In the first chapter of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s memoir The Gulag Archipelago, the author described the terror and uncertainty that were the result of the government’s seemingly random but constant arrests. Solzhenitsyn explains that most often, citizens would just hear a knock on their door in the middle of the night, and it was the police coming to arrest them with no warning or explanation as to why they were being arrested. That system of random arrests worked well for the government because it created instability and uncertainty in citizens everyday lives, allowing the government to constantly manipulate the public’s terror to gain more control over the public. Solzhenitsyn said, “The kind of night arrest described is, in fact, a favorite, because it has important advantages. Everyone living in the apartment is thrown into a state of terror by the first knock at the door… The unhurried, step-by-step visits, first to one apartment, then to another, tomorrow to a third and a fourth, provide an opportunity for the Security operations personnel to be deployed with the maximum efficiency and to imprison many more citizens of a given town than the police force itself numbers,” (Solzhenitsyn, 5-6). Solzhenitsyn describes how the randomized visits and arrests instilled terror in whole apartment buildings at a time, allowing the government to take control through both the public’s fear and imprisoning as many people as possible, making examples out of them even if they didn’t do anything wrong. This tactic of creating subtle instability to allow a totalitarian regime is an idea Hannah Arendt discusses in her work The Origins of Totalitarianism, specifically referring to the Nazis and the Russian Communist parties use. It can also be seen in other works that discuss totalitarian regimes and ideologies, like Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Demons. In the conclusion of the book, after the murder of Shatov and Kirillov’s suicide, one of the revolutionary group’s members, Lyamshin, breaks down and confesses all the deeds the group did to the police. When asked why the revolutionaries did those things, Lyamshin said “for the systematic shaking of the foundations, for the systematic corrupting of society and all principles; in order to dishearten everyone and make a hash of everything, and society being thus loosened, ailing and limp,” (Dostoevsky, 670) and that shaken and corrupted society would allow the revolutionaries to more easily take over.