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:
[T]urning things over in my mind, I remembered Bronevitsky. And I was no longer so schoolboyishly self-righteous. They had unjustly taken his job from him, given him work that was beneath him, locked him up, tortured him, beaten him, starved him, spat in his face—what was he supposed to do? He was supposed to believe that all this was the price of progress, and that his own life, physical and spiritual, the lives of those dear to him, the anguished lives of our whole people, were of no significance.15
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.