While serving in the Soviet army in 1973, a young soldier was imprisoned ‘for acts of disobedience’. Like Solzhenitsyn and Dostoevsky, in his confinement he reflected on the true nature of freedom, and discovered that it was not bound by the walls of a prison cell

While serving in the Soviet army in 1973, a young soldier was imprisoned ‘for acts of disobedience’. Like Solzhenitsyn and Dostoevsky, in his confinement he reflected on the true nature of freedom, and discovered that it was not bound by the walls of a prison cell

The main thing in prison is the smell … The smell of a Soviet prison ­resembles the smell of damp ­basements, rotten potatoes and human waste. That was in fact the purpose of prison: to turn a man into waste.

Since a state is not a living thing, but only a system, a structure, human freedom will hinder it. It is difficult to live with a free person – no one knows what he will pull off. But if, instead of a human being, there is something obedient and manageable, responding correctly to any order, there you have “a worthy member of society”. That is what the ­manageable ones were called in the 1970s. And the method for making a human being manageable was simple: instil fear in him.

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