whispering against authority: portmanteau of sussuration and insurrection. well illustrated by a quote from Solzhenitsyn's _
Gulag Archipelago_:
"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply
sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had
nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at
hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of
Stalin's
thirst, the cursed
machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't
love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward."
