Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile

^{CHAPTER SIX} HELL INTO PURGATORY

After the privileges Solzhenitsyn had enjoyed as an officer in the Soviet army, life as a prisoner must have seemed unbearable. During the first days in the counter-intelligence prison, he had slept on rotten straw beside the latrine bucket, had witnessed the pathetic sight of beaten and sleepless men, had tasted with disgust the prison gruel, and had listened in horror as his fellow prisoners detailed the lurid and hopeless future that awaited him. All his ambitions, which had seemed to stretch out before him on reassuringly immovable tracks, had been derailed. His world, so meticulously planned and worked out in advance, had fallen apart.

Nevertheless, although he was technically no longer a soldier, still less an officer, Solzhenitsyn continued to feel himself superior to those of subordinate rank around him. The prejudice and snobbery he had learned at officer training school were deeply ingrained, and he fumed with indignation whenever a noncommissioned officer barked an order at him. This attitude of superiority was exhibited at its worst when he and seven other prisoners were marched the forty-five miles from Osterode, on the front, to Brodnica, where the counter-intelligence headquarters was located. All the prisoners were Russians, with the exception of one German civilian who, dressed in a black three-piece suit, black overcoat, and black hat, stood out from the rest, his white face “nurtured on gentleman’s food”.¹ The German knew no Russian, and it is doubtful whether the Russians would have spoken to the hated enemy even if he had been fluent in their language.

Before they set out on the march to Brodnica, which would take two days in cold, changeable weather, the chief of the convoy, a sergeant, ordered Solzhenitsyn to pick up the sealed suitcase containing his officer’s equipment as well as the papers that had been seized as evidence when he was arrested. Solzhenitsyn was incensed. A mere sergeant was ordering an officer to carry a large, heavy suitcase. The impudence! Besides, were there not six men from the ranks in their convoy, all empty-handed? And what about the German? “I am an officer”, Solzhenitsyn responded truculently. “Let the German carry it.” Recalling this incident later, Solzhenitsyn remembered with shame the astonished look he received from the Russian prisoner beside him and was relieved that the German could not understand what he had said. The German was ordered to carry the suitcase and did so until he nearly collapsed with exhaustion. At that point, the Russian who was walking beside him, a former prisoner of war, took the suitcase of his own free will and commenced carrying it. After that, all the other Russian POWs took turns in carrying Solzhenitsyn’s case, all without being ordered to do so, only returning it to the German when it was once again his turn. All carried the case except its owner, who, walking at the back of the convoy, witnessed the selflessness of his colleagues with a growing sense of humiliation.

After three days at Brodnica, he was escorted to the railway station destined, he was told, for Moscow. The first part of the journey, to Bialystok and the Soviet border, was made on the platform of a flat railway wagon, totally exposed to the icy winds and snow of February. Three-quarters of the train consisted of similar wagons packed tight with Russian women and girls who had been rounded up in the occupied territories for alleged collaboration with the enemy. Crossing the Soviet border, Solzhenitsyn, escorted by three counter-intelligence officers, was transferred to a passenger train to Minsk, where they caught the Minsk-Moscow Express. Arriving in the Russian capital on February 20, 1945, he was taken via the metro to the famous and feared Lubyanka prison. His experiences upon arrival have been documented in the closing pages of The First Circle, which, he informed Michael Scammell, were an accurate description of his own ordeal. Thus, in the fictional setting of Innokenti Volodin’s arrest and arrival at the Lubyanka in Solzhenitsyn’s novel, the brutality and inhumanity of the author’s first hours in a Russian jail are relived. They began with a period in a tiny windowless cell, so small that it was impossible to lie down in it. A solitary table and stool filled almost the entire floor space. When seated on the stool, it was impossible to straighten one’s legs. At regular intervals, the silent monotony was broken by the sound of the shutter on the peep-hole being slid back so that a solitary eye could peer in at him.

Eventually, the door was unlocked, and he was ordered to go to another room. Here he was strip-searched. Having removed all his clothes, Solzhenitsyn stood passively while a man in gray overalls explored every orifice of his body. He thrust his fingers in the prisoner’s mouth, his ears, pulled down his lower eyelids, and jerked Solzhenitsyn’s head back to look into his nostrils. The humiliated prisoner was then ordered to take hold of his penis, turn the foreskin back and lift it to the left and right. Finally, he was told to spread his legs as far apart as they would go, bend over, take his buttocks in each hand and pull them apart so that the last remaining orifice could be inspected.

The strip search completed, Solzhenitsyn was told to sit naked on a stool, teeth chattering from the cold, while the man in the gray overalls commenced a thorough search of his clothes. Beginning with underpants, vest, and socks, he pinched all the seams and folds before throwing them at the prisoner’s feet and telling him to put them on. Taking out a jack-knife, the man thrust it between the soles of Solzhenitsyn’s boots and pierced the heels with a marlinspike. Next came Solzhenitsyn’s beloved captain’s tunic. The former officer watched in horror as the man meticulously tore off all the gold braid and piping, cut off the buttons and button-loops, and ripped open the lining to feel inside. His trousers and tailored greatcoat received the same scrupulous attention. Buttons were removed, and the knife once again went to work slicing through the lining.

At last, an hour or so after he had arrived, the man in the gray overalls scooped up the ripped-off braid and piping and departed without a word. Solzhenitsyn, left alone with only the tattered trappings of his former life, was beginning to realize that he was no longer an officer in the Soviet army. Instead, though he did not know it at the time, he had joined another desolate and ragged army numbering millions throughout the victorious Soviet Union. He was among the ranks of Stalin’s slaves.

No sooner had the new recruit to this other army recovered from the first ordeal than another began. A warder, this time in off-white overalls, ordered him once again to remove all his clothes and sit naked on the stool. He felt an iron grip on his neck as the warder shaved first his head, then his armpits, and finally his pubic hair. Shortly after this warder had departed, another arrived. Now the purpose was a medical examination, for which the prisoner was obliged to strip once more. The “examination” consisted principally of a series of questions about venereal disease, syphilis, leprosy, and other contagions.

The “processing” of the prisoner continued with the instruction to undress again, this time in order to take a shower, before he was escorted to another room where his photograph and fingerprints were taken.

By the time these formalities had been completed, it was late at night. Solzhenitsyn was again confined in the tiny windowless cell in which he had originally been placed and to which he had intermittently been returned between one or other of the various humiliating episodes. He was utterly exhausted and, in spite of the cramped conditions, sought to get to sleep by curling up on the floor. The shutter of the peep-hole slid back, the solitary eye peered in, the door was opened, and a warder ordered the prisoner to stay awake. Sleeping was against regulations. Again, oblivious to regulations, Solzhenitsyn sought to sleep by leaning his head on the table. Again, obeying regulations, the warder opened the door and demanded that the prisoner stay awake. Sleep was impossible.

Eventually, he was told to put on his clothes and was once more taken from the cell. He was led along corridors, into a yard, down some steps, and into another wing of the prison. Ascending to the fourth floor in a lift, he was placed in another cell, almost identical to the previous one. This, he assumed, was his new “home”. Soon he was again on the move, this time to a slightly bigger cell, about ten feet by five, which had a wooden bench fastened to the wall as well as the customary stool and table. Compared with his previous home, this new cell was a luxury. He almost, unwillingly and unconsciously, felt grateful. After all, the bench was long enough to stretch out on full-length, long enough to sleep on. Already Solzhenitsyn was adapting himself to the survivalist psychology of the long-term prisoner. The unconscious gratitude was accentuated a few moments later when the door opened, and, instead of being called out for a further bout of humiliation, he was handed a mattress, a sheet, a pillow, pillowslip, and blanket. He was being allowed to sleep! Almost as soon as his eyes were closed, the door burst open, and a warder stormed in. He was supposed to sleep with his arms outside the blanket. Regulations. This was easier said than done. His arms grew cold as the night wore on, and he was unable to pull the blankets up to cover his shoulders. In this unnatural position and with a powerful 200-watt bulb glaring overhead, he had a restless night, sleeping only fitfully.

Having been “processed”, Solzhenitsyn was now ready for interrogation. He was led to the office of Captain 1.1. Ezepov, where a thirteen-foot-high, full-length portrait of Stalin gazed down menacingly from the wall, piercing the accused with his larger-than-life eyes. He was informed that he was being charged under Article 58, paragraph 10, of the criminal code for committing anti-Soviet propaganda, and under Article 58, paragraph 11, for founding a hostile organization. Solzhenitsyn soon learned that his interrogator possessed copies of all correspondence between Solzhenitsyn, Nikolai, Natalya, Kirill, and Lydia from April 1944 to February 1945. He also possessed a copy of “Resolution No. 1”, which Solzhenitsyn had kept in his map-case. The letters contained numerous thinly veiled attacks on Stalin, while the Resolution stated unequivocally the intention of Nikolai and Solzhenitsyn to organize a new party. This was more than enough evidence for the experienced interrogator to build a case that Solzhenitsyn was part of a sinister conspiracy to overthrow the Soviet regime.

After four days of interrogation, Captain Ezepov was sufficiently confident about securing a conviction that he gave permission for Solzhenitsyn to be transferred from solitary confinement to a normal investigation cell. Here he would be sharing with three other prisoners, three other human beings in the same pathetic predicament as himself. He would have someone to talk to, someone with whom he could share experiences. After the days of nightmarish seclusion and uncertainty, he would now have human contact, mutual support, companionship. He again felt the involuntary gratitude that had swept over him when he first arrived in the “luxury” cell four days earlier. In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn wrote that he was so happy when the cell door opened and he saw “those three unshaven, crumpled, pale faces… so human, so dear” that he stood hugging his mattress and smiling with happiness. “Out of all the cells you’ve been in,” Solzhenitsyn recalled, “your first cell is a very special one, the place where you first encountered others like yourself, doomed to the same fate. All your life you will remember it with an emotion that you otherwise experience only in remembering your first love.”²

There was another parallel with first love. In his contact with these three prisoners, he was about to be introduced to new horizons, new insights into life, new perspectives that had been invisible to him in his previous blinkered existence. His eyes were opening to a whole new world.

First there was Anatoly Ilyich Fastenko, the oldest of the prisoners. Fastenko was an Old Bolshevik, one of that revered elite of revolutionaries who had been members of the Bolshevik Party before the Revolution. At this stage, Solzhenitsyn still considered himself a good and loyal Marxist. His only complaint was with Stalin, not with Marxism-Leninism, and this Old Bolshevik was an object of reverence in the young communist’s eyes. Solzhenitsyn listened wide-eyed as Fastenko recounted his life story. He had been arrested under the tsarist regime as long ago as 1904 and had participated in the revolution of 1905. He served eight years’ hard labor, followed by internal exile, and fled abroad to Canada and the United States, only returning to Russia after the October Revolution. Most interesting of all, in Solzhenitsyn’s eyes, was the fact that this Old Bolshevik had actually known Lenin personally. Pressing Fastenko for anecdotes and impressions of the great man, who was still for Solzhenitsyn an object of idolization, he was shocked to find that the Old Bolshevik was ready to criticize Lenin as well as Stalin. It was tantamount to blasphemy as far as Solzhenitsyn was concerned. Stalin may indeed have betrayed the Revolution, but Lenin could do no wrong. As Solzhenitsyn insisted on Lenin’s infallibility, a slight coolness developed between the old man and the young Marxist. “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image”, Fastenko responded.

The second prisoner in the interrogation cell was a middle-aged Estonian lawyer named Arnold Susi. Whereas Solzhenitsyn could relate readily to the Old Bolshevik’s life story, steeped as it was in the revolutionary traditions that had been instilled in Solzhenitsyn as an integral part of his Soviet education, the Estonian was of a type quite new to him. Not only was Susi an educated European who spoke fluent Russian, German, and English, as well as his native Estonian, he was, politically speaking, both an Estonian nationalist and a democrat. “Although I had never expected to become interested in Estonia, much less bourgeois democracy”, Solzhenitsyn wrote, he found himself fascinated by Susi’s “loving stories” about his country’s struggle for national self-determination. As he listened, Solzhenitsyn grew to love “that modest, work-loving, small nation of big men” and became interested in the democratic principles of the Estonian constitution, “which had been borrowed from the best of European experience…. And, though the why of it wasn’t clear, I began to like it all and store it all away in my experience.”³

The third cellmate was Georgi Kramarenko, a man for whom Solzhenitsyn developed an almost instant dislike. There was “something alien”, something not quite right about him. Neither was it very long before Solzhenitsyn learned that his initial suspicions were justified. He had never come across the word nasedka—“stool-pigeon”—but he realized quickly that Kramarenko was betraying their private conversations to the prison authorities.

In these three prisoners, and with the incisive grasp of human personality that was to characterize his books, Solzhenitsyn began to see everything more clearly. The Old Bolshevik who criticized Lenin; the cultured Estonian who loved democracy and the smallness of his own nation; and the “stool-pigeon” who had sold his soul, betrayed his companions, and prostituted himself to the prison system—three very different people in one small cell. But what of the fourth prisoner in the cell, Solzhenitsyn himself? Arnold Susi later recalled that Solzhenitsyn emerged in their conversations about Estonia and democracy as “a strange mixture of Marxist and democrat”, an observation Solzhenitsyn thought was accurate: “Yes, things were wildly mixed up inside me at that time.”⁴

As his worldly ambitions had crumbled, so had his ideological and political preconceptions. From atop the rubble of his former ideas, he was slowly, meticulously, observing the world through fresh and unprejudiced eyes. “For the first time in my life I was learning to look at things through a magnifying glass.”⁵

All this time, Solzhenitsyn was still being interrogated and trying desperately not to incriminate anyone else in the process. After all, his interrogator had letters from his wife and university friends. And all the time, beyond the walls of the Lubyanka and the claustrophobic world it enclosed, major events were unfolding in the world at large.

At the end of April, the blackout shade on the window of the cell was removed, the only perceptible signal the prisoners received that the war was almost over. On May 1, the Lubyanka was quieter than ever. All the interrogators were out in Moscow celebrating, and no one was taken for questioning. The silence was broken by someone protesting across the corridor. The unknown, unseen prisoner was bundled into one of the windowless cells that had greeted Solzhenitsyn on his arrival in the Lubyanka ten weeks earlier. The door to the tiny cell was left open while the warders beat the prisoner for what seemed like hours. “In the suspended silence,” wrote Solzhenitsyn, “every blow on his soft and choking mouth could be heard clearly.”⁶

On the following day, a thirty-gun salute roared out across Moscow. Hearing it, the prisoners guessed that it signified the capture of another European capital. Only two had not yet fallen—Berlin and Prague—and the occupants of the cell tried to guess whether it was the German or Czech capital that had succumbed. In fact, it was Berlin, amongst the ruins of which the suicide of Hitler had signified the death of the Third Reich. A week later, on May 9, there was another thirty-gun salute. Prague had fallen. This was followed on the same day by a forty-gun salute announcing the end of the war in Europe, final victory for the Soviet army. Again the Lubyanka was thrown into a deathly silence by the absence of warders and interrogators who had gone to join the thousands of revelers thronging the streets of Moscow.

Blissfully oblivious to the darker secrets sealed behind the walls of the Lubyanka, one Western observer witnessed the joy in the Russian capital on the day victory was announced:

The contrast between the hush of the cells and the celebrations on the streets could not have been more marked. Solzhenitsyn and his desolate colleagues observed the fireworks lighting the heavens through the window of their private hell. “Above the muzzle of our window, and from all the other cells of the Lubyanka, and from all the windows of all the Moscow prisons, we, too, former prisoners of war and former front-line soldiers, watched the Moscow heavens, patterned with fireworks and crisscrossed by the beams of searchlights.” There was no rejoicing in the cells and no hugs and kisses for the soldiers. “That victory was not for us.”⁸

In June, after his interrogator had informed him that the investigation was now completed, Solzhenitsyn was transferred to Butyrki, another Moscow prison, to await his fate. Arriving in his new cell, he could hear through the windows further reminders of the world beyond the walls. Every morning and evening, the prisoners stood by the windows and listened to the sound of brass bands playing marches in the streets below. This seemed to confirm the rumor that had filtered through even to the prisoners that preparations were under way for a huge victory parade in Red Square on June 22—the fourth anniversary of the beginning of the war between the Soviet Union and Germany. One wonders what thoughts passed through Solzhenitsyn’s mind as the anniversary arrived. Four years earlier, fresh from university, he had arrived in Moscow full of hopes and dreams of the future, the world seemingly at his feet. Now that world had fallen away beneath him, disappearing from view so that it was not four years but an eternity away.

With the iron resilience that would serve him so well in the years ahead, Solzhenitsyn was already adapting to his new world, the world of the Gulag. His education continued in the cell at Butyrki, where he heard nightmare stories from returning prisoners of war who had survived the Nazi death camps. After all they had suffered, they were returning home not to the hero’s welcome being rehearsed in the streets below but to the fate awaiting “traitors of the Motherland”. Having endured Hitler’s concentration camps, they were now to experience Stalin’s concentration camps. Such, Solzhenitsyn concluded, was the nature of Soviet justice.

In the summer of 1945, Solzhenitsyn, still only twenty-six years old, was about to receive some valued lessons from an even younger generation of dissident Russians, the most notable of whom was Boris Gammerov. Solzhenitsyn’s first impressions of this young man, four years his junior, were graphic. He was “a pale, yellowish youth, with a Jewish tenderness of face, wrapped, despite the summer, in a threadbare soldier’s overcoat shot full of holes: he was chilled”. Yet, though feeble and anemic-looking, Gammerov held a reserve of spiritual strength which belied his physical frailty. He had served as a sergeant in an anti-tank unit on the front and had been invalided out with shrapnel wounds in a lung. The wound had not healed, causing his poor physical condition. Almost as soon as they met, Solzhenitsyn and Gammerov began a long conversation, principally on politics. Somewhere in the course of the dialogue, Solzhenitsyn had recalled one of the favorite prayers of the late President Roosevelt, which had been published in one of the Soviet newspapers following Roosevelt’s death two months earlier. Having quoted the prayer, Solzhenitsyn expressed what he assumed was a self-evident evaluation of it: “Well, that’s hypocrisy, of course.” To his surprise, Gammerov frowned in obvious disagreement. “Why?” the youth asked pointedly. “Why do you not admit the possibility that a political leader might sincerely believe in God?”⁹

Solzhenitsyn was completely taken aback by the nature of Gammerov’s reply. If the words had been spoken by someone of his parents’ generation, he could have dismissed them as superstitious nonsense. After all, this was 1945, and Soviet society had progressed beyond irrational belief in a God of any description. Yet the riposte to his self-assured atheism had not come from an elderly Russian tied to the traditions of the Old Believers, but from a twenty-two-year-old New Believer not even born when the Revolution had swept religion aside, allegedly forever. Forced to reappraise his own self-assured certainty, Solzhenitsyn suddenly realized that his condemnation of Roosevelt’s prayer had been spoken not out of conviction but as the result of a Pavlovian response instilled by Soviet education. For once, he was lost for words and found himself unable to answer Gammerov’s question. Instead, he asked meekly whether Gammerov believed in God. “Of course”, was the simple and calm response. Again, Solzhenitsyn was dumbstruck.

Although Gammerov’s words had given him food for thought, as had so many other words he had heard since his imprisonment began, Solzhenitsyn was still a long way from any faith in the existence of God. He did, however, share a faith with the majority of other prisoners in something far more tangible—a general amnesty. It was simply inconceivable that all these people, thousands upon thousands of them, could be kept in prison for much longer, especially as so many appeared to have committed no crime other than being taken prisoner by the Germans. Explaining prisoners’ hopes at the time, Solzhenitsyn wrote that “it just couldn’t be that so many people were to remain in prison after the greatest victory in the world. It was just to frighten us that they were holding us for the time being: so that we might remember and take heed. Of course, there would soon be a total amnesty and all of us would be released.”¹⁰ Their hopes were fueled by the various rumors that were rife at the time. Someone had even sworn that he had read in a newspaper that Stalin, replying to some American correspondent, had promised an amnesty after the war the likes of which the world had never seen. Desperate to believe anything that would offer a glimmer of light at the end of their tunnels of fear and misery, the prisoners convinced themselves that it was no longer a question of whether there was going to be an amnesty but when it was going to be. They were placing all their faith and hope in Comrade Stalin’s charity.

As the rumors circulated, faith in the impending amnesty became obsessive. Every new prisoner was asked, the moment he entered the cell, what he had heard of the amnesty. If two or three prisoners were taken from their cells with their things, it was immediately assumed that they were being taken out to be released. Perhaps it had begun! Every prisoner was on the lookout for signs, and one day, early in July, a sign was given. Written infallibly in soap on a glazed lavender slab in the Butyrki baths were the words of prophecy: “Hurrah!! Amnesty on July 17!” There were celebrations throughout the prison as the inmates prepared joyfully for their imminent release.

The seventeenth of July came and went, but hopes remained high nonetheless. There had been a slight miscalculation perhaps, but the infallibility of the soapy message was still in no doubt. Then, after morning tea on July 27, Solzhenitsyn and another prisoner were summoned from their cell. Their cellmates saw them off with boisterous good wishes, and they were assured that they were on their way to freedom. At long last, the amnesty had arrived. Perhaps they had misread the message in the baths. Perhaps it had said, “July 27”, and not, “July 17”. After all, it was not easy to write clearly in soap.

Solzhenitsyn soon discovered that he was one of twenty prisoners summoned from various cells throughout the prison. For three hours, they waited, hoping from the depths of their being that the prophecy of the baths was true. Were they on the point of freedom? After what seemed an eternity, the door opened, and one of their number was summoned. The tension was beyond bearing. The door opened again. Another was summoned, and the first man returned. He was a changed man. The life had drained from his face, and his glazed expression struck fear into the hearts of his colleagues. “Well?” they asked him, already sensing the worst. “Five years”, he replied, crestfallen. At that point, the second man returned, and a third was summoned. “Well?” they asked, crowding round the returning man in the forlorn hope that the first result was an aberration. “Fifteen years”, was the hope-shattering reply.

Not since the arrest itself had Solzhenitsyn’s hopes for the future collapsed so forcefully, nose diving to new depths of despair. He waited in dread for his turn to come.

When he was finally ushered in to hear his sentence, he had already become accustomed to the inevitable. He was brought before a bored, black-haired NKVD major who informed him that he had been sentenced to eight years. Without further ado, he was given the relevant documentation to sign so that he could be shepherded out to make way for the next victim. “It was all so everyday and routine”, Solzhenitsyn recalled. “Could this really be my sentence—the turning point of my life?” He refused to sign the document until he had read it and, having done so, looked expectantly at the major for some further clarification. None was forthcoming. Instead the major gestured to the jailer to get the next prisoner ready. “But, really, this is terrible”, Solzhenitsyn objected in a half-hearted and futile plea for some sort of explanation. “Eight years! What for?”

“Right there.” The major pointed to where the prisoner was expected to sign.

Defeated and deflated, Solzhenitsyn signed, mumbling about the injustice of the sentence and his right to appeal.

“Let’s move along”, commanded the jailer, ushering him from the room.¹¹

His sentence had begun.

Even after the sentence was pronounced, Solzhenitsyn, like most other prisoners, still nurtured hopes of an amnesty. In his first prison letter to Natalya, which she received six months after his last letter to her from the front, he expressed his confidence that he would not have to serve the full eight years. He told Natalya that he was pinning his hopes on an amnesty, about which there were many rumors. In the letter, he also wrote that, should the amnesty not materialize, he felt duty-bound to grant her “complete personal freedom” for the entire term of the sentence. He assured her of the depth of his love for his “beautiful woman” whose youth had been spent waiting in vain for a long-promised future. This was a milder, gentler Solzhenitsyn, whose plans for the future seemed much more subdued and less ambitious than his previous, pre-prison self would have contemplated. In the army, he had dreamed that he and Natalya would set up home in the hustle and bustle of Moscow or Leningrad. Now he saw things differently. After his return to freedom, he informed her, he would like them to live in a “remote, but thriving, well-provisioned, and picturesque village”. This ideal village would need to be far from the nearest railway, perhaps in Siberia or in Kuban, or along the Volga, or even on the Don. They could both become high-school teachers and could spend the summer vacations traveling. Their new life together would be contented, peaceful, close to nature, and safe from such “accidents” as the one that had befallen him on February 9, 1945. Once again, however, his vision of the future was out of focus with Natalya’s own desires. Now she had her heart and ambition set on her “future professorship” and didn’t relish the prospect of teaching in a remote village school.¹² Not for the first time, husband and wife were separated by more than miles, time, or prison walls.

Throughout his letters to his wife, Solzhenitsyn continued to express his hopes for an amnesty. After he was transferred to the New Jerusalem prison in August 1945, he wrote of his “basic hope… for an amnesty for those convicted under Article 58”, adding, “I still think that this will happen.” The hope was that the amnesty would come in November, but when it, too, failed to materialize, Solzhenitsyn’s faith began to falter. It was revived again in March 1946 when he wrote to Natalya: “I am 100 percent sure and still convinced beyond doubt that the amnesty was prepared long ago, in the autumn of 1945, and that it was approved in substance by our government. But then, for some reason, it was postponed.”¹³ Months passed, and new hopes were voiced in almost every letter. On the first anniversary of the victory over the Germans, hopes were particularly high: “Today we were waiting very hard. Although the rumours were conflicting about the ninth, still, from the ninth on, we are giving it another week or two of time. Such a weariness has descended upon us all, it’s as though the newspapers had promised the amnesty for this day, today.”¹⁴ It was only after he had been in prison for eighteen months that he finally confessed resignedly to Natalya, “Whenever they start talking of amnesty—I smile crookedly and go off to one side.”¹⁵

As the months passed, a spiritual chasm was beginning to separate Natalya from her husband, and she failed to recognize the full significance of the changes he was undergoing. The eventual rejection of the false hopes and false faith in an imaginary amnesty was part of the spiritual metamorphosis at the heart of Solzhenitsyn’s being. Its significance was expressed in the third volume of The Gulag Archipelago: “Dismayed by the hopeless length of my sentence, stunned by my first acquaintance with the world of Gulag, I could never have believed at the beginning of my time there that my spirit would recover by degrees from its dejection: that as the years went by, I should ascend, so gradually that I was hardly aware of it myself.”¹⁶

In the midst of hell, Solzhenitsyn had passed into purgatory.