An interesting quote from “Gulag Archipelago”:
“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 goodbye 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 in 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!”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Solzhenitsyn, in the chapter on arrests,discusses how arbritrary and random it became to be arrested. The councils were given quotas in the thousands to arrest (to make room for others who were being shifted into that region for the mass population shifts Stalin was implementing from one country to another). People turned on each other, turned each other in for nothing, for fear, for hoping to delay the day when they would be arrested. People were arrested not just for political or religious views, but for knowing, being related to or having any friendship or connection with someone who had been arrested, and later it became so random it was almost like a lottery. If this type of insanity ever gets started it would definitely be the Christians and conservatives that go first, but if leftists and liberals think they would be safe they are mistaken. This kind of evil grows and morphs like a cancer until the whole country is in bondage & fear, whether physically or not. I traveled in Eastern Europe and Russia in the mid 90’s, and it still had an opressive feeling of psychological and spirtitual darkness, cynicism and distrust, even quite a few years after the fall of communism.
INDEED.
[Forming a political opposition in Russia became a practical impossibility. . .
Firstly, we lack an independent Judiciary. An opposition has to be able to appeal to an independent Legal system. Secondly, we lack independent national mass Media. . .Thirdly; there are no independent sources of Finance for anything substantial. In the absence of these three fundamentals it is impossible to create a viable political opposition. . .There is no democracy now in Russia, because democracy without an opposition is impossible. . .
Were we seeing a crisis of Russian Parliamentary democracy in the Putin era? No, we were witnessing it's death.]
Ugly parallels here, of course; in the message for 'change'.