And how we burned in the camps later, thinking:
What would things have been like if every Security operative,
when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain
whether he would return alive and had to say goodbye to his
family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example
in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city,
people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling in terror
at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the
staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose
and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half
a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else
was at hand. The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage
of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's
thirst; the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!"
- The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn