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.
people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?
Notice how firearms are conspicuously absent from this list. Why? Because by the times Solzhenitsyn is writing about the population has been completely disarmed and all the residual weapons floating around from WWI and Civil War have been totally mopped up by security apparatus. Even having a spent cartridge casing in your pocket was a felony with real (and long) prison sentence attached to it.
http://www.motherjones.com/media/2016/11/trump-japanese-internment-camps-muslim-registry/