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The Gulag Archipelago

Book by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn · 3 quotes · 1973, Soviet Russia, Totalitarianism

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The Gulag Archipelago Quotes

“Should we wrap it all up and simply say that they arrested the innocent? But we omitted saying that the very concept of guilt had been repealed by the proletarian revolution and, at the beginning of the thirties, was defined as rightist opportunism! So we can't even discuss these out-of-date concepts, guilt and innocence.”

CommunismTotalitarianismPolice StateSoviet RussiaStalinism19731938Double ThinkSecurity StateArbitrary Arrest
Book:The Gulag Archipelago
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“But just take the jurists' side for a moment: why, in fact, should a trial be supposed to have two possible outcomes when our general elections are conducted on the basis of one candidate? An acquittal is, in fact, unthinkable from the economic point of view! It would mean that the informers, the Security officers, the Interrogators, the prosecutor's staff, the internal guard in the prison, and the convoy had all worked to no purpose.”

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“What the engineers had first seen in the October coup d'état was ruin. (And for three years there had been ruin and nothing else.) Beyond that, they had seen the loss of even the most elementary freedoms. (And these freedoms never returned.) How, then, could engineers not have wanted a democratic republic? How could engineers accept the dictatorship of the workers, the dictatorship of their subordinates in industry, so little skilled or trained and comprehending neither the physical nor the economic laws of production, but now occupying the top positions, from which they supervised the engineers? Why shouldn't the engineers have considered it more natural for the structure of society to be headed by those who could intelligently direct its activity?”

CommunismMarxismOctober Revolution1973Dictatorship Of The ProletariatMeans Of Production1930WreckingPrompartyThe Law Matures
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