Unfortunately, this precarious state of affairs led Panin to find allies in various unsavory guises. Almost anyone was a friend as long as they were an enemy of Stalin, even “untouchables” like Hitler and Mussolini. Endeavoring to explain this youthful error in his autobiography, he saw it in terms of the vacuum created by an insufficient understanding of Christianity: “A godless dictatorship both sullies and disfigures a man. Only a deep religious faith can provide him with stout armour. When the church is destroyed and people are left on their own, it is easy for them to fall in with evil schemes.”26
From 1932 onward, articles abusive of the Nazis began appearing in Soviet newspapers. The Nazis in Germany and the fascists in Italy were depicted by Soviet propaganda much as a Christian might depict the Antichrist. Hitler and Mussolini were the ultimate embodiment of evil. Meanwhile, of course, in Germany and Italy, the very opposite was being preached. National socialism and fascism would save the world from the horrors of communism, it was claimed, and only strong men like Hitler and Mussolini could stave off the impending world revolution. The Antichrist, as far as fascist propaganda was concerned, was Stalin.
Perhaps Panin’s analysis was correct, and it was easy for whole peoples to fall in with evil schemes without the stout armor provided by religious faith. Throughout the world, anti-communists became fascist sympathizers, and anti-fascists found themselves fellow travelers with the communists. The world, it seemed, was heading for Armageddon, after which either one extreme or the other would emerge triumphant. Amidst this madness, the Catholic Church emerged, not for the first time in her history, as a guardian of sanity. The Church continued to condemn both the atheism of the communists and the paganism of the Nazis, considering the two creeds nothing more than opposite sides of the same pernicious coin. “Totalitarianism”, wrote Pope Pius XII, “extends the civil power beyond due limits; it determines and fixes, both in substance and form, every field of activity, and thus compresses all legitimate manifestation of life—personal, local and professional—into a mechanical unity of collectivity under the stamp of nation, race, or class.”27 Earlier, the same Pope had pointed to the futility of all materialistic creeds: “The wound of our individualistic and materialistic society will not be healed, the deep chasm will not be bridged, by no matter what system, if the system itself is materialistic in principle and mechanical in practice.”28
This teaching, fully comprehended by Panin and Solzhenitsyn alike in later years, was beyond their grasp in the years leading up to the Second World War. Solzhenitsyn was convinced of the correctness of Marxism-Leninism, hating fascism as an “enemy of the people”; Panin took the opposite view, though obviously in secret, that the rise of the Nazis in Germany offered the prospect of Russia’s liberation from communism. Panin’s heart leapt with hope, if not with joy, on hearing of the Nazis’ rise to power in 1933. “The Nazis’ theory of racial superiority and the aggression that it generated naturally provoked our sharp disapproval”, he wrote in his autobiography. “I never met a single man in the Soviet Union who made excuses for them. Nonetheless, Hitler’s promise of a war against Stalin gave the hope, strength, and patience we needed for enduring a terrible existence while we awaited the hour of our opportunity. Russians in all walks of life expected there would be a war of liberation; it made no difference to them who triggered it off. Our constant dream was that war would start very soon.”29
War seemed to be edging ever closer in 1936 with the eruption of a civil war in Spain that looked like a dress rehearsal for the future world conflict between communism and fascism. The Soviet Union was openly backing the communist forces in Spain, supplying weapons, equipment, even pilots. Communist parties throughout the world aided their Spanish comrades by supplying volunteers in the international brigades. At the same time, the Germans and the Italians were backing Franco’s fascists. Thus the Spanish Civil War, over-subscribed with weapons of mass destruction on both sides and fomented by the ideological hatreds that divided the combatants, raged for three years until the final victory of Franco.
The war in Spain coincided with the worst excesses of the communist terror in the Soviet Union, making all discussion of the rights and wrongs of the Spanish war totally impossible, at least in public. In private, however, Panin was wholly on the side of Franco, an act of anti-communist heresy guaranteed to lead to his arrest if discovered. “At the time,” he wrote, “we were not at all interested in how much the Franco regime differed from the Western democracies—as slaves under a dictatorship, we could not afford the luxury of such fine distinctions; therefore we gave Spain’s indomitable anticommunists our approval and support.”30
It was inevitable that one so heretical to communist orthodoxy as Dimitri Panin could not survive at liberty for long in the inquisitorial atmosphere of Stalinist Russia. Eventually, he spoke too freely in the presence of unsympathetic ears and was denounced to the authorities by a work colleague. This led, in July 1940, to a sentence of five years in the labor camps. In 1943, while still serving his first sentence in various camps in the Arctic north, he was given a second sentence, this time for a period of ten years, for “defeatist propaganda”. Thus, when Solzhenitsyn first met Panin in Marfino he had already served seven years, suffering unimaginable hardships that had in turn hardened his hatred of the communist regime still further.
A month after Panin’s arrival at Marfino, another prisoner appeared on the scene who, in many respects, was the diametrical and dialectical opposite of Panin. This was Lev Kopelev, who, as a deeply committed Marxist, loyal Party member, and staunch supporter of the Soviet regime, seemed to represent everything that Panin despised. Surprisingly, however, the two men were best of friends as well as best of enemies, having met previously in Butyrki before their respective transfers reunited them at the sharashka.
In spite of their differences, Panin had befriended Kopelev in Butyrki. Unlike Panin, Kopelev was still a relative novice in the camps, still receiving food parcels from his family. To Panin’s great surprise, Kopelev broke a loaf of white bread in two and handed him half. After seven years in the labor camps of the Arctic, Panin had forgotten how white bread tasted. “If Lev had given me only a tiny bit of it, I would have been rapturously happy. But here was halfa loaf! His grand gesture affected me…. A generous nature and a nobility of spirit distinguished Lev from ordinary men.”31
In fact, Kopelev’s generous nature and nobility of spirit, both dangerous virtues in communist Russia, had eventually caused his imprisonment. During the latter stages of the war, he had reached the rank of major and, being fluent in German, was responsible for organizing anti-Nazi propaganda behind the enemy lines. His downfall came when he opposed the looting, rape, and terror carried out by the advancing Soviet army under the slogan “Blood for blood, death for death”. Accused of being “soft on the Germans”, he was arrested in the same area of the Prussian front as Solzhenitsyn and narrowly escaped a charge of treason.
Solzhenitsyn’s friendship with Kopelev, like that of Panin, was to be hugely influential and was also immortalized in The First Circle, where Kopelev became the inspiration for the character of Lev Rubin. Solzhenitsyn, Panin, and Kopelev, reinvented in The First Circle as, respectively, Nerzhin, Sologdin, and Rubin, formed a triumvirate of truth-seekers whose interminable arguments never became quarrels. For Solzhenitsyn, positioned midway between the two dialectically opposed combatants, the experience was pivotal to his own development, enabling him to weigh up each thesis and antithesis carefully before forming a new synthesis of his own from the clash of ideas. The benefits accrued were considerable and came to creative fruition in one of his finest novels, which at its highest level is a hymn of praise to the pursuit of philosophical truth in the midst of tribulation. “Time to sort yourself out”, Sologdin tells Nerzhin, “to understand the part of good and evil in human life. Where could you do this better than in prison?” Nerzhin sighs, caught between a scepticism he is uncomfortable with and a faith beyond his reach. “All we know is that we don’t know anything”, he replies dejectedly. Yet to himself, Nerzhin ponders with gratitude the insight his friendship with this believing Christian has conferred on him: “[I]t was Sologdin who had first prompted him to reflect that prison was not only a curse but also a blessing”.32