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

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The members of the ruling Party read all sixty issues of Pravda devoted to the trial—for they all read the papers—and all of them said: “Yes, yes, yes” No one mumbled: “No!” What, then, were they surprised at in 1937? What was there to complain about? Hadn’t all the foundations of lawlessness been laid—first by the extrajudicial reprisals of the Cheka, and then by these early trials and this young Code? Wasn’t 1937 also expedient (expedient for Stalin’s purposes and, perhaps, History’s, too, for that matter)? Prophetically, Krylenko let it slip that they were judging not the past but the future. Only the first swath cut by the scythe is difficult.