Ben

“The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

“Mine was, probably, the easiest imaginable kind of arrest. It did not tear me from the embrace of kith and kin, nor wrench me from a deeply cherished home life. One pallid European February it took me from our narrow salient on the Baltic Sea, where, depending on one's point of view, either we had surrounded the Germans or they had surrounded us, and it deprived me only of my familiar artillery battery and the scenes of the last three months of war.

The brigade commander called me to his headquarters and asked me for my pistol; I turned it over without suspecting any evil intent, when suddenly, from a tense, immobile suite of staff officers in the corner, two counterintelligence officers stepped forward hurriedly, crossed the room in a few quick bounds, their four hands grabbed simultaneously at the star on my cap, my shoulder boards, my officer's belt, my map case, and they shouted theatrically: "You are under arrest!"

Burning and prickling from head to toe, all I could explain was, "Me? What for?"

Across the sheer gap separating me from those left behind, across that quarantine line not event a sound dared penetrate, came the unthinkable magic words of the brigade commander: "Sholzhenitsyn. Come back here."

"You have ..." he asked weightily, "a friend on the First Ukrainian Front?"

I knew instantly I had been arrested because of my correspondence with a school friend and understood what direction to expect danger.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“Martin Latsis, writing for the newspaper Red Terror, November 1, 1918: “We are not fighting against single individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. It is not necessary during the interrogation to look for evidence proving that the accused opposed the Soviets by word or action. The first question you should ask him is what class does he belong to, what is his origin, his education and his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. Such is the sense and essence of red terror.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

“The whole system of oppression ... was based on keeping malcontents apart, preventing them from reading each other's eyes and discovering how many of them there were; instilling it into all of them, even into the most dissatisfied, that no one was dissatisfied except for a few doomed individuals, blindly vicious and spiritually bankrupt.

Well, politicals - real politicals for the first time -- had now become "gangsters." It was announced, not very confidently, that these gangsters would soon be discovered ...”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956