“Only a prisoner in his first years of sentence believes, every time he is summoned from his cell and told to collect his belongings, that he is being called to freedom. To him every whisper of an amnesty sounds like the trumpets of archangels. But they call him out of his cell, read him some loathsome documents and shove him into another cell on the floor below, even darker than the previous one but with the same stale used-up air. The amnesty is always postponed-from the anniversary of victory to the anniversary of the Revolution to the Supreme Soviet session. Then it bursts like a bubble, or is applied to thieves, crooks and deserters instead of those who fought in the war and suffered.”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Cancer Ward”, 1968.
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