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