Is it true that Russians are writing denunciations on a large scale?
Sergei Dovlatov, The Zone: A Prison Camp Guard's Story: " We endlessly rail against Comrade Stalin, and, of course, with reason. All the same, I would like to ask—who wrote the four million denunciations at the time of Stalinist terror? (This number appeared in closed Party documents.) Dzerzhinsky? Yezhov? Abakumov and Yagoda? Nothing of the kind. They were written by simple Soviet people. Does this imply that Russians are a nation of informers? Not in the least.