Solzhenitsyn
Page 8
In May 1944, Solzhenitsyn learned of the death of his mother. “I am left with all the good she did for me and all the bad I did to her”, he wrote in a letter to Natalya. “No one wrote to me about her death. A money order came back marked that the addressee was deceased. Apparently she died in March.”29 His sense of guilt must have been heightened when, some time later, he discovered that she had in fact died on January 17, 1944. There had been no money to pay for a gravedigger, and she had been laid in the same grave as his Uncle Roman, who had died just two weeks earlier.
There was little time to grieve. Within a month, Solzhenitsyn had been promoted to the rank of captain and found himself once more in the middle of some of the bloodiest battles on the eastern front. In June, the Soviet assault on Belorussia began, and Solzhenitsyn’s battery of sixty men was in the thick of the fighting. On July 12, 1944, he received the Order of the Red Star [Krasnoi Zvezdy], which was awarded for “exceptional service in the cause of the defense of the Soviet Union”. He was cited “for his fine organization and command skills” during the fighting on June 24, and specifically for “determining, in spite of deafening noise, the precise position of two enemy batteries, which were immediately destroyed”, allowing, in turn, for the attacking Soviet infantry to cross the river Drut and to take the city of Rogachyov. The order was signed by Captain Pshechenko, Liuetenant Colonel Kravets, and Colonel Travkin.30
From almost as far north as Minsk, then westward across Belorussia, the Soviet army advanced inexorably until its triumphant crossing of the Polish border. Amidst the mayhem, Solzhenitsyn still found time to sketch ideas for a novel on the war in the notebook he always carried with him. In particular, he was fascinated by the figure of their political commissar, Major Arseny Pashkin, who fought as courageously as the military men around him and who had subordinated his political function to the urgent demands of the military campaign. Observing the actions of this man closely, Solzhenitsyn made plans to include him in the design for his novel. “I’m sketching in more and more new details of Pashkin”, he wrote excitedly in a letter to Natalya. “Oh, when will I be able to sit down to write The Sixth Course? I will write it so magnificently! Especially now, when the battle of Orel-Kursk stands out in such bold relief and can be seen so vividly through the prism of the year 1944.”31
Another source of inspiration was the distant figure of Bronevitsky, whose collaboration with the Germans in Morozovsk held a morbid fascination for Solzhenitsyn. It was a fascination born of emotional contrasts. He had been genuinely fond of the old man and his younger wife, holding both of them in affection, yet their support for the German invader was utterly incomprehensible and ultimately unforgivable. What made the old man do it? It was a conundrum Solzhenitsyn was determined to solve. He planned to get to grips with the whole issue in a story about Bronevitsky entitled “In the Town of M”. To assist him in the writing of this story, he made a point of going into as many small towns as he could, as the Soviet army continued its westward march, to find out what life had been like under German occupation. He became increasingly fascinated by the phenomenon of occupation and the psychological reaction to it. He strove to understand the feelings of the people in the occupied territories, and especially of the collaborators among them. Their treachery still repelled him, but the very repulsion acted as an attraction. Perhaps he felt the same repulsive attraction that many people feel toward understanding the minds of murderers or serial killers. Without any desire to commit acts of treachery himself, he still needed to know why people did it.
And what of those Russians who actually fought in the German army? What motivated them to take up arms against the Motherland and to kill their compatriots? Such treason was almost beyond comprehension. When Solzhenitsyn had first seen a German propaganda leaflet reporting the creation of the “Russian Liberation Army”, he had frankly disbelieved it, dismissing it as the lies of the enemy. Then came the battle of Orel and a rude awakening:
We soon discovered that there really were Russians fighting against us and that they fought harder than any SS men. In July, 1943, for example, near Orel, a platoon of Russians in German uniform defended Sobakinskiye Vyselki. They fought with the desperation that might have been expected if they had built the place themselves. One of them was driven into a root cellar. They threw hand grenades in after him and he fell silent. But they had no more than stuck their heads in than he let them have another volley from his automatic pistol. Only when they lobbed in an anti-tank grenade did they find out that, within the root cellar, he had another foxhole in which he had taken shelter from the infantry grenades. Just try to imagine the degree of shock, deafness, and hopelessness in which he had kept on fighting.32
Other stories abounded about the bravery of these enemy Russians. They defended the Dnieper bridgehead south of Tursk so fiercely that for two weeks the Soviet units with whom Solzhenitsyn was deployed made little progress in spite of continuous fighting. Then there was the tragi-comic tale Solzhenitsyn recounted about the fierce battles that raged near Malye Kozlovichi in December 1943:
Through many long days both we and they went through the extreme trials of winter, fighting in winter camouflage cloaks that covered our overcoats and caps. . . . As the soldiers dashed back and forth among the pines, things got confused, and two soldiers lay down next to one another. No longer very accurately oriented, they kept shooting at someone, somewhere over there. Both had Soviet automatic pistols. They shared their cartridges, praised one another, and together swore at the grease freezing on their automatic pistols. Finally, their pistols stopped firing altogether, and they decided to take a break and light up. They pulled back their white hoods—and at the same instant each saw the other’s cap . . . the eagle and the star. They jumped up! Their automatic pistols still refused to fire! Grabbing them by the barrel and swinging them like clubs, they began to go at each other. This, if you will, was not politics and not the Motherland, but just sheer caveman distrust: If I take pity on him, he is going to kill me.33
The reason for the reluctance of these enemy Russians to surrender was clear. What awaited them at the hands of Stalin’s secret police would be worse than death. Better to die than surrender. This harsh reality was experienced by Solzhenitsyn when he arrived in Bobruisk at the start of the Belorussian offensive. He was walking along the highway, in the midst of the wreckage of battle, when he heard a desperate cry for help from a fellow Russian. “Captain, sir! Captain, sir!” Looking in the direction of the cries, he saw a Russian, naked from the waist up but wearing German breeches. He had blood all over his face, chest, shoulders, and back, and was being driven along by a mounted security sergeant who was whipping him continuously and spurring his horse into him. “He kept lashing that naked back up and down with the whip, without letting him turn around, without letting him ask for help. He drove him along, beating and beating him, raising new crimson welts on his skin.”34
Solzhenitsyn recalled the incident with shame, in a spirit of self-recrimination and contrition, lamenting that “any officer, possessing any authority, in any army on earth ought to have stopped that senseless torture”. Yet the Soviet army was different from any other army on earth, and Captain Solzhenitsyn had learned to fear the consequences of questioning the rising tide of brutality he was witnessing. “I was afraid. . . . I said nothing and I did nothing. I passed him by as if I could not hear him.”35 And all the time a metamorphosis was taking place as a direct result of the suffering he saw around him. The questions he was too afraid to ask out loud were formulating themselves all the more forcefully inside him. Slowly, almost indiscernibly, the naïve young communist was fading away, being erased by experience, making way for someone much stronger.
CHAPTER FIVE
ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT
By the end of 1944, Soviet forces had crossed the border into Poland. Final victory over the Nazi enemy was in sight.
Solzhenitsyn and his battery, encamped on the river Narev southeast of Bialystok, waited expectantly
for the order to advance on Germany itself. It arrived in the second week of January 1945 when Captain Solzhenitsyn received a bundle of leaflets for distribution to the troops under his command. The leaflet contained Marshal Rokossovsky’s famous message: “Soldiers, sergeants, officers, and generals! Today at 5 A.M. we commence our great last offensive. Germany lies before us! One more blow and the enemy will collapse, and immortal victory will crown our divisions!” A more ominous message had already reached the troops from Stalin himself. He had announced that “everything was allowed” once Soviet forces entered Germany. In a hate-filled address, he solemnly ordered the countless troops about to be unleashed on German soil to wreak vengeance for all that Russia had suffered during the war. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Rape, pillage, and plunder. Nothing was forbidden.1
Repelled by this naked incitement to greed and cruelty, Solzhenitsyn lectured his battery on the need to exercise moderation and restraint. Looking back on the moment, he composed an imaginary speech to his men, which he incorporated in The Way, calling for Russian soldiers to keep their heads, take a responsible stand, and “act the proud sons of a magnanimous land”.2
Magnanimity was not on the mind of the Soviet army as it marched into Germany. Solzhenitsyn’s words fell on deaf and defiant ears. As the Red Army descended on the dying embers of the Third Reich, it was Stalin’s vision, not Solzhenitsyn’s, that became reality.
For bravery in battle on January 27, 1945, Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Order of the Red Banner [Krasnogo Znameni], the USSR’s second-highest military order, which was given for “heroism in combat or other extraordinary accomplishments of military valor during combat operations”. Specifically, he was cited for his personal bravery in leading his men (and valuable equipment) out of near-total encirclement during the night of January 26-27, while virtually cut off from all communication with HQ.3
As it advanced through Poland, Solzhenitsyn’s regiment met little or no resistance from a retreating German army, and within days it had swung north into East Prussia. To his delight, Solzhenitsyn found himself following in the footsteps of General Samsonov, whose disastrous campaign in the First World War had inspired the young Solzhenitsyn to pore over maps in reading rooms, researching his epic. The maps were coming to life before his eyes, and he found himself in the very region where Samsonov had been defeated thirty years earlier, passing through some of the towns and villages he had attempted to describe in 1936 in his planned series of novels. The poignancy was accentuated by the knowledge that this was also where his own father had been during the previous war. Like Samsonov, Solzhenitsyn entered the town of Neidenburg when it was in flames, set ablaze by rampaging Russian troops. “Am tramping through East Prussia for the second day”, he wrote to Natalya, “a hell of a lot of impressions.”4
The impressions were destined to come to dramatic fruition in the battle scenes of August 1914 but also, and with added power, in his great narrative poem Prussian Nights. Having reached Neidenburg (now Nidzica) on January 20, his unit reached Allenstein (now Olsztyn) on January 22, and finally the Baltic—cutting off the German armies to the east—on January 26. Although the poem is not autobiography in the strict sense, the verse narrative conveys Solzhenitsyn’s impressions and experiences of those fateful days far more evocatively than a mere dry rendition of the facts could achieve.
At the beginning of Prussian Nights, the jingoistic praise of Russia’s glorious advance is soon overshadowed as the fiery fingers groping for revenge claw across the “foul witch” of Germany. The narrative sweeps and sways almost drunkenly as Solzhenitsyn describes the wanton destruction of villages, churches, farms, and farm animals. It is an “exultant chaos”. Amid the flames, the narrator almost unwillingly begins to perceive something metaphysically infernal in the physical inferno all about him. It is “portentous, evil, temptingly, work of a devil”.5 As Stalin’s edict is carried out with gusto, the narrator stands aloof. He has no vengeance in his heart but, “like Pilate when he washed his hands”, will do nothing to quench the flames.
Prussian Nights also recounts a scene of inhumanity that exceeds in its shocking precision anything achieved by Owen or Sassoon in their poetic accounts of the First World War. The narrator comes across a house that has “not been burned, just looted, rifled” where he hears “a moaning, by the walls half-muffled”. Inside, he finds a mother and her little daughter. The mother is wounded but still alive. The daughter is dead, having suffered beforehand a fate worse than death. She lies lifeless on a mattress, the victim of a mass rape, and the narrator wonders how many Russian soldiers had lain on top of the girl’s battered body before she died. “A platoon, a company, perhaps?”—“A girl’s been turned into a woman, a woman turned into a corpse”.6 The mother, her eyes “hazy and bloodshot”, has been blinded in the vain struggle to save herself and her daughter. She has nothing to live for and begs the narrator, a soldier she can hear but not see, to kill her. Neither is this the only sickening account of mass rape depicted in the narrative. A few pages later the anarchic invaders come across “a rich house, full of German virgins”, ignoring the desperate pleas of the women that they are not Germans but Polish.7 There is a description of the coldblooded murder of an elderly woman and her bedridden husband. The poem concludes with the narrator finally succumbing to the temptations all around him. He rapes a woman compliant from fear who, when the ordeal is over, begs him not to shoot her. Sickened with remorse, and knowing that it is too late to rectify the wrong he has done, he feels the burden of another’s soul weighing heavily on his own. The climactic evil he has perpetrated has left him unfulfilled, unsatisfied. All that remains is an anticlimax of guilt, intensified into futility.
Of course, it is impossible to discern which parts of this epic verse are autobiographical, which are the result of conversations with fellow veterans such as his prison-camp friend Lev Kopelev, and which are simply the work of poetic license. Nonetheless, as a description of the terrible days of January 1945, they are invaluably evocative, as well as graphically displaying Solzhenitsyn’s great sense of guilt for the part he played in those heady and hellish weeks. Perhaps his feelings were most accurately expressed through the medium of Gleb Nerzhin, the most autobiographically inspired of all the characters in his novel The First Circle: It’s not that I consider myself a good man. In fact I’m very bad—when I remember what I did during the war in Germany, what we all did. . . . But I picked up a lot of it in a corrupt world. What was wrong didn’t seem wrong to me, but something normal, even praiseworthy. But the lower I sank in that inhumanly ruthless world, in some strange way the more I listened to those few who, even then, spoke to my conscience.8
In addition to the atrocities perpetrated by Russians on his own side, Solzhenitsyn continued to come across Russians who were fighting for the Germans. His last contact with these enemy compatriots, deep in the heart of East Prussia at the end of January, almost cost him his life. Finding themselves surrounded on all sides by advancing Soviets, the enemy Russians attempted to break through the position occupied by Solzhenitsyn’s unit. This they did in silence, without artillery preparation, under cover of darkness. As there was no firmly delineated front, they succeeded in penetrating deep into Soviet territory. Just before dawn, Solzhenitsyn saw them “as they suddenly rose from the snow where they’d dug in, wearing their winter camouflage cloaks” and “hurled themselves with a cheer” on the battery of a 152-millimeter gun battalion, knocking out twelve heavy cannon with hand grenades before they could fire a shot. Pursued by their tracer bullets, the remnants of Solzhenitsyn’s group ran almost two miles in fresh snow, fleeing for their lives, until they reached the bridge across the Passarge River. Here, hopelessly outgunned and outnumbered, the surviving enemy Russians were forced to surrender.9 “They knew they would never have the faintest glimpse of mercy”, wrote Solzhenitsyn. “When we captured them, we shot them as soon as the first intelligible Russian word came from their mouths.” Whether this was common practice,
it was not always what happened. Sometimes Russians in enemy uniform were taken prisoner to await their fate in the Soviet Union. This, for many, was considered worse than death itself. Solzhenitsyn records an occasion when three captured enemy Russians were being marched along the roadside a few steps away from him. All of a sudden, one of them twisted around and threw himself under a T-34 tank. The tank veered to avoid him, but the edge of its track crushed him nevertheless. “The broken man lay writhing, bloody foam coming from his mouth. And one could certainly understand him! He preferred a soldier’s death to being hanged in a dungeon.”10
Even amidst the chaos of the Russian rampage through a near-defeated Germany, Solzhenitsyn was able to write to his friends and to Natalya. Now, however, things were different between husband and wife. It seemed that much more separated them than the hundreds of miles between them, or the hundreds of days since they had last seen each other. Much had changed, and perhaps it was Solzhenitsyn himself had changed most of all. His experiences as a front-line soldier, stretching back over eighteen months and culminating in the horrific vision of these Prussian nights, had killed off the carefree youth who had married his student girlfriend nearly five years earlier. The boy had become a man, and the man saw things very differently from the boy. He also saw things very differently from the woman he had married, who was unable to comprehend the changes in her husband’s attitude toward her. “The very last letter my husband wrote me from the front again heaped a mountain of suffering upon me. With one hand he seemed to push me away, and with the other he drew me even closer, even tighter to himself.”11
Natalya described the letter as “an irritated sermon”, which perhaps it was, but it is clear from Natalya’s own response that, for her part, she considered it not only irritated but irritating, an annoyance. The truth was that she was as irritated by her husband as he was by her. In essence, the letter castigated Natalya for the “egotistical” nature of her love: