You only have power over people so long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything, he’s no longer in your power - he’s free again.

The line expresses a paradox of coercion: domination depends on the victim retaining something to lose—property, status, family safety, bodily security, or hope. As long as those stakes remain, fear can be leveraged to extract compliance. But once a person has been stripped of everything, the coercer’s main tool—threat—loses its force; the victim may become psychologically ungovernable, capable of defiance because there is no longer any “price” to pay. In Solzhenitsyn’s moral universe, this also gestures toward an inner freedom that can survive even totalitarian violence: when external goods are gone, conscience and truth-telling can reassert themselves.