"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
*************
T.W.
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