A Criminal Revolted By Murder

"What takes place beyond the Oder and the Rhine gets us all worked up. What goes on in the environs of Moscow and behind the green fences of Sochi, or the fact that the murderers of our husbands and fathers ride through our streets and we make way for them as they pass, doesn't get us worked up at all, doesn't touch us. It would be "digging up the past." ....

But in a quarter-century we have not track down anyone. We have not brought anyone to trial.....

Here is a riddle not for us contemporaries to figure out: Why is Germany allowed to punish its evildoers and Russia is not?

In the German trials an astonishing phenomenon takes place from time to time. The defendant clasps his head in his hands, refuses to make any defense, and from then on asks no concessions from the court. He says that the presentation of his crimes, revived and once again confronting him, has filled him with revulsion and he no longer wants to live. That is the ultimate height a trial can attain: when evil is so utterly condemned that even the criminal is revolted by it.....

Someday our descendants will describe our several generations as generations of dribbling do-nothings. First we submissively allowed them to massacre us by the millions, and then we devoted concern we attended the murderers in their prosperous old age."

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago. VOL 1