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