Sunday, December 06, 2009

I do need to get around to reading some of his works

Oh how we burned in the prison camps, later thinking: what would things have been like if every police operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive? If, during periods of mass arrests, 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 that they had nothing to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers or whatever 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.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Perhaps you can credit Alexander Solzhenitsyn in the post.
His writings are stunningly excellent. Given where and how he wrote and the path his work had to take to reach publication, we are lucky any of it survived.