From the mouths of the socialist revolutionaries described in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel, November 1916 (Chapter 22). And remember, as a freedom fighter, a principled and hardworking historian, and, of course, a longtime resident of the Soviet gulags, Solzhenitsyn knew well what he was talking about.“Boycott the reactionary professors! Let students, not professors, govern the universities!”
“Every important assassination was greeted with pious approval, gloating smiles, and gleeful whispers. Don’t call it murder! Where there’s a party, an ideological basis, terror is not murder, it is the supreme expression of revolutionary energy. Not an act of revenge, but a summons to action, an affirmation of life! Terrorists are people of the highest moral sensitivity.”
“But in the hospital left-wing doctors treat only revolutionaries and soldiers. Any simple soul who makes the sign of the cross is refused admission.”
“Freedom of speech! Yes — but only for orators of whom the majority approved. Those who were out of tune with the crowd were howled down, pummeled, bundled off the platform.”
“Two bombs were planted in the cafe of the Bristol and anarchist proclamations said it was ’so that we can see the vile bourgeois writhing in their death throes.’”
“Later came the ‘robberies movement’: savings banks, post offices, state liquor shops were plundered wholesale. There were daring raids every day...Instructions to terrorists recommended that bombs should be made of cast iron, so that there would be more splinters, and packed with nails…It was bloody work! Done in a hurry, to quench the bonfires of revolution with blood!”
