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

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

And specifically: in reply to the renunciation by the SR’s of armed opposition and to their peaceful proposals, they had put the entire Central Committee of the Socialist Revolutionary Party in prison! (As many of them as they could catch.) That’s how we do it! But to keep them in prison—and hadn’t it already been three years?—wasn’t it necessary to try them? And what should they be charged with? “This period had not been sufficiently investigated in the pretrial examination,” our prosecutor complained. But in the meanwhile one charge was correct. In that same February, 1919, the SR’s had passed a resolution which they had not put into effect, though in terms of the new Criminal Code that didn’t matter at all: to carry on secret agitation in the ranks of the Red Army in order to induce the soldiers to refuse to participate in reprisals against the peasants. And that was a low-down, foul betrayal of the Revolution—to try to persuade men not to take part in reprisals.