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

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Then, of course, the local Party committee—that matchless defender of the workers’ interests—wasn’t dozing either. And Communists were put in charge of the water system. “Only workers are to hold the top positions; there are to be only Communists at leadership level; and the wisdom of this view was confirmed by the given trial.”5 The Moscow Party organization also kept its eyes on the water-supply system. (And behind it stood the Cheka.) “In our own time we built our army on the basis of a healthy feeling of class enmity; in its name, we do not entrust even one responsible position to people who do not belong to our camp, without assigning them . . . a commissar.”6 And so, they all immediately began to order the chief engineer about, to supervise him, to give him instructions, and to shift the engineering personnel around without his knowledge. (“They broke up the whole nest of businessmen.”)