Such was the volatile nature of the times into which the young Solzhenitsyn was born that his father’s war medals were considered dangerously incriminating, and he remembered helping his mother bury them.
His mother, Solzhenitsyn recalled many years later, raised him “in incredibly hard circumstances”. Although widowed at such a young age and so tragically, she never remarried, which Solzhenitsyn believed was “mainly for fear that a stepfather might be too harsh with me”. Soon after he was born, his mother took him to live in Rostov, where they would remain for nineteen years, until the start of the Second World War. For the first fifteen of these, they were unable to obtain a room from the state and were forced to live in rented accommodation, normally overpriced dilapidated shacks. When they finally did secure a room, it was part of a cold and drafty converted stable, heated by coal, itself a scarce commodity in Russia during the twenties and thirties. There was no running water. “I learned what running water in an apartment means only recently”, Solzhenitsyn told correspondents from the New York Times and the Washington Post in March 1972.7
Taissia Solzhenitsyn knew French and English well, and also learned stenography and typing, but she faced consistent discrimination in employment because of her social origin. She was purged on these grounds from her job at Melstrio (the Flour Mill Construction Administration), her dismissal including restrictions on her future right to employment. Forced to take poorly paid jobs, she had little option but to seek extra work in the evenings, and to do her housework late at night when she got home. Looking back on this period, Solzhenitsyn recalled that his mother was always short of sleep.
Taissia Solzhenitsyn’s father had come from the Crimea as a young boy to herd sheep and work as a farmhand. Says Solzhenitsyn,
He started with nothing, then became a tenant farmer, and it is true that by the time he was old he was quite rich. He was a man of rare energy and industry. In his fifty years of work he gave the country more grain and wool than many of today’s state farms, and he worked no less hard than their directors. As for his workers, he treated them in such a way that after the Revolution they voluntarily supported the old man for twelve years until he died. Let a state farm director try begging from his workers after his dismissal.8
Before her marriage, Taissia was the least religious member of the Shcherbak family.9 Her parents had raised her in an atmosphere of piety and devotion, and her aunt Ashkelaya was a nun, but this did not prevent the young Taissia from abandoning her childhood faith, largely through the secularizing influence of the progressive boarding school she attended in Rostov. Returning home during school holidays, she was patronizingly embarrassed by the religious devotion displayed by her family and treated the rites of the Orthodox Church with the amused contempt of one who perceived in them only the superstitious practices of an abandoned cult. The disdain for religious faith was reinforced during her time as a student in Moscow, where she followed the prevailing trends of atheism and anticlericalism with all the enthusiasm of her contemporaries. By 1918, however, events had drawn her back to the church. The tragic death of her husband so soon after their marriage, the presence of a child in her womb, and the fear and uncertainty engendered by the Red Terror and the civil war, all contributed to a rekindling of faith.
The émigré writer Nikolai Zernov, who was living in the neighboring resort of Essentuki at the time, twelve miles from Kislovodsk, described the widespread return to the church of people in the area: “The atmosphere created in the Caucasian resorts encouraged our religious enthusiasm…. It seemed to us that Russia was on the eve of a spiritual renaissance, that the church, purified by her suffering, would reveal to a penitent people the radiant lineaments of our Saviour, and teach Russians how to found their lives on brotherly love.”10
The new wave of religious zeal that had swept through the region, taking Taissia with it, was the product of a potent mixture of hope and fear. By the summer of 1919, with the White armies of Denikin and Wrangel liberating the south from the Bolsheviks, hope was in the ascendancy. It was short-lived. In March 1920, the White resistance finally collapsed. Bolshevik rule now returned to the Caucasus to stay, bringing with it a wave of revenge killing throughout the following months. In the winter of 1920, Taissia and the rest of her family had virtually starved, like everyone else in the area, selling furniture and possessions at derisory prices in order to buy food. The famine, so hard to endure in the Caucasus, was even worse in other parts of Russia, most notably in the Volga area, where starving peasants turned to cannibalism, eating their own children. Russia had never known such a famine, even in the Time of Troubles in the early seventeenth century.11 In the new desperate circumstances, hope was seemingly vanquished and fear triumphant.
The infant Solzhenitsyn, scarcely two years old, was too young to appreciate the desperate nature of the situation. Instead, one of his earliest memories would always fill him with a sense of warmth and security. Almost sixty years later, he was to recall the reassuring icon that hung in one corner of his room, suspended in the angle between wall and ceiling and tilting downward so that its holy face seemed to be gazing directly at him. At night, the candle in front of it would flicker and shudder while he lay in bed staring sleepily upward. In the magic moment between waking and sleeping, the radiant visage seemed to detach itself and float out over his bed, like a true guardian angel. In the mornings, under the direction of his grandmother Evdokia, he would kneel before the icon and say his prayers.
Throughout this period, Taissia’s family lived in fear of losing far more than their property, most of which had been sold or confiscated already. Although they now possessed very little, the fact that they had once been relatively wealthy made them “class enemies”, which, in the new reign of terror, was punishable by death.
By 1921, however, it was not only the rich who went in fear of their lives. Soviet Russia was economically devastated, and the Bolsheviks found themselves confronted with worker unrest. In February 1921, sailors at the Kronstadt naval base—who had been among the Bolsheviks’ staunchest supporters since 1905—staged a protest against worsening economic conditions. The Kronstadt sailors’ revolt precipitated a general strike in St. Petersburg. The Bolsheviks rejected calls for negotiations and, oblivious to the previous loyal support of the Kronstadt sailors, accused the protestors of treason and brutally crushed the revolt.
Meanwhile, Lenin was presiding over the Tenth Party Congress, at which he abolished democratic debate within the Party and banned all factions. In real terms, power had now passed from the purely theoretical “dictatorship of the proletariat” to the utterly practical dictatorship of the Secretariat, the governing body of the newly emerging Party bureaucracy. The first General Secretary of the Secretariat, appointed toward the end of 1922, was a Georgian Bolshevik by the name of Josef Stalin. At the same Congress, Lenin unveiled his New Economic Policy (NEP), which was destined to become increasingly unpopular, particularly with the urban working class who dubbed the NEP the “New Exploitation of the Proletariat”.