Solzhenitsyn

^{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?

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:

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

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.

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 sweetly 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.

A month after Panin’s arrival at Marfino, another prisoner appeared on the scene who, in many respects, was the diametrical and dialectical opposite of Panin. This was Lev Kopelev, who, as a deeply committed Marxist, loyal Party member, and staunch supporter of the Soviet regime, seemed to represent everything that Panin despised. Surprisingly, however, the two men were best of friends as well as best of enemies, having met previously in Butyrki before their respective transfers reunited them at the sharashka.

In spite of their differences, Panin had befriended Kopelev in Butyrki. Unlike Panin, Kopelev was still a relative novice in the camps, still receiving food parcels from his family. To Panin’s great surprise, Kopelev broke a loaf of white bread in two and handed him half. After seven years in the labor camps of the Arctic, Panin had forgotten how white bread tasted. “If Lev had given me only a tiny bit of it, I would have been rapturously happy. But here was halfa loaf! His grand gesture affected me…. A generous nature and a nobility of spirit distinguished Lev from ordinary men.”³¹

In fact, Kopelev’s generous nature and nobility of spirit, both dangerous virtues in communist Russia, had eventually caused his imprisonment. During the latter stages of the war, he had reached the rank of major and, being fluent in German, was responsible for organizing anti-Nazi propaganda behind the enemy lines. His downfall came when he opposed the looting, rape, and terror carried out by the advancing Soviet army under the slogan “Blood for blood, death for death”. Accused of being “soft on the Germans”, he was arrested in the same area of the Prussian front as Solzhenitsyn and narrowly escaped a charge of treason.

Solzhenitsyn’s friendship with Kopelev, like that of Panin, was to be hugely influential and was also immortalized in The First Circle, where Kopelev became the inspiration for the character of Lev Rubin. Solzhenitsyn, Panin, and Kopelev, reinvented in The First Circle as, respectively, Nerzhin, Sologdin, and Rubin, formed a triumvirate of truth-seekers whose interminable arguments never became quarrels. For Solzhenitsyn, positioned midway between the two dialectically opposed combatants, the experience was pivotal to his own development, enabling him to weigh up each thesis and antithesis carefully before forming a new synthesis of his own from the clash of ideas. The benefits accrued were considerable and came to creative fruition in one of his finest novels, which at its highest level is a hymn of praise to the pursuit of philosophical truth in the midst of tribulation. “Time to sort yourself out”, Sologdin tells Nerzhin, “to understand the part of good and evil in human life. Where could you do this better than in prison?” Nerzhin sighs, caught between a scepticism he is uncomfortable with and a faith beyond his reach. “All we know is that we don’t know anything”, he replies dejectedly. Yet to himself, Nerzhin ponders with gratitude the insight his friendship with this believing Christian has conferred on him: “[I]t was Sologdin who had first prompted him to reflect that prison was not only a curse but also a blessing”.³²

“Thank God for prison!” Nerzhin exclaims to Rubin on another occasion. “It has given me the chance to think things out. To understand the nature of happiness we first have to know what it means to eat one’s fill.” He reminds Rubin of the foul prison food they had been given during their interrogation at the Lubyanka:

“You’ve certainly worked it all out”, Rubin replies sceptically, asking with suspicion whether Sologdin had put Nerzhin up to it.³³

“Perhaps he has”, Nerzhin concedes. “For you I suppose it’s just idealism and metaphysics. But listen! The happiness that comes from easy victories, from the total fulfilment of desire, from success, from feeling completely gorged—that is suffering! That is spiritual death, a kind of unending moral indigestion… people don’t know what they are striving for. They exhaust themselves in the senseless pursuit of material things and die without realizing their spiritual wealth.”³⁴

Looking back over the spiritual wealth he has accrued in the half-century since he first received these revelations, Solzhenitsyn states with simplicity, “I am deeply convinced that God participates in every life.”³⁵ Similarly, in his autobiography, The Oak and the Calf, he hints at the role of providence in his life and work. In 1948, however, Solzhenitsyn did not have this spiritual wealth to draw on. Nor did he know that providence was about to offer further opportunities to make spiritual profit from material loss.