"the father would renounce his religion and remain at home to raise the children while the mother went to the Solovetsky Islands."

"However, the root destruction of religion in the country, which throughout the twenties and thirties was one of the most important goals of the GPU-NKVD, could be realized only by mass arrests of [not just high-ranking clergy, but] Orthodox believers. Monks and nuns, whose black habits had been a distinctive feature of Old Russian life, were intensively rounded up on every hand, placed under arrest, and sent into exile. They arrested and sentenced active laymen. The circles kept getting bigger, as they raked in ordinary believers as well, old people, and particularly women, who were the most stubborn believers of all and who, for many long years to come, would be called 'nuns' in transit prisons and in camps.
     "True, they were supposedly being arrested and tried not for their actual faith but for openly declaring their convictions and for bringing up their children in the same spirit. As Tanya Khodkevich wrote:

You can pray freely
But just so God alone can hear.

(She received a ten-year sentence for these verses.) A person convinced that he possessed spiritual truth was required to conceal it from his own children! In the twenties the religious education of children was classified as a political crime under Article 58-10 of the Code—in other words, counterrevolutionary propaganda! True, one was still permitted to renounce one's religion at one's trial: it didn't often happen but it nonetheless did happen that the father would renounce his religion and remain at home to raise the children while the mother went to the Solovetsky Islands. (Throughout all those years women manifested great firmness in their faith.) All persons convicted of religious activity received tenners, the longest term then given."

     Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The gulag archipelago 1918-1956:  an experiment in literary investigation I-II, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York:  Harper & Row, 1973), 37-38.

"why did I keep silent?"

     "Yes, resistance should have begun right there, at the moment of the arrest itself.
     "But it did not begin.

     "And so they are leading you. During a daylight arrest there is always that brief and unique moment when they are leading you, either inconspicuously, on the basis of a cowardly deal you have made, or else quite openly, their pistols unholstered, through a crowd of hundreds of just such doomed innocents as yourself. You aren’t gagged. You really can and you really ought to cry out—to cry out that you are being arrested! That villains in disguise are trapping people! That arrests are being made on the strength of false denunciations!  That millions are being subjected to silent reprisals! . . .
     "Instead, not one sound comes from your parched lips, and that passing crowd naively believes that you and your executioners are friends out for a stroll.
     "I myself often had the chance to cry out. . . .
     ". . . So why did I keep silent? Why, in my last minute out in the open, did I not attempt to enlighten the hoodwinked crowd?
     ". . .
     "Every man has handy a dozen glib little reasons why he is right not to sacrifice himself. Some still have hopes of a favorable outcome to their case and are afraid to ruin their chances by an outcry. . . . Others have not yet attained the mature concepts on which a shout of protest to the crowd must be based. Indeed, only a revolutionary has slogans on his lips that are crying to be uttered aloud; and where would the uninvolved, peaceable average man come by such slogans?  He simply does not know what to shout.  And then, last of all, there is the person whose heart is too full of emotion, whose eyes have seen too much, for that whole ocean to pour forth in a few disconnected cries.
     "As for me,. I kept silent for one further reason: because those Muscovites thronging the steps of the escalators were too few for me, too few! Here my cry would be heard by 200 or twice 200, but what about the 200 million? Vaguely, unclearly, I had a vision that someday I would cry out to the 200 million.
     "But for the time being I did not open my mouth, and the escalator dragged me implacably down into the nether world.
     "And when I got to Okhotny Road, I continued to keep silent.
     "Nor did I utter a cry at the Metropole Hotel.
     "Nor wave my arms on the Golgatha of Lubyanka Square."

     Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The gulag archipelago 1918-1956:  an experiment in literary investigation I-II, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York:  Harper & Row, 1973), 15-18.

Anti-classism

"In his instructions on the use of Red Terror, the Chekist M. I. Latsis wrote:  'In the interrogation do not seek evidence and proof that the person accused acted in word or deed against Soviet power.  The first question should be:  What is his class, what is his origin, what is his education and upbringing? . . . These are the questions which must determine the fate of the accused.'"

       Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The gulag archipelago 1918-1956:  an experiment in literary investigation I-II, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York:  Harper & Row, 1973), 96-97.  Martin Ivanovich Latsis, born in 1888, was himself executed as a counter-revolutionary in 1938.