These were the bezprizornye, the uncared-for, the unwanted by-product of revolution and civil war who could be seen all over Russia. In 1923, Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya, estimated their number at around eight million. Almost a decade later, Malcolm Muggeridge, working in the Soviet Union as the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent, witnessed these children “going about in packs, barely articulate or recognizably human, with pinched animal faces, tangled hair and empty eyes. I saw them in Moscow and Leningrad, clustered under bridges, lurking in railway stations, suddenly emerging like a pack of wild monkeys, then scattering and disappearing.”2 Some as young as three years old, the bezprizornye survived by thieving and scrounging and many, both boys and girls, were prostitutes. Realizing that these hordes of street children were a social embarrassment, especially when observed by astute and horrified Western news correspondents, the state rounded up as many as could be caught and placed them in so-called “children’s republics” from which they later emerged as the brutalized, amoral wretches responsible for keeping order in the camps of the Gulag Archipelago. As Solzhenitsyn’s friend Dimitri Panin wrote:
A huge country, basically Christian, had been made over into a nursery for rearing a new breed of men under conditions of widescale terror and atheism. A new society, governed by primitives, began taking shape. Without asking the consent of the peasants or anyone else, the party heads, to achieve their own ends, unleashed their thugs over our vast land and fettered it in slavery. The young Communist state proceeded to mutilate and crush whatever opposed it, secular or sacred, to bury human lives under atrocities.3
All of this was completely beyond the experience of the young Solzhenitsyn. When he arrived at Rostov, a wide-eyed six-year-old, early in 1925, life in the city seemed, on the surface at least, to have improved immeasurably from the nightmare reality that the ten-year-old Krysko had faced five years earlier in the same place. There were no horrific scenes of unburied corpses; even the street children, it seems, had been “tidied away”. Instead, Solzhenitsyn remained blissfully ignorant of the events unfolding around him until, almost twenty years later, they swallowed him up with the millions of others who had gone before him. In the meantime, the child would become a precocious schoolboy at the top of his class.
Solzhenitsyn started school in 1926 at the former Pokrovsky College, a highly respected establishment in the center of the city renamed after the Soviet minister Zinoviev following the civil war. Colloquially, however, the local people called it the “Malevich Gymnasium” after its popular and talented headmaster, Vladimir Malevich. It was generally considered the best school in Rostov.
Malevich had been headmaster of the school since before the Revolution and, as such, was considered politically unreliable. Although he was still in charge when Solzhenitsyn arrived, he was forced out in 1930, by which time most of the other pre-revolutionary teachers had also been removed. Malevich was eventually arrested in 1937 or 1938 and sent to the labor camps. It is thought that Solzhenitsyn may have sought him out and interviewed him when he was collecting material for The Gulag Archipelago.
The future purge of Solzhenitsyn’s teachers was no more than a malevolent threat on the horizon when he started school. His first teacher, Elena Belgorodtseva, was a devout woman who was known to have icons hanging in her home. She would have had no objection to the cross around her new pupil’s neck, which he had worn since infancy. Nevertheless, state education was becoming increasingly atheist in nature, and the Christianity of the young boy’s home life began to contrast ever more starkly with the fundamental tenets of what he was being taught at school.
At home, the influence of his mother’s religious faith was reinforced during the school holidays by visits to his Uncle Roman and Aunt Irina. Most particularly, the devotion of his aunt exerted a lasting influence. “Solzhenitsyn”, writes his biographer, Michael Scammell, “appears to have come deeply under the spell of his intrepid and romantic aunt.”4 In many ways, she was a true mystic, deriving sense and sustenance from the mysteries of the Gospels and the richness of the Orthodox liturgy. The lavishness of Orthodox ritual fired her imagination, nourished by the belief that manifestations of beauty were themselves manifestations of truth, that beauty and truth were inseparable. In this devotion, she had much in common with her pious mother-in-law, Evdokia, Solzhenitsyn’s grandmother with whom he also stayed during holidays. Both women had icons hanging in virtually every room, and both were strict in their observance of daily prayer and the many fasts and acts of worship Orthodox practice demanded.
Irina was an avid communicant at the local church, and Solzhenitsyn, when staying with her, usually accompanied her to the services. Her enduring influence on Solzhenitsyn was emphasized by Michael Scammell:
She taught him the true beauty and meaning of the rituals of the Russian Orthodox Church, emphasizing its ancient traditions and continuity. She showed him its importance to Russian history, demonstrating how the history of the church was inextricably intertwined with the history of the nation; and she instilled into the boy a patriotic love of the past and a firm faith in the greatness and sacred destiny of the Russian people. Irina thus supplied him with a sense of tradition, of family, and of roots that was otherwise severely attenuated.5
Irina was also an avid aficionado of the arts, and she instilled in her nephew an early and lasting love for literature. She had an extensive library and encouraged Solzhenitsyn to use it to satisfy his increasingly voracious appetite for reading. It seems that he needed little encouragement. During stays with his aunt, he introduced himself to Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, and most of the Russian classics. He first read War and Peace as a ten-year-old and then reread it several times in the course of ensuing summers. It was during this formative period that he first envisaged the figure of Tolstoy as the archetypal Russian writer, a secular icon to be revered and an example to be imitated. Irina also presented him with a copy of Vladimir Dahl’s celebrated collection of Russian proverbs, on which he would draw heavily in his own work in later years.
Aunt Irina’s library was not restricted to Russian literature. Shakespeare, Schiller, and particularly Dickens also made an impression. Another favorite was Jack London, who was enormously popular in Russia both before and after the Revolution. Solzhenitsyn’s admiration for London found expression many years later when, during his first visit to the United States, he sought out his childhood hero’s home in California and made a brief pilgrimage.
Other than religion, the subject which highlighted the stark contrast between Solzhenitsyn’s youthful home life and that of the world at large was politics. “Everyone, of course, was anti-Bolshevik in the circle in which I grew up”, he recalled many years later. Both his mother and his aunt frequently dwelt on the horrors of the civil war and the suffering it had caused the family. No effort was made to hide from him any of the outrages of the immediate past, and he was often present when members of the family made bitter and candid criticisms of the Soviet regime. As a boy, he learned all about family friends who had been arrested or killed; he knew of his Uncle Roman’s temporary detention under sentence of death and of the confiscation of his grandfather’s estate. Yet at school, the Bolsheviks were glorified, and he remembered how he and his friends would “listen with such wide eyes to the exploits of the Reds, wave flags, beat drums, blow trumpets”.6
This struggle with the conflicting claims of home and state was to have a profound impact on his adolescent years, demanding a degree of Orwellian doublethink that resulted in a sort of psychological schism, almost a split personality:
The fact that they used to say everything at home and never shielded me from anything decided my destiny. Generally speaking . . . if you want to know the pivotal point of my life, you have to understand that I received such a charge of social tension in childhood that it pushed everything else to one side and diminished it. . . . [I]nside me I bore this social tension—on the one hand they used to tell me everything at home, and on the other the
y used to work on our minds at school. Those were militant times, not like today. . . . And so this collision between two worlds. . . somehow defined the path I was to follow for the rest of my life.7
The problem was resolved, at least temporarily, by the victory of the state over the family. Solzhenitsyn bowed under the combined force of peer-group pressure and Soviet propaganda, turning his back on the “reactionary” teaching of his family and embracing Marxist dogma. It was a triumph for the architects of the Soviet education system, which, as part of its indoctrination strategy, had virtually abolished the teaching of history except in a highly selective and slanted way and had replaced it with propaganda and ideological training. Faced with such unscrupulous ingenuity, the youth of Russia quickly succumbed to the mythology surrounding the Revolution. The heroes of the Bolshevik Revolution, like a band of modern-day Robin Hoods, had overthrown the cruel oppressors of the Russian people. Their spirit was marching onward into a just and glorious future, handing over the ill-gotten gains of the rich to the world’s poor. It was all so simple, so good, so unstoppable: the triumph of communist fairness over capitalist greed. So it was that Solzhenitsyn and his schoolfriends learned to “wave flags, beat drums, blow trumpets”, taking their place in the ranks of those destined to “complete the Revolution”.
Solzhenitsyn took the first decisive step away from the beliefs of his family and toward the teaching of the state in 1930 when, at the age of eleven, he joined the Young Pioneers. This was the junior wing of the Communist Party’s youth movement, the Komsomol, founded in 1918. Although no older than Solzhenitsyn himself, the Young Pioneers were virtually omnipresent in the life of Russia’s children by the beginning of the thirties. In fact, it was easier to become a member than not. Everyone joined, to be with friends, to go camping, to learn to tie knots, to sing rousing revolutionary songs, to parade in the Pioneers’ red tie and red badge with its five logs representing the five continents ablaze in the flames of world revolution. From the Young Pioneers, it was a natural, and expected, progression to the Komsomol, and then to the final achievement of full Party membership when one was old enough. In this way, almost imperceptibly, the Communist Party was tightening its grip on the nation’s life; and in this way, it was tightening its grip ever more on the young life of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Initially, Solzhenitsyn had been a reluctant recruit. At the age of ten, the cross he had worn since infancy had been ripped from his neck by jeering Pioneers, and the resentment this must have caused, coupled with the remnants of ambivalence toward Bolshevism inherited from his family, led him to refrain from joining even after most of his friends had done so. For over a year, he was ridiculed and pressurized at school meetings, and repeatedly urged by his friends to join. Eventually, the need to conform was greater than any remaining reservations, and Solzhenitsyn succumbed to convention.
In the winter of 1930, a matter of months after Solzhenitsyn had joined the junior wing of the Communist Party, the visit of his grandfather was to serve as a reminder that the boy’s conformity at school could not resolve the continuing conflict between his family and the state. Upon arrival, Grandfather Zakhar sat down dejectedly in the corner and, leafing through the pages of the Bible he was carrying, began bewailing the ill fortune that had fallen on the family since the accursed Revolution. Not only had the old man endured the confiscation of his estate, but he faced recurrent harassment and repeated questioning by the Soviet authorities. Like many of his generation, he still clung to the belief, the forlorn hope, that the communists would soon be overthrown and that life would return to normal. When this happened, he was concerned that his estate should be properly cared for so that he could hand it on to the young Solzhenitsyn, his only grandchild. In a naively inspired effort to comfort his grandfather, Solzhenitsyn had assured him that there was no need to worry: “Don’t worry about it, grandad. I don’t want your estate anyway. I would have refused it on principle.”8 One can only imagine the cold comfort, the pain, that the old man must have felt as the eleven-year-old displayed his communist sympathies and his belief in the evils of property.
The cramped conditions in which Solzhenitsyn and his mother lived meant that any visitors to their tiny shack were forced to sleep on the floor. Early next morning, the seventy-two-year-old woke from an uncomfortable and restless night and crept out to go to church while mother and child still slept. Soon after his departure, they were rudely awakened by the sound of boots kicking against their door. Two Soviet secret policemen burst into the room and demanded to see Zakhar, who was wanted for questioning in connection with the illegal hoarding of gold. These agents had followed the old man from his home in Georgievsk, where he had already been detained twice and questioned on the same subject. Surprised to find that he was not there, they turned on Solzhenitsyn’s mother, abusing her as a “class enemy” and demanding that she hand over any money, gold, or other valuables. Taissia informed them that she had none, whereupon she was threatened with imprisonment. The agents ordered her to sign a statement swearing that she had no gold in the house, warning her that she would be arrested immediately if their search proved that she had lied. Terrified, she asked whether the statement included wedding rings. The agents nodded, and sheepishly she handed over both her own wedding ring and that of her dead husband.
At that moment, Zakhar returned from church to be greeted by a torrent of abuse from the agents who demanded that he hand over his gold. Ignoring them, he fell to his knees before the icon in the corner and began to pray. The agents hauled him to his feet and conducted a thorough body search, but found nothing. Cursing, they stormed out, threatening to catch him on a future occasion.
Zakhar returned home, and, two months later, in February 1931, his wife, Evdokia, died. Unable to attend the funeral in Georgievsk, Taissia arranged a memorial Mass for her mother in Rostov Cathedral. This involved great courage and carried with it considerable personal risk. Churchgoers were now spied on and if reported to the authorities could lose their jobs. For this reason, Taissia had ceased attending church on a regular basis, but she felt duty-bound to go to the Mass and duly attended with her son. Although his mother was fortunate enough to escape retribution, Solzhenitsyn was reported to the headmaster by a fellow pupil and was severely reprimanded for conduct unbecoming of a Young Pioneer.
Grief-stricken after the death of his wife, Zakhar had wandered back to the district where his confiscated estate was, in the vicinity of Armavir, pursued incessantly by the secret police, who remained convinced that he had a secret hoard of gold. Driven half-mad by grief and by the persistent harassment, he is said to have hung a wooden cross round his neck and gone to the secret police headquarters in Armavir. “You have stolen all my money and possessions,” he is purported to have said, “so now you can take me into your jail and keep me.” Whether he was indeed imprisoned or whether he collapsed and died elsewhere would remain a mystery. It was some time before news of his death, a year after that of his wife, filtered through to Taissia, who dutifully arranged another memorial Mass at Rostov Cathedral.
In March 1932, at around the time that his heartbroken and impoverished grandfather was dying in mysterious circumstances, the thirteen-year-old Solzhenitsyn witnessed his first arrest. With the slushy remains of the winter’s snow still on the ground, he had gone round to the home of the Fedorovskys, who were close family friends. As he arrived, he stopped, startled, in his tracks at the sight of Vladimir Fedorovsky, the nearest person in his life to a father, being escorted by two strangers to a waiting car. He watched as Federovsky got into the car and was driven away. Entering the flat, Solzhenitsyn was greeted by a scene of utter devastation. Drawers and cupboards had been emptied on to the floor, rugs and carpets torn up and tossed aside, and books and ornaments were scattered everywhere. This was the aftermath of a search of the flat by the secret police that had lasted twenty-four hours.
It transpired that Fedorovsky’s “crime” was to have appeared in the same photograph as Professor L.
K. Ramzin, an engineer imprisoned two years earlier for allegedly plotting against the government. The photograph, taken during an engineers’ conference both men had attended, was the only “evidence” discovered during the day-long search and was insufficient to put Fedorovsky on trial as an accomplice in Ramzin’s plot. He was released after a year’s detention and interrogation, but was completely broken in health and spirits and never returned to his former employment. He lived for another ten years, more or less aimlessly, and died in 1943.
If this had been Solzhenitsyn’s first experience of an actual arrest, he received regular daily reminders of the presence of the Soviet prison system. Every day on his way home from school, he passed the enormous building in the center of Rostov that had been taken over by the Soviet authorities to be used as a prison. Each day he passed the back entrance to the prison where a permanent line of desolate women waited to make inquiries or to hand in food parcels. There were also the columns of prisoners marched through the streets under armed guard, accompanied by the chilling shouts of the escort commander: “One step out of line, and I’ll give the order to shoot or sabre you down!” The young Solzhenitsyn would occasionally see these columns and be reminded of the existence of an incomprehensible twilight world. Yet he was too young to understand the implications. On another occasion, he heard how a man had clambered out on to the sill of a top floor window of the prison and hurled himself to his death on the pavement below. His mangled body was hastily removed and the blood washed away with hosepipes, but news of the suicide spread through the town.
Later, Solzhenitsyn learned that the dungeons of the prison at Rostov were situated under the pavement, lit by opaque lights set into the asphalt. Almost daily, as a child and then as an adolescent, he had been walking unwittingly over the heads of the prisoners incarcerated beneath his feet.
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