"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... Or, if during periods of mass arrests...people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with 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... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, not withstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to halt!"

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipeligo