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

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“And even if the defendants here in Moscow did not lift a finger [and it looks very much as though that’s the way it was] at such a moment, nevertheless . . . even a conversation over a teacup as to the kind of system that should replace the Soviet system, which is allegedly about to fall, is a counterrevolutionary act. . . . During the Civil War not only is any kind of action [against Soviet power] a crime . . . but the fact of inaction is also criminal.”64 Well, now everything is comprehensible, everything is clear. They are being sentenced to death—for inaction. For a cup of tea. The Petrograd intellectuals, for example, decided that in the event of Yudenich’s taking the city, they would first of all “concern themselves with convening a democratic municipal Duma.” (In other words, to safeguard the city against a possible dictatorship.) Krylenko: “I would like to shout at them: ‘It was your duty to think first of all how you might die in battle, so as not to allow Yudenich into the city!’”