The Gulag Archipelago: The Authorized Abridgement

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

But no; that’s not the way it is! To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions.

Much like the modern social justice movement.

Here is a riddle not for us contemporaries to figure out: Why is Germany allowed to punish its evildoers and Russia is not?

Nazism is punished but bolshevism is not.

Yes, that word which you may have despised out in freedom, when they used it as a substitute for your own individuality (“All of us, like one man!” Or: “We are deeply angered!” Or: “We demand!” Or: “We swear!”), is now revealed to you as something sweet: you are not alone in the world! Wise, spiritual beings—human beings still exist.

True collectivism, not enforced by the regime.

Our soldiers alone, renounced by their Motherland and degraded to nothing in the eyes of enemies and allies, had to push their way to the swine swill being doled out in the backyards of the Third Reich.

Similar disrespect for American soldiers. Walter Reed Hospital, etc.

The ROA not only surrendered to the Americans; it implored them to accept its capitulation and begged for one thing only: the promise that the Americans would not extradite them to the Soviets. Midlevel American officers who did not know anything about big politics sometimes naïvely gave such promises.

America turned a blind eye to the reality of Soviet prison camps.

The crowd was singing hymns from the requiem service; the priests lifted their crosses high above their heads; the young people formed a chain around the elderly, the women, and the children. Then British soldiers started beating them with rifle butts and clubs, grabbing them and throwing them onto the trucks, including the wounded, as if they were packages.

The British aided the Soviets in rounding up dissident populations.