Tom

“Archpriest A. N. Zaozersky had surrendered all the valuables in his own church, but he defended in principle the Patriarch’s appeal regarding forced requisition as sacrilege, and he became the central personage in the trial—and would shortly be shot. (All of which went to prove that what was important was not to feed the starving but to make use of a convenient opportunity to break the back of the church.)”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation

“Incidentally, it is very naive to say What for? At no time have governments been moralists. They never imprisoned people and executed them for having done something. They imprisoned and executed them to keep them from doing something. They imprisoned all those POW’s, of course, not for treason to the Motherland, because it was absolutely clear even to a fool that only the Vlasov men could be accused of treason. They imprisoned all of them to keep them from telling their fellow villagers about Europe. What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve for.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation

“They were vehement in their rear-line wrath (the most intense patriotism always flourishes in the rear), and they added a good deal more in mother oaths.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation

“No matter what the individual qualities [of the defendant], only one method of evaluating him is to be applied: evaluation from the point of view of class expediency”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation