Intellectual elite of Vienna

　　"It was Pauli’s tutor who introduced him to Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Few physicists understood the elegant but radical theory or grasped its profound implications at the time. Pauli, however, had no trouble diving in. Barely two months out of high school, he wrote a paper of his own on the subject. Determined to pursue a career in physics, he moved to Munich in 1918 to study under Arnold Sommerfeld, a pioneer in the emerging field of quantum mechanics. Pauli’s paper, which had even come to Einstein’s attention, impressed Sommerfeld, who wrote to a colleague about it, noting, “I have around me a really astonishing specimen of the intellectual elite of Vienna in the young Pauli … a first-year student!”"

The Pope

"Fermi’s colleagues referred to him as “the Pope” because he was a natural leader and seemed infallible."

These historicists are afraid of change

"Such considerations suggest the possibility that these historicists are afraid of change, and that they cannot accept the idea of change without serious inward struggle. It often seems as if they were trying to comfort themselves for the loss of a stable world by clinging to the view that change is ruled by an unchanging law. (In Parmenides and in Plato, we shall even find the theory that the changing world in which we live is an illusion and that there exists a more real world which does not change.)"

How the need for workers were met

"But this sort of chaotic mistreatment was not reserved only for prisoners. At crucial moments of the civil war , the emergency needs of the Red Army and the Soviet state overrode every thing else, from re-education to revenge to considerations of justice. In October 1918, the commander of the northern front sent a request to the Petrograd military commission for 800 workers, urgently needed for road construction and trench digging. As a result , “a number of citizens from the former merchant classes were invited to appear at Soviet headquarters, allegedly for the purpose of registration for possible labor duty at some future date. When these citizens appeared for registration , they were placed under arrest and sent to the Semenovsky barracks to await their dispatch to the front . ” When even this did not produce enough workers, the local Soviet—the local ruling council —simply surrounded a part of Nevsky Prospekt , Petrograd’s main shopping street , arrested every one without a Party card or a certificate proving they worked for a government institution , and marched them off to a nearby barracks. Later , the women were released, but the men were packed off to the north : “not one of the thus strangely mobilized men was allowed to settle his family affairs, to say goodbye to his relatives, or to obtain suitable clothing and footwear. ”"

Without mercy , without sparing

“Without mercy , without sparing, we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds. Let them be thousands, let them drown themselves in their own blood. For the blood of Lenin . . . let there be floods of blood of the bourgeoisie—more blood, as much as possible . . . ”
~ Krasnaya  Gazeta

People were to be sentenced not for what they had done

"From the very earliest days of the new Soviet state, in other words, people were to be sentenced not for what they had done, but for who they were."

The story of your life was your own

"In fact , reading the accounts of those who survived both , one is struck more by the differences between the victims’ experiences than by the differences between the two camp systems. Each tale has its own unique qualities, each camp held different sorts of horrors for people of different characters. In Germany you could die of cruelty , in Russia you could die of despair . In Auschwitz you could die in a gas chamber , in Kolyma you could freeze to death in the snow . You could die in a German forest or a Siberian waste-land, you could die in a mining accident or you could die in a cattle train . But in the end, the story of your life was your own."

Ins and outs of Gulag

"Although arrests were constant , so too were releases. Prisoners were freed because they finished their sentences, because they were let into the Red Army , because they were invalids or women with small children , because they had been promoted from captive to guard. As a result , the total number of prisoners in the camps generally hovered around two million , but the total number of Soviet citizens who had some experience of the camps, as political or criminal prisoners, is far higher . From 1929, when the Gulag began its major expansion , until 1953, when Stalin died, the best estimates indicate that some eighteen million people passed through this massive system. About another six million were sent into exile, deported to the Kazakh deserts or the Siberian forests. Legally obliged to remain in their exile villages, they too were forced laborers, even though they did not live behind barbed wire."

The Gulag civilization

"Contrary to popular assumption , the Gulag did not cease growing in the 1930s, but rather continued to expand throughout the Second World War and the 1940s, reaching its apex in the early 1950s. By that time the camps had come to play a central role in the Soviet economy . They produced a third of the country’s gold, much of its coal and timber , and a great deal of almost every thing else. In the course of the Soviet Union’s existence, at least 476 distinct camp complexes came into being, consisting of thousands of individual camps, each of which contained anywhere from a few hundred to many thousands of people.The prisoners worked in almost every industry imaginable—logging, mining, construction , factory work, farming, the designing of airplanes and artillery —and lived, in effect , in a country within a country , almost a separate civilization .The Gulag had its own laws, its own customs, its own morality , even its own slang. It spawned its own literature, its own villains, its own heroes, and it left its mark upon all who passed through it , whether as prisoners or guards. Years after being released, the Gulag’s inhabitants were often able to recognize former inmates on the street simply from “the look in their eyes. ”"