There must have been many such cases, because the abuse of power was par- ticularly attractive in

this area. In 1944, another gaybist — State Security officer — forced the daughter of an army general

to marry him by threatening to arrest her father. The girl had a fiance, but to save her father she

married the gaybist. She kept a diary during her brief marriage, gave it to her true love, and then

committed suicide.]

Here’s the sort of people they were. A letter from her fifteen-year old daughter came to Yelizaveta Tsetkova in the Kazan Prison for long-term prisoners: “Mama! Tell me, write to me – are you guilty or not? I hope you weren’t guilty, because then I won’t join the Komsomol, and I won’t forgive them because of you.

nBut if you are guilty – I won’t write you any more and will hate you.” And the mother was stricken by remorse in her damp gravelike cell with its dim little lamp: How could her daughter live without the Komsomol? How could she be permitted to hate Soviet power? Better that she should hate me. And she wrote: “I am guilty…. Enter the Komsomol!”

Solzhenitsyn, A.I. (1975). The Gulag Archipelago (Vol. 2). New York: Harper and Row,

How could it be anything but hard! It was more than the human heart could bear: to fall beneath the beloved axe – then to have to justify its wisdom. But that is the price a man pays for entrusting his God-given soul to human dogma.

nEven today any orthodox Communist will affirm that Tsetkova acted correctly. Even today they cannot be convinced that this is precisely the “perversion of small forces”, that the mother perverted her daughter and harmed her soul.

Here’s the sort of people they were: Y.T. gave sincere testimony against her husband – anything to aid the Party!

Oh, how one could pity them if at least now they had come to comprehend their former wretchedness! This whole chapter could have been written quite differently if today at least they had forsaken their earlier views!

nBut it happened the way Mariya Danielyan had dreamed it would: “If I leave here someday, I am going to live as if nothing had taken place.”

Loyalty? And in our view it is just plain pigheadedness. These devotees to the theory of development construed loyalty to that development to mean renunciation of any personal development whatsoever!

nAs Nikolai Adamovich Vilenchuk said, after serving seventeen years: “We believed in the Party – and we were not mistaken!” Is this loyalty or pigheadedness?

nNo, it was not for show and not out of hypocrisy that they argued in the cells in defense of all the government’s actions. They needed ideological arguments in order to hold on to a sense of their own rightness – otherwise, insanity was not far off.”

Solzhenitsyn, A.I. (1975). The Gulag Archipelago (Vol. 2). New York: Harper and Row