Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile

^{CHAPTER FIVE} ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT

By the end of 1944, Soviet forces had crossed the border into Poland. Final victory over the Nazi enemy was in sight.

Solzhenitsyn and his battery, encamped on the river Narev southeast of Bialystok, waited expectantly for the order to advance on Germany itself. It arrived in the second week of January 1945 when Captain Solzhenitsyn received a bundle of leaflets for distribution to the troops under his command. The leaflet contained Marshal Rokossovsky’s famous message: “Soldiers, sergeants, officers, and generals! Today at 5 A.M. we commence our great last offensive. Germany lies before us! One more blow and the enemy will collapse, and immortal victory will crown our divisions!” A more ominous message had already reached the troops from Stalin himself. He had announced that “everything was allowed” once Soviet forces entered Germany. In a hate-filled address, he solemnly ordered the countless troops about to be unleashed on German soil to wreak vengeance for all that Russia had suffered during the war. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Rape, pillage, and plunder. Nothing was forbidden.¹

Repelled by this naked incitement to greed and cruelty, Solzhenitsyn lectured his battery on the need to exercise moderation and restraint. Looking back on the moment, he composed an imaginary speech to his men, which he incorporated in The Way, calling for Russian soldiers to keep their heads, take a responsible stand, and “act the proud sons of a magnanimous land”.²

Magnanimity was not on the mind of the Soviet army as it marched into Germany. Solzhenitsyn’s words fell on deaf and defiant ears. As the Red Army descended on the dying embers of the Third Reich, it was Stalin’s vision, not Solzhenitsyn’s, that became reality.

For bravery in battle on January 27, 1945, Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Order of the Red Banner [Krasnogo Znameni], the USSR’s second-highest military order, which was given for “heroism in combat or other extraordinary accomplishments of military valor during combat operations”. Specifically, he was cited for his personal bravery in leading his men (and valuable equipment) out of near-total encirclement during the night of January 26-27, while virtually cut off from all communication with HQ.³

As it advanced through Poland, Solzhenitsyn’s regiment met little or no resistance from a retreating German army, and within days it had swung north into East Prussia. To his delight, Solzhenitsyn found himself following in the footsteps of General Samsonov, whose disastrous campaign in the First World War had inspired the young Solzhenitsyn to pore over maps in reading rooms, researching his epic. The maps were coming to life before his eyes, and he found himself in the very region where Samsonov had been defeated thirty years earlier, passing through some of the towns and villages he had attempted to describe in 1936 in his planned series of novels. The poignancy was accentuated by the knowledge that this was also where his own father had been during the previous war. Like Samsonov, Solzhenitsyn entered the town of Neidenburg when it was in flames, set ablaze by rampaging Russian troops. “Am tramping through East Prussia for the second day”, he wrote to Natalya, “a hell of a lot of impressions.”⁴

The impressions were destined to come to dramatic fruition in the battle scenes of August 1914 but also, and with added power, in his great narrative poem Prussian Nights. Having reached Neidenburg (now Nidzica) on January 20, his unit reached Allenstein (now Olsztyn) on January 22, and finally the Baltic—cutting off the German armies to the east—on January 26. Although the poem is not autobiography in the strict sense, the verse narrative conveys Solzhenitsyn’s impressions and experiences of those fateful days far more evocatively than a mere dry rendition of the facts could achieve.

At the beginning of Prussian Nights, the jingoistic praise of Russia’s glorious advance is soon overshadowed as the fiery fingers groping for revenge claw across the “foul witch” of Germany. The narrative sweeps and sways almost drunkenly as Solzhenitsyn describes the wanton destruction of villages, churches, farms, and farm animals. It is an “exultant chaos”. Amid the flames, the narrator almost unwillingly begins to perceive something metaphysically infernal in the physical inferno all about him. It is “portentous, evil, temptingly, work of a devil”.⁵ As Stalin’s edict is carried out with gusto, the narrator stands aloof. He has no vengeance in his heart but, “like Pilate when he washed his hands”, will do nothing to quench the flames.

Prussian Nights also recounts a scene of inhumanity that exceeds in its shocking precision anything achieved by Owen or Sassoon in their poetic accounts of the First World War. The narrator comes across a house that has “not been burned, just looted, rifled” where he hears “a moaning, by the walls half-muffled”. Inside, he finds a mother and her little daughter. The mother is wounded but still alive. The daughter is dead, having suffered beforehand a fate worse than death. She lies lifeless on a mattress, the victim of a mass rape, and the narrator wonders how many Russian soldiers had lain on top of the girl’s battered body before she died. “A platoon, a company, perhaps?”—“A girl’s been turned into a woman, a woman turned into a corpse”.⁶ The mother, her eyes “hazy and bloodshot”, has been blinded in the vain struggle to save herself and her daughter. She has nothing to live for and begs the narrator, a soldier she can hear but not see, to kill her. Neither is this the only sickening account of mass rape depicted in the narrative. A few pages later the anarchic invaders come across “a rich house, full of German virgins”, ignoring the desperate pleas of the women that they are not Germans but Polish.⁷ There is a description of the coldblooded murder of an elderly woman and her bedridden husband. The poem concludes with the narrator finally succumbing to the temptations all around him. He rapes a woman compliant from fear who, when the ordeal is over, begs him not to shoot her. Sickened with remorse, and knowing that it is too late to rectify the wrong he has done, he feels the burden of another’s soul weighing heavily on his own. The climactic evil he has perpetrated has left him unfulfilled, unsatisfied. All that remains is an anticlimax of guilt, intensified into futility.

In addition to the atrocities perpetrated by Russians on his own side, Solzhenitsyn continued to come across Russians who were fighting for the Germans. His last contact with these enemy compatriots, deep in the heart of East Prussia at the end of January, almost cost him his life. Finding themselves surrounded on all sides by advancing Soviets, the enemy Russians attempted to break through the position occupied by Solzhenitsyn’s unit. This they did in silence, without artillery preparation, under cover of darkness. As there was no firmly delineated front, they succeeded in penetrating deep into Soviet territory. Just before dawn, Solzhenitsyn saw them “as they suddenly rose from the snow where they’d dug in, wearing their winter camouflage cloaks” and “hurled themselves with a cheer” on the battery of a 152-millimeter gun battalion, knocking out twelve heavy cannon with hand grenades before they could fire a shot. Pursued by their tracer bullets, the remnants of Solzhenitsyn’s group ran almost two miles in fresh snow, fleeing for their lives, until they reached the bridge across the Passarge River. Here, hopelessly outgunned and outnumbered, the surviving enemy Russians were forced to surrender.⁹ “They knew they would never have the faintest glimpse of mercy”, wrote Solzhenitsyn. “When we captured them, we shot them as soon as the first intelligible Russian word came from their mouths.” Whether this was common practice, it was not always what happened. Sometimes Russians in enemy uniform were taken prisoner to await their fate in the Soviet Union. This, for many, was considered worse than death itself. Solzhenitsyn records an occasion when three captured enemy Russians were being marched along the roadside a few steps away from him. All of a sudden, one of them twisted around and threw himself under a T-34 tank. The tank veered to avoid him, but the edge of its track crushed him nevertheless. “The broken man lay writhing, bloody foam coming from his mouth. And one could certainly understand him! He preferred a soldier’s death to being hanged in a dungeon.”¹⁰

Even amidst the chaos of the Russian rampage through a near-defeated Germany, Solzhenitsyn was able to write to his friends and to Natalya. Now, however, things were different between husband and wife. It seemed that much more separated them than the hundreds of miles between them, or the hundreds of days since they had last seen each other. Much had changed, and perhaps it was Solzhenitsyn himself had changed most of all. His experiences as a front-line soldier, stretching back over eighteen months and culminating in the horrific vision of these Prussian nights, had killed off the carefree youth who had married his student girlfriend nearly five years earlier. The boy had become a man, and the man saw things very differently from the boy. He also saw things very differently from the woman he had married, who was unable to comprehend the changes in her husband’s attitude toward her. “The very last letter my husband wrote me from the front again heaped a mountain of suffering upon me. With one hand he seemed to push me away, and with the other he drew me even closer, even tighter to himself.”¹¹

Natalya described the letter as “an irritated sermon”, which perhaps it was, but it is clear from Natalya’s own response that, for her part, she considered it not only irritated but irritating, an annoyance. The truth was that she was as irritated by her husband as he was by her. In essence, the letter castigated Natalya for the “egotistical” nature of her love:

The letter concluded with a plea that his wife rise above her “completely understandable, completely human” but “egotistical” plans for their future. If she could do this, he suggested, real harmony would reign.¹²

All that reigned when Natalya read her husband’s words was a sense of confusion born out of incomprehension. This gave way to “worry, fear, despair, and finally a sense of hopelessness”.¹³

Perhaps it was not surprising that Solzhenitsyn’s words should have been incomprehensible to his wife. They were a conundrum, but contained the key to understanding the man, at least as he was in January 1945. At the simplest level, the letter appears unreasonable. It seems that it is Solzhenitsyn, not Natalya, whose love is egotistical. It is he, not she, who is demanding that the marriage should progress according to pre-set criteria. It is he, not she, who “must not swerve” from the path at any point; he, not she, who is unprepared to compromise. Yet on a deeper level, the unreasonableness was an expression of something more important to the maturing soldier. He was beginning to perceive that a spirit of sacrifice was at the heart of marriage, and of life, and that the selfish pursuit of needlessly created wants was an obstacle to true happiness. Real harmony could reign only when the desire for material possessions was subjugated to higher goals. For Solzhenitsyn, the higher goal was his art, from which he “must not swerve”. Even his marriage to Natalya was of secondary importance when compared with his literary aspirations. What he needed from her, and demanded from her, was an acceptance that she must be prepared to sacrifice herself to this higher goal. She must love him not because she wanted him or needed him or sought to possess him, but by giving herself heart and soul to him, selflessly sacrificing herself on the altar of his art. He, on the other hand, could not be expected to sacrifice his art for her, or indeed for anything else. Either she must sacrifice herself for their marriage, or he would sacrifice their marriage for his art. It was an ultimatum.

Years later, Solzhenitsyn sought to explain these feelings. “I was so wound up—my path was like that of a piston…. Everything’s important, yes, every side of life has its importance, but at the same time I would have lost my momentum and my kinetic energy.”¹⁴

The wartime delay in the postal system meant that Solzhenitsyn’s letters to his wife usually took a month to arrive. She received the letter containing his confusing ultimatum in early March. About a week later, instead of his next letter, her own postcard to him was returned. It bore the notation: “The addressee has left the unit.” Natalya panicked and wrote to anyone and everyone who might know her husband’s whereabouts.

Recalling this troubled time in her memoirs, Natalya chose to quote from one of her husband’s novels, letting the autobiographical element in the fiction speak for itself:

Little did Natalya know that even as she worried and wept at home, her husband was languishing in a Soviet jail. In a grim twist of fate, or a providential adjustment of divine symmetry, Solzhenitsyn found himself being sacrificed to a “higher goal”. As he had sought Natalya’s sacrifice on the altar of art, so he was now being sacrificed on the altar of Stalin’s all-powerful state.

A few days after his self-assured letter to his wife insisting that his life could not move one millimeter from the tracks on which he had set it, the crushing apparatus of the Soviet state brought all his plans, his schemes, his ambitions, his life itself, to a grinding halt. He was plucked helpless from his path, and placed in an alien environment where the road ahead could not be seen, if indeed any such road existed.

The catastrophic turn in his fortunes commenced with a telephone call from brigade headquarters on February 9, 1945. He was to report at once to Brigadier-General Travkin. As he entered the brigadier-general’s office, he noticed a group of officers standing in a corner of the room, of whom he recognized only one, the brigade’s political commissar. Travkin ordered Solzhenitsyn to step forward and hand over his revolver. Puzzled, he obeyed, handing the weapon to Travkin, who slowly wound the leather strap round and round the butt before placing it in his desk drawer. Then in a low voice Travkin said, “All right, you must go now.”

Solzhenitsyn did not understand and remained awkwardly where he was.

“Yes, yes,” repeated Travkin in the uneasy silence, “it is time for you to go somewhere.”

Instantly, two officers stepped forward from among the group in the corner and told Solzhenitsyn he was under arrest. “Me?” he gasped in reply. “What for?”

Without bothering to explain further, the two officers ripped his epaulettes from his shoulders and the star from his cap, removed his belt, and snatched the map-case from his hands. Ironically, this unceremonious stripping him off his rank and his dignity came only days before the scheduled medal ceremony at which he was due to be presented with the Order of the Red Banner for his heroism in battle less than two weeks earlier. Without further ado, the two officers began to march him from the room.

“Wait a moment!” ordered Travkin.

The two counter-intelligence officers released their grip momentarily, and Solzhenitsyn turned to face the brigadier-general.

“Have you”, Travkin asked meaningfully, “a friend on the First Ukrainian Front?”

“That’s against regulations!” the two arresting officers shouted angrily. “You have no right!”¹⁶

Travkin could say no more, but Solzhenitsyn knew instantly that this was a reference to his old friend Nikolai Vitkevich and that it was intended as a warning. Evidently, his arrest had something to do with his correspondence with Nikolai, or perhaps with their “Resolution No. 1”. Later, he was to consider both the correspondence and the Resolution “a piece of childish stupidity”.¹⁷ He and Nikolai knew that censorship was in place and that their letters would be read, but this had not prevented them making derogatory comments about Stalin in their correspondence. They were, with the wisdom of hindsight, extremely foolish. Solzhenitsyn wrote that their naïveté “aroused only laughter and astonishment” when he discussed their case with fellow prisoners. “Other prisoners told me that two more such stupid jackasses couldn’t exist. And I became convinced of it myself.”¹⁸

As he spent his first day as a prisoner, desolate and bemused, he must have groped in desperation for some last straw of hope. There must have been a mistake. Yes, that was it. There had been a mistake, and soon he would receive an apology. He would be released, and everything would be all right. Yet as he spent the next three days in the counter-intelligence prison at the headquarters of the front, he heard the disquieting voices of his fellow cellmates. They spoke of the deceptions practiced by the interrogators, their threats, and beatings. They told him that once a person was arrested, he was never released. No one was ever released. Hope as he might, there had been no mistake. The system didn’t make mistakes. He was told by his fellow prisoners that he would get a “tenner”, a ten-year sentence. In fact, they would all get tenners. Everyone got tenners. As he listened to these voices, his hopes, the only light on the horizon, faded away. The future was black, too black to see. An abyss. A nightmare, but no dream. Reality.

In time, the harsh realities of prison life would become the only reality he knew, eclipsing his previous memories. Two years later, he even saw his time in the army as belonging to a different, distant world: “The war had licked away four of my years. I no longer believed that it had all actually happened and I didn’t want to remember it. Two years here, two years in the Archipelago, had dimmed in my mind all the roads of the front, all the comradeship of the front line, had totally darkened them.”¹⁹

Many years later, having passed through the suffering of the prison system, he would see how important the arrest and imprisonment had been to the subsequent development of his life and personality. He even learned to be grateful to the Gulag, confessing that, along with his time in the army, the most important event “would be the arrest”. He went so far as to describe it as the second “defining moment” of his life, crucial “because it allowed me to understand Soviet reality in its entirety and not merely the one-sided view I had of it previous to the arrest”.²⁰ He then reiterated what had been taken away from him by his youth in the Soviet Union, most notably the “Christian spirit” of his childhood. If he had not been arrested, he could only imagine with “horror… what kind of emptiness awaited me. The gaol returned all that to me.”²¹

Solzhenitsyn’s military career, as Scammell wrote, had begun as farce and ended in tragedy. Yet the tragic end was really only the beginning. It was the crucifixion preceding the resurrection, labor pains preceding birth. The arrest was the real beginning of the Passion Play of Solzhenitsyn’s life, in which the pride and selfishness of his former self were stripped away like unwanted garments.