“ 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.”
There is nothing “hesitant” about it - we see exactly what is going on, and we will never accept this tyranny. If you insist on testing your odds with this, you will only cause unimaginable suffering, and then lose.
The point is that this only works when the truth is on your side. “They” are understood to be the dominant/incumbent forces, but the truth eventually wins.
Hopefully you never find out how hard people fight when they know that they are fighting pure evil.