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

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

And what if they were, nevertheless, not guilty of overthrowing the government, and not guilty of terrorism, and if there had been hardly any “expropriations” at all, and if they had long since been forgiven for all the rest? Our favorite prosecutor pulled out his canonical weapon of last resort: “Ultimately, failure to denounce is a category of crime applying to all the defendants without exception, and it must be considered as having been proved.”29 The Socialist Revolutionary Party was guilty of not having squealed on itself! Now there’s something that couldn’t miss! This represented a discovery that juridical thought had made in the new Code. It was a paved highway along which they would keep driving and driving grateful descendants into Siberia!