A more tangible ghost from Solzhenitsyn’s past than that of his youthful Marxism returned to haunt him during his brief stay at Butyrki in the summer of 1946. To his embarrassment, he bumped into the elderly German civilian whom he had obliged to carry his suitcase on the long march to Brodnica almost eighteen months earlier. Solzhenitsyn blushed apologetically at the recollection of his ignoble actions, but the German appeared to have wholly forgiven him and to be genuinely pleased by their meeting. Having exercised forgiveness, exorcising the ghost of Solzhenitsyn’s guilt in the process, the German informed his erstwhile persecutor that he had been sentenced to ten years’ hard labor. Looking on the elderly man’s worn and weary features, Solzhenitsyn knew that he would not live to see Germany again.
Solzhenitsyn’s reprieve from the harshness of the labor camps was due to his re-categorization as a “special-assignment prisoner” bound for one of the special prison institutes for scientific research, known as sharashkas. These were fully equipped with laboratories, research apparatus, workshops, and sometimes whole factories, and were run by prisoners capable of producing results in their specialist fields. Solzhenitsyn had been saved from the hardship and drudgery of the camps, and possibly from death itself, by his degree in mathematics and physics from Rostov University.
The first sharashka to which Solzhenitsyn was consigned, in September 1946, was at Rybinsk on the upper reaches of the Volga, where jet engines were being designed and constructed. After five months, he was moved to another sharashka, in Zagorsk, but was informed that he was there only in transit and that his final destination was yet another sharashka which was to be opened shortly. This was Marfino, otherwise known as “Special Prison No. 16”, on the northern outskirts of Moscow, to which Solzhenitsyn was dispatched on July 9, 1947. It became the inspiration and the setting for almost the whole of his novel The First Circle, in which Marfino is renamed “Mavrino”. Life at the Special Prison is described in the novel as better than life in the camps: “There was meat for dinner and butter for breakfast. You didn’t have to work till the skin came off your hands and your fingers froze. You didn’t have to flop down at night half dead, in your filthy rope sandals, on the wooden boards of a bunk. At Mavrino you slept sweetly under a nice clean sheet.”18
Three months after Solzhenitsyn’s own arrival at Marfino, a new prisoner arrived at the sharashka. He was Dimitri Panin.
In his memoirs, Panin described his first meeting with Solzhenitsyn on the morning after his arrival in October 1947. Panin recalled seeing “an impressive figure of a man in an officer’s greatcoat” coming down the stairs and took “an immediate liking to the candid face, the bold blue eyes, the splendid light brown hair, the aquiline nose”.19 For his part, Solzhenitsyn appeared to be equally taken by Panin. The character of Dimitri Sologdin in The First Circle was so closely based on Panin that Panin described him as “my literary double”. Panin also considered The First Circle a vivid and honest record of their time in Marfino, in which the inmates are brilliantly described, and that in the novel’s principal character, Gleb Nerzhin, Solzhenitsyn “gives an extraordinarily truthful and accurate picture of himself”.20 This being so, it seems legitimate to draw extensively from The First Circle in order to throw light on Solzhenitsyn’s relationship with Panin.
Physically, Sologdin / Panin is described in the novel as though he was the very image of an idealized knight of Christendom. He had a high, straight forehead, regular features, penetrating blue eyes, a blond mustache and beard, muscular physique, and upright bearing. This striking physical image was complemented by a mind of equal stature, diamond-sharp in both science and philosophy. If not the epitome of a Nietzschean superman, he was certainly an icon of medieval Christian chivalry.
Panin was six years older than Solzhenitsyn and could remember scenes from the Revolution and civil war that the latter had been too young to experience directly. From childhood onward, he had remained hostile to the communist regime. As a child, Panin could remember anti-Soviet intellectuals among the small circles of friends and acquaintances of his parents and enjoyed the benefit of their candid, accurate appraisals of past events. He had the same experience of Soviet indoctrination at school as had Solzhenitsyn but, being older, appears to have been largely immune to its effects: “They pumped us full of political propaganda and other sickening rubbish, all this in an atmosphere of mutual denunciation and constant spying.” He appears to have been similarly immune to the anti-Christian nature of Soviet education: “Next, there was the brutal uprooting of religion. Horrible persecutions were started against the church. By these means, the authorities encouraged many believers to break away. And then the active propagation of atheism began. Religious literature, as well as philosophical works unpalatable to the regime, were destroyed wholesale. Furnaces burned entire libraries down to ashes.”21
Panin graduated from a technical school in 1928, a resolute if quietly resigned Christian in a revolutionary and atheist world. He remembered the “frightful year” of his graduation when he witnessed the systematic destruction of hundreds of churches in Moscow. In 1931, the magnificent Cathedral of Christ the Savior, erected in thanksgiving for Russia’s deliverance from Napoleon in 1812, was demolished. In spite of this, there were no public protests. “The Russian people, deformed by the weight of dictatorship, were being reduced to abject compliance.”22 Only once did he witness the pain that such persecution was causing beneath the seemingly calm surface of Soviet society. With secret admiration, he had observed an elderly woman on her knees in the rubble of a demolished cathedral, praying fervently and making the sign of the cross, oblivious to the danger she was bringing upon herself. He was told that her husband, a fervent believer, had died in prison.
Although Panin detested the communist regime, harboring a secret nostalgia for pre-revolutionary Russia and a secret sympathy for the Whites in the civil war who “had tried to save Russia—and the rest of the world as well—from impending disaster”,23 he was himself being browbeaten into submission by the system he despised. In 1930, a massive campaign was started in factories throughout the Soviet Union to induce the workforces into membership of the Communist Party. The factory just outside Moscow in which Panin worked as an engineer was included in this campaign, and, reluctantly, the closet anti-communist joined the Komsomol, remaining a member “in name only”. Almost immediately, he regretted his decision to join but found that he was trapped in the communist net: “I could not resign—an open break would have carried the threat of prison. I had to sweat it out until they considered me old enough to be crossed off the rolls officially. All the time I was a member I had a feeling of shameful complicity.”24
Panin found himself living a precarious life, engaged in doublethink for much of the time. At work, he made the right noises because to make the wrong ones was perilous. At home and with trusted friends, and in the privacy of his own thoughts, he maintained a staunch antipathy to the Soviet regime. He likened this period to “a walk over a tightrope stretched above a horrible, evil-smelling quicksand bog”.25 Trying desperately to keep his balance, he knew that one slip would mean disaster.