The incongruity of Solzhenitsyn’s position as a true helper of the Party was hammered home even more forcefully five days later when a review of his novel appeared in Pravda. The review was written by Vladimir Ermilov, a communist time-server who epitomized everything Solzhenitsyn detested. During the Stalinist purges, Ermilov had been a secret-police informer who had denounced many writers and intellectuals, consigning them to the very camps that Solzhenitsyn was describing. Now that the tide had turned against Stalin, Ermilov had turned with it, determined to remain in favor. Stalin was now the “enemy of the people” while Solzhenitsyn was a newly discovered hero, “a writer gifted with a rare talent, and, as befits a real artist, he has told us a truth that cannot be forgotten, and must not be forgotten, a truth that is staring us in the face”.2
Whatever his attitude to official praise of his work, Solzhenitsyn surely received a degree of genuine consolation from the letters he began to receive from former prisoners.
“You have taken a picture of quite a day…. Reading your story and comparing it with the camp, it is impossible to distinguish one from another. They are alike as two peas—the arrangement of the compound, the punishment block, and the attitude to the prisoners.”
“I could not sit still. I kept leaping up, walking about and imagined all those scenes as taking place in the camp I was in.”
“When I read it, I literally felt the blast of cold as one leaves the hut for inspection.”3
Another former prisoner, after declaring that his own life was described exactly in the novel, recounted his riposte to “a loudly dressed lady with a gold ring” who had said that she didn’t like Solzhenitsyn’s novel because it was too depressing: “It’s better to have a bitter truth than a sweet lie”, he had replied.4
“After reading it,” wrote a woman whose husband had perished in the camps, “the only thing left to do is to knock a nail into the wall, tie a knot and hang oneself.” A young female student who had lost both her grandparents in the camps could not even bear to read it, writing to Solzhenitsyn that she had flicked through it before being forced to put it down. Another woman, the wife of one who had died, expressed the grief more eloquently:
I see, I hear this crowd of hungry, freezing creatures, half people, half animals, and amongst them is my husband…. Continue to write, write the truth, even though they won’t print it now! Our floods of tears were not shed in vain—the truth will rise to the surface in this river of tears…. My husband wrote to me from Taishet that one of his companions in misfortune would come to me some day and tell me about him, and give me a ring that he made for me there, in his place of torment. But nobody came to me, and now will never come.5
There were other letters too, not sent to Solzhenitsyn but published in the press. These were not from former political prisoners but from those who had never experienced “one day in the life of Ivan Denisovich”. Many of these were either blissfully ignorant of the realities depicted in Solzhenitsyn’s novel or else were guards or former guards who held the prisoners in contempt.
“These submen with their shabby little souls were dealt with too leniently by the courts.”
“Why give a lot of food to those who do not work? Their energy remains unexpended…. I say the criminal world is being treated far too gently.”
“Where rations are concerned we shouldn’t forget one thing—that they are not in a holiday resort. They must atone for their guilt with honest toil.”
“Solzhenitsyn’s story should be withdrawn immediately from all libraries and reading rooms.”
“This book should not have been published, the material should have been handed over to the Organs of the KGB instead.”6
There was one letter Solzhenitsyn found grimly amusing for its woeful lack of scriptural knowledge. “I’ve never before had to swallow such trash…. And this is not just my opinion. Many of us feel the same, our name is Legion.”
“Quite right,” Solzhenitsyn replied, “their name is Legion. Only they were in too much of a hurry to check their reference to the Gospel. It was of course a Legion of devils.”7
Clearly, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich had touched a raw nerve. As its impact resounded throughout the Soviet Union, from the grandeur of the Kremlin to the humble homes of former prisoners, Solzhenitsyn contemplated the power his novel had unleashed. “If the first tiny droplet of truth has exploded like a psychological bomb, what then will happen in our country when whole waterfalls of Truth burst forth?”8 Solzhenitsyn was not the only person asking this question. There were many who had a vested interest in keeping the truth hidden, and these people, the hard-line communists, were already preparing their response.
However, it was Khrushchev himself who had planted the psychological bomb at the highest level of Soviet life and had given it his blessing. Encouraged by this, Tvardovsky felt confident enough to overcome his initial misgivings and publish Matryona’s House, along with another short story by Solzhenitsyn entitled “An Incident at Krechetovka Station”, in the January 1963 edition of Novy Mir. In many ways, Matryona’s House is one of the most important of Solzhenitsyn’s works, a spiritual bomb just as One Day in the Life was a psychological bomb. According to the dissident historian Grigori Pomerants, Christianity began for a million Russians with the reading of Matryona’s House: “A million people (if not more) took the first step towards the light with Solzhenitsyn.”9
Yet where some saw the light, others saw only darkness. Matryona’s House was condemned at a meeting of Moscow writers in March for failing to educate youth by positive examples. It was the task of Soviet writers to lead the youth “to a bright future, to communism”: “When you read this story you get the impression that the peasant’s psychology has remained the same as it was sixty years ago. But this is not true! We need works which are historically truthful, and tell of the enormous revolutionary changes that have taken place in the Soviet village.”10
A few days later, Sergei Pavlov, First Secretary of the Young Communist League, attacked Solzhenitsyn and other writers in Novy Mir for failing “to speak of lofty ideas, of communism… under the pretext of the struggle against the consequences of the cult of the individual and dogmatism”. Matryona’s House was “immersed in a narrow little world of philistine problems” and breathed “such pessimism, mustiness, hopelessness”.11
Against the crescendo of resentment, Khrushchev’s words a week or so earlier sounded ominously isolated: “The party gives its backing to artistic creations which are really truthful, whatever negative aspects of life they may deal with, so long as they help the people in their effort to build a new society.”12
The last thing the communists desired was a new society with all the unwelcome changes that would inevitably accompany it. Sensing that the winds of change were once more blowing in their direction, they ceased fighting a rearguard action and moved on to the offensive.
The publication of Solzhenitsyn’s For the Good of the Cause in the July 1963 edition of Novy Mir heralded a major debate between the two schools of thought vying for supremacy in the Soviet Union, the Stalinists and those fighting for a de-Stalinized new society. For the Good of the Cause, as the ironic title suggested, was Solzhenitsyn’s boldest attack yet on the corruption and injustice endemic in the communist regime. As such, it was bound to provoke a hostile response.