[E. Pluribus Unum]

“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

[BatGuano]

I remember that passage, the question of “what would things have been like if?” I have read the three volumes of the “GA” and recommend it to all. I have even thought of visiting one of the sites mentioned, the Solovetsky Islands and the Solovetsky Monastery. You can visit it on Google Maps, earth depiction and one is able to view at ground level the wall etc., using the “little gold guy.” It looks like a cold, barren landscape, ideal for a location on the archipelago.

One other passage that impressed me was about how the person who turned in the “enemy of the state” would likely be with that enemy on the transport to the Gulag!!!