Not since the arrest itself had Solzhenitsyn’s hopes for the future collapsed so forcefully, nose diving to new depths of despair. He waited in dread for his turn to come.
When he was finally ushered in to hear his sentence, he had already become accustomed to the inevitable. He was brought before a bored, black-haired NKVD major who informed him that he had been sentenced to eight years. Without further ado, he was given the relevant documentation to sign so that he could be shepherded out to make way for the next victim. “It was all so everyday and routine”, Solzhenitsyn recalled. “Could this really be my sentence—the turning point of my life?” He refused to sign the document until he had read it and, having done so, looked expectantly at the major for some further clarification. None was forthcoming. Instead the major gestured to the jailer to get the next prisoner ready. “But, really, this is terrible”, Solzhenitsyn objected in a half-hearted and futile plea for some sort of explanation. “Eight years! What for?”
“Right there.” The major pointed to where the prisoner was expected to sign.
Defeated and deflated, Solzhenitsyn signed, mumbling about the injustice of the sentence and his right to appeal.
“Let’s move along”, commanded the jailer, ushering him from the room.11
His sentence had begun.
Even after the sentence was pronounced, Solzhenitsyn, like most other prisoners, still nurtured hopes of an amnesty. In his first prison letter to Natalya, which she received six months after his last letter to her from the front, he expressed his confidence that he would not have to serve the full eight years. He told Natalya that he was pinning his hopes on an amnesty, about which there were many rumors. In the letter, he also wrote that, should the amnesty not materialize, he felt duty-bound to grant her “complete personal freedom” for the entire term of the sentence. He assured her of the depth of his love for his “beautiful woman” whose youth had been spent waiting in vain for a long-promised future. This was a milder, gentler Solzhenitsyn, whose plans for the future seemed much more subdued and less ambitious than his previous, pre-prison self would have contemplated. In the army, he had dreamed that he and Natalya would set up home in the hustle and bustle of Moscow or Leningrad. Now he saw things differently. After his return to freedom, he informed her, he would like them to live in a “remote, but thriving, well-provisioned, and picturesque village”. This ideal village would need to be far from the nearest railway, perhaps in Siberia or in Kuban, or along the Volga, or even on the Don. They could both become high-school teachers and could spend the summer vacations traveling. Their new life together would be contented, peaceful, close to nature, and safe from such “accidents” as the one that had befallen him on February 9, 1945. Once again, however, his vision of the future was out of focus with Natalya’s own desires. Now she had her heart and ambition set on her “future professorship” and didn’t relish the prospect of teaching in a remote village school.12 Not for the first time, husband and wife were separated by more than miles, time, or prison walls.
Throughout his letters to his wife, Solzhenitsyn continued to express his hopes for an amnesty. After he was transferred to the New Jerusalem prison in August 1945, he wrote of his “basic hope . . . for an amnesty for those convicted under Article 58”, adding, “I still think that this will happen.” The hope was that the amnesty would come in November, but when it, too, failed to materialize, Solzhenitsyn’s faith began to falter. It was revived again in March 1946 when he wrote to Natalya: “I am 100 percent sure and still convinced beyond doubt that the amnesty was prepared long ago, in the autumn of 1945, and that it was approved in substance by our government. But then, for some reason, it was postponed.”13 Months passed, and new hopes were voiced in almost every letter. On the first anniversary of the victory over the Germans, hopes were particularly high: “Today we were waiting very hard. Although the rumours were conflicting about the ninth, still, from the ninth on, we are giving it another week or two of time. Such a weariness has descended upon us all, it’s as though the newspapers had promised the amnesty for this day, today.”14 It was only after he had been in prison for eighteen months that he finally confessed resignedly to Natalya, “Whenever they start talking of amnesty—I smile crookedly and go off to one side.”15
As the months passed, a spiritual chasm was beginning to separate Natalya from her husband, and she failed to recognize the full significance of the changes he was undergoing. The eventual rejection of the false hopes and false faith in an imaginary amnesty was part of the spiritual metamorphosis at the heart of Solzhenitsyn’s being. Its significance was expressed in the third volume of The Gulag Archipelago: “Dismayed by the hopeless length of my sentence, stunned by my first acquaintance with the world of Gulag, I could never have believed at the beginning of my time there that my spirit would recover by degrees from its dejection: that as the years went by, I should ascend, so gradually that I was hardly aware of it myself.”16
In the midst of hell, Solzhenitsyn had passed into purgatory.
CHAPTER SEVEN
PROFIT FROM LOSS
On the day he was sentenced, Solzhenitsyn, numbed by the prospect of eight years in Soviet labor camps, stared blindly into the abyss before him. The cellmate who had been sentenced with him, seeking to come to terms with his own fate and possibly seeking to reassure both himself and Solzhenitsyn at the same time, tried to remain positive. They were still young, he asserted, and they would live for a long time to come. The most important thing was not to upset the authorities still further. They would serve out their sentence as model prisoners, working hard and keeping their mouths shut. They would conform and utter no words of dissent.
Solzhenitsyn listened in silence as his friend spoke, but words of dissent were already forming inside him: “One wanted to agree with him, to serve out the term cozily, and then expunge from one’s head what one had lived through. But I had begun to sense a truth inside myself: if in order to live it is necessary not to live, then what’s it all for?”1
To be or not to be, that was the question. It was the beginning of an ardent and arduous search for truth, which was to preoccupy Solzhenitsyn throughout the long years and drudgery of the labor camps. Even at this early stage of his sentence, he was beginning to discern that a man’s spirit was not determined by his material circumstances but could rise above them. Much later in the sentence, at the beginning of his fourth spell in this same Butyrki Prison, he heard for the thousandth time the same endless catch-phrase of the Gulag: “Last name? Given name and patronymic? Year of birth?” He muttered the same time-honored response, but inside he was giving a different answer: “My name? I am the Interstellar Wanderer! They have tightly bound my body, but my soul is beyond their power.”2
In early August, only days after sentence had been passed, Solzhenitsyn was transferred to the Krasnaya Presnya transit prison in another part of Moscow. This prison, close to the Novokhoroshevo Highway in the heart of Russia’s capital, was also at the heart of the Soviet prison system. It was a teeming hive of activity, always bursting at the seams with prisoners en route to some labor camp or other. In the same way that the entire Soviet railway system converged on Moscow, so the prison system converged on Krasnaya Presnya. It was the main terminus: Gulag Junction.
The overcrowding at this prison must have been hard to bear at the best of times, but in the heat of August it was intolerable. Solzhenitsyn speaks of bedbugs and flies biting all night long as the prisoners lay “naked and sweaty under the bright lights”. During the day, the inmates streamed with sweat every time they moved, and “it simply poured out” when they ate. There were a hundred to a cell, and since the cells were no larger than an average-sized room the prisoners were packed in so tightly that there was no floor space even to put one’s feet. Two little windows on one wall were blocked with “muzzles” made of steel sheets, which not only stopped the air from circulating but got very hot from the sun, radiating an intense heat that turned the cell into an oven.3
The overcrowding and high turnover of prisoners, the sheer weight of numbers at Krasnaya Presnya, had turned it into a factory farm, a people processing plant. The bread rations were piled high on wheelbarrows, and the steaming gruel was served from buckets.
There was one other important respect in which Krasnaya Presnya differed from the Butyrki Prison Solzhenitsyn had just left. At Butyrki, all the inmates were political prisoners, but now, for the first time, Solzhenitsyn found himself amongst hardened criminals, devoid of all civilized standards of behavior. He was about to undergo a brutal baptism.
Armed only with the valued food parcel that Natalya had sent him, he was placed in his first cell at Krasnaya Presnya. Apart from the overcrowding, the heat, and the stench, the first thing he noticed upon arrival was that there were no spare bunks. The upper tier of bunks was occupied by the criminals. Their leaders, the top dogs, had the bunks by the window. The lower tier was occupied by “a neutral grey mass”, mostly former prisoners of war. There was, however, plenty of space under the bunks. Having no option, Solzhenitsyn slid along the asphalt floor on his belly, inching himself under one of the bunks. A few moments later, in the semi-darkness, he heard “a wordless rustling” and noticed juveniles, some as young as twelve, creeping up on all fours “like big rats”. They jumped on him from all sides and, in total silence, “with only the sound of sinister sniffing”, he felt several pairs of hands searching for his precious bundle of bacon, sugar, and bread. He was totally powerless to resist, trapped beneath the bunk and unable to get up or move. Then, as swiftly and silently as they had arrived, they were gone. Solzhenitsyn was left feeling stupid and humiliated. Creeping out awkwardly, rear end first, he got up from under the bunk. Rising, he noticed the cell’s godfather seated on his throne, an upper-tier bunk beside the window. In front of him were the contents of Solzhenitsyn’s food parcel, displayed as trophies. The godfather’s face “sagged crookedly and loosely, with a low forehead, a savage scar, and modern steel crowns on the front teeth. His little eyes were exactly large enough to see all familiar objects and yet not take delight in the beauties of the world.” He looked at Solzhenitsyn “as a boar looks at a deer, knowing he could always knock me off my feet”.4
It was then that Solzhenitsyn acted in a way which would torment his conscience for many years afterward. In a display of mean-spirited selfishness similar to that of the episode with the suitcase soon after his arrest, he complained indignantly that since the godfather had taken his food he might at least be granted a place on one of the bunks. The godfather agreed and ordered a former prisoner of war to vacate his bunk by the window. The POW obeyed submissively and crawled under one of the other bunks. It was not until nightfall that Solzhenitsyn heard the reproachful whispers of his neighbors. How could he kowtow to the thieves by driving one of his own people under the bunks in his place? The whispers struck a raw nerve. Yes, they were his own people, imprisoned under 58-lb, the POWs. They were his own brothers-in-loss, and he had betrayed them. “And only then did awareness of my own meanness prick my conscience and make me blush. (And for many years thereafter I blushed every time I remembered it.)”5
The feelings of guilt rushing through Solzhenitsyn’s body as he felt the reproachful glare of his own people engendered a spell of intense introspection. What sort of person was he? A traitor? A Judas? A coward? Surely, not a coward. Hadn’t he pushed his way into the heat of a bombing in the open steppe? Hadn’t he driven bravely through a minefield? Hadn’t he remained cool-headed when he had led his battery out of encirclement in East Prussia, and hadn’t he even gone back into the midst of the danger zone to salvage a damaged command car? No, surely he was not a coward. Why, then, had he submitted so cravenly to the theft of his food? Why had he not smashed his fist into the godfather’s ugly face? Perhaps, after all, he was a coward. Certainly, it seemed harder to be brave in the sickening heat of this prison cell than it had been in the gory heat of battle. And, in any case, even if he was no coward, he was a traitor, a Judas betraying his friends not with a kiss but with a craven plea to a craven crook. And all because of a few rashers of bacon.
The introspection sent ideas whirling round and round in the prisoner’s conscience until it fastened on the thought of food parcels. Were they not more trouble than they were worth? Did they not consume much more than they were consumed? Had they not already consumed the soul of the godfather? Were they not too cruel a temptation?
Foolish relatives! They dash about in freedom, borrow money . . . and send you foodstuffs and things—the widow’s last mite, but also a poisoned gift, because it transforms you from a free though hungry person into one who is anxious and cowardly, and it deprives you of that newly dawning enlightenment, that toughening resolve, which are all you need for your descent into the abyss. Oh, wise Gospel saying about the camel and the eye of a needle! These material things will keep you from entering the heavenly kingdom of the liberated spirit.6
Slowly the introspection began to heal his troubled mind. He had come to accept the loss of the food parcel and, in the very act of doing so, had profited from the loss. Profit from loss—a purgatorial paradox, pointing to paradise. He had learned a valuable lesson at Krasnaya Presnya: “And thus it is that we have to keep getting banged on flank and snout again and again so as to become, in time at least, human beings, yes, human beings.”7
Having learned the lesson, Solzhenitsyn did not have to tolerate the cramped and criminal environment of Krasnaya Presnya for very long. On August 14, 1945, he and sixty other political prisoners were transferred to Novy Ierusalim—“New Jerusalem”—a somewhat inapt name for a corrective labor camp situated thirty miles west of Moscow in the buildings of a former monastery of the same name. They were transported in two open lorries but were ordered to squat on the floor so as not to be visible to inquisitive onlookers on Moscow’s streets. The streets themselves were bedecked with flags. It was VJ Day, the day of final victory over Japan. The Second World War, which Solzhenitsyn had greeted with such jingoistic delight when the Soviet Motherland had entered the fray four years earlier, had finally come to an end. With the irony of these reflections in his mind, one wonders what Solzhenitsyn thought when he arrived at New Jerusalem for the first time to be greeted with cries that “the Fascists have arrived!” Many of the prisoners arriving for the first time with him had suffered terribly as prisoners of war in Nazi death camps, and such cries of derision added insult to injury. None of this mattered amidst the unsubtle stereotypes that governed thought in the Soviet Union. All political prisoners were “fascists” and were considered worse than their “criminal” counterparts.
It was at New Jerusalem that Solzhenitsyn got his first bitter taste of forced labor. He was put to work in the digging brigades in the clay-pits, and for the first time felt the crushing force of his physical limitations. “The work-loads of an unskilled labourer are beyond my strength”, he wrote to Natalya. “I curse my physical underdevelopment.”8 In fact, he had told Natalya only half the story, less than half the story.
At long last, there had been an amnesty, but it applied only to those who, in Solzhenitsyn’s words, were “habitual criminals and nonpolitical offenders”.9 Not only were the political prisoners, the “fascists”, excluded from the amnesty, they were expected to work even harder because of it. All over the camp, giant slogans appeared: “For this broad amnesty let us thank our dear Party and government by doubling productivity”. The production target for each worker in the clay-pits was raised to six wagons of clay per shift, far beyond the capabilities of anyone unaccustomed to physical labor, and Solzhenitsyn worked himself into the ground struggling to fill half that number. The squelch and squalor of those dismal days in the clay-pits at New Jerusalem were described graphically in The Gulag Archipelago:
And the next day that fine drizzle kept falling and falling. The clay pit had got drenched, and we were stuck in it for good. No matter how much clay you took on your spade, and no matter how much you banged it on the side of th
e truck, the clay would not drop off. And each time we had to reach over and push the clay off the spade into the car. And then we realized that we had been merely doing extra work. We put aside the spades and began simply to gather up the squelching clay from under our feet and toss it into the car.10
Solzhenitsyn’s work partner during those days in the pit was Boris Gammerov, the young man whose candid confession of faith back in Butyrki Prison had forced Solzhenitsyn to confront the shallowness of his own implicit atheism. The two men tried to keep their spirits up by discussing the importance of Vladimir Solovyev, the Russian poet, philosopher, and Christian mystic, or endeavored to make light of their labors by telling jokes. When they became too exhausted to talk, Gammerov would gain consolation by composing poetry in his head. Solzhenitsyn looked upon his friend, who was still only twenty-two, with a mixture of admiration and fear. He admired his spiritual strength and dogged resilience, but feared for his physical health. The fragment of a German tank shell was still lodged immovably in his lungs, and he was visibly weakening, his face becoming skeletal in appearance.
The young poet did not survive his first winter in the camps, dying a few months later of tuberculosis and exhaustion. “I revere in him a poet who was never even allowed to peep”, wrote Solzhenitsyn. “His spiritual image was lofty, and his verses seemed to me very powerful at the time. But I did not memorize even one of them, and I can find them nowhere now, so as to be able at least to make him a gravestone from those little stones.”11
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