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

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

From this followed the serious fourth charge: in the summer and fall of 1918, those final months and weeks when the Kaiser’s Germany was scarcely managing to hold its own against the Allies, and the Soviet government, faithful to the Brest treaty, was supporting Germany in its difficult struggle with trainloads of foodstuffs and a monthly tribute in gold, the SR’s traitorously prepared (well, they didn’t actually prepare anything but, as was their custom, did more talking about it than anything—but what if they really had!) to blow up the railroad tracks in front of one such train, thus keeping the gold in the Motherland. In other words, they “prepared criminal destruction of our public wealth, the railroads.”