They did it in such a way so they can hide behind incompetence. If they were competent, they were treasonous. Very clever but deserving of Henry Bowman justice.

Agreed. Parts were a bit tricky to get through (at least for me) because of it being translated from Russian, but well worth the read. The "Gulag Archipelago II" was a good read as well. These books give a very good timeline of experience of how things can go bad.

A quote from Solzhenitsyn on Socialism: “In different places over the years I have had to prove that socialism, which to many western thinkers is a sort of kingdom of justice, was in fact full of coercion, of bureaucratic greed and corruption and avarice, and consistent within itself that socialism cannot be implemented without the aid of coercion. Communist propaganda would sometimes include statements such as ‘we include almost all the commandments of the Gospel in our ideology’. The difference is that the Gospel asks all this to be achieved through love, through self-limitation, but socialism only uses coercion”