“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
I am brushing up on my Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
George Orwell’s 1984 is a must read. It is mandatory reading in mos high schools. It is a scary book, of course, but because it is fiction, I think some people don’t take it seriously.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was the Soviet Union’s George Orwell. He actually spent eight years doing labor in a Gulag because of a private letter he wrote to a friend. He lived what Orwell only saw from afar. Solzhenitsyn’s magnum opera are One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago.
Both are excellent, and should be mandatory reading by all Americans once per election cycle. If I could ever get the funding I would make The Gulag Archipelago into a movie or maybe a mini series.
by gunfreezone.net
