The bitter humor of this state of affairs was not lost on the poet Tanya Khodkevich:
She too received a ten-year sentence for expressing her sense of humor in this way.
George Orwell, of course, was to develop the concept of “double-think” one step further: in Nineteen Eighty-Four the thought itself became a crime. Yet, although Orwellian thought-crime had not, at this stage, entered the Soviet criminal code, the fact would have come as cold comfort to those languishing in prison camps throughout the Soviet Union.
Although the young Solzhenitsyn remained oblivious to the suffering inflicted on an older generation of Russians, it is significant that his earliest memory relates to an incident connected to the state persecution of the church. It occurred in 1922 or 1923, at the very height of the wave of attacks on the church that followed the show trials of leading churchmen in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Solzhenitsyn was three or four years old, and he was attending church in Kislovodsk with his mother. “There were lots of people, candles, vestments…. [T]hen something happened: the service was brusquely interrupted. I wanted a better view, so my mother held me up at arm’s length and I looked over the heads of the crowd. I saw, filing arrogantly down the central aisle of the nave, the sugar-loaf ‘Budenny’ hats of Soviet soldiers. It was the period when the government was confiscating church property all over Russia.” The soldiers “sliced through the dumbstruck crowd of worshippers”, invaded the sanctuary beyond the altar screen, and stopped the service.18
For the toddler, held aloft by his mother to get a better view, it was all too much to take in and way beyond his childish powers of comprehension. Yet even to the adults in the congregation, the rude interruption by armed soldiers must have seemed ii incomprehensible, a bad dream. To those beleaguered believers, it must have seemed that the world about them had gone mad.
Nevertheless, life retained some sort of normality, and throughout the twenties Solzhenitsyn was able to enjoy a childhood relatively unimpeded by events in the world at large. Even by the end of the decade, when he had developed an interest in politics, he remained blissfully unaware of the hidden horrors unfolding around him:
[E]ven as a callow adolescent I… was staggered by the fraudulence of the famous trials—but nothing led me to draw the line connecting those minute Moscow trials (which seemed so tremendous at the time) with the huge crushing wheel rolling through the land (the number of its victims somehow escaped notice). I had spent my childhood in queues—for bread, for milk, for meal (meat was a thing unknown at that time)—but I could not make the connection between the lack of bread and the ruin of the countryside, or understand why it had happened. We were provided with another formula: “temporary difficulties”. Every night, in the large town where we lived, hour after hour after hour people were being hauled off to jail—but I did not walk the streets at night. And in the daytime the families of those arrested hung out no black flags, nor did my classmates say a word about their fathers being taken away.
According to the newspapers there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. And young men are so eager to believe that all is well.19
CHAPTER TWO
BLISSFUL IGNORANCE
In spite of the hardships he suffered as a child, Solzhenitsyn was lucky compared with many children his own age. For millions of children in Russia during the 1920s, life had become a living nightmare. In an unpublished memoir, Professor Doctor W. W. Krysko recalls the horrific scene he encountered as a ten-year-old in the spring of 1920. As the snows melted in the field outside his father’s factory in Rostov, mounds of corpses and skeletons appeared. Thousands of bodies had been dumped there for eventual burial. Among the human remains were the carcasses of horses, whose rib cages became the dens of hundreds of wild dogs, wolves, jackals, and hyenas. And worst of all, among the corpses and the dogs, lived bands of equally wild children, orphaned and abandoned.1
These were the bezprizornye, the uncared-for, the unwanted by-product of revolution and civil war who could be seen all over Russia. In 1923, Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya, estimated their number at around eight million. Almost a decade later, Malcolm Muggeridge, working in the Soviet Union as the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent, witnessed these children “going about in packs, barely articulate or recognizably human, with pinched animal faces, tangled hair and empty eyes. I saw them in Moscow and Leningrad, clustered under bridges, lurking in railway stations, suddenly emerging like a pack of wild monkeys, then scattering and disappearing.”2 Some as young as three years old, the bezprizornye survived by thieving and scrounging and many, both boys and girls, were prostitutes. Realizing that these hordes of street children were a social embarrassment, especially when observed by astute and horrified Western news correspondents, the state rounded up as many as could be caught and placed them in so-called “children’s republics” from which they later emerged as the brutalized, amoral wretches responsible for keeping order in the camps of the Gulag Archipelago. As Solzhenitsyn’s friend Dimitri Panin wrote:
A huge country, basically Christian, had been made over into a nursery for rearing a new breed of men under conditions of widescale terror and atheism. A new society, governed by primitives, began taking shape. Without asking the consent of the peasants or anyone else, the party heads, to achieve their own ends, unleashed their thugs over our vast land and fettered it in slavery. The young Communist state proceeded to mutilate and crush whatever opposed it, secular or sacred, to bury human lives under atrocities.3
All of this was completely beyond the experience of the young Solzhenitsyn. When he arrived at Rostov, a wide-eyed six-year-old, early in 1925, life in the city seemed, on the surface at least, to have improved immeasurably from the nightmare reality that the ten-year-old Krysko had faced five years earlier in the same place. There were no horrific scenes of unburied corpses; even the street children, it seems, had been “tidied away”. Instead, Solzhenitsyn remained blissfully ignorant of the events unfolding around him until, almost twenty years later, they swallowed him up with the millions of others who had gone before him. In the meantime, the child would become a precocious schoolboy at the top of his class.
Solzhenitsyn started school in 1926 at the former Pokrovsky College, a highly respected establishment in the center of the city renamed after the Soviet minister Zinoviev following the civil war. Colloquially, however, the local people called it the “Malevich Gymnasium” after its popular and talented headmaster, Vladimir Malevich. It was generally considered the best school in Rostov.
Malevich had been headmaster of the school since before the Revolution and, as such, was considered politically unreliable. Although he was still in charge when Solzhenitsyn arrived, he was forced out in 1930, by which time most of the other pre-revolutionary teachers had also been removed. Malevich was eventually arrested in 1937 or 1938 and sent to the labor camps. It is thought that Solzhenitsyn may have sought him out and interviewed him when he was collecting material for The Gulag Archipelago.