while you occupied yourself to your heart’s content studying the safe secrets of the atomic nucleus, researching the influence of Heidegger on Sartre, or collecting Picasso reproductions; while you rode off in your railroad sleeping compartment to vacation resorts, or finished building your country house near Moscow-the Black Marias rolled incessantly through the streets and the gaybisty-the State Security men-knocked at doors and rang doorbells.

Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: an experiment in literary investigation, New York, 1974, p. 102