences.

  By 1929, more than 1 million citizens were imprisoned in these harsh labor camps, called GULAGs. By 1940, more than 13 million people were in the GULAGs. The crimes leading to punishment in the GULAGs were vaguely defined in Article 58 of the Soviet laws and included unproven espionage, suspected espionage, and simply talking to another person suspected of espionage; letting weeds grow, failing to produce sufficient crops, and allowing machines to break down; perceived expression of intent to perform a terrorist act; and the most common crime: creating, distributing, writing in a letter or personal diary about, discussing, or otherwise hinting at anything related to propaganda or agitation against the Soviet government.

  In The Hunger Games series, we might think of the districts as prison camps. Certainly, District 11 operates as a prison camp, with its thirty-five-feet-tall barbed wire fences, watch towers, and armed guards. As civil unrest grows and new Peacekeepers come into District 12, if these new police even think someone is acting subversive, they torture him with public beatings and whippings. The attitude of the government is clear, as stated by President Snow in Catching Fire: “And if a girl from District 12 of all places can defy the Capitol and walk away unharmed, what is to stop [all of the people] from doing the same?” (Catching Fire, 21.) Further, just as the evil leaders in Stalin’s era and in Ivan’s labor camp think, Snow believes that letting Katniss go unpunished could lead to an uprising and possibly a full revolution.

  Solzhenitsyn’s novel begins when Ivan wakes up in the Siberian GULAG, feeling sick and facing another grueling day. The Hunger Games begins when Katniss wakes up to face Reaping Day.

  In Solzhenitsyn’s novel, we learn that the only way Ivan can survive is to fend for himself and not worry about his fellow prisoners. Violence is necessary for self-preservation. And what do the tributes have to do in order to survive the Hunger Games? The same thing. Like Ivan, Katniss is basically a kind, gentle, and decent human being, but when pitted against other people for her own survival in the Games, she must maim and kill.

  Ivan and everyone else is starving in the prison camp. The guards take portions of his meager bread allotment every day, because without the food thefts, even the guards can’t survive. Fighting for food is essential if Ivan is to live. In the world of The Hunger Games, food is carefully rationed by the government, with people getting basically less than is needed to survive. Despite the fact it’s illegal, Peacekeepers, the Mayor, and other local officials gladly take hunted game from Katniss. To get more grain, children throw their names into the Reaping lottery multiple times. Greasy Sae doles out ladles of stew made from bark, mice, and entrails.

  Toward the end of Solzhenitsyn’s novel, Ivan comments that the only reason Stalin’s regime remains in power is because Stalin has divided all the people against each other. This is how the government controls everyone. The same happens in The Hunger Games trilogy, where the Capitol divides everyone into districts that are never allowed to communicate with one another.

  Stalin, whose birth name was Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, was born in 1879, and rose from the lowest classes of pre-Russian Revolution society. His father was a violent alcoholic cobbler, his mother a washerwoman; both were serfs in Georgia before their homeland was conquered by the czar. Stalin actually trained to be a priest, but leaving the church to become a revolutionary activist, he ended up in prison. The czarist government exiled Stalin to Siberia.

  After the overthrow of the czar, Stalin became a high-ranking leader in the Communist Party. He collectivized agriculture throughout the Soviet Union in the 1920s and ’30s. When unrest broke out because affluent kulak peasants weren’t sharing their farm animals with the collective, the government shipped a million kulak families to Siberia. Other peasants, those who were grumbling about collectivization, were shipped off to become laborers. During the early 1930s, millions of people died from starvation under Stalin’s rule. This is a clear case in reality where a brutal government dictator starves his own people to death, and this is not the only case by far.

  Paranoid that citizens were thinking about staging upheavals or rebellions, Stalin tortured people, imprisoned them, exiled them, starved them; and he deported millions to the GULAGs, where many died. Overall, Stalin was responsible for the deaths of 4 to 10 million of his own people, plus another 6 to 8 million from forced starvation. These are actually conservative numbers, as some historians suggest that Stalin was responsible for as many as 20 million deaths.

  President Snow tortures people, imprisons them, and starves them. He deports children to the Games, where they die. While not responsible for slaughters approaching 10 or 20 million people, he’s as cold, impassive, and cruel as Stalin. His regime is as repressive as Stalin’s government. And Snow’s main reason for cruelty is to squash any uprisings or rebellions.

  People have rebelled against repressive regimes since the dawn of civilization. Spartacus’s revolt against Rome during the time of the gladiator games (see chapter 4, “Tributes”) is similar to Katniss’s revolt, except of course, that Spartacus ultimately was defeated whereas Katniss succeeds.

  As I write this book in February 2011, rebellions against repressive regimes are raging across the Middle East. A major trigger was the revolt of Mohamed Bouazizi on December 17, 2010 when he set fire to himself in Tunisia. Living in an agricultural region, he was unemployed and trying to sell vegetables with a street cart, when government officials told him it was against the law. His act sparked demonstrations from other Tunisians against the mass unemployment under the repressive government, which retaliated by sending police to open fire on the citizens. As the rebellion spread and police violence continued, close to eighty citizens ended up dead. At first, President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali backed the police brutality and murders, but later, he started reversing his position. He promised to create jobs, lower food costs, and allow freedom of speech. Eventually, he had to flee the country, and as of this writing, is in Saudi Arabia. He had ruled Tunisia for twenty-three years.

  In February 2011, hundreds of thousands of Egyptians gathered to protest the government policies of Pres
ident Hosni Mubarak. After thirty years of power, he fled Cairo for Sharm el-Sheikh, and millions of people packed the streets of Cairo to celebrate. Like Ben Ali, Mubarak tried to hold onto his power by promising jobs, higher wages, and freedom of speech, but after being repressed for so many decades, the mobs weren’t buying it.

  Also in February 2011, police fought thousands of protestors in Bahrain, yet another recent example of anti-government unrest in the Middle East. The leader of Bahrain, Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, is a Sunni Muslim whose family has ruled the country since the eighteenth century. The majority of people in Bahrain, however, are not Sunni Muslims; rather, they are Shia. Sheikh Hamad promised to institute reforms, but as many as 10,000 protestors gathered in the streets, demanding jobs and housing, civil and political rights, and the removal of Prime Minister Sheikh Khalifa bin Salman Al Khalifa, who had held his position for forty years. As this book goes to print in early May 2011, government forces have arrested 800 people; tortured, imprisoned, and killed civilians; and fired 1,000 citizens from their jobs.

  Also in February 2011, hundreds of thousands of people throughout the Middle East held demonstrations on behalf of the Libyans who are trying to overthrow the repressive regime of Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi. In Libya, military forces shot gunfire into unarmed civilian crowds, including thousands of people leaving mosques after praying. Qaddafi warned his people that Libya would become a hell if the protests against his government didn’t cease. As of February 2011, tens of thousands of citizens were participating in demonstrations, with soldiers defecting from Qaddafi to guard the masses from police attack. As of late March 2011, the United Nations voted to enforce “no-flying” zones in Libya and to help the country’s oppressed people. As this book goes to print in early May 2011, NATO continues bombing Libya in hopes of diminishing Gaddafi’s military power.

  These various examples share some obvious commonalities: government control over citizens, harassment of citizens; erosion of civil liberties; penalties for invoking freedom of speech; and ultimately—at least in the cases cited—repressive regimes face rebellions.

  This is exactly what happens when the people of Panem revolt against their government and its leaders. People can take just so much abuse. The kicker, of course, is that President Coin’s regime ends up being no better than President Snow’s regime. By eliminating Coin, the people of Panem finally achieve some true hope of liberation from oppressive power-hungry leadership. We often trade one evil for another, and as the old saying goes: “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

  In the twentieth century, the world saw revolutions in Czarist Russia; in Italy and Germany between World War I and World War II; and also revolutions in China, Cuba, and Vietnam. There were additional revolutions in Iran and South Africa, among others.

  It’s well beyond the scope of this book to describe all of these revolutions. For that, the reader has to turn to history texts. In general, there are some key factors that lead to outright rebellions, as in The Hunger Games series:

  First, a large portion of the population is extremely frustrated and unhappy with the government. Support among all the poor and rural people is key to a successful overthrow of a repressive regime. Everyone except the leaders and their cohorts in the Capitol are poor and can be considered rural: nobody really has anything, nobody really has any power.

  Second, the majority of the population—no matter what their social and economic classes—agrees that conditions are so bad that the only way to remedy current circumstances is by overthrowing the government. There’s no question that this is true in The Hunger Games. As soon as one district rebels, all the districts start following suit; after District 8 revolts, the rebellion spreads rapidly to other districts. Midway through Catching Fire, Districts 8, 3, 4, 7, and 11 have already starting fighting against the Capitol (Catching Fire, 165–68). Bakers (like Peeta and his family) and engineers and inventors (like Beetee), who have higher status and better lifestyles than most people, join the revolution.

  Third, the so-called elite classes vote for rebellion. This is similar to the second criterion: The vast majority of people join forces and try to overthrow the repressive government. If the intellectuals are with the cause, so much the better. In the case of The Hunger Games, it’s hard to point to an intellectual class because everybody has been subjugated to such a large extent. However, there are some people who might be considered in the intellectual class—possibly Mayors; Peacekeepers who don’t torture citizens; the Head Gamemaker, Plutarch Heavensbee, who is in a secret organization hell-bent on overthrowing the government (Catching Fire, 385); inventors such as Beetee; anyone (other than Coin and her cronies) in District 13. For Seneca Crane, Head Gamemaker before Plutarch, he had a “sentimental streak” and didn’t kill Katniss during the poison berry episode, and hence, according to President Snow, the government had to kill him (Catching Fire, 20).

  Fourth, a serious crisis paralyzes the ability of the repressive regime to use force against the people. These crises may take the form of economic collapse, no jobs, no food, too much war, corrupt leaders, an elite upper stratum that has all the money and power. Need I point out the corollaries with The Hunger Games, not to mention the current (as of February 2011) rebellions throughout the Middle East?

  Finally, a major rebellion may be imminent if no other global government intervenes to help the people. Nobody from anywhere else in the world helps the repressed people of Panem. In fact, we don’t know if anyone exists outside of Panem because they’re never mentioned in any of the three books.

  As noted in chapter 1, “The Hunger Games Trilogy,” Suzanne Collins provides a couple of clues about her apocalyptic scenario. She tells us that the government leaders feared war or complete destruction of the Earth’s atmosphere (Mockingjay, 17). She tells us that the seas swelled and swallowed much of the land of North America to form a much smaller Panem, that there were “droughts” and “storms,” and finally, a “brutal war” over any remaining food sources (The Hunger Games, 18). As postulated in chapter 1, it’s possible that Collins was alluding to the melting of the ice caps due to climate change. The clue is in the swelling of the seas to the point where the continent becomes much smaller. If the entire world is flooded by the melting of the ice in Greenland and all of Antarctica, the seas may rise two hundred feet.15 Without going into the entire scenario suggested in chapter 1, if we assume that the sea swells dramatically affected all of the civilization just as it affected North America, then we can also assume that the survivors elsewhere are busy trying to find sustenance and stay alive just as they did in North America after the apocalyptic event. Further, given that Collins supplies no reason for us to believe that global satellite communications still work or that undersea cables have survived the climate crisis, it’s safe to assume that communications with survivors on other continents are severed. Shortwave low-bandwidth radios would still work. Ships could still sail the high seas; but, with global starvation and meltdowns, diseases may also be rampant, which would limit the desire to communicate via ship or any other means with other continents. The bottom line is that Suzanne Collins does not tell us why the apocalypse occurred, nor does she spell out what happened to the rest of the world.

  James DeFronzo, Associate Professor Emeritus at the University of Connecticut, summarizes the five criteria needed for rebellion as: mass discontent; elite dissent; unifying motive; state crisis; and world permissiveness.16 He provides global evidence that attempted revolutions lacking one or more of these factors tend to fail.

  In the United States at present, people are increasingly discontent due to factors noted earlier in this chapter: unemployment, no hope for jobs, losing their homes, etc. Banks have collapsed, the economy is tanking rapidly. Republicans fling dirt at Democrats. And Democrats fling dirt at Republicans. Nobody wins. The homeless are still homeless, the starving are still starving, the uneducated are still uneducated. The cost of higher education is through the roof. The country is fighting wars on multi
ple fronts and at great expense, yet the government is so riddled with debt, U.S. treasury notes are actually losing money. There seems to be no solution to the nation’s ills.

  What will happen is anyone’s guess.

  We’ve witnessed the USA PATRIOT Act, the bizarre Total Information Awareness proposal, John Ashcroft’s super-secret detentions, and the Guantanamo incident. (And, oh yes, some time ago, we had Nixon’s “plumbers” and the Watergate Tapes, and the Joseph McCarthy Red Scare era, not to mention George W. Bush’s weapons of mass destruction fiasco.)

  The USA PATRIOT Act assaulted the civil rights of Americans by allowing the FBI to look at records about anyone they want without going to court first. Yes, they can view your medical records, financial records, Internet use, travel history, lending library records, and just about anything else. They can tap your phone and read your e-mail.

  The Terrorism Information and Prevention System (TIPS) was a program that President George W. Bush devised that would encourage people to spy on their family, friends, and neighbors. This smacks of the Stalin era, doesn’t it? Or the McCarthy era. Luckily, Congress nixed the idea.

  Face it, we have very little privacy in this country. The Total Information Awareness (TIA) project can put us all under the government microscope. Its aim is to create ultra-huge databases containing all information about people. It is run by the Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Among its many creepy features, it works toward covertly tracking where you go and what you do—without your knowledge.

  Jay Stanley and Barry Steinhardt of the American Civil Liberties Union note: