As he spent his first day as a prisoner, desolate and bemused, he must have groped in desperation for some last straw of hope. There must have been a mistake. Yes, that was it. There had been a mistake, and soon he would receive an apology. He would be released, and everything would be all right. Yet as he spent the next three days in the counter-intelligence prison at the headquarters of the front, he heard the disquieting voices of his fellow cellmates. They spoke of the deceptions practiced by the interrogators, their threats, and beatings. They told him that once a person was arrested, he was never released. No one was ever released. Hope as he might, there had been no mistake. The system didn’t make mistakes. He was told by his fellow prisoners that he would get a “tenner”, a ten-year sentence. In fact, they would all get tenners. Everyone got tenners. As he listened to these voices, his hopes, the only light on the horizon, faded away. The future was black, too black to see. An abyss. A nightmare, but no dream. Reality.
In time, the harsh realities of prison life would become the only reality he knew, eclipsing his previous memories. Two years later, he even saw his time in the army as belonging to a different, distant world: “The war had licked away four of my years. I no longer believed that it had all actually happened and I didn’t want to remember it. Two years here, two years in the Archipelago, had dimmed in my mind all the roads of the front, all the comradeship of the front line, had totally darkened them.”19
Many years later, having passed through the suffering of the prison system, he would see how important the arrest and imprisonment had been to the subsequent development of his life and personality. He even learned to be grateful to the Gulag, confessing that, along with his time in the army, the most important event “would be the arrest”. He went so far as to describe it as the second “defining moment” of his life, crucial “because it allowed me to understand Soviet reality in its entirety and not merely the one-sided view I had of it previous to the arrest”.20 He then reiterated what had been taken away from him by his youth in the Soviet Union, most notably the “Christian spirit” of his childhood. If he had not been arrested, he could only imagine with “horror… what kind of emptiness awaited me. The gaol returned all that to me.”21
Solzhenitsyn’s military career, as Scammell wrote, had begun as farce and ended in tragedy. Yet the tragic end was really only the beginning. It was the crucifixion preceding the resurrection, labor pains preceding birth. The arrest was the real beginning of the Passion Play of Solzhenitsyn’s life, in which the pride and selfishness of his former self were stripped away like unwanted garments.
CHAPTER SIX
HELL INTO PURGATORY
After the privileges Solzhenitsyn had enjoyed as an officer in the Soviet army, life as a prisoner must have seemed unbearable. During the first days in the counter-intelligence prison, he had slept on rotten straw beside the latrine bucket, had witnessed the pathetic sight of beaten and sleepless men, had tasted with disgust the prison gruel, and had listened in horror as his fellow prisoners detailed the lurid and hopeless future that awaited him. All his ambitions, which had seemed to stretch out before him on reassuringly immovable tracks, had been derailed. His world, so meticulously planned and worked out in advance, had fallen apart.
Nevertheless, although he was technically no longer a soldier, still less an officer, Solzhenitsyn continued to feel himself superior to those of subordinate rank around him. The prejudice and snobbery he had learned at officer training school were deeply ingrained, and he fumed with indignation whenever a noncommissioned officer barked an order at him. This attitude of superiority was exhibited at its worst when he and seven other prisoners were marched the forty-five miles from Osterode, on the front, to Brodnica, where the counter-intelligence headquarters was located. All the prisoners were Russians, with the exception of one German civilian who, dressed in a black three-piece suit, black overcoat, and black hat, stood out from the rest, his white face “nurtured on gentleman’s food”.1 The German knew no Russian, and it is doubtful whether the Russians would have spoken to the hated enemy even if he had been fluent in their language.
Before they set out on the march to Brodnica, which would take two days in cold, changeable weather, the chief of the convoy, a sergeant, ordered Solzhenitsyn to pick up the sealed suitcase containing his officer’s equipment as well as the papers that had been seized as evidence when he was arrested. Solzhenitsyn was incensed. A mere sergeant was ordering an officer to carry a large, heavy suitcase. The impudence! Besides, were there not six men from the ranks in their convoy, all empty-handed? And what about the German? “I am an officer”, Solzhenitsyn responded truculently. “Let the German carry it.” Recalling this incident later, Solzhenitsyn remembered with shame the astonished look he received from the Russian prisoner beside him and was relieved that the German could not understand what he had said. The German was ordered to carry the suitcase and did so until he nearly collapsed with exhaustion. At that point, the Russian who was walking beside him, a former prisoner of war, took the suitcase of his own free will and commenced carrying it. After that, all the other Russian POWs took turns in carrying Solzhenitsyn’s case, all without being ordered to do so, only returning it to the German when it was once again his turn. All carried the case except its owner, who, walking at the back of the convoy, witnessed the selflessness of his colleagues with a growing sense of humiliation.
After three days at Brodnica, he was escorted to the railway station destined, he was told, for Moscow. The first part of the journey, to Bialystok and the Soviet border, was made on the platform of a flat railway wagon, totally exposed to the icy winds and snow of February. Three-quarters of the train consisted of similar wagons packed tight with Russian women and girls who had been rounded up in the occupied territories for alleged collaboration with the enemy. Crossing the Soviet border, Solzhenitsyn, escorted by three counter-intelligence officers, was transferred to a passenger train to Minsk, where they caught the Minsk-Moscow Express. Arriving in the Russian capital on February 20, 1945, he was taken via the metro to the famous and feared Lubyanka prison. His experiences upon arrival have been documented in the closing pages of The First Circle, which, he informed Michael Scammell, were an accurate description of his own ordeal. Thus, in the fictional setting of Innokenti Volodin’s arrest and arrival at the Lubyanka in Solzhenitsyn’s novel, the brutality and inhumanity of the author’s first hours in a Russian jail are relived. They began with a period in a tiny windowless cell, so small that it was impossible to lie down in it. A solitary table and stool filled almost the entire floor space. When seated on the stool, it was impossible to straighten one’s legs. At regular intervals, the silent monotony was broken by the sound of the shutter on the peep-hole being slid back so that a solitary eye could peer in at him.