And what of those Russians who actually fought in the German army? What motivated them to take up arms against the Motherland and to kill their compatriots? Such treason was almost beyond comprehension. When Solzhenitsyn had first seen a German propaganda leaflet reporting the creation of the “Russian Liberation Army”, he had frankly disbelieved it, dismissing it as the lies of the enemy. Then came the battle of Orel and a rude awakening:
We soon discovered that there really were Russians fighting against us and that they fought harder than any SS men. In July, 1943, for example, near Orel, a platoon of Russians in German uniform defended Sobakinskiye Vyselki. They fought with the desperation that might have been expected if they had built the place themselves. One of them was driven into a root cellar. They threw hand grenades in after him and he fell silent. But they had no more than stuck their heads in than he let them have another volley from his automatic pistol. Only when they lobbed in an anti-tank grenade did they find out that, within the root cellar, he had another foxhole in which he had taken shelter from the infantry grenades. Just try to imagine the degree of shock, deafness, and hopelessness in which he had kept on fighting.32
Other stories abounded about the bravery of these enemy Russians. They defended the Dnieper bridgehead south of Tursk so fiercely that for two weeks the Soviet units with whom Solzhenitsyn was deployed made little progress in spite of continuous fighting. Then there was the tragi-comic tale Solzhenitsyn recounted about the fierce battles that raged near Malye Kozlovichi in December 1943:
Through many long days both we and they went through the extreme trials of winter, fighting in winter camouflage cloaks that covered our overcoats and caps…. As the soldiers dashed back and forth among the pines, things got confused, and two soldiers lay down next to one another. No longer very accurately oriented, they kept shooting at someone, somewhere over there. Both had Soviet automatic pistols. They shared their cartridges, praised one another, and together swore at the grease freezing on their automatic pistols. Finally, their pistols stopped firing altogether, and they decided to take a break and light up. They pulled back their white hoods—and at the same instant each saw the other’s cap… the eagle and the star. They jumped up! Their automatic pistols still refused to fire! Grabbing them by the barrel and swinging them like clubs, they began to go at each other. This, if you will, was not politics and not the Motherland, but just sheer caveman distrust: If I take pity on him, he is going to kill me.33
The reason for the reluctance of these enemy Russians to surrender was clear. What awaited them at the hands of Stalin’s secret police would be worse than death. Better to die than surrender. This harsh reality was experienced by Solzhenitsyn when he arrived in Bobruisk at the start of the Belorussian offensive. He was walking along the highway, in the midst of the wreckage of battle, when he heard a desperate cry for help from a fellow Russian. “Captain, sir! Captain, sir!” Looking in the direction of the cries, he saw a Russian, naked from the waist up but wearing German breeches. He had blood all over his face, chest, shoulders, and back, and was being driven along by a mounted security sergeant who was whipping him continuously and spurring his horse into him. “He kept lashing that naked back up and down with the whip, without letting him turn around, without letting him ask for help. He drove him along, beating and beating him, raising new crimson welts on his skin.”34
Solzhenitsyn recalled the incident with shame, in a spirit of self-recrimination and contrition, lamenting that “any officer, possessing any authority, in any army on earth ought to have stopped that senseless torture”. Yet the Soviet army was different from any other army on earth, and Captain Solzhenitsyn had learned to fear the consequences of questioning the rising tide of brutality he was witnessing. “I was afraid…. I said nothing and I did nothing. I passed him by as if I could not hear him.”35 And all the time a metamorphosis was taking place as a direct result of the suffering he saw around him. The questions he was too afraid to ask out loud were formulating themselves all the more forcefully inside him. Slowly, almost indiscernibly, the naïve young communist was fading away, being erased by experience, making way for someone much stronger.
CHAPTER FIVE
ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT
By the end of 1944, Soviet forces had crossed the border into Poland. Final victory over the Nazi enemy was in sight.
Solzhenitsyn and his battery, encamped on the river Narev southeast of Bialystok, waited expectantly for the order to advance on Germany itself. It arrived in the second week of January 1945 when Captain Solzhenitsyn received a bundle of leaflets for distribution to the troops under his command. The leaflet contained Marshal Rokossovsky’s famous message: “Soldiers, sergeants, officers, and generals! Today at 5 A.M. we commence our great last offensive. Germany lies before us! One more blow and the enemy will collapse, and immortal victory will crown our divisions!” A more ominous message had already reached the troops from Stalin himself. He had announced that “everything was allowed” once Soviet forces entered Germany. In a hate-filled address, he solemnly ordered the countless troops about to be unleashed on German soil to wreak vengeance for all that Russia had suffered during the war. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Rape, pillage, and plunder. Nothing was forbidden.1
Repelled by this naked incitement to greed and cruelty, Solzhenitsyn lectured his battery on the need to exercise moderation and restraint. Looking back on the moment, he composed an imaginary speech to his men, which he incorporated in The Way, calling for Russian soldiers to keep their heads, take a responsible stand, and “act the proud sons of a magnanimous land”.2
Magnanimity was not on the mind of the Soviet army as it marched into Germany. Solzhenitsyn’s words fell on deaf and defiant ears. As the Red Army descended on the dying embers of the Third Reich, it was Stalin’s vision, not Solzhenitsyn’s, that became reality.
For bravery in battle on January 27, 1945, Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Order of the Red Banner [Krasnogo Znameni], the USSR’s second-highest military order, which was given for “heroism in combat or other extraordinary accomplishments of military valor during combat operations”. Specifically, he was cited for his personal bravery in leading his men (and valuable equipment) out of near-total encirclement during the night of January 26-27, while virtually cut off from all communication with HQ.3
As it advanced through Poland, Solzhenitsyn’s regiment met little or no resistance from a retreating German army, and within days it had swung north into East Prussia. To his delight, Solzhenitsyn found himself following in the footsteps of General Samsonov, whose disastrous campaign in the First World War had inspired the young Solzhenitsyn to pore over maps in reading rooms, researching his epic. The maps were coming to life before his eyes, and he found himself in the very region where Samsonov had been defeated thirty years earlier, passing through some of the towns and villages he had attempted to describe in 1936 in his planned series of novels. The poignancy was accentuated by the knowledge that this was also where his own father had been during the previous war. Like Samsonov, Solzhenitsyn entered the town of Neidenburg when it was in flames, set ablaze by rampaging Russian troops. “Am tramping through East Prussia for the second day”, he wrote to Natalya, “a hell of a lot of impressions.”4