“Right there.” The major pointed to where the prisoner was expected to sign.
Defeated and deflated, Solzhenitsyn signed, mumbling about the injustice of the sentence and his right to appeal.
“Let’s move along”, commanded the jailer, ushering him from the room.11
His sentence had begun.
Even after the sentence was pronounced, Solzhenitsyn, like most other prisoners, still nurtured hopes of an amnesty. In his first prison letter to Natalya, which she received six months after his last letter to her from the front, he expressed his confidence that he would not have to serve the full eight years. He told Natalya that he was pinning his hopes on an amnesty, about which there were many rumors. In the letter, he also wrote that, should the amnesty not materialize, he felt duty-bound to grant her “complete personal freedom” for the entire term of the sentence. He assured her of the depth of his love for his “beautiful woman” whose youth had been spent waiting in vain for a long-promised future. This was a milder, gentler Solzhenitsyn, whose plans for the future seemed much more subdued and less ambitious than his previous, pre-prison self would have contemplated. In the army, he had dreamed that he and Natalya would set up home in the hustle and bustle of Moscow or Leningrad. Now he saw things differently. After his return to freedom, he informed her, he would like them to live in a “remote, but thriving, well-provisioned, and picturesque village”. This ideal village would need to be far from the nearest railway, perhaps in Siberia or in Kuban, or along the Volga, or even on the Don. They could both become high-school teachers and could spend the summer vacations traveling. Their new life together would be contented, peaceful, close to nature, and safe from such “accidents” as the one that had befallen him on February 9, 1945. Once again, however, his vision of the future was out of focus with Natalya’s own desires. Now she had her heart and ambition set on her “future professorship” and didn’t relish the prospect of teaching in a remote village school.12 Not for the first time, husband and wife were separated by more than miles, time, or prison walls.
Throughout his letters to his wife, Solzhenitsyn continued to express his hopes for an amnesty. After he was transferred to the New Jerusalem prison in August 1945, he wrote of his “basic hope… for an amnesty for those convicted under Article 58”, adding, “I still think that this will happen.” The hope was that the amnesty would come in November, but when it, too, failed to materialize, Solzhenitsyn’s faith began to falter. It was revived again in March 1946 when he wrote to Natalya: “I am 100 percent sure and still convinced beyond doubt that the amnesty was prepared long ago, in the autumn of 1945, and that it was approved in substance by our government. But then, for some reason, it was postponed.”13 Months passed, and new hopes were voiced in almost every letter. On the first anniversary of the victory over the Germans, hopes were particularly high: “Today we were waiting very hard. Although the rumours were conflicting about the ninth, still, from the ninth on, we are giving it another week or two of time. Such a weariness has descended upon us all, it’s as though the newspapers had promised the amnesty for this day, today.”14 It was only after he had been in prison for eighteen months that he finally confessed resignedly to Natalya, “Whenever they start talking of amnesty—I smile crookedly and go off to one side.”15
As the months passed, a spiritual chasm was beginning to separate Natalya from her husband, and she failed to recognize the full significance of the changes he was undergoing. The eventual rejection of the false hopes and false faith in an imaginary amnesty was part of the spiritual metamorphosis at the heart of Solzhenitsyn’s being. Its significance was expressed in the third volume of The Gulag Archipelago: “Dismayed by the hopeless length of my sentence, stunned by my first acquaintance with the world of Gulag, I could never have believed at the beginning of my time there that my spirit would recover by degrees from its dejection: that as the years went by, I should ascend, so gradually that I was hardly aware of it myself.”16
In the midst of hell, Solzhenitsyn had passed into purgatory.
CHAPTER SEVEN
PROFIT FROM LOSS
On the day he was sentenced, Solzhenitsyn, numbed by the prospect of eight years in Soviet labor camps, stared blindly into the abyss before him. The cellmate who had been sentenced with him, seeking to come to terms with his own fate and possibly seeking to reassure both himself and Solzhenitsyn at the same time, tried to remain positive. They were still young, he asserted, and they would live for a long time to come. The most important thing was not to upset the authorities still further. They would serve out their sentence as model prisoners, working hard and keeping their mouths shut. They would conform and utter no words of dissent.
Solzhenitsyn listened in silence as his friend spoke, but words of dissent were already forming inside him: “One wanted to agree with him, to serve out the term cozily, and then expunge from one’s head what one had lived through. But I had begun to sense a truth inside myself: if in order to live it is necessary not to live, then what’s it all for?”1
To be or not to be, that was the question. It was the beginning of an ardent and arduous search for truth, which was to preoccupy Solzhenitsyn throughout the long years and drudgery of the labor camps. Even at this early stage of his sentence, he was beginning to discern that a man’s spirit was not determined by his material circumstances but could rise above them. Much later in the sentence, at the beginning of his fourth spell in this same Butyrki Prison, he heard for the thousandth time the same endless catch-phrase of the Gulag: “Last name? Given name and patronymic? Year of birth?” He muttered the same time-honored response, but inside he was giving a different answer: “My name? I am the Interstellar Wanderer! They have tightly bound my body, but my soul is beyond their power.”2
In early August, only days after sentence had been passed, Solzhenitsyn was transferred to the Krasnaya Presnya transit prison in another part of Moscow. This prison, close to the Novokhoroshevo Highway in the heart of Russia’s capital, was also at the heart of the Soviet prison system. It was a teeming hive of activity, always bursting at the seams with prisoners en route to some labor camp or other. In the same way that the entire Soviet railway system converged on Moscow, so the prison system converged on Krasnaya Presnya. It was the main terminus: Gulag Junction.
The overcrowding at this prison must have been hard to bear at the best of times, but in the heat of August it was intolerable. Solzhenitsyn speaks of bedbugs and flies biting all night long as the prisoners lay “naked and sweaty under the bright lights”. During the day, the inmates streamed with sweat every time they moved, and “it simply poured out” when they ate. There were a hundred to a cell, and since the cells were no larger than an average-sized room the prisoners were packed in so tightly that there was no floor space even to put one’s feet. Two little windows on one wall were blocked with “muzzles” made of steel sheets, which not only stopped the air from circulating but got very hot from the sun, radiating an intense heat that turned the cell into an oven.3
The overcrowding and high turnover of prisoners, the sheer weight of numbers at Krasnaya Presnya, had turned it into a factory farm, a people processing plant. The bread rations were piled high on wheelbarrows, and the steaming gruel was served from buckets.