Solzhenitsyn

by Joseph Pearce

  You imagine our future as an uninterrupted life together, with accumulating furniture, with a cozy apartment, with regular visits from guests, evenings at the theatre. . . . It is quite probable that none of this will transpire. Ours may be a restless life. Moving from apartment to apartment. Things will accumulate but they will have to be just as easily discarded.

  Everything depends upon you. I love you, I love nobody else. But just as a train cannot move off the rails for a single millimetre without crashing, so is it with me—I must not swerve from my path at any point. For now, you love only me, which means, in the final analysis, you love only for yourself, for the satisfaction of your own needs.

  The letter concluded with a plea that his wife rise above her “completely understandable, completely human” but “egotistical” plans for their future. If she could do this, he suggested, real harmony would reign.12

  All that reigned when Natalya read her husband’s words was a sense of confusion born out of incomprehension. This gave way to “worry, fear, despair, and finally a sense of hopelessness”.13

  Perhaps it was not surprising that Solzhenitsyn’s words should have been incomprehensible to his wife. They were a conundrum, but contained the key to understanding the man, at least as he was in January 1945. At the simplest level, the letter appears unreasonable. It seems that it is Solzhenitsyn, not Natalya, whose love is egotistical. It is he, not she, who is demanding that the marriage should progress according to pre-set criteria. It is he, not she, who “must not swerve” from the path at any point; he, not she, who is unprepared to compromise. Yet on a deeper level, the unreasonableness was an expression of something more important to the maturing soldier. He was beginning to perceive that a spirit of sacrifice was at the heart of marriage, and of life, and that the selfish pursuit of needlessly created wants was an obstacle to true happiness. Real harmony could reign only when the desire for material possessions was subjugated to higher goals. For Solzhenitsyn, the higher goal was his art, from which he “must not swerve”. Even his marriage to Natalya was of secondary importance when compared with his literary aspirations. What he needed from her, and demanded from her, was an acceptance that she must be prepared to sacrifice herself to this higher goal. She must love him not because she wanted him or needed him or sought to possess him, but by giving herself heart and soul to him, selflessly sacrificing herself on the altar of his art. He, on the other hand, could not be expected to sacrifice his art for her, or indeed for anything else. Either she must sacrifice herself for their marriage, or he would sacrifice their marriage for his art. It was an ultimatum.

  Years later, Solzhenitsyn sought to explain these feelings. “I was so wound up—my path was like that of a piston. . . . Everything’s important, yes, every side of life has its importance, but at the same time I would have lost my momentum and my kinetic energy.”14

  The wartime delay in the postal system meant that Solzhenitsyn’s letters to his wife usually took a month to arrive. She received the letter containing his confusing ultimatum in early March. About a week later, instead of his next letter, her own postcard to him was returned. It bore the notation: “The addressee has left the unit.” Natalya panicked and wrote to anyone and everyone who might know her husband’s whereabouts.

  Recalling this troubled time in her memoirs, Natalya chose to quote from one of her husband’s novels, letting the autobiographical element in the fiction speak for itself:

  It is always difficult to wait for a husband to come home from war. But the last months before war’s end are most difficult of all: shrapnel and bullets take no account of how long a man has been fighting.

  It was precisely at this point that letters from Gleb stopped arriving.

  Nadya would run outside to look for the mailman. She wrote her husband, she wrote his friends, she wrote to his superiors. Everyone maintained a silence, as though enchanted.

  In the spring of 1945 hardly an evening went by without salutes blasting the skies. One city after another was taken! Taken! Taken!—Königsberg, Frankfurt, Berlin, Prague.

  But there were no letters. The world dimmed. Apathy set in. But she must not let go of herself. What if he is alive and returns?. . . And she consumed herself with long-extended days of work—nights alone were reserved for tears.15

  Little did Natalya know that even as she worried and wept at home, her husband was languishing in a Soviet jail. In a grim twist of fate, or a providential adjustment of divine symmetry, Solzhenitsyn found himself being sacrificed to a “higher goal”. As he had sought Natalya’s sacrifice on the altar of art, so he was now being sacrificed on the altar of Stalin’s all-powerful state.

  A few days after his self-assured letter to his wife insisting that his life could not move one millimeter from the tracks on which he had set it, the crushing apparatus of the Soviet state brought all his plans, his schemes, his ambitions, his life itself, to a grinding halt. He was plucked helpless from his path, and placed in an alien environment where the road ahead could not be seen, if indeed any such road existed.

  The catastrophic turn in his fortunes commenced with a telephone call from brigade headquarters on February 9, 1945. He was to report at once to Brigadier-General Travkin. As he entered the brigadier-general’s office, he noticed a group of officers standing in a corner of the room, of whom he recognized only one, the brigade’s political commissar. Travkin ordered Solzhenitsyn to step forward and hand over his revolver. Puzzled, he obeyed, handing the weapon to Travkin, who slowly wound the leather strap round and round the butt before placing it in his desk drawer. Then in a low voice Travkin said, “All right, you must go now.”

  Solzhenitsyn did not understand and remained awkwardly where he was.

  “Yes, yes,” repeated Travkin in the uneasy silence, “it is time for you to go somewhere.”

  Instantly, two officers stepped forward from among the group in the corner and told Solzhenitsyn he was under arrest. “Me?” he gasped in reply. “What for?”

  Without bothering to explain further, the two officers ripped his epaulettes from his shoulders and the star from his cap, removed his belt, and snatched the map-case from his hands. Ironically, this unceremonious stripping him off his rank and his dignity came only days before the scheduled medal ceremony at which he was due to be presented with the Order of the Red Banner for his heroism in battle less than two weeks earlier. Without further ado, the two officers began to march him from the room.

  “Wait a moment!” ordered Travkin.

  The two counter-intelligence officers released their grip momentarily, and Solzhenitsyn turned to face the brigadier-general.

  “Have you”, Travkin asked meaningfully, “a friend on the First Ukrainian Front?”

  “That’s against regulations!” the two arresting officers shouted angrily. “You have no right!”16

  Travkin could say no more, but Solzhenitsyn knew instantly that this was a reference to his old friend Nikolai Vitkevich and that it was intended as a warning. Evidently, his arrest had something to do with his correspondence with Nikolai, or perhaps with their “Resolution No. 1”. Later, he was to consider both the correspondence and the Resolution “a piece of childish stupidity”.17 He and Nikolai knew that censorship was in place and that their letters would be read, but this had not prevented them making derogatory comments about Stalin in their correspondence. They were, with the wisdom of hindsight, extremely foolish. Solzhenitsyn wrote that their naïveté “aroused only laughter and astonishment” when he discussed their case with fellow prisoners. “Other prisoners told me that two more such stupid jackasses couldn’t exist. And I became convinced of it myself.”18

  As he spent his first day as a prisoner, desolate and bemused, he must have groped in desperation for some last straw of hope. There must have been a mistake. Yes, that was it. There had been a mistake, and soon he would receive an apology. He would be released, and everything would be all right. Yet as he spent the next three days in the counter-intelligence prison at
the headquarters of the front, he heard the disquieting voices of his fellow cellmates. They spoke of the deceptions practiced by the interrogators, their threats, and beatings. They told him that once a person was arrested, he was never released. No one was ever released. Hope as he might, there had been no mistake. The system didn’t make mistakes. He was told by his fellow prisoners that he would get a “tenner”, a ten-year sentence. In fact, they would all get tenners. Everyone got tenners. As he listened to these voices, his hopes, the only light on the horizon, faded away. The future was black, too black to see. An abyss. A nightmare, but no dream. Reality.

  In time, the harsh realities of prison life would become the only reality he knew, eclipsing his previous memories. Two years later, he even saw his time in the army as belonging to a different, distant world: “The war had licked away four of my years. I no longer believed that it had all actually happened and I didn’t want to remember it. Two years here, two years in the Archipelago, had dimmed in my mind all the roads of the front, all the comradeship of the front line, had totally darkened them.”19

  Many years later, having passed through the suffering of the prison system, he would see how important the arrest and imprisonment had been to the subsequent development of his life and personality. He even learned to be grateful to the Gulag, confessing that, along with his time in the army, the most important event “would be the arrest”. He went so far as to describe it as the second “defining moment” of his life, crucial “because it allowed me to understand Soviet reality in its entirety and not merely the one-sided view I had of it previous to the arrest”.20 He then reiterated what had been taken away from him by his youth in the Soviet Union, most notably the “Christian spirit” of his childhood. If he had not been arrested, he could only imagine with “horror . . . what kind of emptiness awaited me. The gaol returned all that to me.”21

  Solzhenitsyn’s military career, as Scammell wrote, had begun as farce and ended in tragedy. Yet the tragic end was really only the beginning. It was the crucifixion preceding the resurrection, labor pains preceding birth. The arrest was the real beginning of the Passion Play of Solzhenitsyn’s life, in which the pride and selfishness of his former self were stripped away like unwanted garments.

  CHAPTER SIX

  HELL INTO PURGATORY

  In sooth I had not been so courteous

  While I was living, for the great desire

  Of excellence, on which my heart was bent.

  Here of such pride is paid the forfeiture;

  And yet I should not be here, were it not

  That, having power to sin, I turned to God.

  —Dante, Purgatorio, Canto XI

  After the privileges Solzhenitsyn had enjoyed as an officer in the Soviet army, life as a prisoner must have seemed unbearable. During the first days in the counter-intelligence prison, he had slept on rotten straw beside the latrine bucket, had witnessed the pathetic sight of beaten and sleepless men, had tasted with disgust the prison gruel, and had listened in horror as his fellow prisoners detailed the lurid and hopeless future that awaited him. All his ambitions, which had seemed to stretch out before him on reassuringly immovable tracks, had been derailed. His world, so meticulously planned and worked out in advance, had fallen apart.

  Nevertheless, although he was technically no longer a soldier, still less an officer, Solzhenitsyn continued to feel himself superior to those of subordinate rank around him. The prejudice and snobbery he had learned at officer training school were deeply ingrained, and he fumed with indignation whenever a noncommissioned officer barked an order at him. This attitude of superiority was exhibited at its worst when he and seven other prisoners were marched the forty-five miles from Osterode, on the front, to Brodnica, where the counter-intelligence headquarters was located. All the prisoners were Russians, with the exception of one German civilian who, dressed in a black three-piece suit, black overcoat, and black hat, stood out from the rest, his white face “nurtured on gentleman’s food”.1 The German knew no Russian, and it is doubtful whether the Russians would have spoken to the hated enemy even if he had been fluent in their language.

  Before they set out on the march to Brodnica, which would take two days in cold, changeable weather, the chief of the convoy, a sergeant, ordered Solzhenitsyn to pick up the sealed suitcase containing his officer’s equipment as well as the papers that had been seized as evidence when he was arrested. Solzhenitsyn was incensed. A mere sergeant was ordering an officer to carry a large, heavy suitcase. The impudence! Besides, were there not six men from the ranks in their convoy, all empty-handed? And what about the German? “I am an officer”, Solzhenitsyn responded truculently. “Let the German carry it.” Recalling this incident later, Solzhenitsyn remembered with shame the astonished look he received from the Russian prisoner beside him and was relieved that the German could not understand what he had said. The German was ordered to carry the suitcase and did so until he nearly collapsed with exhaustion. At that point, the Russian who was walking beside him, a former prisoner of war, took the suitcase of his own free will and commenced carrying it. After that, all the other Russian POWs took turns in carrying Solzhenitsyn’s case, all without being ordered to do so, only returning it to the German when it was once again his turn. All carried the case except its owner, who, walking at the back of the convoy, witnessed the selflessness of his colleagues with a growing sense of humiliation.

  After three days at Brodnica, he was escorted to the railway station destined, he was told, for Moscow. The first part of the journey, to Bialystok and the Soviet border, was made on the platform of a flat railway wagon, totally exposed to the icy winds and snow of February. Three-quarters of the train consisted of similar wagons packed tight with Russian women and girls who had been rounded up in the occupied territories for alleged collaboration with the enemy. Crossing the Soviet border, Solzhenitsyn, escorted by three counter-intelligence officers, was transferred to a passenger train to Minsk, where they caught the Minsk-Moscow Express. Arriving in the Russian capital on February 20, 1945, he was taken via the metro to the famous and feared Lubyanka prison. His experiences upon arrival have been documented in the closing pages of The First Circle, which, he informed Michael Scammell, were an accurate description of his own ordeal. Thus, in the fictional setting of Innokenti Volodin’s arrest and arrival at the Lubyanka in Solzhenitsyn’s novel, the brutality and inhumanity of the author’s first hours in a Russian jail are relived. They began with a period in a tiny windowless cell, so small that it was impossible to lie down in it. A solitary table and stool filled almost the entire floor space. When seated on the stool, it was impossible to straighten one’s legs. At regular intervals, the silent monotony was broken by the sound of the shutter on the peep-hole being slid back so that a solitary eye could peer in at him.

  Eventually, the door was unlocked, and he was ordered to go to another room. Here he was strip-searched. Having removed all his clothes, Solzhenitsyn stood passively while a man in gray overalls explored every orifice of his body. He thrust his fingers in the prisoner’s mouth, his ears, pulled down his lower eyelids, and jerked Solzhenitsyn’s head back to look into his nostrils. The humiliated prisoner was then ordered to take hold of his penis, turn the foreskin back and lift it to the left and right. Finally, he was told to spread his legs as far apart as they would go, bend over, take his buttocks in each hand and pull them apart so that the last remaining orifice could be inspected.

  The strip search completed, Solzhenitsyn was told to sit naked on a stool, teeth chattering from the cold, while the man in the gray overalls commenced a thorough search of his clothes. Beginning with underpants, vest, and socks, he pinched all the seams and folds before throwing them at the prisoner’s feet and telling him to put them on. Taking out a jack-knife, the man thrust it between the soles of Solzhenitsyn’s boots and pierced the heels with a marlinspike. Next came Solzhenitsyn’s beloved captain’s tunic. The former officer watched in horror as the man meticulously tore off all
the gold braid and piping, cut off the buttons and button-loops, and ripped open the lining to feel inside. His trousers and tailored greatcoat received the same scrupulous attention. Buttons were removed, and the knife once again went to work slicing through the lining.

  At last, an hour or so after he had arrived, the man in the gray overalls scooped up the ripped-off braid and piping and departed without a word. Solzhenitsyn, left alone with only the tattered trappings of his former life, was beginning to realize that he was no longer an officer in the Soviet army. Instead, though he did not know it at the time, he had joined another desolate and ragged army numbering millions throughout the victorious Soviet Union. He was among the ranks of Stalin’s slaves.

  No sooner had the new recruit to this other army recovered from the first ordeal than another began. A warder, this time in off-white overalls, ordered him once again to remove all his clothes and sit naked on the stool. He felt an iron grip on his neck as the warder shaved first his head, then his armpits, and finally his pubic hair. Shortly after this warder had departed, another arrived. Now the purpose was a medical examination, for which the prisoner was obliged to strip once more. The “examination” consisted principally of a series of questions about venereal disease, syphilis, leprosy, and other contagions.

  The “processing” of the prisoner continued with the instruction to undress again, this time in order to take a shower, before he was escorted to another room where his photograph and fingerprints were taken.

  By the time these formalities had been completed, it was late at night. Solzhenitsyn was again confined in the tiny windowless cell in which he had originally been placed and to which he had intermittently been returned between one or other of the various humiliating episodes. He was utterly exhausted and, in spite of the cramped conditions, sought to get to sleep by curling up on the floor. The shutter of the peep-hole slid back, the solitary eye peered in, the door was opened, and a warder ordered the prisoner to stay awake. Sleeping was against regulations. Again, oblivious to regulations, Solzhenitsyn sought to sleep by leaning his head on the table. Again, obeying regulations, the warder opened the door and demanded that the prisoner stay awake. Sleep was impossible.