That Marxism is not a science is entirely clear to intelligent people in the Soviet Union. One would even feel awkward to refer to it as a science. Leaving aside the exact sciences, such as physics, mathematics, and the natural sciences, even the social sciences can predict an event—when, in what wa…
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The Gulag Archipelago
At no time have governments been moralists. They never imprisoned people and executed them for having done something. They imprisoned and executed them to keep them from doing something. They imprisoned all those POW's, of course, not for treason to the motherland, because it was absolutely clear ev…
Confronted by the pit into which we are about to toss those who have done us harm, we halt, stricken dumb: it is after all only because of the way things worked out that they were the executioners and we weren't.
History sometimes does know revenge, a sort of voluptuous and delayed justice, but chooses strange forms for it and unexpected executors of its will.
Human nature, if it changes at all, changes not much faster than the geological face of the earth.
Thanks to ideology the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing calculated on a scale in the millions.
Here is a riddle not for us contemporaries to figure out: Why is Germany allowed to punish its evildoers and Russia is not? What kind of disastrous path lies ahead of us if we do not have the chance to purge ourselves of that putrefaction rotting inside our body? What, then, can Russia teach the wor…
That is the precise line the Shakespearean evildoer could not cross. But the evildoer with ideology does cross it, and his eyes remain dry and clear.
The solemn pledge to abstain from telling the truth was called socialist realism.
Arrest is an instantaneous, shattering thrust, expulsion, somersault from one state into another.
Power is a poison well known for thousands of years. If only no one were ever to acquire material power over others! But to the human being who has faith in some force that holds dominion over all of us, and who is therefore conscious of his own limitations, power is not necessarily fatal. For those…
Oh, how hard it is to part with power! This one has to understand.
Every man always has handy a dozen glib little reasons why he is right not to sacrifice himself.
At what point, then, should one resist? When one's belt is taken away? When one is ordered to face into a corner? When one crosses the threshold of one's home? An arrest consists of a series of incidental irrelevancies, of a multitude of things that do not matter, and there seems no point in arguing…
Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: 'Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.' Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history…
We didn't love freedom enough.
Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.
Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words…By means of art were are sometimes sent—dimly, briefly—revelations unattainable by reason.
We always pay dearly for chasing after what is cheap.
Our envy of others devours us most of all.