A powerful piece of writing I thought. The last two lines especially. 

"The old fella with the lively eyebrows - and at sixty-three he i no way bote himself like an old man - was Abatoky Ilyich Fastenko. He was a big asset to our Lubyanka cell - both as a keeper of the old Russian prison traditions and as a living history of Russian revolutions. Thanks to all that he remembered, he somehow managed to put in perspective everything that had taken place in the past and everything that was taking place in the present. Such people are valuable not only in a Cell. We badly need them in our society as a whole. "
-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago. VOL 1.