Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile

^{CHAPTER FOUR} MAN OF WAR

A few days after their marriage, the newlyweds were separated by Natalya’s departure for Moscow. She, together with Nikolai and some of the other chemistry students, was to spend the remainder of the academic year at the National Institute for Science and Research. The pair was reunited seven weeks later when Solzhenitsyn arrived in Moscow on June 18 to take his half-yearly MIFLI examinations. Upon his arrival, Natalya rushed to meet him, and they spent the day strolling through the Park of Rest and Culture and wandering into the Neskuchny Gardens. “Of course,” Natalya wrote in her memoirs, “we could not suspect that we would be here again, five years later, and under quite different circumstances. Then we would be separated by barbed wire and would be communicating by sign language, he perched on the third-storey window sill of a house in Kaluzhkaya Plaza, where he was laying parquet floors, and I gazing up at him from these very same Neskuchny Gardens.”¹

It was from Moscow that Solzhenitsyn finally wrote to his mother, informing her of the marriage. She relayed the news to Solzhenitsyn’s two aunts, Irina and Maria, who were shocked at the secrecy surrounding the wedding and, since it had not taken place in church, flatly refused to recognize its validity. Many years later, in an interview with Stern magazine in 1971, the aging Irina still referred to Natalya dismissively as a “mistress”. Their attitude must have served to alienate Solzhenitsyn still further from his reactionary relatives.

At the end of July, their respective studies completed, the couple rented a modest cabin in the district of Tarusa, a popular country resort about seventy miles south of Moscow. Here, on the very edge of a forest, they spent their honeymoon. In spite of the idyllic surroundings, they spent little time exploring the local terrain. Instead, they preferred to stretch out comfortably in the shade of the birch trees, while Solzhenitsyn read aloud to his wife from Sergei Esenin’s poems or Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Then, of course, there was the mandatory studying, sometimes together but often separately. Solzhenitsyn was already preparing for the following term’s work at the MIFLI, leaving his wife to “fill up the gaps” in her own education.²

One of Solzhenitsyn’s principal preoccupations at the time was history, especially the reforms of Peter the Great. Surprisingly perhaps, considering his Marxist education, he found himself vehemently opposed to the “progress” engendered by Peter’s reforms. In his opposition to the former tsar, Solzhenitsyn was aware that he was out of step with the official Party line, which fully endorsed Peter’s “progressive” policies. He admitted this in his autobiographical poem The Way, when he confessed that his antipathy to Peter meant that “I’m a heretic.”³ Perhaps his “heretical” antipathy was a lasting legacy of his religious childhood; lovers of the old Russian way of life and the traditional forms of the Russian church, such as his own mother and his Aunt Irina, had never forgiven Peter for his brutal persecution of traditionalists.

Apart from this one minor heresy, Solzhenitsyn still prided himself on his orthodox Marxism. As Michael Scammell remarks, Solzhenitsyn “must be one of the few bridegrooms in history to have taken Das Kapital on his honeymoon (and to have read it)”.⁴ Awaking in the morning, Natalya would find the space in the bed beside her empty and would discover her husband on the veranda, his head buried in an annotated copy of Marx’s masterpiece. In The Way, Solzhenitsyn evoked his bride’s understandable perplexity at his neglect of her, but explained that he was powerless to resist Marx’s advances. He was a man possessed. He and his friends were “apostles… Bolsheviks…. And I? I believe to the marrow of my bones. I suffer no doubts, no hesitations—life is crystal clear to me.”⁵

Solzhenitsyn and Natalya stayed longer in Tarusa than they had originally intended, extending their honeymoon into the early autumn, when the forest was changing color. The beauty of their holiday hideaway had served to confirm Solzhenitsyn’s preference for the landscapes of central Russia over the drabness of the south, first awoken by the journey down the Volga the previous summer. He now felt that he had been born in the wrong place, but had found himself.

On the rail journey back to Rostov, he was confronted with an uncomfortable reminder of the less savory parts of the previous year’s trip down the Volga. Their train halted in a siding next to another that looked somehow odd. It was neither a passenger train like theirs nor a freight train. Peering through the window, Solzhenitsyn caught a glimpse of compartments crowded with shaven-headed troglodytes who looked as if they had come from a different planet. With deep-sunken eyes, distorted faces, and sub-human features, the alien creatures gazed back at him. The twenty-one-year-old looked away. A minute or so later, the train started again, and the aliens disappeared as silently as they had emerged. Little did the naive newlywed know it, but the trainload of convicts being transported from one labor camp to another were the ghosts of his own future.

Neither did he realize that the grim reality he had glimpsed so fleetingly from a train in the wilderness was also a lot closer to home, if only he had eyes to see. One fellow student called Tanya, with whom he had studied side by side at Rostov University for five years, kept hidden the tragedy in her own life at the time. Only fifty years later, when Solzhenitsyn returned to Rostov after his years in exile, did she reveal it to him. He had asked her nostalgically whether she remembered a particular class photograph being taken. “How could I not remember?” the old woman replied. “Just twenty days later, my father was arrested; and three days after that, my uncle.”⁶

The grim reality confronting many of his colleagues had no place in Solzhenitsyn’s own cosseted life during the autumn of 1940. As he began his last year at university, he found himself considerably better off than in previous years and much more prosperous than the vast majority of his fellow students. This was due to his being awarded one of the newly instituted Stalin scholarships for outstanding achievement. Only three of these were granted to the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics and only four more in the entire university. They carried a stipend two and a halftimes greater than the usual grant and were awarded not only for academic performance but also for social and political activism in the Komsomol. Solzhenitsyn qualified on both counts. He had straight 5s and continued to excel in his studies, but he was also a valued and trusted member of the Komsomol. He was, in fact, a model Soviet citizen.

His most notable achievement as a true son of the Revolution during his last year at university was his editorship of the students’ newspaper, which he transformed from a dull unread propaganda sheet, published only twice a year, into a vibrant and widely read weekly journal. This latest success ensured him a place of honor in the local party Komsomol, assuring him an easy transition to full Party membership, with all the privileges that went with it. In every respect, he appeared to be on the threshold of a brilliant career.

The improved financial situation meant that Solzhenitsyn and Natalya could afford to take up residence on their own, away from their families. They found a room on Chekhov Lane, which Natalya described as “small but comfortable, even though we had to put up with a cantankerous landlady”.⁷ Their new home was conveniently placed with respect to their families and, crucially, to Solzhenitsyn’s two favorite reading rooms. Natalya remembered that their first year of married life together, which was also destined to be their last for many years, was “busy beyond measure”. After an early breakfast, they would both depart for the university, or, if there were no classes, Solzhenitsyn would leave for the library while Natalya studied at home. They would meet for lunch at three o’clock at the home of one of Natalya’s relatives. At Solzhenitsyn’s insistence, lunch was served punctually so that he would not lose any study time, but if for any reason it was delayed, he would remove the homemade cards from his pocket and get his wife to test him. Then, lunch consumed, he would hurry off back to the library, where he would often stay until it closed at ten o’clock. Returning home, he frequently continued to study until two o’clock in the morning before finally collapsing into bed.

Only on Sundays did the couple allow themselves to lie in before going to the home of Solzhenitsyn’s mother for lunch. “She put all her talents, all her love into serving us the most delicious meals possible”, wrote Natalya. “The energy, the deftness, the speed with which she did everything, despite her illness (she had active tuberculosis), were amazing. Her speech was rapid-fire, just like her son’s, only interrupted by brief coughing spells; and she had the same mobile features.”⁸

Somewhere amidst the hectic schedule of his life, Solzhenitsyn managed to continue with his writing. During this period, he wrote a politically correct tale entitled “Mission Abroad”, completed in February 1941, whose hero was a Soviet diplomat cunningly outwitting bourgeois statesmen in Western Europe. He continued to write poetry, which found its way into the exercise books containing his Juvenile Verse. The fruits of his studies at the MIFLI found their way into another exercise book entitled Remarks on Dialectical Materialism and Art, and all the while he continued to plan his historical epic depicting the glorious triumph of the Revolution.

In spring 1941, he gained a first-class degree in mathematics and physics. In June, he traveled to Moscow to take his second-year examinations at the MIFLI, nurturing a desire to move permanently to Russia’s capital, where he imagined all sorts of opportunities would present themselves. Events in the world at large, however, were destined to lay waste the young man’s schemes. On June 22, 1941, the very day he arrived in Moscow, war was declared between the Soviet Union and Germany. Hitler, too, nurtured a desire for the Russian capital and had launched the might of the Third Reich against his communist foe, unleashing the Wehrmacht across the Soviet border along a two-thousand-mile front.

“What an appalling moment in time this is!” wrote Alan Clark in Barbarossa. “The head-on crash of the two greatest armies, the two most absolute systems, in the world. No battle in history compares with it. Not even that first ponderous heave of August 1914, when all the railway engines in Europe sped the mobilization…. In terms of numbers of men, weight of ammunition, length of front, the desperate crescendo of the fighting, there will never be another day like 22nd June, 1941.”⁹

The Nazi onslaught had thrown the whole of the Soviet Union into turmoil, and all thought of examinations at the MIFLI was abandoned. Solzhenitsyn, like most of the other students, rushed to the recruitment office to volunteer on the spot. He was told that as his draft card was in Rostov, he must return there in order to enlist. He hurried to the station but found that the railways had been thrown into chaos by the declaration of war. It was several days before he finally succeeded in catching a train south, and even then the journey was insufferably slow. For a young man frantic with desire to join the fighting, the interminable delays must have been intolerable.

When he eventually arrived in Rostov, more disappointment awaited him. His army physical resulted in a classification of “limited fitness” due to an abdominal disability, the result of a groin disorder in infancy that had gone undetected. The disability was so slight that Solzhenitsyn had barely noticed that he suffered from it, but it was sufficient to disqualify him from military service.

Seething with anger, Solzhenitsyn returned home and was forced to watch helplessly while most of his university friends enlisted and were dispatched for training. The sense of frustration must have been accentuated by his complete commitment to the war effort. Not only was Russia the victim of aggression, which would in itself have made it a just war, but she was the standard-bearer of communist truth against the lies and errors of the fascists. Germany had always been Russia’s enemy, but now, under the tyranny of the Nazi swastika, she was her ideological enemy as well as her historical foe. His Marxist faith left no room for uncertainty about the rights and wrongs of the war, nor about who would be the final victors. The Soviet Union as the champion of the international proletariat would always triumph over her enemies.

A year earlier, on his honeymoon, he had written an ode that bore all the hallmarks of one who relishes the romance of war without having experienced its bloody realities. It was a piece of jingoistic juvenilia, flying defiantly in the face of the “inexpressible turbulence” of impending war. Invoking Lenin as the inspiration, Solzhenitsyn boasted that his generation, which “sprang to life” in the “whirlwind” of the October Revolution, would die willingly so that the Revolution could “ascend”, if necessary “upon our dead bodies”. His generation, the October generation, “must make the supreme sacrifice”.¹⁰

The sacrifice that Solzhenitsyn was in fact called to make in September 1941 was supreme only in its irksome futility. While his friends marched to war, heading for glory, he and Natalya were dispatched to the Cossack settlement of Morozovsk as village schoolteachers. Solzhenitsyn was to teach mathematics and astronomy, while his wife’s subjects were chemistry and the foundations of Darwinism. Morozovsk was an isolated community about 180 miles northeast of Rostov and halfway to Stalingrad. It was a dead-end place, or so Solzhenitsyn must have thought in his frustration. Nothing ever happened in Morozovsk. Nevertheless, as he recalled, even there, “anxiety about the German advance was stealing over us like the invisible clouds stealing over the milky sky to smother the small and defenseless moon”.¹¹ Such feelings were exacerbated by the arrival of trainloads of refugees, which stopped at the local station every day before proceeding to Stalingrad. During the break in their journey, these refugees would fill the marketplace of Morozovsk with terrible rumors about the disastrous way the war was turning.

The short time that the Solzhenitsyns spent in Morozovsk was relatively tranquil, the calm before the storm. Solzhenitsyn remembered “quiet, warm, moonlit evenings, not as yet rent by the rumble of planes and by exploding bombs”.¹² He and Natalya had rented lodgings on the same little yard as an older couple, the Bronevitskys. Nikolai Gerasimovich Bronevitsky was a sixty-year-old engineer, described by Solzhenitsyn as “an intellectual of Chekhovian appearance, very likable, quiet, and clever”. His wife was “even quieter and gentler than he was—a faded woman with flaxen hair close to her head, twenty-five years younger than her husband, but not at all young in her behaviour”. The two couples struck up a friendship and spent long evenings sitting on the steps of the porch, enjoying the warmth of the fading summer, and talking. The Solzhenitsyns were totally at ease with the Bronevitskys, and Solzhenitsyn remembered that “we said whatever we thought without noticing the discrepancies between our way of looking at things and theirs”. One discrepancy Solzhenitsyn did notice was the way that Bronevitsky described those towns that had fallen to the Germans not as having “surrendered” but as having been “taken”. Looking back on their friendship, Solzhenitsyn perceived that the older couple probably considered their young counterparts “two surprising examples of naively enthusiastic youth”. Asked what they remembered about 1938 and 1939, the youngsters could only recount the carefree trivia of their student life: “the university library, examinations, the fun we had on sporting trips, dances, amateur concerts, and of course love affairs—we were at the age for love”. The Bronevitskys listened incredulously to the flippancy of the other couple. But, they asked, hadn’t any of their professors been put away at that time? Yes, the Solzhenitsyns replied, two or three of them had been. Their places had been taken by senior lecturers. What about the students—had any of them gone inside? The younger couple did indeed recall that some senior students had been jailed. Bronevitsky was puzzled:

“And what did you make of it?”

“Nothing; we carried on dancing.”

“And no one near to you was—er—touched?”

“No; no one.”¹³

The reason for Bronevitsky’s morbid interest in the darker side of Soviet life soon became apparent. He had been one of the thousands of engineers who had been arrested during the thirties and sent to the newly opened labor camps. He had been in several prisons and camps but spoke with particular passion and disgust about Dzhezkazgan. Recalling the horror of camp life with a lurid disregard for the sheltered sensibilities of his listeners, he described the poisoned water, the poisoned air, the murders, the degradation, and the futility of complaints to Moscow. By the time he had finished, the very syllables “Dzhez-kaz-gan” made Solzhenitsyn’s flesh creep: “And yet… did this Dzhezkazgan have the slightest effect on our way of looking at the world? Of course not. It was not very near. It was not happening to us…. It is better not to think about it. Better to forget.”¹⁴

The Solzhenitsyns’ brief friendship with the Bronevitskys came to an end when the younger couple left Morozovsk. Later, Natalya learned that Bronevitsky had collaborated with the Germans when they occupied the town the following year. “Can you imagine it,” she wrote to her husband, “they say that Bronevitsky acted as burgomaster for the Germans while they were in Morozovsk. How disgusting!” Solzhenitsyn shared his wife’s shock at their erstwhile friend’s betrayal of the Motherland, thinking it a “filthy thing to do”. Years later, his own circumstances would lead him to alter his judgment:

Solzhenitsyn was to express a similar view concerning the sense of patriotic duty that Russians were meant to feel toward Stalin’s Soviet Union. If our mother has sold us to the gypsies, he asked, or, even worse, thrown us to the dogs, does she still remain our mother? “If a wife has become a whore, are we really still bound to her in fidelity? A Motherland that betrays its soldiers—is that really a Motherland?”¹⁶

These sentiments, born of bitter experience, could not have been further from the mind of Solzhenitsyn in 1941. Instead, he still longed for the opportunity to fight and if need be die for the Soviet Motherland. In mid-October, the war took a further turn for the worse. Moscow was threatened, and the German advance seemed irresistible. Under these dire circumstances, all classifications of fitness were cast aside as the Soviet authorities scavenged for recruits. In the district of Morozovsk, virtually every able-bodied man was summoned to the local recruitment center. At long last, Solzhenitsyn’s chance had come. “How difficult it was to leave home on that day,” he wrote to Natalya many years later, “but it was only on that day that my life began. We never know at the time what is happening to us.”¹⁷ Later still, as an old man looking back over the salient features of his past, he considered his time in the Soviet army as one of the “most important and defining moments” in his life. Most interesting of all, he saw it in terms of escape: “My father died before I was born, and so I had lacked upbringing by men. In the army, I ran away from that.”¹⁸ What exactly was he running away from? Was he looking for a convenient escape from the feminine? His increasingly ill mother? Supercilious aunts, including the three extra aunts and a mother-in-law he had inherited in marrying Natalya? And what of Natalya herself? Was he escaping from her too?

“Solzhenitsyn’s military career began as farce and ended in tragedy”, writes Michael Scammell.¹⁹ Certainly, it would be fair to say that it began inauspiciously. It was a long time before he finally got to the front, and, in his first months as a soldier, he was often the victim of cruelty at the hands of his more experienced comrades, who took a dislike to the provincial schoolteacher newly arrived in the ranks. “I did not move in one stride from being a student worn out by mathematics to officer’s rank”, he wrote in The Gulag Archipelago. “Before becoming an officer I spent a half-year as a downtrodden soldier. And one might think I would have gotten through my thick skull what it was like always to obey people who were perhaps not worthy of your obedience and to do it on a hungry stomach to boot.”²⁰

His experience did not improve once he was accepted for officer training school. He disliked the strict disciplinarian regime, complaining that “they trained us like young beasts so as to infuriate us to the point where we would later want to take it out on someone else”.²¹ Yet however much he hated his time there, his greatest fear, and that of all his fellow candidates, was failure to stick it out until graduation and the receipt of his officer’s insignia. The price of failure was immediate posting to the battle for Stalingrad where the casualty rate was so high that being sent there was virtually a death sentence. The threat of Stalingrad receded in October 1942, when Solzhenitsyn was awarded his first lieutenant’s stars. Eventually, in June 1944, he was to reach the rank of captain. His experiences ought to have taught him, “once and for all, the bitterness of service as a rank-and-file soldier”. Yet soon “they pinned two little stars on my shoulder boards, and then a third, and then a fourth. And I forgot every bit of what it had been like!”²² He had passed from the rank and file to the rank of officer, from persecuted to persecutor, and only in later years did he realize how he had been brutalized by the experience.

Now that he was an officer, Solzhenitsyn hoped he would soon, at long last, be sent to the front. There was to be more disappointment, however, because in early November he was posted to Saransk in central Russia, a town which he described to Natalya as “three little houses in a flat field”.²³ It was not until February 13, 1943, that his battalion was finally mobilized. Solzhenitsyn was sure that this time they would be heading for the southern front; instead they went in the opposite direction, to the far north, arriving a week or two later in Ostashkov, midway between Rzhev and Novgorod. They then moved slowly westward, where they encamped in a forest waiting for orders to advance. Surely, now he would see some action. Six weeks passed and nothing happened. Finally, in April, they received further orders and were transferred by train four hundred miles to the southeast. At a point just east of Orel, they dug in on the river Neruch.

This was an area of Russia unknown to Solzhenitsyn, and he was not seeing it at its best. A low-lying, swampy region, dotted with woods, it had never been the most picturesque of landscapes. Now, having been twice fought over in recent months—first during the German advance and then again during their retreat—it was a battle-scarred quagmire. Houses, trees, whole villages, all had been flattened by bombs and shells. Roads and fields had been churned into a lumpy soup by thousands of marching feet, exploding shells, and the caterpillar tracks of countless tanks. In the distance, the quid pro quo of both sides’ artillery thumped incessant insults at each other. Yet Solzhenitsyn still sensed his nation’s soil beneath the desolation. Although it was “abandoned, wild, overgrown” without crops, vegetable patches, or even a grain of rye, it was still “Turgenev country”, and gazing across the war-torn desert, the young soldier “at last understood that one word—homeland”.²⁴

At the end of May, Solzhenitsyn received the first letter from his mother for many months. Her handwriting had deteriorated and was so weak and spidery that he hardly recognized it. On January 12, when he was still in Saransk, he had sent her a telegram as soon as he had learned of the German retreat from the Caucasus, but it was not until now, four months later, that he finally discovered what had become of her. When the Germans had arrived in Georgievsk, where she had been staying with her relatives, Taissia had returned to Rostov. Upon arrival, she had discovered her home in ruins and the furniture destroyed. Now homeless, she was forced to find accommodation in a fourth-floor room without either running water or heating, consequently having to struggle up four floors with buckets of water and firewood. There was little to eat in the ruins of the German-occupied city, and, shivering from the intense cold of the winter, she had suffered a severe recurrence of tuberculosis and had been compelled to return to her sister Maria in Georgievsk. The details of his mother’s letter only confirmed what the weakness of her handwriting had hinted. She was now a physically broken woman. One can imagine Solzhenitsyn reflecting on the perverse irony of events. He had been in the army for over eighteen months without so much as a scratch to show for his endeavors; meanwhile the war had crept up from behind and was killing his mother by stealth.

It was while he was encamped on the river Neruch that Solzhenitsyn met up once again with his old friend Nikolai Vitkevich, who, as luck would have it, was an infantry officer in a regiment stationed in a neighboring sector of the front. The two friends had temporarily lost touch with each other but found on being reunited that they had as much in common as ever, both politically and emotionally. They were “like the two halves of a single walnut”.²⁵ In the days that followed, they enjoyed once more the endless hours of debate and speculation that had been such a joyful part of their adolescent lives. It seemed that nothing had changed. Both men still considered themselves loyal communists, and Nikolai, unlike Solzhenitsyn, had actually joined the Party, but there was one important, and ultimately fatal, difference in their thinking from that which had characterized earlier years. Now they had learned to be critical of the Soviet regime, albeit from a Leninist perspective. Rashly, they drafted a political manifesto, “Resolution No. 1”, which likened aspects of Stalin’s regime to feudalism. Fortunately, for the two embryonic dissidents, they did not take the suicidal decision to show their “Resolution” to anyone else but merely promised solemnly to keep a copy of it on their person throughout the war. Their reunion, brief but sweet, was swept away by the eruption of battle.

On July 4, Solzhenitsyn recorded that the Germans had bombed their entrenchment, not with high explosives but with leaflets urging them to surrender before it was too late. “You have more than once experienced the crushing strength of the German attacks”, the leaflets warned.²⁶ This was the prelude to the launching of the great German attack on the Kursk salient, the failure of which effectively secured the eventual defeat of the Nazis on the eastern front. In truth, since their defeat at Stalingrad, the armies of the Third Reich had been in almost constant retreat. They had been driven out of the Caucasus, and Solzhenitsyn’s home city of Rostov had been liberated in February. By the time Hitler had launched this last-ditch offensive, his forces had been pushed back to a line running from just east of the river Donets in the south to Orel and Kursk in the north. They were far from defeated, however, and no fewer than seventeen panzer divisions and eighteen infantry divisions had been deployed for the Kursk offensive. With such forces at his disposal, Hitler had good reason to be confident that his troops would once again smash their way through the Soviet defenses. At last, Lieutenant Solzhenitsyn was set to taste the bitterness of war.

The fighting that followed the initial German attack was fierce and intense, but the Russians had built up colossal forces of their own in the area, and their defensive fortifications stretched back to a depth of sixty miles. The first set-piece tank battle lasted for three weeks but ended in stalemate. In spite of heavy losses on both sides, the Germans had failed in their principal objective, to capture Kursk, and had hardly moved the front forward at all. The last great German offensive in the east had failed, but the battle was by no means over. The Nazis still controlled Orel. Solzhenitsyn recalled the morning when the Soviet attack on Orel began and “thousands of whistles cut through the air above us”.²⁷

The battle for Orel lasted a further three weeks of continuous fighting, with Solzhenitsyn’s unit as part of the central front commanded by General Rokossovsky. On August 5, Solzhenitsyn entered Orel with the victorious Russian army, and ten days later he was awarded the Order of the Patriotic War, second class, for his part in the battle. Specifically, he was cited “for a speedy and successful training of battery personnel, and for [his] skilled command in determining the enemy’s artillery groupings”, which contributed to the taking of Lvov on July 23, 1943. The order was issued on August 10, 1943, and signed by Captain Pshechenko, Colonel Airapetov, and Major General Semyonov.²⁸

In May 1944, Solzhenitsyn learned of the death of his mother. “I am left with all the good she did for me and all the bad I did to her”, he wrote in a letter to Natalya. “No one wrote to me about her death. A money order came back marked that the addressee was deceased. Apparently she died in March.”²⁹ His sense of guilt must have been heightened when, some time later, he discovered that she had in fact died on January 17, 1944. There had been no money to pay for a gravedigger, and she had been laid in the same grave as his Uncle Roman, who had died just two weeks earlier.

There was little time to grieve. Within a month, Solzhenitsyn had been promoted to the rank of captain and found himself once more in the middle of some of the bloodiest battles on the eastern front. In June, the Soviet assault on Belorussia began, and Solzhenitsyn’s battery of sixty men was in the thick of the fighting. On July 12, 1944, he received the Order of the Red Star [Krasnoi Zvezdy], which was awarded for “exceptional service in the cause of the defense of the Soviet Union”. He was cited “for his fine organization and command skills” during the fighting on June 24, and specifically for “determining, in spite of deafening noise, the precise position of two enemy batteries, which were immediately destroyed”, allowing, in turn, for the attacking Soviet infantry to cross the river Drut and to take the city of Rogachyov. The order was signed by Captain Pshechenko, Liuetenant Colonel Kravets, and Colonel Travkin.³⁰

From almost as far north as Minsk, then westward across Belorussia, the Soviet army advanced inexorably until its triumphant crossing of the Polish border. Amidst the mayhem, Solzhenitsyn still found time to sketch ideas for a novel on the war in the notebook he always carried with him. In particular, he was fascinated by the figure of their political commissar, Major Arseny Pashkin, who fought as courageously as the military men around him and who had subordinated his political function to the urgent demands of the military campaign. Observing the actions of this man closely, Solzhenitsyn made plans to include him in the design for his novel. “I’m sketching in more and more new details of Pashkin”, he wrote excitedly in a letter to Natalya. “Oh, when will I be able to sit down to write The Sixth Course? I will write it so magnificently! Especially now, when the battle of Orel-Kursk stands out in such bold relief and can be seen so vividly through the prism of the year 1944.”³¹

Another source of inspiration was the distant figure of Bronevitsky, whose collaboration with the Germans in Morozovsk held a morbid fascination for Solzhenitsyn. It was a fascination born of emotional contrasts. He had been genuinely fond of the old man and his younger wife, holding both of them in affection, yet their support for the German invader was utterly incomprehensible and ultimately unforgivable. What made the old man do it? It was a conundrum Solzhenitsyn was determined to solve. He planned to get to grips with the whole issue in a story about Bronevitsky entitled “In the Town of M”. To assist him in the writing of this story, he made a point of going into as many small towns as he could, as the Soviet army continued its westward march, to find out what life had been like under German occupation. He became increasingly fascinated by the phenomenon of occupation and the psychological reaction to it. He strove to understand the feelings of the people in the occupied territories, and especially of the collaborators among them. Their treachery still repelled him, but the very repulsion acted as an attraction. Perhaps he felt the same repulsive attraction that many people feel toward understanding the minds of murderers or serial killers. Without any desire to commit acts of treachery himself, he still needed to know why people did it.

And what of those Russians who actually fought in the German army? What motivated them to take up arms against the Motherland and to kill their compatriots? Such treason was almost beyond comprehension. When Solzhenitsyn had first seen a German propaganda leaflet reporting the creation of the “Russian Liberation Army”, he had frankly disbelieved it, dismissing it as the lies of the enemy. Then came the battle of Orel and a rude awakening:

Other stories abounded about the bravery of these enemy Russians. They defended the Dnieper bridgehead south of Tursk so fiercely that for two weeks the Soviet units with whom Solzhenitsyn was deployed made little progress in spite of continuous fighting. Then there was the tragi-comic tale Solzhenitsyn recounted about the fierce battles that raged near Malye Kozlovichi in December 1943:

The reason for the reluctance of these enemy Russians to surrender was clear. What awaited them at the hands of Stalin’s secret police would be worse than death. Better to die than surrender. This harsh reality was experienced by Solzhenitsyn when he arrived in Bobruisk at the start of the Belorussian offensive. He was walking along the highway, in the midst of the wreckage of battle, when he heard a desperate cry for help from a fellow Russian. “Captain, sir! Captain, sir!” Looking in the direction of the cries, he saw a Russian, naked from the waist up but wearing German breeches. He had blood all over his face, chest, shoulders, and back, and was being driven along by a mounted security sergeant who was whipping him continuously and spurring his horse into him. “He kept lashing that naked back up and down with the whip, without letting him turn around, without letting him ask for help. He drove him along, beating and beating him, raising new crimson welts on his skin.”³⁴

Solzhenitsyn recalled the incident with shame, in a spirit of self-recrimination and contrition, lamenting that “any officer, possessing any authority, in any army on earth ought to have stopped that senseless torture”. Yet the Soviet army was different from any other army on earth, and Captain Solzhenitsyn had learned to fear the consequences of questioning the rising tide of brutality he was witnessing. “I was afraid…. I said nothing and I did nothing. I passed him by as if I could not hear him.”³⁵ And all the time a metamorphosis was taking place as a direct result of the suffering he saw around him. The questions he was too afraid to ask out loud were formulating themselves all the more forcefully inside him. Slowly, almost indiscernibly, the naïve young communist was fading away, being erased by experience, making way for someone much stronger.