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

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The spetsy were to blame for everything. But the proletarian court was not merciless with them. Their sentences were lenient. Of course, an inner hostility to those cursed spetsy remains in proletarian hearts—but one can’t get along without them; everything goes to rack and ruin. And the tribunal doesn’t persecute them, and Krylenko even says that from 1920 on “there is no question of any sabotage.” The spetsy are to blame, but not out of malice on their part; it’s simply because they are inept; they aren’t able to do any better; under capitalism, they hadn’t learned to work, or else they were simply egotists and bribe-takers. And so, at the beginning of the reconstruction period, a surprising tendency toward leniency could be observed in regard to the engineers.