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

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Our accuser’s heart jumps right out of our chest, outrunning the sentence. Well, what punishment was adequate for these assistants to the general? Just one, of course—to be shot! That was not merely what the accuser demanded—it was the sentence of the tribunal. (Alas, it was later commuted to concentration camp until the end of the Civil War.) And indeed the defendants’ guilt consisted in the fact that they hadn’t sat in their own corners, sucking on their quarter-pound of bread; that “they had talked things over and reached agreements as to what the state structure should be after the fall of the Soviet regime.” In contemporary scientific language, this is known as the study of the alternative possibility.