In his 1970 Nobel Lecture in literature, the famous Soviet dissident and writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn declared that the violence that is at the root of communist totalitarianism – the Stalinist labour camps and brutal violence that he experienced and chronicled in works like The Gulag Archipelago – is inherent to that system. “It is invariably intertwined with the lie,” he said. “They are linked in the most intimate, most organic and profound fashion: violence cannot conceal itself behind anything except lies, and lies have nothing to maintain them save violence. Anyone who has once proclaimed violence as his method must inexorably choose the lie as his principle.”
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