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

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

It was difficult for Yuri to accept. Yuri resisted. But the old man kept peeling off layer after layer. What was it all about? Stalin? But wasn’t it too much to ascribe everything to Stalin, to those stubby hands? He who draws a conclusion only halfway fails to draw it at all. What about the rest of them? The ones right next to Stalin and below him, and everywhere around the country—all those whom the Motherland had authorized to speak for it? What is the right course of action if our mother has sold us to the gypsies? No, even worse, thrown us to the dogs? Does she really remain our mother? If a wife has become a whore, are we really still bound to her in fidelity? A Motherland that betrays its soldiers—is that really a Motherland? And everything turned topsy-turvy for Yuri! He used to take pride in his father—now he cursed him! For the first time he began to consider that his father had, in essence, betrayed his oath to that army in which he had been brought up—had betrayed it in order to help establish this system which now betrayed its own soldiers.