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“Slavery! It sounds archaic and perhaps even silly, and this word, too, people dared pronounce only in their hidden thoughts. “Slavery — it sounds menacing and perhaps not altogether true,” writes Ināra Egle on John’s day 1989 in Padomju Jaunatne in connection with the unrest in Uzbekhia. “But there is no other name for the empire-generated voiding of human rights, the lack of will to live an ordinary life…” The life of the kolkhoznik resembled closely that of our forefathers, consisting of the ordeals of the serf, the only difference being electricity for lighting in place of burning splinters and death camps instead of the gallows, camps in which his life, for the time remaining to him, is utilized to “raise communism”. I wander. November”
― Suddenly, a Criminal: Sixteen Years in Siberia
― Suddenly, a Criminal: Sixteen Years in Siberia
“But tis strange: And oftentimes, to win us to our harm, the Instruments of Darkness tell us truths, win us with honest trifles, to betray's in deepest consequence.”
― Macbeth
― Macbeth
“To here in Siberia, we were brought without tickets, stuffed into cattle cars like livestock. We were given water and at two-day intervals, warm food. We came here in convoys of one hundred cars in each, and the journey lasted three weeks. From the thirty people in my barred car, twelve remained in cemeteries in Siberia. On my return sixteen years later, I rode as the ghost of a human being, who has waded through the black abyss of suffering, in the hope of a rebirth into a human being. My”
― Suddenly, a Criminal: Sixteen Years in Siberia
― Suddenly, a Criminal: Sixteen Years in Siberia
“Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth.”
―
―
“The train continued on its way to Rīga. I could not peel my eyes from the window. On some hillock, an old friend from long-gone days rushed towards me: the grey rock. A sight for sore eyes after stone-less Siberia. Beside the large one, two smaller ones. One more. Another one. Now, this is the homeland! Homeland, in which my near and dear long-unseen rocks are greeting me. In Siberia, we felt the lack of rocks keenly, that is why they touched me so deeply now. The Latvian has grown up so symbiotically with the rock, just as he has with his land and his sky. I remembered a scene Pumpurs had described, about some refugee who had embraced the rock in the forest meadow of his home with both arms, pressed his forehead against its cold forehead, stopped suffering, and started being joyful. The land is the same. What had changed were the circumstances and people who also called it their own. A”
― Suddenly, a Criminal: Sixteen Years in Siberia
― Suddenly, a Criminal: Sixteen Years in Siberia
Charlie’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Charlie’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
1,432 books
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42 friends
162 books
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372 friends
590 books
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217 friends
2,372 books
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72 friends
299 books
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16 friends
383 books
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226 friends
63 books
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35 friends
328 books
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121 friends
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