Solzhenitsyn

by Joseph Pearce

  Solzhenitsyn escaped from the exhausting labor, the sludge, and the reddish-gray monotony of the clay-pits quite unexpectedly on September 9, 1945. New Jerusalem was to become a camp for German prisoners of war, and, in order to make way for them, all the current prisoners at the camp were to be transferred elsewhere. Solzhenitsyn was being returned to Moscow, this time to Kaluga Gate, on the south side of the city. As he made the return journey, his spirits lifted. He had enjoyed the outward journey, only three weeks earlier, as “one of the supreme hours” of his life, and there is no reason to believe that his feelings on escaping the infernal pits of New Jerusalem were any less exhilarating. He now seemed to see the beauties of life for the first time. Once he had been free to enjoy them whenever he chose but had been too blind to see; now that he was deprived of them except on rare moments such as these journeys between camps, the whole of creation came to glorious life. As the prison transport sped through the Russian countryside heading for Moscow, “a whirlwind of scents of new-mown hay and of the early evening freshness of the meadows swirled around our shaven heads. This meadow breeze—who could breathe it more greedily than prisoners? Real genuine green blinded our eyes, grown used to grey and more grey . . . all the air, the speed, the colours were ours. Oh, forgotten brightness of the world!”12 For the first time he was enjoying what G. K. Chesterton called “the glorious gift of the senses and the sensational experience of sensation”.13 He was fully alive. As the prison transport arrived in Moscow, he wondered whether the teeming thousands of free people in the city streets were as fully alive as he was. “The streetcars were red, the trolley-buses sky-blue, the crowd in white and many-coloured. Do they themselves see these colours as they crowd onto the buses?”14 Could they see, or were they as blind to the beauty around them as they were to the suffering of their compatriots in the camps?

  Solzhenitsyn was destined to spend ten months at Kaluga Gate, until, in the early afternoon of July 18, 1946, he was transferred the short distance across the city to Butyrki, where he had spent a month the preceding summer. In the year that had elapsed since he was last there, the prison had become busier and more crowded. It took eleven hours for Solzhenitsyn to be processed in the now familiar way: search—endless minutes alone in a windowless cell—bath—endless minutes alone in a windowless cell—fumigation—endless minutes alone in a windowless cell. . . . All punctuated at regular intervals with the endless repetition of the catch-phrase: name, date of birth, place of birth, charge, and sentence.

  It was not until three o’clock the following morning that Solzhenitsyn finally arrived at Cell 75, his new home. The overcrowded and stuffy conditions in the hot July air, the buzz of tireless flies flitting from sleeper to sleeper, making them twitch, must have reminded him of the criminal-infested cell at Krasnaya Presnya. This time eighty men had been squeezed into a cell designed for twenty-five, and Solzhenitsyn found a space of unoccupied floor beneath the lowest tier of bunks, next to the latrine tank. Throughout the night, prisoners needing to use the latrine tank would step across Solzhenitsyn’s fitfully sleeping body, and the acrid stench of the tank itself, putrefying in the heat, bore on his nostrils as mercilessly as the two bright electric bulbs bore on his eyelids, and the incessant flies bore on his skin. Yet such was the horror of life in the labor camps that this was luxury in comparison.

  I was happy! There, on the asphalt floor, under the bunks, in a dog’s den, with dust and crumbs from the bunks falling in our eyes, I was absolutely happy, without any qualifications. Epicurus spoke truly: Even the absence of variety can be sensed as satisfaction when a variety of dissatisfactions has preceded it. After camp, which had already seemed endless, and after a ten-hour workday, after cold, rain, and aching back, oh, what happiness it was to lie there for whole days on end, to sleep, and nevertheless receive a pound and a half of bread and two hot meals a day—made from cattle feed, or from dolphin’s flesh.15

  After the ordeal of forced labor at New Jerusalem and Kaluga Gate, sleep was particularly welcome. During his two months in the cell, he slept enough “to make up for the past year and the year ahead”. Nevertheless, his second spell at Butyrki was not all spent in sleep, and he developed many friendships with fellow prisoners. There were discussion groups, games of chess, a limited number of books to read, and all the while his education at the hands of others was continuing. He listened intently as émigrés spoke of their experiences in various parts of the world, and he soaked up the lectures by others on a host of subjects ranging from Gogol and Le Corbusier to the habits of bees.

  He was not shy of getting involved himself when the occasion arose. When an Orthodox priest, Evgeny Divnich, strayed from discussions of theology to denunciations of Marxism, Solzhenitsyn felt duty-bound to spring to its defense. He was, after all, still a Marxist, wasn’t he? Battle was joined between the Orthodox believer and the loyal child of the Revolution. Divnich condemned Marxism and claimed that, as a political philosophy, it was a spent force and that nobody in Europe had taken it seriously for years. Solzhenitsyn did his best to counter the arguments with all the well-rehearsed and well-worn ripostes, but somehow his responses sounded hollow and less convincing than they had done in the past. “Even a year ago I would have confidently demolished him with quotations; how disparagingly I would have mocked him!”16 Now, however, a year in prison had left its mark, and he was no longer so sure of the correctness of his former beliefs. He hesitated, fumbled, conceded points that he never would have done previously. Almost imperceptibly, he had changed over the past twelve months, and it was only when he was called upon to defend his old ideas in open debate that he realized the change that had taken place. “My whole line of reasoning began to weaken, and so they could beat me in our arguments without half-trying.”17

  A more tangible ghost from Solzhenitsyn’s past than that of his youthful Marxism returned to haunt him during his brief stay at Butyrki in the summer of 1946. To his embarrassment, he bumped into the elderly German civilian whom he had obliged to carry his suitcase on the long march to Brodnica almost eighteen months earlier. Solzhenitsyn blushed apologetically at the recollection of his ignoble actions, but the German appeared to have wholly forgiven him and to be genuinely pleased by their meeting. Having exercised forgiveness, exorcising the ghost of Solzhenitsyn’s guilt in the process, the German informed his erstwhile persecutor that he had been sentenced to ten years’ hard labor. Looking on the elderly man’s worn and weary features, Solzhenitsyn knew that he would not live to see Germany again.

  Solzhenitsyn’s reprieve from the harshness of the labor camps was due to his re-categorization as a “special-assignment prisoner” bound for one of the special prison institutes for scientific research, known as sharashkas. These were fully equipped with laboratories, research apparatus, workshops, and sometimes whole factories, and were run by prisoners capable of producing results in their specialist fields. Solzhenitsyn had been saved from the hardship and drudgery of the camps, and possibly from death itself, by his degree in mathematics and physics from Rostov University.

  The first sharashka to which Solzhenitsyn was consigned, in September 1946, was at Rybinsk on the upper reaches of the Volga, where jet engines were being designed and constructed. After five months, he was moved to another sharashka, in Zagorsk, but was informed that he was there only in transit and that his final destination was yet another sharashka which was to be opened shortly. This was Marfino, otherwise known as “Special Prison No. 16”, on the northern outskirts of Moscow, to which Solzhenitsyn was dispatched on July 9, 1947. It became the inspiration and the setting for almost the whole of his novel The First Circle, in which Marfino is renamed “Mavrino”. Life at the Special Prison is described in the novel as better than life in the camps: “There was meat for dinner and butter for breakfast. You didn’t have to work till the skin came off your hands and your fingers froze. You didn’t have to flop down at night half dead, in your filthy rope sandals, on the wooden boards of a bunk. At Mavrino you slept sweet
ly under a nice clean sheet.”18

  Three months after Solzhenitsyn’s own arrival at Marfino, a new prisoner arrived at the sharashka. He was Dimitri Panin.

  In his memoirs, Panin described his first meeting with Solzhenitsyn on the morning after his arrival in October 1947. Panin recalled seeing “an impressive figure of a man in an officer’s greatcoat” coming down the stairs and took “an immediate liking to the candid face, the bold blue eyes, the splendid light brown hair, the aquiline nose”.19 For his part, Solzhenitsyn appeared to be equally taken by Panin. The character of Dimitri Sologdin in The First Circle was so closely based on Panin that Panin described him as “my literary double”. Panin also considered The First Circle a vivid and honest record of their time in Marfino, in which the inmates are brilliantly described, and that in the novel’s principal character, Gleb Nerzhin, Solzhenitsyn “gives an extraordinarily truthful and accurate picture of himself”.20 This being so, it seems legitimate to draw extensively from The First Circle in order to throw light on Solzhenitsyn’s relationship with Panin.

  Physically, Sologdin / Panin is described in the novel as though he was the very image of an idealized knight of Christendom. He had a high, straight forehead, regular features, penetrating blue eyes, a blond mustache and beard, muscular physique, and upright bearing. This striking physical image was complemented by a mind of equal stature, diamond-sharp in both science and philosophy. If not the epitome of a Nietzschean superman, he was certainly an icon of medieval Christian chivalry.

  Panin was six years older than Solzhenitsyn and could remember scenes from the Revolution and civil war that the latter had been too young to experience directly. From childhood onward, he had remained hostile to the communist regime. As a child, Panin could remember anti-Soviet intellectuals among the small circles of friends and acquaintances of his parents and enjoyed the benefit of their candid, accurate appraisals of past events. He had the same experience of Soviet indoctrination at school as had Solzhenitsyn but, being older, appears to have been largely immune to its effects: “They pumped us full of political propaganda and other sickening rubbish, all this in an atmosphere of mutual denunciation and constant spying.” He appears to have been similarly immune to the anti-Christian nature of Soviet education: “Next, there was the brutal uprooting of religion. Horrible persecutions were started against the church. By these means, the authorities encouraged many believers to break away. And then the active propagation of atheism began. Religious literature, as well as philosophical works unpalatable to the regime, were destroyed wholesale. Furnaces burned entire libraries down to ashes.”21

  Panin graduated from a technical school in 1928, a resolute if quietly resigned Christian in a revolutionary and atheist world. He remembered the “frightful year” of his graduation when he witnessed the systematic destruction of hundreds of churches in Moscow. In 1931, the magnificent Cathedral of Christ the Savior, erected in thanksgiving for Russia’s deliverance from Napoleon in 1812, was demolished. In spite of this, there were no public protests. “The Russian people, deformed by the weight of dictatorship, were being reduced to abject compliance.”22 Only once did he witness the pain that such persecution was causing beneath the seemingly calm surface of Soviet society. With secret admiration, he had observed an elderly woman on her knees in the rubble of a demolished cathedral, praying fervently and making the sign of the cross, oblivious to the danger she was bringing upon herself. He was told that her husband, a fervent believer, had died in prison.

  Although Panin detested the communist regime, harboring a secret nostalgia for pre-revolutionary Russia and a secret sympathy for the Whites in the civil war who “had tried to save Russia—and the rest of the world as well—from impending disaster”,23 he was himself being browbeaten into submission by the system he despised. In 1930, a massive campaign was started in factories throughout the Soviet Union to induce the workforces into membership of the Communist Party. The factory just outside Moscow in which Panin worked as an engineer was included in this campaign, and, reluctantly, the closet anti-communist joined the Komsomol, remaining a member “in name only”. Almost immediately, he regretted his decision to join but found that he was trapped in the communist net: “I could not resign—an open break would have carried the threat of prison. I had to sweat it out until they considered me old enough to be crossed off the rolls officially. All the time I was a member I had a feeling of shameful complicity.”24

  Panin found himself living a precarious life, engaged in doublethink for much of the time. At work, he made the right noises because to make the wrong ones was perilous. At home and with trusted friends, and in the privacy of his own thoughts, he maintained a staunch antipathy to the Soviet regime. He likened this period to “a walk over a tightrope stretched above a horrible, evil-smelling quicksand bog”.25 Trying desperately to keep his balance, he knew that one slip would mean disaster.

  Unfortunately, this precarious state of affairs led Panin to find allies in various unsavory guises. Almost anyone was a friend as long as they were an enemy of Stalin, even “untouchables” like Hitler and Mussolini. Endeavoring to explain this youthful error in his autobiography, he saw it in terms of the vacuum created by an insufficient understanding of Christianity: “A godless dictatorship both sullies and disfigures a man. Only a deep religious faith can provide him with stout armour. When the church is destroyed and people are left on their own, it is easy for them to fall in with evil schemes.”26

  From 1932 onward, articles abusive of the Nazis began appearing in Soviet newspapers. The Nazis in Germany and the fascists in Italy were depicted by Soviet propaganda much as a Christian might depict the Antichrist. Hitler and Mussolini were the ultimate embodiment of evil. Meanwhile, of course, in Germany and Italy, the very opposite was being preached. National socialism and fascism would save the world from the horrors of communism, it was claimed, and only strong men like Hitler and Mussolini could stave off the impending world revolution. The Antichrist, as far as fascist propaganda was concerned, was Stalin.

  Perhaps Panin’s analysis was correct, and it was easy for whole peoples to fall in with evil schemes without the stout armor provided by religious faith. Throughout the world, anti-communists became fascist sympathizers, and anti-fascists found themselves fellow travelers with the communists. The world, it seemed, was heading for Armageddon, after which either one extreme or the other would emerge triumphant. Amidst this madness, the Catholic Church emerged, not for the first time in her history, as a guardian of sanity. The Church continued to condemn both the atheism of the communists and the paganism of the Nazis, considering the two creeds nothing more than opposite sides of the same pernicious coin. “Totalitarianism”, wrote Pope Pius XII, “extends the civil power beyond due limits; it determines and fixes, both in substance and form, every field of activity, and thus compresses all legitimate manifestation of life—personal, local and professional—into a mechanical unity of collectivity under the stamp of nation, race, or class.”27 Earlier, the same Pope had pointed to the futility of all materialistic creeds: “The wound of our individualistic and materialistic society will not be healed, the deep chasm will not be bridged, by no matter what system, if the system itself is materialistic in principle and mechanical in practice.”28

  This teaching, fully comprehended by Panin and Solzhenitsyn alike in later years, was beyond their grasp in the years leading up to the Second World War. Solzhenitsyn was convinced of the correctness of Marxism-Leninism, hating fascism as an “enemy of the people”; Panin took the opposite view, though obviously in secret, that the rise of the Nazis in Germany offered the prospect of Russia’s liberation from communism. Panin’s heart leapt with hope, if not with joy, on hearing of the Nazis’ rise to power in 1933. “The Nazis’ theory of racial superiority and the aggression that it generated naturally provoked our sharp disapproval”, he wrote in his autobiography. “I never met a single man in the Soviet Union who made excuses for them. Nonetheless, Hitler’s promise of a
war against Stalin gave the hope, strength, and patience we needed for enduring a terrible existence while we awaited the hour of our opportunity. Russians in all walks of life expected there would be a war of liberation; it made no difference to them who triggered it off. Our constant dream was that war would start very soon.”29

  War seemed to be edging ever closer in 1936 with the eruption of a civil war in Spain that looked like a dress rehearsal for the future world conflict between communism and fascism. The Soviet Union was openly backing the communist forces in Spain, supplying weapons, equipment, even pilots. Communist parties throughout the world aided their Spanish comrades by supplying volunteers in the international brigades. At the same time, the Germans and the Italians were backing Franco’s fascists. Thus the Spanish Civil War, over-subscribed with weapons of mass destruction on both sides and fomented by the ideological hatreds that divided the combatants, raged for three years until the final victory of Franco.

  The war in Spain coincided with the worst excesses of the communist terror in the Soviet Union, making all discussion of the rights and wrongs of the Spanish war totally impossible, at least in public. In private, however, Panin was wholly on the side of Franco, an act of anti-communist heresy guaranteed to lead to his arrest if discovered. “At the time,” he wrote, “we were not at all interested in how much the Franco regime differed from the Western democracies—as slaves under a dictatorship, we could not afford the luxury of such fine distinctions; therefore we gave Spain’s indomitable anticommunists our approval and support.”30

  It was inevitable that one so heretical to communist orthodoxy as Dimitri Panin could not survive at liberty for long in the inquisitorial atmosphere of Stalinist Russia. Eventually, he spoke too freely in the presence of unsympathetic ears and was denounced to the authorities by a work colleague. This led, in July 1940, to a sentence of five years in the labor camps. In 1943, while still serving his first sentence in various camps in the Arctic north, he was given a second sentence, this time for a period of ten years, for “defeatist propaganda”. Thus, when Solzhenitsyn first met Panin in Marfino he had already served seven years, suffering unimaginable hardships that had in turn hardened his hatred of the communist regime still further.