Solzhenitsyn
Page 7
The Nazi onslaught had thrown the whole of the Soviet Union into turmoil, and all thought of examinations at the MIFLI was abandoned. Solzhenitsyn, like most of the other students, rushed to the recruitment office to volunteer on the spot. He was told that as his draft card was in Rostov, he must return there in order to enlist. He hurried to the station but found that the railways had been thrown into chaos by the declaration of war. It was several days before he finally succeeded in catching a train south, and even then the journey was insufferably slow. For a young man frantic with desire to join the fighting, the interminable delays must have been intolerable.
When he eventually arrived in Rostov, more disappointment awaited him. His army physical resulted in a classification of “limited fitness” due to an abdominal disability, the result of a groin disorder in infancy that had gone undetected. The disability was so slight that Solzhenitsyn had barely noticed that he suffered from it, but it was sufficient to disqualify him from military service.
Seething with anger, Solzhenitsyn returned home and was forced to watch helplessly while most of his university friends enlisted and were dispatched for training. The sense of frustration must have been accentuated by his complete commitment to the war effort. Not only was Russia the victim of aggression, which would in itself have made it a just war, but she was the standard-bearer of communist truth against the lies and errors of the fascists. Germany had always been Russia’s enemy, but now, under the tyranny of the Nazi swastika, she was her ideological enemy as well as her historical foe. His Marxist faith left no room for uncertainty about the rights and wrongs of the war, nor about who would be the final victors. The Soviet Union as the champion of the international proletariat would always triumph over her enemies.
A year earlier, on his honeymoon, he had written an ode that bore all the hallmarks of one who relishes the romance of war without having experienced its bloody realities. It was a piece of jingoistic juvenilia, flying defiantly in the face of the “inexpressible turbulence” of impending war. Invoking Lenin as the inspiration, Solzhenitsyn boasted that his generation, which “sprang to life” in the “whirlwind” of the October Revolution, would die willingly so that the Revolution could “ascend”, if necessary “upon our dead bodies”. His generation, the October generation, “must make the supreme sacrifice”.10
The sacrifice that Solzhenitsyn was in fact called to make in September 1941 was supreme only in its irksome futility. While his friends marched to war, heading for glory, he and Natalya were dispatched to the Cossack settlement of Morozovsk as village schoolteachers. Solzhenitsyn was to teach mathematics and astronomy, while his wife’s subjects were chemistry and the foundations of Darwinism. Morozovsk was an isolated community about 180 miles northeast of Rostov and halfway to Stalingrad. It was a dead-end place, or so Solzhenitsyn must have thought in his frustration. Nothing ever happened in Morozovsk. Nevertheless, as he recalled, even there, “anxiety about the German advance was stealing over us like the invisible clouds stealing over the milky sky to smother the small and defenseless moon”.11 Such feelings were exacerbated by the arrival of trainloads of refugees, which stopped at the local station every day before proceeding to Stalingrad. During the break in their journey, these refugees would fill the marketplace of Morozovsk with terrible rumors about the disastrous way the war was turning.
The short time that the Solzhenitsyns spent in Morozovsk was relatively tranquil, the calm before the storm. Solzhenitsyn remembered “quiet, warm, moonlit evenings, not as yet rent by the rumble of planes and by exploding bombs”.12 He and Natalya had rented lodgings on the same little yard as an older couple, the Bronevitskys. Nikolai Gerasimovich Bronevitsky was a sixty-year-old engineer, described by Solzhenitsyn as “an intellectual of Chekhovian appearance, very likable, quiet, and clever”. His wife was “even quieter and gentler than he was—a faded woman with flaxen hair close to her head, twenty-five years younger than her husband, but not at all young in her behaviour”. The two couples struck up a friendship and spent long evenings sitting on the steps of the porch, enjoying the warmth of the fading summer, and talking. The Solzhenitsyns were totally at ease with the Bronevitskys, and Solzhenitsyn remembered that “we said whatever we thought without noticing the discrepancies between our way of looking at things and theirs”. One discrepancy Solzhenitsyn did notice was the way that Bronevitsky described those towns that had fallen to the Germans not as having “surrendered” but as having been “taken”. Looking back on their friendship, Solzhenitsyn perceived that the older couple probably considered their young counterparts “two surprising examples of naively enthusiastic youth”. Asked what they remembered about 1938 and 1939, the youngsters could only recount the carefree trivia of their student life: “the university library, examinations, the fun we had on sporting trips, dances, amateur concerts, and of course love affairs—we were at the age for love”. The Bronevitskys listened incredulously to the flippancy of the other couple. But, they asked, hadn’t any of their professors been put away at that time? Yes, the Solzhenitsyns replied, two or three of them had been. Their places had been taken by senior lecturers. What about the students—had any of them gone inside? The younger couple did indeed recall that some senior students had been jailed. Bronevitsky was puzzled:
“And what did you make of it?”
“Nothing; we carried on dancing.”
“And no one near to you was—er—touched?”
“No; no one.”13
The reason for Bronevitsky’s morbid interest in the darker side of Soviet life soon became apparent. He had been one of the thousands of engineers who had been arrested during the thirties and sent to the newly opened labor camps. He had been in several prisons and camps but spoke with particular passion and disgust about Dzhezkazgan. Recalling the horror of camp life with a lurid disregard for the sheltered sensibilities of his listeners, he described the poisoned water, the poisoned air, the murders, the degradation, and the futility of complaints to Moscow. By the time he had finished, the very syllables “Dzhez-kaz-gan” made Solzhenitsyn’s flesh creep: “And yet . . . did this Dzhezkazgan have the slightest effect on our way of looking at the world? Of course not. It was not very near. It was not happening to us. . . . It is better not to think about it. Better to forget.”14
The Solzhenitsyns’ brief friendship with the Bronevitskys came to an end when the younger couple left Morozovsk. Later, Natalya learned that Bronevitsky had collaborated with the Germans when they occupied the town the following year. “Can you imagine it,” she wrote to her husband, “they say that Bronevitsky acted as burgomaster for the Germans while they were in Morozovsk. How disgusting!” Solzhenitsyn shared his wife’s shock at their erstwhile friend’s betrayal of the Motherland, thinking it a “filthy thing to do”. Years later, his own circumstances would lead him to alter his judgment:
[T]urning things over in my mind, I remembered Bronevitsky. And I was no longer so schoolboyishly self-righteous. They had unjustly taken his job from him, given him work that was beneath him, locked him up, tortured him, beaten him, starved him, spat in his face—what was he supposed to do? He was supposed to believe that all this was the price of progress, and that his own life, physical and spiritual, the lives of those dear to him, the anguished lives of our whole people, were of no significance.15
Solzhenitsyn was to express a similar view concerning the sense of patriotic duty that Russians were meant to feel toward Stalin’s Soviet Union. If our mother has sold us to the gypsies, he asked, or, even worse, thrown us to the dogs, does she still remain our mother? “If a wife has become a whore, are we really still bound to her in fidelity? A Motherland that betrays its soldiers—is that really a Motherland?”16
These sentiments, born of bitter experience, could not have been further from the mind of Solzhenitsyn in 1941. Instead, he still longed for the opportunity to fight and if need be die for the Soviet Motherland. In mid-October, the war took a further turn for the worse. Moscow was threatened, and the G
erman advance seemed irresistible. Under these dire circumstances, all classifications of fitness were cast aside as the Soviet authorities scavenged for recruits. In the district of Morozovsk, virtually every able-bodied man was summoned to the local recruitment center. At long last, Solzhenitsyn’s chance had come. “How difficult it was to leave home on that day,” he wrote to Natalya many years later, “but it was only on that day that my life began. We never know at the time what is happening to us.”17 Later still, as an old man looking back over the salient features of his past, he considered his time in the Soviet army as one of the “most important and defining moments” in his life. Most interesting of all, he saw it in terms of escape: “My father died before I was born, and so I had lacked upbringing by men. In the army, I ran away from that.”18 What exactly was he running away from? Was he looking for a convenient escape from the feminine? His increasingly ill mother? Supercilious aunts, including the three extra aunts and a mother-in-law he had inherited in marrying Natalya? And what of Natalya herself? Was he escaping from her too?
“Solzhenitsyn’s military career began as farce and ended in tragedy”, writes Michael Scammell.19 Certainly, it would be fair to say that it began inauspiciously. It was a long time before he finally got to the front, and, in his first months as a soldier, he was often the victim of cruelty at the hands of his more experienced comrades, who took a dislike to the provincial schoolteacher newly arrived in the ranks. “I did not move in one stride from being a student worn out by mathematics to officer’s rank”, he wrote in The Gulag Archipelago. “Before becoming an officer I spent a half-year as a downtrodden soldier. And one might think I would have gotten through my thick skull what it was like always to obey people who were perhaps not worthy of your obedience and to do it on a hungry stomach to boot.”20
His experience did not improve once he was accepted for officer training school. He disliked the strict disciplinarian regime, complaining that “they trained us like young beasts so as to infuriate us to the point where we would later want to take it out on someone else”.21 Yet however much he hated his time there, his greatest fear, and that of all his fellow candidates, was failure to stick it out until graduation and the receipt of his officer’s insignia. The price of failure was immediate posting to the battle for Stalingrad where the casualty rate was so high that being sent there was virtually a death sentence. The threat of Stalingrad receded in October 1942, when Solzhenitsyn was awarded his first lieutenant’s stars. Eventually, in June 1944, he was to reach the rank of captain. His experiences ought to have taught him, “once and for all, the bitterness of service as a rank-and-file soldier”. Yet soon “they pinned two little stars on my shoulder boards, and then a third, and then a fourth. And I forgot every bit of what it had been like!”22 He had passed from the rank and file to the rank of officer, from persecuted to persecutor, and only in later years did he realize how he had been brutalized by the experience.
Now that he was an officer, Solzhenitsyn hoped he would soon, at long last, be sent to the front. There was to be more disappointment, however, because in early November he was posted to Saransk in central Russia, a town which he described to Natalya as “three little houses in a flat field”.23 It was not until February 13, 1943, that his battalion was finally mobilized. Solzhenitsyn was sure that this time they would be heading for the southern front; instead they went in the opposite direction, to the far north, arriving a week or two later in Ostashkov, midway between Rzhev and Novgorod. They then moved slowly westward, where they encamped in a forest waiting for orders to advance. Surely, now he would see some action. Six weeks passed and nothing happened. Finally, in April, they received further orders and were transferred by train four hundred miles to the southeast. At a point just east of Orel, they dug in on the river Neruch.
This was an area of Russia unknown to Solzhenitsyn, and he was not seeing it at its best. A low-lying, swampy region, dotted with woods, it had never been the most picturesque of landscapes. Now, having been twice fought over in recent months—first during the German advance and then again during their retreat—it was a battle-scarred quagmire. Houses, trees, whole villages, all had been flattened by bombs and shells. Roads and fields had been churned into a lumpy soup by thousands of marching feet, exploding shells, and the caterpillar tracks of countless tanks. In the distance, the quid pro quo of both sides’ artillery thumped incessant insults at each other. Yet Solzhenitsyn still sensed his nation’s soil beneath the desolation. Although it was “abandoned, wild, overgrown” without crops, vegetable patches, or even a grain of rye, it was still “Turgenev country”, and gazing across the war-torn desert, the young soldier “at last understood that one word—homeland”.24
At the end of May, Solzhenitsyn received the first letter from his mother for many months. Her handwriting had deteriorated and was so weak and spidery that he hardly recognized it. On January 12, when he was still in Saransk, he had sent her a telegram as soon as he had learned of the German retreat from the Caucasus, but it was not until now, four months later, that he finally discovered what had become of her. When the Germans had arrived in Georgievsk, where she had been staying with her relatives, Taissia had returned to Rostov. Upon arrival, she had discovered her home in ruins and the furniture destroyed. Now homeless, she was forced to find accommodation in a fourth-floor room without either running water or heating, consequently having to struggle up four floors with buckets of water and firewood. There was little to eat in the ruins of the German-occupied city, and, shivering from the intense cold of the winter, she had suffered a severe recurrence of tuberculosis and had been compelled to return to her sister Maria in Georgievsk. The details of his mother’s letter only confirmed what the weakness of her handwriting had hinted. She was now a physically broken woman. One can imagine Solzhenitsyn reflecting on the perverse irony of events. He had been in the army for over eighteen months without so much as a scratch to show for his endeavors; meanwhile the war had crept up from behind and was killing his mother by stealth.
It was while he was encamped on the river Neruch that Solzhenitsyn met up once again with his old friend Nikolai Vitkevich, who, as luck would have it, was an infantry officer in a regiment stationed in a neighboring sector of the front. The two friends had temporarily lost touch with each other but found on being reunited that they had as much in common as ever, both politically and emotionally. They were “like the two halves of a single walnut”.25 In the days that followed, they enjoyed once more the endless hours of debate and speculation that had been such a joyful part of their adolescent lives. It seemed that nothing had changed. Both men still considered themselves loyal communists, and Nikolai, unlike Solzhenitsyn, had actually joined the Party, but there was one important, and ultimately fatal, difference in their thinking from that which had characterized earlier years. Now they had learned to be critical of the Soviet regime, albeit from a Leninist perspective. Rashly, they drafted a political manifesto, “Resolution No. 1”, which likened aspects of Stalin’s regime to feudalism. Fortunately, for the two embryonic dissidents, they did not take the suicidal decision to show their “Resolution” to anyone else but merely promised solemnly to keep a copy of it on their person throughout the war. Their reunion, brief but sweet, was swept away by the eruption of battle.
On July 4, Solzhenitsyn recorded that the Germans had bombed their entrenchment, not with high explosives but with leaflets urging them to surrender before it was too late. “You have more than once experienced the crushing strength of the German attacks”, the leaflets warned.26 This was the prelude to the launching of the great German attack on the Kursk salient, the failure of which effectively secured the eventual defeat of the Nazis on the eastern front. In truth, since their defeat at Stalingrad, the armies of the Third Reich had been in almost constant retreat. They had been driven out of the Caucasus, and Solzhenitsyn’s home city of Rostov had been liberated in February. By the time Hitler had launched this last-ditch offensive, his forces had been pushed back t
o a line running from just east of the river Donets in the south to Orel and Kursk in the north. They were far from defeated, however, and no fewer than seventeen panzer divisions and eighteen infantry divisions had been deployed for the Kursk offensive. With such forces at his disposal, Hitler had good reason to be confident that his troops would once again smash their way through the Soviet defenses. At last, Lieutenant Solzhenitsyn was set to taste the bitterness of war.
The fighting that followed the initial German attack was fierce and intense, but the Russians had built up colossal forces of their own in the area, and their defensive fortifications stretched back to a depth of sixty miles. The first set-piece tank battle lasted for three weeks but ended in stalemate. In spite of heavy losses on both sides, the Germans had failed in their principal objective, to capture Kursk, and had hardly moved the front forward at all. The last great German offensive in the east had failed, but the battle was by no means over. The Nazis still controlled Orel. Solzhenitsyn recalled the morning when the Soviet attack on Orel began and “thousands of whistles cut through the air above us”.27
The battle for Orel lasted a further three weeks of continuous fighting, with Solzhenitsyn’s unit as part of the central front commanded by General Rokossovsky. On August 5, Solzhenitsyn entered Orel with the victorious Russian army, and ten days later he was awarded the Order of the Patriotic War, second class, for his part in the battle. Specifically, he was cited “for a speedy and successful training of battery personnel, and for [his] skilled command in determining the enemy’s artillery groupings”, which contributed to the taking of Lvov on July 23, 1943. The order was issued on August 10, 1943, and signed by Captain Pshechenko, Colonel Airapetov, and Major General Semyonov.28