First there was Anatoly Ilyich Fastenko, the oldest of the prisoners. Fastenko was an Old Bolshevik, one of that revered elite of revolutionaries who had been members of the Bolshevik Party before the Revolution. At this stage, Solzhenitsyn still considered himself a good and loyal Marxist. His only complaint was with Stalin, not with Marxism-Leninism, and this Old Bolshevik was an object of reverence in the young communist’s eyes. Solzhenitsyn listened wide-eyed as Fastenko recounted his life story. He had been arrested under the tsarist regime as long ago as 1904 and had participated in the revolution of 1905. He served eight years’ hard labor, followed by internal exile, and fled abroad to Canada and the United States, only returning to Russia after the October Revolution. Most interesting of all, in Solzhenitsyn’s eyes, was the fact that this Old Bolshevik had actually known Lenin personally. Pressing Fastenko for anecdotes and impressions of the great man, who was still for Solzhenitsyn an object of idolization, he was shocked to find that the Old Bolshevik was ready to criticize Lenin as well as Stalin. It was tantamount to blasphemy as far as Solzhenitsyn was concerned. Stalin may indeed have betrayed the Revolution, but Lenin could do no wrong. As Solzhenitsyn insisted on Lenin’s infallibility, a slight coolness developed between the old man and the young Marxist. “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image”, Fastenko responded.
The second prisoner in the interrogation cell was a middle-aged Estonian lawyer named Arnold Susi. Whereas Solzhenitsyn could relate readily to the Old Bolshevik’s life story, steeped as it was in the revolutionary traditions that had been instilled in Solzhenitsyn as an integral part of his Soviet education, the Estonian was of a type quite new to him. Not only was Susi an educated European who spoke fluent Russian, German, and English, as well as his native Estonian, he was, politically speaking, both an Estonian nationalist and a democrat. “Although I had never expected to become interested in Estonia, much less bourgeois democracy”, Solzhenitsyn wrote, he found himself fascinated by Susi’s “loving stories” about his country’s struggle for national self-determination. As he listened, Solzhenitsyn grew to love “that modest, work-loving, small nation of big men” and became interested in the democratic principles of the Estonian constitution, “which had been borrowed from the best of European experience…. And, though the why of it wasn’t clear, I began to like it all and store it all away in my experience.”3
The third cellmate was Georgi Kramarenko, a man for whom Solzhenitsyn developed an almost instant dislike. There was “something alien”, something not quite right about him. Neither was it very long before Solzhenitsyn learned that his initial suspicions were justified. He had never come across the word nasedka—“stool-pigeon”—but he realized quickly that Kramarenko was betraying their private conversations to the prison authorities.
In these three prisoners, and with the incisive grasp of human personality that was to characterize his books, Solzhenitsyn began to see everything more clearly. The Old Bolshevik who criticized Lenin; the cultured Estonian who loved democracy and the smallness of his own nation; and the “stool-pigeon” who had sold his soul, betrayed his companions, and prostituted himself to the prison system—three very different people in one small cell. But what of the fourth prisoner in the cell, Solzhenitsyn himself? Arnold Susi later recalled that Solzhenitsyn emerged in their conversations about Estonia and democracy as “a strange mixture of Marxist and democrat”, an observation Solzhenitsyn thought was accurate: “Yes, things were wildly mixed up inside me at that time.”4
As his worldly ambitions had crumbled, so had his ideological and political preconceptions. From atop the rubble of his former ideas, he was slowly, meticulously, observing the world through fresh and unprejudiced eyes. “For the first time in my life I was learning to look at things through a magnifying glass.”5
All this time, Solzhenitsyn was still being interrogated and trying desperately not to incriminate anyone else in the process. After all, his interrogator had letters from his wife and university friends. And all the time, beyond the walls of the Lubyanka and the claustrophobic world it enclosed, major events were unfolding in the world at large.
At the end of April, the blackout shade on the window of the cell was removed, the only perceptible signal the prisoners received that the war was almost over. On May 1, the Lubyanka was quieter than ever. All the interrogators were out in Moscow celebrating, and no one was taken for questioning. The silence was broken by someone protesting across the corridor. The unknown, unseen prisoner was bundled into one of the windowless cells that had greeted Solzhenitsyn on his arrival in the Lubyanka ten weeks earlier. The door to the tiny cell was left open while the warders beat the prisoner for what seemed like hours. “In the suspended silence,” wrote Solzhenitsyn, “every blow on his soft and choking mouth could be heard clearly.”6
On the following day, a thirty-gun salute roared out across Moscow. Hearing it, the prisoners guessed that it signified the capture of another European capital. Only two had not yet fallen—Berlin and Prague—and the occupants of the cell tried to guess whether it was the German or Czech capital that had succumbed. In fact, it was Berlin, amongst the ruins of which the suicide of Hitler had signified the death of the Third Reich. A week later, on May 9, there was another thirty-gun salute. Prague had fallen. This was followed on the same day by a forty-gun salute announcing the end of the war in Europe, final victory for the Soviet army. Again the Lubyanka was thrown into a deathly silence by the absence of warders and interrogators who had gone to join the thousands of revelers thronging the streets of Moscow.
Blissfully oblivious to the darker secrets sealed behind the walls of the Lubyanka, one Western observer witnessed the joy in the Russian capital on the day victory was announced:
May 9 was an unforgettable day in Moscow. The spontaneous joy of the two or three million people who thronged the Red Square that evening—and the Moscow River embankments, and Gorki Street, all the way up to the Belorussian Station—was of a quality and depth I had never yet seen in Moscow before. They danced and sang in the streets; every soldier and officer was hugged and kissed; outside the US Embassy the crowds shouted “Hurray for Roosevelt!” (Even though he had died a month before)…. Nothing like this had ever happened in Moscow before. For once, Moscow had thrown all reserve and restraint to the winds. The fireworks display that evening was the most spectacular I have ever seen.7
The contrast between the hush of the cells and the celebrations on the streets could not have been more marked. Solzhenitsyn and his desolate colleagues observed the fireworks lighting the heavens through the window of their private hell. “Above the muzzle of our window, and from all the other cells of the Lubyanka, and from all the windows of all the Moscow prisons, we, too, former prisoners of war and former front-line soldiers, watched the Moscow heavens, patterned with fireworks and crisscrossed by the beams of searchlights.” There was no rejoicing in the cells and no hugs and kisses for the soldiers. “That victory was not for us.”8
In June, after his interrogator had informed him that the investigation was now completed, Solzhenitsyn was transferred to Butyrki, another Moscow prison, to await his fate. Arriving in his new cell, he could hear through the windows further reminders of the world beyond the walls. Every morning and evening, the prisoners stood by the windows and listened to the sound of brass bands playing marches in the streets below. This seemed to confirm the rumor that had filtered through even to the prisoners that preparations were under way for a huge victory parade in Red Square on June 22—the fourth anniversary of the beginning of the war between the Soviet Union and Germany. One wonders what thoughts passed through Solzhenitsyn’s mind as the anniversary arrived. Four years earlier, fresh from university, he had arrived in Moscow full of hopes and dreams of the future, the world seemingly at his feet. Now that world had fallen away beneath him, disappearing from view so that it was not four years but an eternity away.