“This realm of darkness, of falsehood, or brute force, of justice denied and distrust of the good, this slimy swamp was formed by us, and no one else. We grew used to the idea that we must submit and lie in order to survive – and we brought up our children to do so. Each of us, if he honestly reviews the life he has led, without special pleading or concealment, will recall more than one occasion in which he pretended not to hear a cry for help, averted his indifferent eyes from an imploring gaze, burned letters and photographs which it was his duty to keep, forgot someone’s name or dropped certain widows, turned his back on prisoners under escort, and-but of course-always voted, rose to his feet and applauded obscenities … how, otherwise, could he survive? How, moreover, could the great Archipelago [GULAG] have endured in our midst for fifty years unnoticed?”
Every Russian bears some responsibility since those of “the present older and middle generations have spent our whole lives floundering and wallowing in the stinking swamp of a society based on force and fraud.” Almost everyone chose to live by the lie, to accommodate themselves in one way or another to the ideocratic regime.
