Fyodor Dostoevsky — one of the few writers to survive state terror and return with a psychology sharp enough to indict it.
In The Idiot, Dostoevsky commits a formal transgression that feels almost indecent. Early in the novel, he arrests the narrative to describe an execution – not the mechanics of death, but the interior experience of a man who has been told exactly how long he has left before a firing squad ends his life.
Five minutes. Not an estimate. A sentence measured in time.
Dostoevsky dissects those minutes with pitiless precision. The condemned man begins to ration consciousness: two minutes to say goodbye, two minutes to think through his life, one minute to look at the world for the last time. Time does not accelerate. It thickens. It coagulates. Each second swells until it becomes almost uninhabitable.
The mind, confronted with annihilation, does not collapse. It clarifies. Light on a church dome becomes unbearably vivid. Faces sharpen. Existence itself reveals an intensity previously concealed by habit. The condemned man realizes, with something like terror, that if life were returned to him, even a single minute would be sufficient to live an entire moral universe. Nothing would be wasted. Nothing trivial.
What makes the scene unbearable is not fear of pain. It is the discovery that consciousness intensifies at the edge of extinction – and that this intensity carries an ethical demand.
Dostoevsky knew this because the scene was not invention in the ordinary sense. In December 1849, he himself stood before a firing squad in St. Petersburg. Arrested for belonging to the Petrashevsky Circle – an informal group of young intellectuals whose crime was reading banned books aloud and discussing ideas without permission – he had been sentenced to death. No weapons. No conspiracy. Only language circulating freely.
On a frozen morning in Semyonovsky Square, Dostoevsky was dressed in burial clothes, tied to a post, and placed in the second group, meaning he would watch the first men prepare to die before his own turn came. The rifles were raised. The command was imminent.
And then, at the final second, the state intervened.
A mounted officer arrived with the Tsar’s decree: the sentence was commuted.
This was not mercy. It was instruction.
The reprieve had been planned in advance. Nicholas, I wanted the condemned men to experience death completely – psychologically, temporally, existentially – before being returned to life marked by the knowledge that existence itself was conditional. Execution would have been crude. Survival, after terror had done its work, was the more refined punishment.
This is why The Idiot dwells on the minute before death rather than death itself. Execution is blunt. Suspended execution is surgical. It educates.
The state did not want Dostoevsky dead. It wanted him transformed.
He was sent instead to Siberia, to the Omsk prison camp: four years of hard labor among murderers and thieves, chained, vermin-ridden, denied privacy, forbidden to write. His epilepsy worsened. Disease was constant. Violence was arbitrary. Time dissolved into endurance. The prison was not designed to destroy the body quickly, but to colonize the inner life – to make thought feel dangerous, to make conscience feel futile, to turn time itself into an instrument of compliance.
What emerged from Siberia was not obedience. It was a writer whose work would forever orbit that minute before annihilation – the moment when power reveals its true ambition: not obedience, but ownership of consciousness. Dostoevsky’s novels would become psychological indictments of authority, written by someone who had learned, at unbearable cost, how states educate free minds.
This history is not safely past.
Myanmar’s military regime has mastered the same curriculum, adapted for the present. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi is not imprisoned because she plotted violence. She is imprisoned because she embodies a form of authority the junta cannot counterfeit: legitimacy rooted in moral continuity rather than force.
Killing her would be inefficient. Martyrs clarify meaning. The regime prefers a slower pedagogy.
She is held in a windowless cell, deprived of natural light. This is not incidental. When time loses its markers, consciousness becomes malleable. Days blur. Seasons vanish. The body becomes the clock.
At eighty years old, Aung San Suu Kyi endures conditions calibrated to erode rather than execute. Vermin. Heat. Prolonged isolation. She suffers from a chronic heart condition. She has endured severe dental and gum infections, left untreated for extended periods – pain administered not through spectacle, but through neglect. Medical care is conditional. Family contact is restricted. Information arrives late, distorted, or not at all.
This is not bureaucratic failure. It is method.
Modern authoritarianism has learned that killing is often unnecessary. It is enough to suspend life inside managed uncertainty. The goal is not confession or ideological conversion, but exhaustion – the gradual internalization of power as fate.
Like Dostoevsky before the firing squad, Aung San Suu Kyi lives inside a sentence that has not yet concluded. Her punishment is not spectacular, but calibrated. The regime does not seek her death. It seeks to contain her consciousness within time it controls.
The cruelty is not aimed at her alone. It is didactic. Every detail of her confinement is legible to the population. The message is unmistakable: this is what happens to a free mind.
Dostoevsky understood, after Siberia, that the most terrifying power a state possesses is not the ability to kill, but the ability to decide when life is allowed to feel meaningful. This is why The Idiot insists on that final minute. The revelation is intolerable for power: a human being, fully conscious of mortality, becomes ethically ungovernable.
Aung San Suu Kyi represents the same danger. Her continued existence under conditions designed to erase interior freedom exposes the regime’s fear. They cannot refute her legitimacy. They can only administer her time.
History has seen this lesson before. States that stage terror imagine they are teaching submission. What they actually teach – again and again – is clarity. Dostoevsky returned from his reprieve with a literature that still indicts power. The empire that tried to educate him collapsed into footnotes.
Aung San Suu Kyi’s education is still unfolding. She inhabits the long middle of history’s pause – the minute before the gunshot stretched across years. Her suffering is not accidental. It is instructional.
The question is not whether she will be remembered. History remembers those who survive terror with consciousness intact.
The question is whether we recognize, now, what it means when a state chooses not to kill a conscience – but to keep it alive in darkness, as a lesson to everyone else.
Dostoevsky taught us what a single minute before death reveals.
Myanmar is teaching us what happens when that minute is never allowed to end.
About the Author
Alan Clements is an author, journalist, and former Buddhist monk. He has spent decades engaged with Myanmar’s democracy movement and has written extensively on nonviolence, addiction, authoritarianism, and the moral psychology of power. He is the author of Conversation with a Dictator, Unsilenced, and Politics of the Heart: Nonviolence in an Age of Atrocity. His work explores the inner architectures that give rise to external violence and the possibility of reconciliation in an age of normalized harm.
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