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

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Comrade Krylenko vouchsafed them a flash of his brilliant logic. “If we should admit even for one second that these people were telling untruths, then why were they arrested and why did they all at once start babbling their heads off?”23 Now that is the power of logic for you! For a thousand years prosecutors and accusers had never even imagined that the fact of arrest might in itself be a proof of guilt. If the defendants were innocent, then why had they been arrested? And once they had been arrested, that meant they were guilty!