Here's a quote from a man with experiance-

"And how we burned in the camps later thinking: What would things have been like if every operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain wether he would return alive and had to say goodbye to his family? Or if during periods of mass arrests people had not simply sat in thier lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall a half dozen people with axes, hammers pokers or whatever was at hand..."
Alexander Solzhenitsyn