Secrecy and Power - Who will resist and who will serve? (Books - Children of the Arbat III)

While I couldn't find any images of original editions of Children of the Arbat, this is the original samizdat (see a definition here) of Czech writer Vaclav Havel's Letters to Olga. Havel wrote, largely for the theater, as well as leading a campaign to save a subversive literary magazine Tvar. In 1965 the StB tried to recruit Havel as an informant but his refusal led to his continual observation throughout the communist regime. In 1979 he was arrested for anti-state activities and imprisoned for months without a trial. He was imprisoned four times but remained no less subversive a voice. After the devision of Czechoslovakia, he became the first president of the Czech Republic. I give this very short summary of his political life to ask - what makes one person subversive and the other submissive?

One of the plot lines that I'm enjoying right now in Children of the Arbat is about Yuri Sharok, the son of factory workers, whose aim is to become a lawyer for the factory where he worked as a young man. He is among a group of students in school whose popular leader, Sasha, is expelled for anti-state activities and sentenced to three years in Siberia. He had been a rival to the popular Sasha. Following school, he is approached by the NKVD, Stalin's secret police who were the force behind the political repression, running the Gulags, as well as conducting espionage in other countries, including the assassination of Leon Trotsky.

Why had they picked him? He was an average student, he never got the best grades. And his social work was average, he only did what he was told. Average people had their uses, too, evidently...

Sharok had been created for this job, he was right for it, not open-hearted Maxim Kostin, or that spineless intellectual Vadim Marasevich, or that overconfident Sasah Pankratov. Nobody would be able to wriggle out from Sharok's grasp, or manage to justify tghemselves. He would not believe in anyone's sincerity - it was impossible to believe sincerely in this whole business, and anyone who claimed they did was lying...

He's be safe there, nobody would be able to touch him. He'd by one of those who could reach everyone else.

In this part of Rybakov's story, we observe the evolution of his choice - the birth of cruelty. Another one of those instances where it is easy to say "I would never...," but would we? I would like to think I would not. But would I lie in jail like Havel? Endanger my friends and family? My livelihood? My life?