" The whole system of oppression ... was based on keeping malcontents apart, preventing them from reading each other's eyes and discovering how many of them there were; instilling it into all of them, even into the most dissatisfied, that no one was dissatisfied except for a few doomed individuals, blindly vicious and spiritually bankrupt.

Well, politicals - real politicals for the first time -- had now become "gangsters." It was announced, not very confidently, that these gangsters would soon be discovered ... "

― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956 (Abridged)