Silent Peasants

More from the Gulag:

But peasants are a silent people, without a literary voice, nor do they write complaints or memoirs. No interrogators sweated out the night with them, nor did they bother to draw up formal indictments — it was enough to have a decree from the village soviet. This wave poured forth, sank down into the permafrost, and even our most active minds recall hardly a thing about it. It is as if it had not even scarred the Russian conscience. And yet Stalin (and you and I as well) committed no crime more heinous than this.

We've only just started Chapter 2. The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Let the silent misery sink in. Too cold to bury the dead, the utter emasculation must surely lie thick upon their memory. Instead, the survivors cover up the horrors in a pall of amnesia.