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!
Solzhenitsyn
Excellent.
I agree, excellent. I love Solzhenitsyn (so much that I remember how to spell his name). The Gulag Archipelago was one sobering book.
Saving that quote.