The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, developing his brilliant idea, wrote in the heat of the moment, on May 19: Comrade Dzerzhinsky! On the question of exiling abroad writers and professors who aid the counterrevolution: this is a measure which must be prepared most carefully. Unless we prepare well, we can commit stupidities. . . . We must arrange the business in such a way as to catch these “military spies” and keep on catching them constantly and systematically and exiling them abroad. I beg you to show this secretly, and without making any copies of it, to members of the Politburo.1