[Kartographer]

“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.” ― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

[freedomlover]

That passage gets quoted a lot here. It’s good writing, and gives a dramatic impression that if they had just stuck their necks out and been willing to die earlier for the cause, al would have ended up well.

But IMHO the money quote is

– we had no awareness of the real situation....

Lack of information coupled with a failure to understand that your own government does not have your best interests in mind is all it really takes.