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

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The Organs did everything to blot out for him his future and distort his present: to lead him to believe that his friends and family had all been arrested and that material proof of his guilt had been found. It was their habit to exaggerate their power to destroy him and those he loved as well as their authority to pardon (which the Organs didn’t even have). They pretended that there was some connection between the sincerity of a prisoner’s “repentance” and a reduction in his sentence or an easing of the camp regimen. (No such connection ever existed.)