Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile

^{CHAPTER NINE} BEAUTIFUL EXILE

Solzhenitsyn would always consider his close encounter with death at the Ekibastuz labor camp as the third and final of the “most important and defining moments” in his life, following his experiences as a front-line soldier and his subsequent arrest. “When at the end of jail, on top of everything else, I was placed with cancer, then I was fully cleansed and came back to a deep awareness of God and a deep understanding of life. From that time, I was formed essentially into who I am now. After that it was mostly evolution, there were no abrupt turns, no breaking directions.”¹ The process, culminating in religious conversion, was summed up succinctly in an interview Solzhenitsyn gave to Georges Suffert in 1976: “First comes the fight for survival, then the discovery of life, then God.”²

One is drawn to parallels between Solzhenitsyn’s experience and those of his great literary predecessor Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who also felt that his life had been transformed by his sufferings as a prisoner in Siberia. “It was a good school”, Dostoyevsky wrote. “It strengthened my faith and awakened my love for those who bear all their suffering with patience. It also strengthened my love for Russia and opened my eyes to the great qualities of the Russian people.” The kinship is further illustrated in Dostoyevsky’s appraisal of the importance of suffering to his development as a writer: “I have been through a lot and will see and experience even more—you shall see how much I will have to write about.”³

Having embraced Christianity, Solzhenitsyn began to sympathize more than ever with those who had been persecuted for their religious faith. At Ekibastuz, he rubbed shoulders with many devout men who had been imprisoned for their beliefs and began to feel a deep affinity with them. The Old Believers, the traditionalist recusants of the Orthodox Church, were no longer the strange anachronism they had seemed to Solzhenitsyn in his days as a Marxist. Now they were the “eternally persecuted, eternal exiles”, the ones who three centuries earlier had “divined the ruthlessness at the heart of Authority”.⁴ He heard with a sense of growing admiration about the struggle of these Old Believers to retain their faith and way of life in the hostile environment of Stalin’s Russia. In The Gulag Archipelago, he recounts the story of the Yaruyevo Old Believers who had fled from the oppression of Soviet collectivization. A whole village had literally uprooted itself and disappeared deep into the remoteness of the Russian wilderness. For twenty years, these uncompromising Christians had lived a self-sufficient existence in the vast basin of the Podkamennaya Tunguska, living in secluded isolation from the prying eyes of the outside world. The end came in 1950 when the previously unknown settlement was spotted from a plane and its position reported to the authorities. When Soviet troops arrived, they found a small but thriving community that had enjoyed “twenty years of life as free human beings among the wild beasts, instead of twenty years of… misery”. They were all wearing homespun garments and homemade knee boots, and they were all “exceptionally sturdy”.⁵ The whole village was arrested on a charge of “anti-Soviet agitation” and for constituting a hostile organization and found themselves in the same labor camps as Solzhenitsyn.

In 1946, four years before the Yaruyevo Old Believers were discovered, another group of Old Believers was arrested in a forgotten monastery somewhere in the backwoods. They were then floated on rafts down the Yenisei River bound for the camps. “Prisoners still, and still indomitable—the same under Stalin as they had been under Peter!—they jumped from the rafts into the waters of the Yenisei, where our Tommy-gunners finished them off.”⁶

Solzhenitsyn heard these stories and consigned them carefully to memory. He was determined that one day the world should know the full truth, the ugly secrets lurking in the murky depths of Soviet society. In order to do this, he had his own secrets to keep. He was now writing more than ever before, scrawling lines of verse on scraps of paper, which were burnt as soon as he had memorized the words. If his thoughts were discovered on paper, he would certainly receive a further sentence of imprisonment, and he was determined not to make the same naive mistakes that had led to his initial arrest more than seven years earlier. At Ekibastuz, his writing became almost obsessive, pressing on his consciousness at all hours of the day. “In the interval between two barrowloads of mortar I would put my bit of paper on the bricks and (without letting my neighbours see what I was doing) write down with a pencil stub the verses which had rushed into my head while I was slapping on the last hodful.” According to his own account of this period of intensive writing at Ekibastuz in 1952, he lived in a dream for much of the time and sat in the mess hall over the ritual gruel “deaf to those around me—feeling my way about my verses and trimming them to fit like bricks in a wall”.⁷

The most important of Solzhenitsyn’s fellow literary conspirators at Ekibastuz was the religious poet Anatoly Vasilyevich Silin. Solzhenitsyn had met him initially through their mutual friendship with the Baptist prisoners at the camp. He was over forty, about ten years Solzhenitsyn’s senior, and Solzhenitsyn described him as “meek and gentle with everyone, but reserved”. During their long conversations, strolling round the camp on their Sundays off, the younger prisoner discovered in the older man a kindred spirit. Silin had been a homeless child, brought up as an atheist in a children’s home, but had come across some religious books in a German prisoner-of-war camp and been totally carried away by them. From that time, he had become not only a fervent believer but also a gifted philosopher and theologian. Since he had spent the entire period since his conversion in prisons of one sort or another, he had never had the benefit of further spiritual reading. Instead, he gleaned the truth through his own perceptions, expressed in verse. According to Solzhenitsyn, Silin knew some twenty thousand lines of verse by heart at the time they met, reciting many of them to his younger fellow poet. Like Solzhenitsyn, Silin looked upon his verse as “a way of remembering and of transmitting thoughts”.⁹

For The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn gleaned a few precious memories of their time together in the camp. He recalled Silin bending over one of the rare blades of grass growing in the barren camp. “How beautiful are the grasses of the earth”, he exclaimed. “But even these the Creator has given to man for a carpet under his feet. How much more beautiful, then, must we be than they!” Silin’s theological mysticism was distinctly unpuritanical, and he asserted to Solzhenitsyn that “even earthly, carnal love is a manifestation of a lofty aspiration to Union”. On another occasion, he had answered the refusal of atheists to believe that spirit could beget matter: “Why don’t they ask themselves how crude matter could beget spirit? That way round, it would surely be a miracle. Yes, a still greater miracle!” Yet it was in his belief in the necessity of suffering that he had most in common with Solzhenitsyn. Silin declared that the soul must suffer before it was able to know the “perfect bliss of paradise”, and that “by grief alone is love perfected”. This law, though harsh, was the only way that weak men could “win eternal peace”.¹⁰

Solzhenitsyn wrote of Silin that this “doomed and exhausted slave, with four number patches on his clothes… had more in his heart to say to living human beings than the whole tribe of hacks firmly established in journals, in publishing houses, in radio—and of no use to anyone except themselves”.¹¹

If the twenty thousand lines of poetry Silin had memorized was an awesome achievement, Solzhenitsyn’s own powers of retention were scarcely less remarkable. By the time he was released, he had consigned twelve thousand lines of his own work to memory. He had been helped in this by the use of a rosary, which had been made for him by some Catholic Lithuanian prisoners. Each bead, made of small pieces of wet bread, represented a line of verse, and Solzhenitsyn could often be seen fingering the beads, apparently in prayer, but actually memorizing his poetry.

Most of the poetry Solzhenitsyn wrote at Ekibastuz, collectively entitled The Way, was broadly autobiographical. He later rejected much of it as unworthy of publication, but Prussian Nights, the epic poem based on his experiences in Prussia in January 1945, was an exception, being born from The Way but taking on a full and vibrant life of its own. Also composed at Ekibastuz were A Feast of Conquerors (published in English in 1981 under the title Victory Celebrations), which was a play written entirely in rhymed verse, and a longer play entitled Prisoners.

Many critics have highlighted the flaws in these plays, and Solzhenitsyn concedes that “they are inferior to my other work in the sense that I was using them for the expression of ideas and I was not as demanding perhaps in terms of dramaturgical requirements.”¹²

In A Feast of Conquerors, the idea Solzhenitsyn was seeking to convey found expression in the contrasting characters of Gridnev and Galina. In many respects, these two characters are an incarnation of the warring spirits at the core of all Solzhenitsyn’s art. Gridnev takes the path of least resistance, becoming utterly corrupted by his desire to find the most comfortable route through life; Galina, on the other hand, takes the path of sacrifice, embodying the alternative vision of nobility and heroism in the face of adversity, the way of the Cross. Yet the eternal verities incarnated in these two characters are also rooted in a specific historical context. A Feast of Conquerors is set in an East Prussian country house and depicts a scene similar to one experienced by Solzhenitsyn himself during the Soviet advance in January 1945. Like Prussian Nights, it is infused with autobiographical detail. For this reason, Solzhenitsyn insists that the conflict between Galina and Gridnev should be seen on several different levels, physical as well as metaphysical:

Prisoners shares many of the themes which were at the center of A Feast of Conquerors. The moral dilemma of those fighting in the anti-communist Russian Liberation Army is addressed. Having signed up with the Nazi devil, these “liberators” were swallowed up by the deep red sea of the Soviet advance. The other leitmotif in Prisoners resonant of A Feast of Conquerors is that depicting the triumph of unconquerable spirit over physical adversity. Throughout both plays, there is a recurrent anger at the injustice at the heart of the Soviet regime, an anger that became the energy, the motive force, behind Solzhenitsyn’s future work. The quiet prisoner saying his “prayers” with the crude rosary at Ekibastuz was preparing a literary time bomb, primed to explode at an unknown date in the future.

As the months of 1952 passed slowly away, another future date was pressing ever more insistently on Solzhenitsyn’s mind: the date of his release. Officially, his sentence was to end on February 9, 1953, and as the golden day approached, he dreamed of the exile that awaited him. He knew that he would not be allowed to return to normal life and that, in all probability, perpetual exile was all he could expect, but, after the ordeal of the camps, even “exile” sounded like Eden or Paradise to his freedom-starved heart. “The dream of exile burns like a secret light in the prisoner’s mind”, Solzhenitsyn wrote, “a flickering iridescent mirage, and the wasted breasts of prisoners on their dark bunks heave in sighs of longing: ‘If only they would sentence me to exile!’”¹⁴ Solzhenitsyn was not immune to such longing. As long ago as the infernal clay-pits at New Jerusalem, which had killed his friend Boris Gammerov, he had listened to the cocks crowing in the nearby village and had dreamed of exile.

His dream came true on February 13, 1953, when, four days after the official end of his sentence, he was led out of the main camp gates with a group of other released prisoners and marched under armed guard to the railway station. Almost exactly a year earlier, he had been operated on for cancer, yet now, fit and well, he was finally on the verge of freedom. Perhaps, at long last, his luckless life was about to change for the better. There followed one of the customary interminable journeys to an unknown destination and an unknown future. Several days later, Solzhenitsyn and the other prisoners arrived in Dzhambul, midway between Alma-Ata and Tashkent in Kazakhstan, where they were informed that they were being exiled “in perpetuity” to the district of Kok-Terek, on the southern fringe of Kazakhstan’s vast desert of Bet-Pak-Dala. He finally arrived at his new home on the edge of the arid wastelands of Kazakhstan on March 3, 1953, eighteen days after leaving Ekibastuz. His eight-year sentence of imprisonment had ended; his perpetual sentence of exile had begun.

For the first few days of his new life, Solzhenitsyn was drunk with freedom. On the first night, he was unable to sleep and walked and walked in the moonlight. “The donkeys sing their song. The camels sing. Every fibre in me sings: I am free! I am free!” In the end, overtaken by tiredness, he spread out on a bed of hay in a barn, listening to the horses a few yards away, standing at their mangers munching hay. He could imagine “no sweeter, no more friendly sound” on this his first night of freedom: “Champ away, you mild, inoffensive creatures!” The following day he managed to find private lodgings in a tiny hut, with a single window and a roof so low that it was impossible to stand upright. The floor was earthen, but he managed to obtain two wooden boxes, which served as a makeshift bed. He didn’t own the hut and even the boxes were borrowed, but he felt richer than he had ever been in his life. “What more could I desire?”¹⁵

Then, on March 6, as he woke on his third morning of freedom, he heard the news that surpassed all his desires. His elderly landlady, herself an exile from Novgorod, whispered that he should go to the town square and listen to the announcements on the radio. She dared not repeat the news she had just heard. Intrigued, he made his way to the square where a crowd of about two hundred people had gathered round the loudspeaker. For the most part, the crowd was clearly grief-stricken. Even before he heard the news confirmed by the announcer on the radio, he had guessed what had happened. Stalin was dead.

Throughout the Soviet Union, there was a phenomenal outpouring of largely genuine grief. In the days that followed, countless mourners would be crushed to death outside the House of Unions, where the body of the “Wise Father of all the Peoples” lay in state, in the very Columned Hall where he had ordered the infamous show trials in the 1930s that had consigned so many thousands of his countrymen to the labor camps.

In The First Circle, Solzhenitsyn allowed himselfthe liberty of imagining Stalin’s last days, locked up in his room, distrustful of everyone he knew, fearing assassination. Stalin, the great dictator who had exiled millions of Russians to the far-flung corners of the Soviet empire, was himself an exile in his own palace, an exile of his own paranoia. The irony was not lost on the happy exile in Kok-Terek.

Needless to say, Solzhenitsyn’s feelings as he heard the news of Stalin’s death were anything but grief-stricken:

He returned to his hut to spend the remainder of the day writing a poem, “The Fifth of March”, to commemorate the occasion. Certainly his life in exile had begun magnificently.

In April, Solzhenitsyn was finally accepted as a teacher of maths and physics in a local school, having been rejected when he had initially applied a month earlier. He was overjoyed. “Shall I describe the happiness it gave me to go into the classroom and pick up the chalk? This was really the day of my release, the restoration of my citizenship.”¹⁸

At last, or so it must have seemed as he began life as a village schoolteacher, Solzhenitsyn’s future could be faced with optimism. His circumstances, which had already improved beyond measure since the misery of the camps, could only get better. He was still only thirty-four years old. He had many good years of life ahead of him. Then, like a death knell tolling his doom across the barren steppe, the specter of his cancer returned. As the year rolled on, the deadly disease tormented him more and more, “as though it was in league with my jailers”.¹⁹ Intermittently, but with ever greater frequency, he was struck by excruciating pains in the abdominal area. During the day, he could barely stand up in front of his class, and at night he slept very little. He had no appetite for food and was visibly weakening with every week that passed. At first, he had not wanted to believe that the cause of his illness was a return of the cancer that had nearly claimed his life in Ekibastuz. His hopes were raised, albeit falsely, by the inability of the medical authorities in Kok-Terek to diagnose his condition. They thought it might be an ulcer, or perhaps gastritis. Yet as the year drew to a close, Solzhenitsyn began to fear the worst. Perhaps his own life was also drawing to a close. Hurriedly, he wrote down all that he had previously written in the camp and stored in his memory, and all that he had composed in exile since his release, and buried it in the ground in the forlorn hope that someone, some day, might dig it up by accident and read it.

Since his condition continued to baffle the local doctors, it was decided that he needed the attention of specialists. He was granted permission to leave for Dzhambul, the administrative center of the region, for further tests on his abdomen. An X-ray revealed exactly what Solzhenitsyn had feared. The cause of his pain was not an ulcer, but a tumor the size of a big fist, which had grown from the back wall of the abdominal cavity. It was entirely possible, he was informed, that the tumor was malignant.

Solzhenitsyn returned to Kok-Terek in early December, knowing he would have to report to the Oncological Health Center in Tashkent a few weeks later. Once again, he was staring death in the face, gaining a few priceless morsels of consolation from the belief that death would not be the end of life. Yet even his faith could not totally eclipse the bitterness he felt at what appeared to be the futility of his life. “I remember clearly that night before I left for Tashkent, the last night of 1953: it seemed as though for me life, and literature, was ending right there. I felt cheated.”²⁰

Solzhenitsyn was admitted to Ward 13 of the Tashkent Medical Institute on January 4, 1954. The following day, a drawing was made on his stomach, dividing it into four squares, and each square was irradiated in turn. Over the next month and a half, he had fifty-five sessions of radiotherapy, during which the tumor was bombarded with 12,000 roentgens of radiation.

Solzhenitsyn’s experiences in the Tashkent Medical Institute during January and February 1954 became the background to, and the inspiration for, his novel Cancer Ward. This novel, like The First Circle and so much of his other work, is infused throughout with autobiographical fragments. In the character of Kostoglotov, the most autobiographically sketched of the characters in Cancer Ward, there is much to be gleaned about Solzhenitsyn’s own feelings as a cancer patient. Kostoglotov tells Zoya, one of the nurses, that during the last month he hasn’t been able to lie down, sit down, or stand without it hurting and has been sleeping only a few minutes a day. As a result he has done plenty of thinking:

This transcendental approach to life’s ultimate realities is contrasted with the inability of other characters in the novel to come to terms with their terminal illness. For these people, corrupted by the transient material comforts of life, the prospect of death is unthinkable, unmentionable. “Modern man is helpless when confronted with death”, another character muses; “he has no weapon to meet it with.”²² The angst at the very core of modern man is analyzed in the relationships of the various cancer patients in the novel, not only with each other but with themselves as they struggle to deal with the abyss lying before them. In one particularly poignant passage, Kostoglotov, in the midst of an argument on the validity of Marxism, suddenly perceives the pettiness and futility of politics in the face of higher truths: “Was it weariness or illness that gave him this urge to yawn? Or was it because these arguments, counter-arguments, technical terms, bitter, angry glances suddenly seemed so much squelching in a swamp? None of this was to be compared with the disease that afflicted them or with death, which loomed before them. He yearned for the touch of something different, something pure and unshakable. But where he would find that Oleg had no idea.”²³

This passage from Cancer Ward encapsulates much of Solzhenitsyn’s central message to the modern world—the ultimate subsistence of politics within a higher moral and ultimately religious truth; the transcendent nature of pain and death and the immensity of both in relation to transient circumstantial comforts; and, perhaps most important of all, the inarticulate yearning of agnostic man for the sublime depths of theological truth, a return to religious faith. Commenting on this particular passage, Solzhenitsyn agreed that he was attempting to grapple with the way people struggled with eternal verities in the absence of religion: “I am describing Soviet people who are devoid of religion. Therefore there’s a feeling for some sort of other form, some ersatz. They’re groping, they’re trying to clamber upwards.”²⁴

There were, however, other motivations behind the writing of Cancer Ward. One was the desire to explore “the relationship between the corporeal and the spiritual aspects of love”.

Solzhenitsyn was discharged from the cancer ward in Tashkent in mid-March. When he arrived two months earlier, he had been given only a one-in-three chance of survival. He had responded well to treatment and had made a remarkable recovery. The tumor had shrunk to only half its previous size. But he was still not out of danger and was told that he would have to return in June for a further course of treatment.

Before returning to exile at Kok-Terek, Solzhenitsyn took the opportunity to wander round the city and was astonished to find a church that was actually open. For the first time since attending requiem Mass as a child with his mother, he entered a real, living church and gave thanks for having survived to see another spring.

In June, he returned to Tashkent, where radiotherapy was resumed. As he lay once more in the cancer ward, with thoughts of the future novel floating in his head, the horrors of the Gulag he had left less than eighteen months earlier were carrying on without him. During that same June, at Kengir Camp in Kazakhstan, eight thousand political prisoners had staged a mutiny and taken over the camp. Religious services were held, and men and women who had previously corresponded secretly from their separate stockades met and consummated their love. Then, on June 25, the Soviet tanks rolled in, crushing everyone in their way. One prisoner remembered the corner of a hut collapsing “as if in a nightmare”, and the tank rolling over the wreckage and over living bodies. Prisoners were bayoneted in cold blood; women, desperately trying to shield their men from the cold steel, were bayoneted first. One young couple, unprepared to be separated again so soon after they had been united, threw themselves under a tank clasped in each other’s arms, choosing to die together rather than live apart. By the time the rebellion was crushed, some three hundred prisoners had been killed.²⁶

Almost simultaneously, Jean-Paul Sartre, in an act of willful ignorance reminiscent of that shown by Wells, Shaw, and the Webbs in the thirties, was eulogizing the Soviet regime in the pages of Liberation. Having recently visited the Soviet Union, he assured his interviewer that “Soviet citizens criticize their government much more and more effectively than we do. There is total freedom of criticism in the USSR.”²⁷ Furthermore, Sartre assured Liberation’s readers, the only reason that Soviet citizens did not travel abroad was not that they were in any way prevented from doing so but that they had no desire to leave their marvelous country.

Meanwhile, in his marvelous country, Solzhenitsyn was discharged from the hospital, totally cured of the cancer, and returned to the tiny village on the edge of the desert where he was condemned to live in perpetuity, prevented even from traveling to other parts of the Soviet Union, let alone abroad.

Back in Kok-Terek, Solzhenitsyn threw himself into his writing. He wrote another play, initially called The Republic of Labor but eventually published under the title The Love Girl and the Innocent, and in the following year, 1955, he began work on his first novel. This was The First Circle, based on his experiences at the Marfino sharashka. He must have been helped in this by a renewal of his acquaintance with Dimitri Panin and Lev Kopelev, his old intellectual sparring partners at Marfino. Of course, they couldn’t possibly meet in the flesh—Panin, like Solzhenitsyn, was still in exile, while Kopelev was living in Moscow—but, after Panin’s wife had succeeded in tracking her husband’s friends down, they began to correspond regularly.

In many respects, Solzhenitsyn later looked on these months in Kok-Terek as among the happiest in his life. In The Gulag Archipelago, he referred to the period as “my two years of truly Beautiful Exile”, evoking with delight the contentment that reigned within him: “[A]ll my days were lived in a state of constant blissfully heightened awareness, and I felt no constraint on my freedom. At school I could give as many lessons as I wanted, in both shifts—and every lesson brought a throbbing happiness, never weariness or boredom. And every day I had a little time left for writing—and there was never any need for me to attune my thoughts: as soon as I sat down the lines raced from under my pen.”²⁸ Regular employment as a schoolteacher had improved his financial circumstances. He bought a little clay house and a firm table to write on but still eschewed other material comforts, choosing to continue sleeping on the same bare wooden boxes. He did, however, invest in a short-wave radio set, listening surreptitiously for any forbidden news from the West, holding his ear close to the speaker in an effort to make out what he could through “the cascading crash of jamming”. Yet for all his efforts, he heard little to inspire him: “We were so worn out by decades of lying nonsense, we yearned for any scrap of truth, however tattered—and yet this work was not worth the time I wasted on it: the infantile West had no riches of wisdom or courage to bestow on those of us who were nurtured by the Archipelago.”²⁹

As with his time in the Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn “was fully conscious that exile was a blessing”, cherishing the “purer vision” it gave. He was utterly content and fully resigned to living in Kok-Terek if not in perpetuity, then at least for twenty years or so. Events in the Soviet Union were on the move, however, even if the isolated exile was not fully aware of the changes afoot. Soon, much sooner than he expected, he would be catapulted back into the center of the storm.

Following Stalin’s death, a power struggle had ensued within the Soviet leadership as warring factions fought for supremacy. The first victim was Lavrenty Beria, the hated chief of the secret police, who was arrested and executed in July 1953. Georgi Malenkov, who had succeeded Stalin in 1953, was forced from office in February 1955 and in July 1957 was accused with Molotov and Kaganovich of setting up an “anti-party group”. In one of the many ironies of fate in the twisted history of the Soviet Union, Malenkov was dismissed from all senior party positions and exiled to Kazakhstan as manager of a hydroelectric plant. Molotov, meanwhile, was exiled to Outer Mongolia, where he served as ambassador until 1960. Kaganovich would soon disappear without trace but was last heard of in August 1957, in “a position of considerable responsibility” in a Siberian cement works. One doubts whether these erstwhile heroes of the Soviet Union would have agreed with Solzhenitsyn that exile could be a blessing.

The man who emerged triumphant from this bout of internecine feuding and bloodletting was Nikita Khrushchev, who, in 1956, broke the taboo by giving a “Secret Speech” to the Twentieth Party Congress in which Stalin was criticized openly for the first time. Khrushchev officially implicated the “Wise Father of all the Peoples” in Kirov’s murder and held him responsible for the sufferings of millions during the Terror. The unspeakable had been uttered, and many delegates to the Congress were said to have been traumatized by the revelations—not that Khrushchev was himself blameless. During the Terror, he had been so ruthless in the execution of Stalin’s orders that he had earned the nickname “Butcher of the Ukraine”. Indeed, in the very year in which he made the Secret Speech, he earned another nickname as the “Butcher of Budapest”, ordering Soviet tanks into Hungary to put down brutally the anti-communist uprising there. Later he was to oversee the building of the Berlin Wall and take the world to the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Nonetheless, Khrushchev’s policy of de-Stalinization came as a great relief to millions of persecuted Soviet citizens. During 1956, thousands of political prisoners were rehabilitated and returned from the camps or from exile, and Solzhenitsyn was destined to be one tiny but scarcely insignificant drop in that returning ocean.

Solzhenitsyn’s rehabilitation came following a session of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR on February 6, 1956. During the course of the session, the Chief Military Prosecutor called for all charges against Solzhenitsyn to be dropped on the grounds that there was an “absence of proof of a crime”. The reasons given were as follows:

“These statements by Solzhenitsyn”, the Chief Military Prosecutor asserted, “do not constitute proof of a crime.”³⁰

The Collegium then questioned a number of people, including Natalya, to whom Solzhenitsyn was alleged to have made anti-Soviet allegations, all of whom “characterized Solzhenitsyn as a Soviet patriot and denied that he had conducted anti-Soviet conversations”. The Collegium also examined Solzhenitsyn’s military record and a report by Captain Melnikov with whom he had served. From these, the Collegium concluded that Solzhenitsyn had “fought courageously for his homeland, more than once displayed personal heroism and inspired the devotion of the section he commanded”. Furthermore, “Solzhenitsyn’s section was the best in the unit for discipline and battle effectiveness.”

Having examined all the evidence, the Collegium ruled that “Solzhenitsyn’s actions do not constitute a crime and his case should be closed for lack of proof.”³¹

The decision to drop all charges had come a decade too late, after the man who was now declared innocent had already served eight years in prison and three in exile. One wonders whether Solzhenitsyn still managed to raise a wry smile when reading the Supreme Court document. He had, almost overnight, been transformed from a hated enemy of the people, a pariah, to a war hero and wise critic of Stalin’s deficiencies. Now, presumably, he was supposed to go home quietly, like a good and loyal Soviet citizen, and say nothing of the horrors he had seen and experienced.

Little did the Chief Military Prosecutor know it, but he had plucked this ticking time bomb from the relative safety of a village in Kazakhstan and placed it carefully at the heart of Soviet society. Solzhenitsyn, strengthened and purified by his time in prison and exile, was primed and ready to explode on an unsuspecting literary world.