And, of course, there are these words of warning to us here in America today:
“...At what exact point, then, should one resist the
communists?...”
“How we burned in the prison 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 people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling in terror at every bang on the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood 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 else was at hand...the Organs (police) would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers...and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt.”
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago
This photo shows the amazing change from being an exiled enemy of the state to receiving a virtual state funeral. FIRST CIRCLE has already been recommended on this thread but one should also catch the Canadian mini-series of the same name. It has Christopher Plummer as weak-kneed henchman of Stalin and F. Murray Abraham as Stalin.