To finish further in the chapter quoted he wrote:
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