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

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

If the “comrades who were often brought in from outside”—i.e., the Communist leaders—did not have a correct grasp of the business at hand, then it was the engineers, or spetsy, who were supposed to “outline for them the correct approach to the problem.”1 And this meant that “it was not the leaders who were to blame. . . .