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

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Krylenko hounded them with his theoretical questions—and as a result of simple human slips of the tongue inconsistent with their assigned roles, the nucleus of the truth is disclosed to us—as to what really had taken place and from what the entire bubble had been blown. What the engineers had first seen in the October coup d’etat was ruin. (And for three years there had truly been ruin and nothing else.) Beyond that, they had seen the loss of even the most elementary freedoms. (And these freedoms never returned.) How, then, could engineers not have wanted a democratic republic? How could engineers accept the dictatorship of the workers, the dictatorship of their subordinates in industry, so little skilled or trained and comprehending neither the physical nor the economic laws of production, but now occupying the top positions, from which they supervised the engineers? Why shouldn’t the engineers have considered it more natural for the structure of society to be headed by those who could intelligently direct its activity?