"And how we burned in the camps later ... "

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a Russian novelist, dramatist and historian. Through his writings he made the world aware of the Gulag, the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system ---particularly The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, his two best-known works. For these efforts Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970, and exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974. He returned to Russia in 1994.  He died in 2008.

Solzhenitsyn had himself served time in the labor camp system, because while he had served in the Red Army in WWII, he had written some derogatory comments about Stalin's conduct of the war in letters to a friend.

The Gulag Archipelago was a three-volume work on the Soviet prison camp system. It was based upon Solzhenitsyn's own experience as well as the testimony of 227 former prisoners and Solzhenitsyn's own research into the history of the penal system. The appearance of the book in the West put the word "gulag" into the Western political vocabulary and guaranteed swift retribution from the Soviet authorities.

"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 good-bye 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 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, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you'd be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur---what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked? 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!
If ... if ... We didn't love freedom enough. And even more---we had no awareness of the real situation. We spent ourselves in one unrestrained outburst in 1917 [the year of the Russian Revolution -- Rob], and then we hurried to submit. We submitted with pleasure! .... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward."
---------Gulag Archipelago, Volume 1, p. 13.

Do we love freedom enough?