The Gulag Archipelago, ch. 2

Chapter 2, pgs. 24 to 92, down. With a clever eye for analogy, A. Solzhenitsyn titled this chapter (or rather, Thomas P. Whitney translated his title) "The History of Our Sewage Disposal System". It describes the constitutions of the many waves of arrests that fed the Russian jails, and some of the motivations behind them.

( Excerpts - cut for length )

Somehow, this chapter did not have the impact the first chapter did on me. Perhaps it is because it is so extreme that it begins to sound like propaganda, whether or not it is true. Also it may be because some aspects of it, like the story of the applause, have almost become jokes about despotic regimes.