"How we burned in the prison camps later thinking: What would
things have been like if every police operative, when he went out at night to
make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive? If during
periods of mass arrests 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 to lose and had boldly set up in
the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers,
pokers, or whatever was at hand? The organs 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, Nobel
Prize winner and author of
The Gulag Archipelago, who spent 11 years in
Soviet concentration camps.
Comments (2)
If ignorance truly was the cause of all such inaction, let us never forget the lesson so painfully purchased.
If it was not, then I pray man never again fails to fight when there is nothing to be lost and everything to be gained.