In the winter of 1930, a matter of months after Solzhenitsyn had joined the junior wing of the Communist Party, the visit of his grandfather was to serve as a reminder that the boy’s conformity at school could not resolve the continuing conflict between his family and the state. Upon arrival, Grandfather Zakhar sat down dejectedly in the corner and, leafing through the pages of the Bible he was carrying, began bewailing the ill fortune that had fallen on the family since the accursed Revolution. Not only had the old man endured the confiscation of his estate, but he faced recurrent harassment and repeated questioning by the Soviet authorities. Like many of his generation, he still clung to the belief, the forlorn hope, that the communists would soon be overthrown and that life would return to normal. When this happened, he was concerned that his estate should be properly cared for so that he could hand it on to the young Solzhenitsyn, his only grandchild. In a naively inspired effort to comfort his grandfather, Solzhenitsyn had assured him that there was no need to worry: “Don’t worry about it, grandad. I don’t want your estate anyway. I would have refused it on principle.”8 One can only imagine the cold comfort, the pain, that the old man must have felt as the eleven-year-old displayed his communist sympathies and his belief in the evils of property.
The cramped conditions in which Solzhenitsyn and his mother lived meant that any visitors to their tiny shack were forced to sleep on the floor. Early next morning, the seventy-two-year-old woke from an uncomfortable and restless night and crept out to go to church while mother and child still slept. Soon after his departure, they were rudely awakened by the sound of boots kicking against their door. Two Soviet secret policemen burst into the room and demanded to see Zakhar, who was wanted for questioning in connection with the illegal hoarding of gold. These agents had followed the old man from his home in Georgievsk, where he had already been detained twice and questioned on the same subject. Surprised to find that he was not there, they turned on Solzhenitsyn’s mother, abusing her as a “class enemy” and demanding that she hand over any money, gold, or other valuables. Taissia informed them that she had none, whereupon she was threatened with imprisonment. The agents ordered her to sign a statement swearing that she had no gold in the house, warning her that she would be arrested immediately if their search proved that she had lied. Terrified, she asked whether the statement included wedding rings. The agents nodded, and sheepishly she handed over both her own wedding ring and that of her dead husband.
At that moment, Zakhar returned from church to be greeted by a torrent of abuse from the agents who demanded that he hand over his gold. Ignoring them, he fell to his knees before the icon in the corner and began to pray. The agents hauled him to his feet and conducted a thorough body search, but found nothing. Cursing, they stormed out, threatening to catch him on a future occasion.
Zakhar returned home, and, two months later, in February 1931, his wife, Evdokia, died. Unable to attend the funeral in Georgievsk, Taissia arranged a memorial Mass for her mother in Rostov Cathedral. This involved great courage and carried with it considerable personal risk. Churchgoers were now spied on and if reported to the authorities could lose their jobs. For this reason, Taissia had ceased attending church on a regular basis, but she felt duty-bound to go to the Mass and duly attended with her son. Although his mother was fortunate enough to escape retribution, Solzhenitsyn was reported to the headmaster by a fellow pupil and was severely reprimanded for conduct unbecoming of a Young Pioneer.
Grief-stricken after the death of his wife, Zakhar had wandered back to the district where his confiscated estate was, in the vicinity of Armavir, pursued incessantly by the secret police, who remained convinced that he had a secret hoard of gold. Driven half-mad by grief and by the persistent harassment, he is said to have hung a wooden cross round his neck and gone to the secret police headquarters in Armavir. “You have stolen all my money and possessions,” he is purported to have said, “so now you can take me into your jail and keep me.” Whether he was indeed imprisoned or whether he collapsed and died elsewhere would remain a mystery. It was some time before news of his death, a year after that of his wife, filtered through to Taissia, who dutifully arranged another memorial Mass at Rostov Cathedral.
In March 1932, at around the time that his heartbroken and impoverished grandfather was dying in mysterious circumstances, the thirteen-year-old Solzhenitsyn witnessed his first arrest. With the slushy remains of the winter’s snow still on the ground, he had gone round to the home of the Fedorovskys, who were close family friends. As he arrived, he stopped, startled, in his tracks at the sight of Vladimir Fedorovsky, the nearest person in his life to a father, being escorted by two strangers to a waiting car. He watched as Federovsky got into the car and was driven away. Entering the flat, Solzhenitsyn was greeted by a scene of utter devastation. Drawers and cupboards had been emptied on to the floor, rugs and carpets torn up and tossed aside, and books and ornaments were scattered everywhere. This was the aftermath of a search of the flat by the secret police that had lasted twenty-four hours.
It transpired that Fedorovsky’s “crime” was to have appeared in the same photograph as Professor L. K. Ramzin, an engineer imprisoned two years earlier for allegedly plotting against the government. The photograph, taken during an engineers’ conference both men had attended, was the only “evidence” discovered during the day-long search and was insufficient to put Fedorovsky on trial as an accomplice in Ramzin’s plot. He was released after a year’s detention and interrogation, but was completely broken in health and spirits and never returned to his former employment. He lived for another ten years, more or less aimlessly, and died in 1943.
If this had been Solzhenitsyn’s first experience of an actual arrest, he received regular daily reminders of the presence of the Soviet prison system. Every day on his way home from school, he passed the enormous building in the center of Rostov that had been taken over by the Soviet authorities to be used as a prison. Each day he passed the back entrance to the prison where a permanent line of desolate women waited to make inquiries or to hand in food parcels. There were also the columns of prisoners marched through the streets under armed guard, accompanied by the chilling shouts of the escort commander: “One step out of line, and I’ll give the order to shoot or sabre you down!” The young Solzhenitsyn would occasionally see these columns and be reminded of the existence of an incomprehensible twilight world. Yet he was too young to understand the implications. On another occasion, he heard how a man had clambered out on to the sill of a top floor window of the prison and hurled himself to his death on the pavement below. His mangled body was hastily removed and the blood washed away with hosepipes, but news of the suicide spread through the town.
Later, Solzhenitsyn learned that the dungeons of the prison at Rostov were situated under the pavement, lit by opaque lights set into the asphalt. Almost daily, as a child and then as an adolescent, he had been walking unwittingly over the heads of the prisoners incarcerated beneath his feet.
At school, he was an exceptional pupil, excelling in both the arts and the sciences, encouraged by his mother, who, like her gifted son, had been top of the class as a child. The precocious schoolboy became close friends with two other gifted pupils in his class. His friendship with Nikolai Vitkevich and Kirill Simonyan was to last through the rest of their school years and through their years at Rostov University. Soon they were so inseparable that they referred to themselves jokingly as “The Three Musketeers”. Their other close friend, admitted as an honorary fourth member of the intimate circle, was Lydia Ezherets, known to her friends as Lida. The four were drawn together principally by their love of literature. They wrote essays on Shakespeare, Byron, and Pushkin, each trying to outdo the other in friendly competitiveness; and they wrote “very bad, very imitative poetry”.9 Encouraged by their literature teacher, Anastasia Grunau, they collaborated on the writing of a novel, which was dubbed “the novel of the three madmen”, and started producing a satirical magazine in which they wrote poems and epigrams on each other and on the teachers. Later, they developed an infatuation with the theater, organizing a drama club and rehearsing plays by Ostrovsky, Chekhov, and Rostand.