Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile

^{CHAPTER TWO} BLISSFUL IGNORANCE

In spite of the hardships he suffered as a child, Solzhenitsyn was lucky compared with many children his own age. For millions of children in Russia during the 1920s, life had become a living nightmare. In an unpublished memoir, Professor Doctor W. W. Krysko recalls the horrific scene he encountered as a ten-year-old in the spring of 1920. As the snows melted in the field outside his father’s factory in Rostov, mounds of corpses and skeletons appeared. Thousands of bodies had been dumped there for eventual burial. Among the human remains were the carcasses of horses, whose rib cages became the dens of hundreds of wild dogs, wolves, jackals, and hyenas. And worst of all, among the corpses and the dogs, lived bands of equally wild children, orphaned and abandoned.¹

These were the bezprizornye, the uncared-for, the unwanted by-product of revolution and civil war who could be seen all over Russia. In 1923, Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya, estimated their number at around eight million. Almost a decade later, Malcolm Muggeridge, working in the Soviet Union as the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent, witnessed these children “going about in packs, barely articulate or recognizably human, with pinched animal faces, tangled hair and empty eyes. I saw them in Moscow and Leningrad, clustered under bridges, lurking in railway stations, suddenly emerging like a pack of wild monkeys, then scattering and disappearing.”² Some as young as three years old, the bezprizornye survived by thieving and scrounging and many, both boys and girls, were prostitutes. Realizing that these hordes of street children were a social embarrassment, especially when observed by astute and horrified Western news correspondents, the state rounded up as many as could be caught and placed them in so-called “children’s republics” from which they later emerged as the brutalized, amoral wretches responsible for keeping order in the camps of the Gulag Archipelago. As Solzhenitsyn’s friend Dimitri Panin wrote:

All of this was completely beyond the experience of the young Solzhenitsyn. When he arrived at Rostov, a wide-eyed six-year-old, early in 1925, life in the city seemed, on the surface at least, to have improved immeasurably from the nightmare reality that the ten-year-old Krysko had faced five years earlier in the same place. There were no horrific scenes of unburied corpses; even the street children, it seems, had been “tidied away”. Instead, Solzhenitsyn remained blissfully ignorant of the events unfolding around him until, almost twenty years later, they swallowed him up with the millions of others who had gone before him. In the meantime, the child would become a precocious schoolboy at the top of his class.

Solzhenitsyn started school in 1926 at the former Pokrovsky College, a highly respected establishment in the center of the city renamed after the Soviet minister Zinoviev following the civil war. Colloquially, however, the local people called it the “Malevich Gymnasium” after its popular and talented headmaster, Vladimir Malevich. It was generally considered the best school in Rostov.

Malevich had been headmaster of the school since before the Revolution and, as such, was considered politically unreliable. Although he was still in charge when Solzhenitsyn arrived, he was forced out in 1930, by which time most of the other pre-revolutionary teachers had also been removed. Malevich was eventually arrested in 1937 or 1938 and sent to the labor camps. It is thought that Solzhenitsyn may have sought him out and interviewed him when he was collecting material for The Gulag Archipelago.

The future purge of Solzhenitsyn’s teachers was no more than a malevolent threat on the horizon when he started school. His first teacher, Elena Belgorodtseva, was a devout woman who was known to have icons hanging in her home. She would have had no objection to the cross around her new pupil’s neck, which he had worn since infancy. Nevertheless, state education was becoming increasingly atheist in nature, and the Christianity of the young boy’s home life began to contrast ever more starkly with the fundamental tenets of what he was being taught at school.

At home, the influence of his mother’s religious faith was reinforced during the school holidays by visits to his Uncle Roman and Aunt Irina. Most particularly, the devotion of his aunt exerted a lasting influence. “Solzhenitsyn”, writes his biographer, Michael Scammell, “appears to have come deeply under the spell of his intrepid and romantic aunt.”⁴ In many ways, she was a true mystic, deriving sense and sustenance from the mysteries of the Gospels and the richness of the Orthodox liturgy. The lavishness of Orthodox ritual fired her imagination, nourished by the belief that manifestations of beauty were themselves manifestations of truth, that beauty and truth were inseparable. In this devotion, she had much in common with her pious mother-in-law, Evdokia, Solzhenitsyn’s grandmother with whom he also stayed during holidays. Both women had icons hanging in virtually every room, and both were strict in their observance of daily prayer and the many fasts and acts of worship Orthodox practice demanded.

Irina was an avid communicant at the local church, and Solzhenitsyn, when staying with her, usually accompanied her to the services. Her enduring influence on Solzhenitsyn was emphasized by Michael Scammell:

Irina was also an avid aficionado of the arts, and she instilled in her nephew an early and lasting love for literature. She had an extensive library and encouraged Solzhenitsyn to use it to satisfy his increasingly voracious appetite for reading. It seems that he needed little encouragement. During stays with his aunt, he introduced himself to Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, and most of the Russian classics. He first read War and Peace as a ten-year-old and then reread it several times in the course of ensuing summers. It was during this formative period that he first envisaged the figure of Tolstoy as the archetypal Russian writer, a secular icon to be revered and an example to be imitated. Irina also presented him with a copy of Vladimir Dahl’s celebrated collection of Russian proverbs, on which he would draw heavily in his own work in later years.

Aunt Irina’s library was not restricted to Russian literature. Shakespeare, Schiller, and particularly Dickens also made an impression. Another favorite was Jack London, who was enormously popular in Russia both before and after the Revolution. Solzhenitsyn’s admiration for London found expression many years later when, during his first visit to the United States, he sought out his childhood hero’s home in California and made a brief pilgrimage.

Other than religion, the subject which highlighted the stark contrast between Solzhenitsyn’s youthful home life and that of the world at large was politics. “Everyone, of course, was anti-Bolshevik in the circle in which I grew up”, he recalled many years later. Both his mother and his aunt frequently dwelt on the horrors of the civil war and the suffering it had caused the family. No effort was made to hide from him any of the outrages of the immediate past, and he was often present when members of the family made bitter and candid criticisms of the Soviet regime. As a boy, he learned all about family friends who had been arrested or killed; he knew of his Uncle Roman’s temporary detention under sentence of death and of the confiscation of his grandfather’s estate. Yet at school, the Bolsheviks were glorified, and he remembered how he and his friends would “listen with such wide eyes to the exploits of the Reds, wave flags, beat drums, blow trumpets”.⁶

This struggle with the conflicting claims of home and state was to have a profound impact on his adolescent years, demanding a degree of Orwellian doublethink that resulted in a sort of psychological schism, almost a split personality:

The problem was resolved, at least temporarily, by the victory of the state over the family. Solzhenitsyn bowed under the combined force of peer-group pressure and Soviet propaganda, turning his back on the “reactionary” teaching of his family and embracing Marxist dogma. It was a triumph for the architects of the Soviet education system, which, as part of its indoctrination strategy, had virtually abolished the teaching of history except in a highly selective and slanted way and had replaced it with propaganda and ideological training. Faced with such unscrupulous ingenuity, the youth of Russia quickly succumbed to the mythology surrounding the Revolution. The heroes of the Bolshevik Revolution, like a band of modern-day Robin Hoods, had overthrown the cruel oppressors of the Russian people. Their spirit was marching onward into a just and glorious future, handing over the ill-gotten gains of the rich to the world’s poor. It was all so simple, so good, so unstoppable: the triumph of communist fairness over capitalist greed. So it was that Solzhenitsyn and his schoolfriends learned to “wave flags, beat drums, blow trumpets”, taking their place in the ranks of those destined to “complete the Revolution”.

Solzhenitsyn took the first decisive step away from the beliefs of his family and toward the teaching of the state in 1930 when, at the age of eleven, he joined the Young Pioneers. This was the junior wing of the Communist Party’s youth movement, the Komsomol, founded in 1918. Although no older than Solzhenitsyn himself, the Young Pioneers were virtually omnipresent in the life of Russia’s children by the beginning of the thirties. In fact, it was easier to become a member than not. Everyone joined, to be with friends, to go camping, to learn to tie knots, to sing rousing revolutionary songs, to parade in the Pioneers’ red tie and red badge with its five logs representing the five continents ablaze in the flames of world revolution. From the Young Pioneers, it was a natural, and expected, progression to the Komsomol, and then to the final achievement of full Party membership when one was old enough. In this way, almost imperceptibly, the Communist Party was tightening its grip on the nation’s life; and in this way, it was tightening its grip ever more on the young life of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Initially, Solzhenitsyn had been a reluctant recruit. At the age of ten, the cross he had worn since infancy had been ripped from his neck by jeering Pioneers, and the resentment this must have caused, coupled with the remnants of ambivalence toward Bolshevism inherited from his family, led him to refrain from joining even after most of his friends had done so. For over a year, he was ridiculed and pressurized at school meetings, and repeatedly urged by his friends to join. Eventually, the need to conform was greater than any remaining reservations, and Solzhenitsyn succumbed to convention.

In the winter of 1930, a matter of months after Solzhenitsyn had joined the junior wing of the Communist Party, the visit of his grandfather was to serve as a reminder that the boy’s conformity at school could not resolve the continuing conflict between his family and the state. Upon arrival, Grandfather Zakhar sat down dejectedly in the corner and, leafing through the pages of the Bible he was carrying, began bewailing the ill fortune that had fallen on the family since the accursed Revolution. Not only had the old man endured the confiscation of his estate, but he faced recurrent harassment and repeated questioning by the Soviet authorities. Like many of his generation, he still clung to the belief, the forlorn hope, that the communists would soon be overthrown and that life would return to normal. When this happened, he was concerned that his estate should be properly cared for so that he could hand it on to the young Solzhenitsyn, his only grandchild. In a naively inspired effort to comfort his grandfather, Solzhenitsyn had assured him that there was no need to worry: “Don’t worry about it, grandad. I don’t want your estate anyway. I would have refused it on principle.”⁸ One can only imagine the cold comfort, the pain, that the old man must have felt as the eleven-year-old displayed his communist sympathies and his belief in the evils of property.

The cramped conditions in which Solzhenitsyn and his mother lived meant that any visitors to their tiny shack were forced to sleep on the floor. Early next morning, the seventy-two-year-old woke from an uncomfortable and restless night and crept out to go to church while mother and child still slept. Soon after his departure, they were rudely awakened by the sound of boots kicking against their door. Two Soviet secret policemen burst into the room and demanded to see Zakhar, who was wanted for questioning in connection with the illegal hoarding of gold. These agents had followed the old man from his home in Georgievsk, where he had already been detained twice and questioned on the same subject. Surprised to find that he was not there, they turned on Solzhenitsyn’s mother, abusing her as a “class enemy” and demanding that she hand over any money, gold, or other valuables. Taissia informed them that she had none, whereupon she was threatened with imprisonment. The agents ordered her to sign a statement swearing that she had no gold in the house, warning her that she would be arrested immediately if their search proved that she had lied. Terrified, she asked whether the statement included wedding rings. The agents nodded, and sheepishly she handed over both her own wedding ring and that of her dead husband.

At that moment, Zakhar returned from church to be greeted by a torrent of abuse from the agents who demanded that he hand over his gold. Ignoring them, he fell to his knees before the icon in the corner and began to pray. The agents hauled him to his feet and conducted a thorough body search, but found nothing. Cursing, they stormed out, threatening to catch him on a future occasion.

Zakhar returned home, and, two months later, in February 1931, his wife, Evdokia, died. Unable to attend the funeral in Georgievsk, Taissia arranged a memorial Mass for her mother in Rostov Cathedral. This involved great courage and carried with it considerable personal risk. Churchgoers were now spied on and if reported to the authorities could lose their jobs. For this reason, Taissia had ceased attending church on a regular basis, but she felt duty-bound to go to the Mass and duly attended with her son. Although his mother was fortunate enough to escape retribution, Solzhenitsyn was reported to the headmaster by a fellow pupil and was severely reprimanded for conduct unbecoming of a Young Pioneer.

Grief-stricken after the death of his wife, Zakhar had wandered back to the district where his confiscated estate was, in the vicinity of Armavir, pursued incessantly by the secret police, who remained convinced that he had a secret hoard of gold. Driven half-mad by grief and by the persistent harassment, he is said to have hung a wooden cross round his neck and gone to the secret police headquarters in Armavir. “You have stolen all my money and possessions,” he is purported to have said, “so now you can take me into your jail and keep me.” Whether he was indeed imprisoned or whether he collapsed and died elsewhere would remain a mystery. It was some time before news of his death, a year after that of his wife, filtered through to Taissia, who dutifully arranged another memorial Mass at Rostov Cathedral.

In March 1932, at around the time that his heartbroken and impoverished grandfather was dying in mysterious circumstances, the thirteen-year-old Solzhenitsyn witnessed his first arrest. With the slushy remains of the winter’s snow still on the ground, he had gone round to the home of the Fedorovskys, who were close family friends. As he arrived, he stopped, startled, in his tracks at the sight of Vladimir Fedorovsky, the nearest person in his life to a father, being escorted by two strangers to a waiting car. He watched as Federovsky got into the car and was driven away. Entering the flat, Solzhenitsyn was greeted by a scene of utter devastation. Drawers and cupboards had been emptied on to the floor, rugs and carpets torn up and tossed aside, and books and ornaments were scattered everywhere. This was the aftermath of a search of the flat by the secret police that had lasted twenty-four hours.

It transpired that Fedorovsky’s “crime” was to have appeared in the same photograph as Professor L. K. Ramzin, an engineer imprisoned two years earlier for allegedly plotting against the government. The photograph, taken during an engineers’ conference both men had attended, was the only “evidence” discovered during the day-long search and was insufficient to put Fedorovsky on trial as an accomplice in Ramzin’s plot. He was released after a year’s detention and interrogation, but was completely broken in health and spirits and never returned to his former employment. He lived for another ten years, more or less aimlessly, and died in 1943.

If this had been Solzhenitsyn’s first experience of an actual arrest, he received regular daily reminders of the presence of the Soviet prison system. Every day on his way home from school, he passed the enormous building in the center of Rostov that had been taken over by the Soviet authorities to be used as a prison. Each day he passed the back entrance to the prison where a permanent line of desolate women waited to make inquiries or to hand in food parcels. There were also the columns of prisoners marched through the streets under armed guard, accompanied by the chilling shouts of the escort commander: “One step out of line, and I’ll give the order to shoot or sabre you down!” The young Solzhenitsyn would occasionally see these columns and be reminded of the existence of an incomprehensible twilight world. Yet he was too young to understand the implications. On another occasion, he heard how a man had clambered out on to the sill of a top floor window of the prison and hurled himself to his death on the pavement below. His mangled body was hastily removed and the blood washed away with hosepipes, but news of the suicide spread through the town.

Later, Solzhenitsyn learned that the dungeons of the prison at Rostov were situated under the pavement, lit by opaque lights set into the asphalt. Almost daily, as a child and then as an adolescent, he had been walking unwittingly over the heads of the prisoners incarcerated beneath his feet.

At school, he was an exceptional pupil, excelling in both the arts and the sciences, encouraged by his mother, who, like her gifted son, had been top of the class as a child. The precocious schoolboy became close friends with two other gifted pupils in his class. His friendship with Nikolai Vitkevich and Kirill Simonyan was to last through the rest of their school years and through their years at Rostov University. Soon they were so inseparable that they referred to themselves jokingly as “The Three Musketeers”. Their other close friend, admitted as an honorary fourth member of the intimate circle, was Lydia Ezherets, known to her friends as Lida. The four were drawn together principally by their love of literature. They wrote essays on Shakespeare, Byron, and Pushkin, each trying to outdo the other in friendly competitiveness; and they wrote “very bad, very imitative poetry”.⁹ Encouraged by their literature teacher, Anastasia Grunau, they collaborated on the writing of a novel, which was dubbed “the novel of the three madmen”, and started producing a satirical magazine in which they wrote poems and epigrams on each other and on the teachers. Later, they developed an infatuation with the theater, organizing a drama club and rehearsing plays by Ostrovsky, Chekhov, and Rostand.

Aside from literature, Solzhenitsyn’s other great love during these years was cycling, having obtained a bicycle in 1936 in somewhat unorthodox circumstances. During his last year at school, he had been nominated by the headmaster for a civic prize for outstanding pupils. Normally, the award of the prize was a mere formality once the nominations were made, but Solzhenitsyn’s nomination was blocked on account of his social background. The headmaster was incensed and demanded that the injustice be rectified. Reluctantly, the officials consented to award Solzhenitsyn a bicycle as an extraordinary consolation prize.

Solzhenitsyn was more than happy with his “consolation”. Bicycles were a rare luxury in those days, and neither he nor his mother would ever have been able to afford one. His other friends also owned bicycles, and thereafter cycling became a favorite hobby. The next three summers were devoted to touring holidays, and the first, in 1937 when Solzhenitsyn was eighteen years old, took the friends, five boys and two girls, to Tbilisi via the most scenic and spectacular passes of the Caucasus Mountains.

Inspired by his new-found love of cycling, Solzhenitsyn indulged his other love for literature in what he called his Cycling Notes. These were composed in the autumn, shortly after his return from the tour of the Caucasus in July and August, and were contained in three school exercise books labeled “My Travels, Volume IV, Books 1, 2, and 3”. The Notes, written in naive schoolboy prose, were nonetheless full of high spirits and infectious humor, notably in a description of a series of punctures and other mishaps in the pouring rain when the group was en route to Stalin’s birthplace at Gori. In an unintentionally amusing display of post-pubescent indignation, Solzhenitsyn waxed lyrical on the arrogant sex discrimination of Georgian men while simultaneously displaying jealousy of their easy southern charm. The Georgian men, he complained, exhibited an insufferably patronizing attitude toward Russian women, regarding them as easy conquests and therefore of easy virtue.

More disturbingly, the Notes displayed a political naïveté that illustrated the extent to which Solzhenitsyn’s generation had soaked up Soviet propaganda. Their very thoughts, it seemed, were saturated with communist slogans and jargon. “Two things cause tuberculosis—poverty and the impotence of medicine”, he stated glibly, referring to the TB sanatorium that the cyclists had come across on their travels. “The Revolution has liquidated poverty. Medicine, why are you lacking behind? Tear these unfortunates from death’s grasping paws!”

These and similarly trite declarations throughout the Notes confirmed that Solzhenitsyn and his friends were now utterly convinced of the correctness of Stalinism. Their pilgrimage to the place of Stalin’s birth, achieved in spite of the combined endeavors of the elements and sundry protesting bicycle tires to prevent their arrival, was an act of homage befitting true and trusted—and trusting—children of the Revolution. Solzhenitsyn’s own devotion to the father of the nation was confirmed by the motto he selected to adorn the cover of one of the exercise books in which he had written his Cycling Notes: “We shall have excellent and numerous cadres in industry, agriculture, transport, and the army—our country will be invincible (Stalin).” It was almost as though only the immortal words of Stalin himself deserved place of honor on the cover of any of Solzhenitsyn’s literary works. The Soviet education system had triumphed indeed.

There was, however, one notable redeeming passage in the Notes, inspired by a visit to the grave of Alexander Griboyedov, described by Solzhenitsyn as “that radiant genius, that pride of the Russian nation”. Woe from Wit, Griboyedov’s masterpiece, a verse comedy in the manner of Moliere written in 1822-1823, was one of Solzhenitsyn’s favorite plays, and he often declaimed passages from it when, as a student, he took part in readings. While in Tbilisi, he had taken the opportunity to visit Griboyedov’s resting place, and the poignancy of the occasion inspired thoughts more worthy of the selfless and incisively introspective writer who was to emerge triumphant from the Gulag Archipelago almost twenty years later:

In 1937, there were early signs that Solzhenitsyn was destined to become one of these “rarest of individuals”. It was at this time that he conceived the idea for an epic work which, more than sixty years later, he was to consider “the most important book of my life”.¹¹ Eventually, under the collective title of The Red Wheel, this would run to several volumes, the fruit of a lifetime’s labor:

When he first conceived it, the eighteen-year-old Solzhenitsyn did not have the benefit of the wisdom his seventy-nine-year-old counterpart had accrued. Nevertheless, when, on November 18, 1936, he first resolved to write “a big novel about the Revolution”, he envisaged it on the grandest of scales, modeled in scope on Tolstoy’s War and Peace. It would be not merely a novel but a true epic, in multiple volumes and parts. It would be his masterpiece. What a tribute it is to Solzhenitsyn’s vision, his determination, and, indeed, his genius that this wildest and most arrogantly ambitious of teenage dreams was brought to fruition through half a century of careful and considered reflection, coupled with superhuman endeavor.

Provisionally labeled R-17, its principal focus being the Revolution of 1917, the young Solzhenitsyn’s epic had originally been planned to reflect the orthodox communist point of view. “From childhood on, I had somehow known that my objective was the history of the Russian Revolution and that nothing else concerned me. To understand the Revolution I had long since required nothing beyond Marxism. I cut myself off from everything else that came up and turned my back on it.”¹³ The novel’s hero, Olkhovsky, who was to become Lenartovich in August 1914, was intended to be an idealistic communist; according to Natalya Reshetovskaya, Solzhenitsyn’s first wife, the purpose of the novel was to show “the complete triumph of the Revolution on a global scale”.¹⁴

Solzhenitsyn soon realized, however, that it was impossible to understand or do justice to the Revolution without appreciating fully the huge significance of the First World War. He started to study some of the war’s military campaigns and became increasingly fascinated by the defeat of General Samsonov at the Battle of Tannenberg, in East Prussia. For the first three months of 1937, Solzhenitsyn spent hours in Rostov’s libraries studying this particular campaign, an experience he was later to evoke in his poem Prussian Nights.

His labors bore fruit in 1937 and 1938 when he drafted the first few chapters of part one of his novel under the provisional title “Russians in the Advance Guard”. He also sketched in a scene between Olkhovsky and Severtsev (later Vorotyntsev) for a chapter entitled “Black on Red”. When writing August 1914 thirty years later, he was able to draw heavily from these initial drafts, taking not only source material but in some cases whole scenes that barely needed any amendment at all.

Solzhenitsyn had now entered the local university where, surprisingly, he elected to take a degree in physics and mathematics rather than in literature. At Rostov University, literature was not taught at the faculty level but only at the teacher training college level, where students were prepared for teaching in secondary schools. This was not a prospect that Solzhenitsyn found attractive.

It was usual at this time for students to sit an entrance examination before being accepted to a university and to submit their social credentials for scrutiny, but Solzhenitsyn’s superlative record of straight 5s in school meant that he was accepted without an examination. This in turn averted too close a scrutiny of his class origins. In any case, he was now becoming adept at avoiding the awkward parts of the endless questionnaires that had become such a feature of Soviet life. He invariably wrote “office worker” when describing his father’s former occupation: “I could never tell anyone that he had been an officer in the Russian army, because that was considered a disgrace.”¹⁶

Solzhenitsyn’s brilliant academic career continued at university where he received top marks in all his examinations. Simultaneously, finding his course very easy, he found time to develop a new love that was soon vying with literature for his extracurricular attention. This was the study of Marxism-Leninism. Along with his friends, he had passed with unquestioning ease from the Young Pioneers to the Komsomol in his tenth and final year at school. Then, from the age of seventeen onward, he threw himself into the study of Party doctrine with an almost religious zeal: “[D]uring my years at the university, I spent a lot of time studying dialectical materialism, not only as part of my courses but in my spare time as well. Then and later… I read an enormous amount about it and got completely carried away. I was absolutely sincerely enthralled by it over a period of several years.”¹⁷

As Solzhenitsyn reached manhood, it seemed that he was determined to leave his childhood behind in every conceivable sense. He had come to the conclusion that the doubts, fears, and confusion of his childhood years were caused by the reactionary errors of his elders, who were unfortunately handicapped by their emotional attachment to old and discredited beliefs. With the self-assured audacity of youth, he had rejected old traditions and superstitions in favor of the brave new world presented by the Revolution. He had solved the psychological schism of his boyhood by rejecting the heresies of Russian Orthodoxy and embracing the orthodoxy of communism. It was all so easy: “The Party had become our father and we, the children, obeyed. So when I was leaving school and embarking on my time at university, I made a choice: I banished all my memories, all my childhood misgivings. I was a Communist. The world would be what we made it.”¹⁸

The banishment of memories must have been made difficult by the occasional reminders that dogged his years at university. In 1937, during his first year, some senior students were arrested and disappeared, and some of the professors were said to have disappeared as well. When Solzhenitsyn heard about this, it is hard to believe that the painful vision of Vladimir Fedorovsky’s arrest would not have returned to haunt him. Similarly, the wretched figure of Professor Trifonov scurrying nervously down the corridors and flinching whenever his name was called must have resurrected unwelcome childhood misgivings. “We learned later that he had been inside and if anybody called out his name in the corridor he thought perhaps the security officers had sent for him.”¹⁹ Is it feasible that the young communist student could have seen this broken wretch of a man without visions of his grandfather, half-maddened by constant persecution, walking the streets with a wooden cross hanging from his neck?

One suspects that the born-again communist nurtured a sneaking admiration for the celebrated mathematician Professor Mordukhai-Boltovskoi in spite of his anti-Marxist heresies, or perhaps even because of them. On one occasion, according to Solzhenitsyn, the elderly professor was lecturing on Newton when one of the students sent up a note which said, “Marx wrote that Newton was a materialist, yet you say he was an idealist. To which the professor replied, “I can only say that Marx was wrong. Newton believed in God, like every other great scientist.” On another occasion, when his students told him that there was an attack on him in one of the newspapers pasted to the walls of the university, he replied with weighted indifference, “My nanny told me never to read what was written on walls.”²⁰ Not surprisingly, Mordukhai-Boltovskoi was purged from the university, but he was saved from prison by his age, his reputation as a famous mathematician, and allegedly by the personal intervention of Kalinin, chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR, to whom the professor had turned for help. As a result, he was reprieved and was merely “relegated” by being transferred to the teacher training college.

The professor was one of a small and very fortunate minority in being the recipient of state-sponsored leniency at this time. During the 1930s, Stalin had instituted a new reign of terror designed principally to eliminate all actual or potential rivals. At the Seventeenth Party Congress, “the Congress of Victors”, in 1934, Stalin had declared that the Party had triumphed over all opposition, promising the Party faithful a glorious and joyful future: “Life has become better, Comrades. Life has become gayer.” Of the two thousand delegates who applauded on that day, two-thirds were arrested in the course of the next five years. In 1934, Sergei Kirov was murdered in Leningrad, and a wave of show trials followed: the trial of Kamenev and Zinoviev in 1935, the Old Bolsheviks trial in 1936, the trial of Pyatakov and Radek in 1937, the trial of Rykov and Bukharin in 1938, and a host of lesser trials. In 1940, having been sentenced to death in his absence, Trotsky was murdered in exile. Yet the new reign of terror was not restricted to the higher echelons of Soviet power. It permeated downward, contaminating every stratum of society with an atmosphere of fear. In Leningrad alone, during the spring of 1935, between thirty and forty thousand people were arrested. Over the following three years, the total number arrested across the Soviet Union as a whole ran into millions. The purpose of Stalin’s murderous Machiavellianism was summed up succinctly by Michael Scammell: “Soviet society was turned upside down and remade in Stalin’s image.”²¹

At the height of the Terror, it seemed that almost anyone could be arrested at any time. This was illustrated by a grimly absurd episode in Solzhenitsyn’s own life. In the mid-1930s, he narrowly escaped arrest when standing in a bread queue. The people in the queue were accused of being “saboteurs” who were “sowing panic” among the public by suggesting there was a bread shortage. Fortunately for the young and enthusiastic communist, someone interceded on his behalf, and he was released without being charged.

There was also a grim irony in the way that socialist intellectuals in the West continued their love affair with the Soviet Union in general and Stalin in particular. When H. G. Wells was granted an audience with Stalin in the autumn of 1934, he told the Soviet leader that “at the present time there are in the world only two persons to whose opinion, to whose every word, millions are listening—you and Roosevelt.” The incredible gullibility that Wells displayed regularly throughout his life was evident when he told his mentor, “I have already seen the happy faces of healthy men and women and I know that something very considerable is being done here. The contrast with 1920 is astounding.”²²

“Much more could have been done had we Bolsheviks been cleverer”, Stalin replied in mock humility. Yet Wells, dazzled by the brilliance of his hero, would accept no weakness in the Soviet system. If perfection had not been achieved in the socialist utopia, he reasoned, people and not the Party were to blame. “No,” Wells responded, “if human beings were cleverer. It would be a good thing to invent a Five Year Plan for the reconstruction of the human brain, which obviously lacks many things needed for a perfect social order.”²³ This riposte met with the Leader’s approval, and Wells recorded that both men burst out laughing at the wit of his reply.

Wells concluded his meeting with Stalin by mentioning the “free expression of opinion—even of opposition opinion”, adding apologetically, “I do not know if you are prepared yet for that much freedom.” Stalin was quick to reassure him: “We Bolsheviks call it ‘self-criticism’. It is widely used in the USSR.”²⁴ Wells did not record any laughter at this point, and Stalin may have managed to keep a straight face, but his own reply, amidst his plans for mass arrests and murder, far exceeded in wit anything Wells had said.

Following Wells’ return to England, the transcript of his interview with the Soviet leader was published in The New Statesman and Nation on October 27, 1934, under the heading “A Conversation between Stalin and Wells.” It was criticized heavily in the subsequent issue, not, as one might expect, for its naïveté, but for being too harsh on Stalin. George Bernard Shaw complained, “Stalin listens attentively and seriously to Wells, taking in his pleadings exactly, and always hitting the nail precisely on the head in his reply. Wells does not listen to Stalin: he only waits with suffering patience to begin again when Stalin stops. He has not come to be instructed by Stalin, but to instruct him.” Another writer eager to spring to Stalin’s defense in the wake of Wells’ interview was the German expressionist playwright and poet Ernst Toller, who insisted that, compared with fascist countries, intellectual freedom in the USSR was growing.²⁵

Within a few years, both Wells and Toller had become disillusioned with events in the Soviet Union. Toller committed suicide in New York in 1939, and Wells ended his literary career with the desolate thoughts of The Mind at the End of its Tether. Only Shaw remained blissfully oblivious to the many contradictions at the heart of his thinking.

Perhaps one should not be too harsh on those Western intellectuals who had fallen under the spell of Stalin’s propaganda machine, especially as many citizens of the Soviet Union were similarly beguiled. During the show trials, Soviet newspapers were full of gloating accounts of the defendants’ confessions and sycophantic praise of the secret police for their “eternal vigilance”. The press was full of vituperative rhetoric against the “enemies of the people” and their constant plots to undermine the good work of the Party through “ideological and economic sabotage”. Pavlik Morozov became an overnight hero for denouncing his own father to the secret police and was held up as a model for Soviet youth to emulate. All over the country, armies of Party spokesmen were mobilized to lecture the nation’s students on why the purges were necessary and to brainwash them into acceptance.

In spite of his near arrest for daring to queue for bread in a public place, and in spite of the arrests he knew about both in the past and present, Solzhenitsyn accepted the situation as a temporary but necessary phenomenon, crucial to the success of the Revolution. The purges were exactly that, a thorough cleansing of the Party machine so that it could continue the revolutionary struggle in a spirit of purity. Years later, looking back at this period in a spirit of self-critical contrition, Solzhenitsyn grieved over “the astonishing swinishness of egotistical youth…. We had no sense of living in the midst of a plague, that people were dropping all around us, that a plague was in progress. It’s amazing, but we didn’t realize it.”²⁶

In autumn 1938, during his third year at university and shortly before his twentieth birthday, Solzhenitsyn faced a test, a temptation which, had he succumbed, could have changed his life irrevocably. He was summoned before the District Komsomol Committee and given an application form for entry into one of the training colleges of the NKVD, the government department responsible for the recruitment and training of the secret police. The prospect of joining the secret police must have been tempting. After all, was he not a committed Marxist? A loyal child of the Revolution? Hadn’t he learned from all those lectures on historical materialism that the purges were necessary, that “the struggle against the internal enemy was a crucial battlefront, and to share in it was an honourable task”?²⁷ Then, of course, apart from such ideological grounds for joining the ranks of the secret police, there were very good material considerations to take into account. Could the provincial university at which he was studying offer him the same opportunities as a career in the NKVD? No, it couldn’t. The best he could hope for after graduating was a teaching post at some remote rural school where the pay would be paltry. In comparison, the NKVD training college offered the prospect of double or triple pay and the lure of special rations. On the face of it, there was no competition. He should join the secret police where he could serve the Party and be relatively rich into the bargain. For some reason, however, he hesitated—hesitated and then refused: “People can shout at you from all sides: ‘You must!’ And your own head can be saying also: ‘You must!’ But inside your breast there is a sense of revulsion, repudiation. I don’t want to. It makes me feel sick. Do what you want without me; I want no part of it.”²⁸ It was a defining moment and one which would cause Solzhenitsyn much painful heart searching in years to come: “If, by the time war broke out, I had already been wearing an NKVD officer’s insignia on my blue tabs, what would I have become?… If my life had turned out differently, might I myself not have become just such an executioner?”²⁹ For one so ruthlessly introspective as Solzhenitsyn, the issue could not be shirked and the ramifications were chilling: “It is a dreadful question if one really answers it honestly.”³⁰

These, however, were the questions of an old man looking back over a lifetime’s suffering. The insight was not available to the young, carefree Solzhenitsyn, who was soon able to put the NKVD episode out of his idealistic mind. By day, he and his young communist friends paraded with banners through the streets of Rostov proclaiming the Revolution while, by night, the Black Marias passed unnoticed through the same streets. Ignorance indeed was bliss. “We twenty-year-olds marched in the column of the October children, and as the Revolution’s children, we looked forward to a glittering future.”³¹

The aging sage saw things differently: “I was brought up in a Christian spirit but youth in the Soviet period took me away from religion entirely. I now read through some of my letters and my efforts at literature from that period of my youth and I am grasped by a horror of what kind of emptiness awaited me.”³²