It was while he was encamped on the river Neruch that Solzhenitsyn met up once again with his old friend Nikolai Vitkevich, who, as luck would have it, was an infantry officer in a regiment stationed in a neighboring sector of the front. The two friends had temporarily lost touch with each other but found on being reunited that they had as much in common as ever, both politically and emotionally. They were “like the two halves of a single walnut”.25 In the days that followed, they enjoyed once more the endless hours of debate and speculation that had been such a joyful part of their adolescent lives. It seemed that nothing had changed. Both men still considered themselves loyal communists, and Nikolai, unlike Solzhenitsyn, had actually joined the Party, but there was one important, and ultimately fatal, difference in their thinking from that which had characterized earlier years. Now they had learned to be critical of the Soviet regime, albeit from a Leninist perspective. Rashly, they drafted a political manifesto, “Resolution No. 1”, which likened aspects of Stalin’s regime to feudalism. Fortunately, for the two embryonic dissidents, they did not take the suicidal decision to show their “Resolution” to anyone else but merely promised solemnly to keep a copy of it on their person throughout the war. Their reunion, brief but sweet, was swept away by the eruption of battle.
On July 4, Solzhenitsyn recorded that the Germans had bombed their entrenchment, not with high explosives but with leaflets urging them to surrender before it was too late. “You have more than once experienced the crushing strength of the German attacks”, the leaflets warned.26 This was the prelude to the launching of the great German attack on the Kursk salient, the failure of which effectively secured the eventual defeat of the Nazis on the eastern front. In truth, since their defeat at Stalingrad, the armies of the Third Reich had been in almost constant retreat. They had been driven out of the Caucasus, and Solzhenitsyn’s home city of Rostov had been liberated in February. By the time Hitler had launched this last-ditch offensive, his forces had been pushed back to a line running from just east of the river Donets in the south to Orel and Kursk in the north. They were far from defeated, however, and no fewer than seventeen panzer divisions and eighteen infantry divisions had been deployed for the Kursk offensive. With such forces at his disposal, Hitler had good reason to be confident that his troops would once again smash their way through the Soviet defenses. At last, Lieutenant Solzhenitsyn was set to taste the bitterness of war.
The fighting that followed the initial German attack was fierce and intense, but the Russians had built up colossal forces of their own in the area, and their defensive fortifications stretched back to a depth of sixty miles. The first set-piece tank battle lasted for three weeks but ended in stalemate. In spite of heavy losses on both sides, the Germans had failed in their principal objective, to capture Kursk, and had hardly moved the front forward at all. The last great German offensive in the east had failed, but the battle was by no means over. The Nazis still controlled Orel. Solzhenitsyn recalled the morning when the Soviet attack on Orel began and “thousands of whistles cut through the air above us”.27
The battle for Orel lasted a further three weeks of continuous fighting, with Solzhenitsyn’s unit as part of the central front commanded by General Rokossovsky. On August 5, Solzhenitsyn entered Orel with the victorious Russian army, and ten days later he was awarded the Order of the Patriotic War, second class, for his part in the battle. Specifically, he was cited “for a speedy and successful training of battery personnel, and for [his] skilled command in determining the enemy’s artillery groupings”, which contributed to the taking of Lvov on July 23, 1943. The order was issued on August 10, 1943, and signed by Captain Pshechenko, Colonel Airapetov, and Major General Semyonov.28
In May 1944, Solzhenitsyn learned of the death of his mother. “I am left with all the good she did for me and all the bad I did to her”, he wrote in a letter to Natalya. “No one wrote to me about her death. A money order came back marked that the addressee was deceased. Apparently she died in March.”29 His sense of guilt must have been heightened when, some time later, he discovered that she had in fact died on January 17, 1944. There had been no money to pay for a gravedigger, and she had been laid in the same grave as his Uncle Roman, who had died just two weeks earlier.
There was little time to grieve. Within a month, Solzhenitsyn had been promoted to the rank of captain and found himself once more in the middle of some of the bloodiest battles on the eastern front. In June, the Soviet assault on Belorussia began, and Solzhenitsyn’s battery of sixty men was in the thick of the fighting. On July 12, 1944, he received the Order of the Red Star [Krasnoi Zvezdy], which was awarded for “exceptional service in the cause of the defense of the Soviet Union”. He was cited “for his fine organization and command skills” during the fighting on June 24, and specifically for “determining, in spite of deafening noise, the precise position of two enemy batteries, which were immediately destroyed”, allowing, in turn, for the attacking Soviet infantry to cross the river Drut and to take the city of Rogachyov. The order was signed by Captain Pshechenko, Liuetenant Colonel Kravets, and Colonel Travkin.30
From almost as far north as Minsk, then westward across Belorussia, the Soviet army advanced inexorably until its triumphant crossing of the Polish border. Amidst the mayhem, Solzhenitsyn still found time to sketch ideas for a novel on the war in the notebook he always carried with him. In particular, he was fascinated by the figure of their political commissar, Major Arseny Pashkin, who fought as courageously as the military men around him and who had subordinated his political function to the urgent demands of the military campaign. Observing the actions of this man closely, Solzhenitsyn made plans to include him in the design for his novel. “I’m sketching in more and more new details of Pashkin”, he wrote excitedly in a letter to Natalya. “Oh, when will I be able to sit down to write The Sixth Course? I will write it so magnificently! Especially now, when the battle of Orel-Kursk stands out in such bold relief and can be seen so vividly through the prism of the year 1944.”31
Another source of inspiration was the distant figure of Bronevitsky, whose collaboration with the Germans in Morozovsk held a morbid fascination for Solzhenitsyn. It was a fascination born of emotional contrasts. He had been genuinely fond of the old man and his younger wife, holding both of them in affection, yet their support for the German invader was utterly incomprehensible and ultimately unforgivable. What made the old man do it? It was a conundrum Solzhenitsyn was determined to solve. He planned to get to grips with the whole issue in a story about Bronevitsky entitled “In the Town of M”. To assist him in the writing of this story, he made a point of going into as many small towns as he could, as the Soviet army continued its westward march, to find out what life had been like under German occupation. He became increasingly fascinated by the phenomenon of occupation and the psychological reaction to it. He strove to understand the feelings of the people in the occupied territories, and especially of the collaborators among them. Their treachery still repelled him, but the very repulsion acted as an attraction. Perhaps he felt the same repulsive attraction that many people feel toward understanding the minds of murderers or serial killers. Without any desire to commit acts of treachery himself, he still needed to know why people did it.