As with his time in the Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn “was fully conscious that exile was a blessing”, cherishing the “purer vision” it gave. He was utterly content and fully resigned to living in Kok-Terek if not in perpetuity, then at least for twenty years or so. Events in the Soviet Union were on the move, however, even if the isolated exile was not fully aware of the changes afoot. Soon, much sooner than he expected, he would be catapulted back into the center of the storm.
Following Stalin’s death, a power struggle had ensued within the Soviet leadership as warring factions fought for supremacy. The first victim was Lavrenty Beria, the hated chief of the secret police, who was arrested and executed in July 1953. Georgi Malenkov, who had succeeded Stalin in 1953, was forced from office in February 1955 and in July 1957 was accused with Molotov and Kaganovich of setting up an “anti-party group”. In one of the many ironies of fate in the twisted history of the Soviet Union, Malenkov was dismissed from all senior party positions and exiled to Kazakhstan as manager of a hydroelectric plant. Molotov, meanwhile, was exiled to Outer Mongolia, where he served as ambassador until 1960. Kaganovich would soon disappear without trace but was last heard of in August 1957, in “a position of considerable responsibility” in a Siberian cement works. One doubts whether these erstwhile heroes of the Soviet Union would have agreed with Solzhenitsyn that exile could be a blessing.
The man who emerged triumphant from this bout of internecine feuding and bloodletting was Nikita Khrushchev, who, in 1956, broke the taboo by giving a “Secret Speech” to the Twentieth Party Congress in which Stalin was criticized openly for the first time. Khrushchev officially implicated the “Wise Father of all the Peoples” in Kirov’s murder and held him responsible for the sufferings of millions during the Terror. The unspeakable had been uttered, and many delegates to the Congress were said to have been traumatized by the revelations—not that Khrushchev was himself blameless. During the Terror, he had been so ruthless in the execution of Stalin’s orders that he had earned the nickname “Butcher of the Ukraine”. Indeed, in the very year in which he made the Secret Speech, he earned another nickname as the “Butcher of Budapest”, ordering Soviet tanks into Hungary to put down brutally the anti-communist uprising there. Later he was to oversee the building of the Berlin Wall and take the world to the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Nonetheless, Khrushchev’s policy of de-Stalinization came as a great relief to millions of persecuted Soviet citizens. During 1956, thousands of political prisoners were rehabilitated and returned from the camps or from exile, and Solzhenitsyn was destined to be one tiny but scarcely insignificant drop in that returning ocean.
Solzhenitsyn’s rehabilitation came following a session of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR on February 6, 1956. During the course of the session, the Chief Military Prosecutor called for all charges against Solzhenitsyn to be dropped on the grounds that there was an “absence of proof of a crime”. The reasons given were as follows:
It is clear from the evidence in this case that Solzhenitsyn, in his diary and letters to a friend, N. D. Vitkevich, although speaking of the correctness of Marxism-Leninism, the progressiveness of the socialist revolution in our country and the inevitability of its victory throughout the world, also spoke out against the personality of Stalin and wrote of the artistic and ideological shortcomings of the works of many Soviet authors and the air of unreality that pervades many of them. He also wrote that our works of art fail to give readers of the bourgeois world a sufficiently comprehensive and versatile explanation of the inevitability of the victory of the Soviet army and people, and that our literary works are no match for the adroitly fashioned slanders of the bourgeois world against our country.
“These statements by Solzhenitsyn”, the Chief Military Prosecutor asserted, “do not constitute proof of a crime.”30
The Collegium then questioned a number of people, including Natalya, to whom Solzhenitsyn was alleged to have made anti-Soviet allegations, all of whom “characterized Solzhenitsyn as a Soviet patriot and denied that he had conducted anti-Soviet conversations”. The Collegium also examined Solzhenitsyn’s military record and a report by Captain Melnikov with whom he had served. From these, the Collegium concluded that Solzhenitsyn had “fought courageously for his homeland, more than once displayed personal heroism and inspired the devotion of the section he commanded”. Furthermore, “Solzhenitsyn’s section was the best in the unit for discipline and battle effectiveness.”
Having examined all the evidence, the Collegium ruled that “Solzhenitsyn’s actions do not constitute a crime and his case should be closed for lack of proof.”31
The decision to drop all charges had come a decade too late, after the man who was now declared innocent had already served eight years in prison and three in exile. One wonders whether Solzhenitsyn still managed to raise a wry smile when reading the Supreme Court document. He had, almost overnight, been transformed from a hated enemy of the people, a pariah, to a war hero and wise critic of Stalin’s deficiencies. Now, presumably, he was supposed to go home quietly, like a good and loyal Soviet citizen, and say nothing of the horrors he had seen and experienced.
Little did the Chief Military Prosecutor know it, but he had plucked this ticking time bomb from the relative safety of a village in Kazakhstan and placed it carefully at the heart of Soviet society. Solzhenitsyn, strengthened and purified by his time in prison and exile, was primed and ready to explode on an unsuspecting literary world.
CHAPTER TEN
IVAN THE TERRIBLE
In April 1956, several weeks after learning of his rehabilitation, Solzhenitsyn wrote to Natalya, informing her that he had been freed from exile and that his previous convictions had been officially expunged from the record. He now wished to settle in some relatively remote region and hoped that Natalya could make inquiries in the Ryazan Region, where she was currently living, to see whether there were any vacancies in the field of physics or mathematics. At the same time, he sought to assure her that, should he take up residence in Ryazan, there would be “no shadow cast upon your life”. In reply, Natalya informed him that there was a surplus of mathematicians and physicists in the Ryazan area and that he should try to settle in a city.1
Meanwhile, Solzhenitsyn remained at Kok-Terek until he had fulfilled his obligations as a schoolteacher. It was not until he had marked the final examinations at the end of the school year that he was finally free to leave. On June 20, 1956, he caught the train to Moscow, a journey taking four days. For the first two days, the train traveled through the hot, dusty steppes of central Asia, his home as prisoner and exile for the previous six years. On the third day, the train crossed the Volga, and, as it did so, Solzhenitsyn found himself overwhelmed emotionally by the sense of return to the central Russian heartland. He walked along the corridor until he found a platform where the upper half of the door was open, and stood there seemingly for an eternity, staring out at the Russian countryside. The wind rushed into his face and the tears streamed from his eyes.2 He was coming home.