With the iron resilience that would serve him so well in the years ahead, Solzhenitsyn was already adapting to his new world, the world of the Gulag. His education continued in the cell at Butyrki, where he heard nightmare stories from returning prisoners of war who had survived the Nazi death camps. After all they had suffered, they were returning home not to the hero’s welcome being rehearsed in the streets below but to the fate awaiting “traitors of the Motherland”. Having endured Hitler’s concentration camps, they were now to experience Stalin’s concentration camps. Such, Solzhenitsyn concluded, was the nature of Soviet justice.
In the summer of 1945, Solzhenitsyn, still only twenty-six years old, was about to receive some valued lessons from an even younger generation of dissident Russians, the most notable of whom was Boris Gammerov. Solzhenitsyn’s first impressions of this young man, four years his junior, were graphic. He was “a pale, yellowish youth, with a Jewish tenderness of face, wrapped, despite the summer, in a threadbare soldier’s overcoat shot full of holes: he was chilled”. Yet, though feeble and anemic-looking, Gammerov held a reserve of spiritual strength which belied his physical frailty. He had served as a sergeant in an anti-tank unit on the front and had been invalided out with shrapnel wounds in a lung. The wound had not healed, causing his poor physical condition. Almost as soon as they met, Solzhenitsyn and Gammerov began a long conversation, principally on politics. Somewhere in the course of the dialogue, Solzhenitsyn had recalled one of the favorite prayers of the late President Roosevelt, which had been published in one of the Soviet newspapers following Roosevelt’s death two months earlier. Having quoted the prayer, Solzhenitsyn expressed what he assumed was a self-evident evaluation of it: “Well, that’s hypocrisy, of course.” To his surprise, Gammerov frowned in obvious disagreement. “Why?” the youth asked pointedly. “Why do you not admit the possibility that a political leader might sincerely believe in God?”9
Solzhenitsyn was completely taken aback by the nature of Gammerov’s reply. If the words had been spoken by someone of his parents’ generation, he could have dismissed them as superstitious nonsense. After all, this was 1945, and Soviet society had progressed beyond irrational belief in a God of any description. Yet the riposte to his self-assured atheism had not come from an elderly Russian tied to the traditions of the Old Believers, but from a twenty-two-year-old New Believer not even born when the Revolution had swept religion aside, allegedly forever. Forced to reappraise his own self-assured certainty, Solzhenitsyn suddenly realized that his condemnation of Roosevelt’s prayer had been spoken not out of conviction but as the result of a Pavlovian response instilled by Soviet education. For once, he was lost for words and found himself unable to answer Gammerov’s question. Instead, he asked meekly whether Gammerov believed in God. “Of course”, was the simple and calm response. Again, Solzhenitsyn was dumbstruck.
Although Gammerov’s words had given him food for thought, as had so many other words he had heard since his imprisonment began, Solzhenitsyn was still a long way from any faith in the existence of God. He did, however, share a faith with the majority of other prisoners in something far more tangible—a general amnesty. It was simply inconceivable that all these people, thousands upon thousands of them, could be kept in prison for much longer, especially as so many appeared to have committed no crime other than being taken prisoner by the Germans. Explaining prisoners’ hopes at the time, Solzhenitsyn wrote that “it just couldn’t be that so many people were to remain in prison after the greatest victory in the world. It was just to frighten us that they were holding us for the time being: so that we might remember and take heed. Of course, there would soon be a total amnesty and all of us would be released.”10 Their hopes were fueled by the various rumors that were rife at the time. Someone had even sworn that he had read in a newspaper that Stalin, replying to some American correspondent, had promised an amnesty after the war the likes of which the world had never seen. Desperate to believe anything that would offer a glimmer of light at the end of their tunnels of fear and misery, the prisoners convinced themselves that it was no longer a question of whether there was going to be an amnesty but when it was going to be. They were placing all their faith and hope in Comrade Stalin’s charity.
As the rumors circulated, faith in the impending amnesty became obsessive. Every new prisoner was asked, the moment he entered the cell, what he had heard of the amnesty. If two or three prisoners were taken from their cells with their things, it was immediately assumed that they were being taken out to be released. Perhaps it had begun! Every prisoner was on the lookout for signs, and one day, early in July, a sign was given. Written infallibly in soap on a glazed lavender slab in the Butyrki baths were the words of prophecy: “Hurrah!! Amnesty on July 17!” There were celebrations throughout the prison as the inmates prepared joyfully for their imminent release.
The seventeenth of July came and went, but hopes remained high nonetheless. There had been a slight miscalculation perhaps, but the infallibility of the soapy message was still in no doubt. Then, after morning tea on July 27, Solzhenitsyn and another prisoner were summoned from their cell. Their cellmates saw them off with boisterous good wishes, and they were assured that they were on their way to freedom. At long last, the amnesty had arrived. Perhaps they had misread the message in the baths. Perhaps it had said, “July 27”, and not, “July 17”. After all, it was not easy to write clearly in soap.
Solzhenitsyn soon discovered that he was one of twenty prisoners summoned from various cells throughout the prison. For three hours, they waited, hoping from the depths of their being that the prophecy of the baths was true. Were they on the point of freedom? After what seemed an eternity, the door opened, and one of their number was summoned. The tension was beyond bearing. The door opened again. Another was summoned, and the first man returned. He was a changed man. The life had drained from his face, and his glazed expression struck fear into the hearts of his colleagues. “Well?” they asked him, already sensing the worst. “Five years”, he replied, crestfallen. At that point, the second man returned, and a third was summoned. “Well?” they asked, crowding round the returning man in the forlorn hope that the first result was an aberration. “Fifteen years”, was the hope-shattering reply.
Not since the arrest itself had Solzhenitsyn’s hopes for the future collapsed so forcefully, nose diving to new depths of despair. He waited in dread for his turn to come.
When he was finally ushered in to hear his sentence, he had already become accustomed to the inevitable. He was brought before a bored, black-haired NKVD major who informed him that he had been sentenced to eight years. Without further ado, he was given the relevant documentation to sign so that he could be shepherded out to make way for the next victim. “It was all so everyday and routine”, Solzhenitsyn recalled. “Could this really be my sentence—the turning point of my life?” He refused to sign the document until he had read it and, having done so, looked expectantly at the major for some further clarification. None was forthcoming. Instead the major gestured to the jailer to get the next prisoner ready. “But, really, this is terrible”, Solzhenitsyn objected in a half-hearted and futile plea for some sort of explanation. “Eight years! What for?”