Quotessence
Home / Books / The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books V-VII

The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books V-VII

Book by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn · 3 quotes · 1977, Soviet Russia, Katorga

Filter quotes by topic

All1977Soviet RussiaKatorga1976CommunismTotalitarianismAuthoritarianismGulag19411948195119531961Behind The WireCivil DisobedienceDouble ThinkExileFollowing OrdersForty Days Of KengirFraming

The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books V-VII Quotes

“This is surely the main problem of the twentieth century: is it permissible merely to carry out orders and commit one's conscience to someone else's keeping? Can a man do without ideas of his own about good and evil, and merely derive them from the printed instructions and verbal orders of his superiors? Oaths! Those solemn pledges pronounced with a tremor in the voice and intended to defend people against the evildoers: see how easily they can be misdirected to the service of the evildoers and against the people!”

TotalitarianismWar Crimes1976NurembergOath Of OfficeFollowing OrdersOaths
Book:The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books V-VII
Create image

“That's how the world is arranged: they can take anyone's freedom from him, without a qualm. If we want to take back the freedom which is our birthright—they make us pay with our lives and the lives of all whom we meet on the way. They can do anything, but we cannot. That's why they are stronger than we.”

TotalitarianismAuthoritarianismSoviet RussiaStalinism19771951
Book:The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books V-VII
Create image

“These people, who had experienced on their own hides twenty-four years of Communist happiness, knew by 1941 what as yet no one else in the world knew: that nowhere on the planet, nowhere in history, was there a regime more vicious, more bloodthirsty, and at the same time more cunning and ingenious than the Bolshevik, the self-styled Soviet regime. That no other regime on earth could compare with it either in the number of those it had done to death, in hardiness, in the range of its ambitions, in its thoroughgoing and unmitigated totalitarianism—no, not even the regime of its pupil Hitler, which at that time blinded Western eyes to all else.”

CommunismTotalitarianismNazismSoviet Russia19411977
Book:The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books V-VII
Create image