I think George Orwell would have appreciated this excerpt from the anthology I’m reading. It’s a collection of Russian writing from the Soviet era. Most of the writers were imprisoned, exiled, or killed by the Soviets:

“In 1937 Shalamov [Varlam Shalamov, short story writer] was informed on by someone who heard him express the opinion that Ivan Bunin [exiled Nobel Prize winner] was a classical Russian author. For this crime he [Shalamov] spent seventeen years in Kolyma [Siberia with hard labor]. Hitler acknowledged the Bolsheviks as his teachers in certain techniques of population control, but his preferred instrument was fire. Stalin used ice.”