I'm going to post a small portion of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago over the next few days; specifically, all fourteen sections of Article 58, the Criminal Code of 1926 in communist Russia, as written in the book starting with the preface to the listed sections. I think its more digestible this way, each short excerpt is very impactful especially considering popular mainstream rhetoric today. I will add some emphasis with bold here and there, or some small context in parentheses. "Paradoxically enough, every act of the all-penetrating, eternally wakeful Organs(gov't programs), over a span of many years, was based solely on ONE article of the 140 articles of the nongeneral division of the Criminal Code of 1926.* One can find more epithets in praise of this article than Turgenev once assembled to praise the Russian language, or Nekrasov to praise Mother Russia: great, powerful, abundant, highly ramified, multiform, wide-sweeping 58, which summed up the world not so much through the exact terms of it sections as in their extended dialectical interpretation. Who among us has not experienced its all-encompassing embrace? In all truth, there is no step, thought, action, or lack of action under the heavens which could not be punished by the heavy hand of Article 58. The article itself could not be worded in such broad terms, but it proved possible to interpret it this broadly. Article 58 was not in that division of the Code dealing with political crimes; and nowhere was it categorized as "political." No. It was included, with crimes against public order and organized gangsterism, in a division of "crimes against the state." Thus the Criminal Code starts off by refusing to recognize anyone under its jurisdiction as a political offender. All are simply criminals."