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

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

A Soviet citizen who had returned from the United States had made the slanderous statement that there were good automobile roads in America—and nothing else. That was all there was to the case. The judge ventured to send the case back for further investigation for the purpose of getting “genuine anti-Soviet materials”—in other words, so that the accused could be beaten and tortured. But his praiseworthy intention wasn’t taken into account. The angry answer came back: “You mean you don’t trust our Organs?” And, in the upshot, the judge was exiled to the post of secretary of a military tribunal on Sakhalin!