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A tale about arrest quotas from Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago:
... They merely had overall assignments, quotas for specific numbers of arrests. These quotas might be filled on an orderly basis or wholly arbitrarily. In 1937, a woman came to the reception room of the Novocherkaask NKVD to ask what she should do about the unfed unweaned infant of a neighbor who had been arrested. They said: "Sit down, we'll find out." She sat there for two hours --- whereupon they took her and tossed her into a cell. They had a total plan which had to be fulfilled in a hurry, and there was no one available to send out into the city --- and here was this woman already in their hands! ...
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