Tom

“Archpriest A. N. Zaozersky had surrendered all the valuables in his own church, but he defended in principle the Patriarch’s appeal regarding forced requisition as sacrilege, and he became the central personage in the trial—and would shortly be shot. (All of which went to prove that what was important was not to feed the starving but to make use of a convenient opportunity to break the back of the church.)”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation

“Every crime is the result of a given social system, and in these terms criminal convictions under the laws of a capitalist society and in Tsarist times do not, in our eyes, constitute a fact branding a person with an indelible mark once and for all. . . . We know of many examples of persons in our ranks branded by such facts in the past, but we have never drawn the conclusion that it was necessary to remove such a person from our milieu. A person who knows our principles cannot fear that the existence of previous criminal convictions in his record will jeopardize his being included in the ranks of the revolutionaries.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation

“No matter what the individual qualities [of the defendant], only one method of evaluating him is to be applied: evaluation from the point of view of class expediency”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation

“They were vehement in their rear-line wrath (the most intense patriotism always flourishes in the rear), and they added a good deal more in mother oaths.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation