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The Gulag Archipelago

Book by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn · 2 quotes · 1973, Soviet Russia, Totalitarianism

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The Gulag Archipelago Quotes

“(Please forgive us, reader. We have once more gone astray with this rightist opportunism—this concept of "guilt," and of the guilty or innocent. It has, after all, been explained to us that the heart of the matter is not personal guilt, but social danger. One can imprison an innocent person if he is socially hostile. And one can release a guilty man if he is socially friendly. But lacking legal training, we can be forgiven, for the 1926 [Soviet Criminal] Code, according to which, my good fellow, we lived for twenty-five years and more, was itself criticized for an "impermissible bourgeois approach," for an "insufficiently class-conscious approach," and for some kind of "bourgeois weighting of punishment in relation to the gravity of what had been committed.")”

Soviet Union1969JurisprudenceBourgeois Society
Book:The Gulag Archipelago
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“At no time have governments been moralists. They never imprisoned people and executed them for having done something. They imprisoned and executed them to keep them from doing something. They imprisoned all those POW's, of course, not for treason to the motherland, because it was absolutely clear even to a fool that only the Vlasov men could be accused of treason. They imprisoned all of them to keep them from telling their fellow villagers about Europe. What the eye doesn't see, the heart doesn't grieve for.”

Soviet UnionTotalitarianismRepressionTreasonImprisonmentStalinismPolitical PrisonersPrisoner Of War19451973
Book:The Gulag Archipelago
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