Engaging.com

Look at one of many examples that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn gave in The Gulag Archipelago for how the Soviet Union would condemn someone to many years in the Gulag as an “enemy of the people” for the most innocuous of “crimes”:

A tailor laying aside his needle stuck it into a newspaper on the wall so it wouldn’t get lost and happened to stick it in the eye of a portrait of [Lazar M.] Kaganovich [close associate of Stalin and head of the Soviet railroad system]. A customer observed this: Article 58, ten years (terrorism).

The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 2, p 293

Look at what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago how Gulag prisoners (“zeks”) modified everyday words to demonstrate to one another that nothing in the Archipelago was genuine to them:

How much self-ridicule there is in this world! “We are . . . not the real thing!” The zek language dearly loves and makes stubborn use of all these disparaging diminutive Russian suffixes: not “mat”–mother–but mamika; not “bolnitsa”–hospital–but bolnichka; not “svidaniye”–a rendezvous–but svidanka; not “pomilovaniye”–pardon–but pomilovka; not “volny”–a free person–but volnyashka; not “zhenitsa”–to marry a woman–but podzhenitsa–to “submarry,” this being the same derisiveness even though not in the suffix. And even chetvertnaya (a twenty-five-year [prison] term) is demoted to chetvertaka–from twenty-five rubles to twenty-five kopecks!

By this insistent bias of the language, the zeks demonstrate that nothing in the Archipelago is genuine, everything is a forgery, everything is of the lowest grade. And that they themselves do not set any value on the things ordinary people value. They show awareness of the fake nature of the medical treatment they get, the fake character of the petitions for pardon which they write out of compulsion and without faith.

The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 2, p 242

Look what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago about how the Soviets extracted much extra labor from prisoners for little extra reward:

Percentages above 100 conferred the right to supplementary spoonfuls of kasha (those previously taken away). What a merciless knowledge of human nature! Neither those pieces of bread nor those cereal patties were comparable with the expenditure of strength that went into earning them. But as one of his eternal, disastrous traits the human being is incapable of grasping the ratio of an object to its price. For a cheap glass of vodka a soldier is roused to attack in a war not his own and laws down his life; in the same way the zek, for those pauper’s handouts, slips off a log, gets dunked in the icy freshet of a northern river, or kneads clay for mud huts barefoot in icy water, and because of this those feet are never going to reach the land of freedom.

The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 2, p 156

Look at what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago about the word “people”:

“Have you fed the people?” “Have you sent the people out to work?” “How many people do you have there?” “Send me one person!” People, people, whom do they mean? That’s the way they talked about serfs. And that is how they speak about prisoners. One cannot speak like that about officers or leaders, however–“How many people do you have?” No one would understand you.

The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 2, p 150

On a happier note, here’s a South Park excerpt with a song to “people”: