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

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

However, it didn’t work out constantly and systematically. Perhaps the roar with which the émigrés announced that they regarded it as a “gift” made it apparent that this punishment left something to be desired, that it was a mistake to have let go good material for the executioner, and that poisonous flowers might grow on that garbage dump. And so they abandoned this form of punishment. And all subsequent purging led to either the executioner or the Archipelago.