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

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

However, in 1945, in the very center of Soviet jurisdiction, they were charged with: actions directed toward the overthrow of the government of the workers’ and peasants’ soviets; armed incursion into Soviet territory, in other words, not having immediately left Russia when Petrograd was declared Soviet; aiding the international bourgeoisie (which they had never seen even in their dreams); serving counterrevolutionary governments (i.e., their own generals, to whom they had been subordinate all their lives). And all these sections—Nos. 1, 2, 4, 13—of Article 58 were included in a Criminal Code adopted in 1926, that is, six to seven years after the end of the Civil War. This was a classic and unconscionable example of the ex post facto application of a law! In addition, Article 2 of the Code specified that it applied only to citizens taken into custody on the territory of the Russian Republic. But State Security’s strong right arm had grabbed people who were in no wise Soviet citizens from all the countries of Europe and Asia.