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

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

As an industrial designer or electrician, you could have preserved your patriotic purity only if you had stayed in the POW camp to dig in the earth, to rot, to pick through the garbage heap. In that case, for pure treason to the Motherland, you could count on getting, your head raised high in pride, ten years in prison and five more “muzzled.” Whereas for treason to the Motherland aggravated by working for the enemy, especially in one’s own profession, you got, with bowed head, the same ten years in prison and five more muzzled.