Solzhenitsyn soon realized, however, that it was impossible to understand or do justice to the Revolution without appreciating fully the huge significance of the First World War. He started to study some of the war’s military campaigns and became increasingly fascinated by the defeat of General Samsonov at the Battle of Tannenberg, in East Prussia. For the first three months of 1937, Solzhenitsyn spent hours in Rostov’s libraries studying this particular campaign, an experience he was later to evoke in his poem Prussian Nights.
His labors bore fruit in 1937 and 1938 when he drafted the first few chapters of part one of his novel under the provisional title “Russians in the Advance Guard”. He also sketched in a scene between Olkhovsky and Severtsev (later Vorotyntsev) for a chapter entitled “Black on Red”. When writing August 1914 thirty years later, he was able to draw heavily from these initial drafts, taking not only source material but in some cases whole scenes that barely needed any amendment at all.
Solzhenitsyn had now entered the local university where, surprisingly, he elected to take a degree in physics and mathematics rather than in literature. At Rostov University, literature was not taught at the faculty level but only at the teacher training college level, where students were prepared for teaching in secondary schools. This was not a prospect that Solzhenitsyn found attractive.
I had no desire to become a teacher of literature, because I had too many complex ideas of my own, and I simply wasn’t interested in retailing crude, simplified nuggets of information to children in school. Teaching mathematics, however, was much more interesting. I didn’t have any particular ambitions in the field of science, but I found it came easy to me, very easy, so I decided it would be better for me to become a mathematician and keep literature as a consolation of the spirit. And it was the right thing to do.15
It was usual at this time for students to sit an entrance examination before being accepted to a university and to submit their social credentials for scrutiny, but Solzhenitsyn’s superlative record of straight 5s in school meant that he was accepted without an examination. This in turn averted too close a scrutiny of his class origins. In any case, he was now becoming adept at avoiding the awkward parts of the endless questionnaires that had become such a feature of Soviet life. He invariably wrote “office worker” when describing his father’s former occupation: “I could never tell anyone that he had been an officer in the Russian army, because that was considered a disgrace.”16
Solzhenitsyn’s brilliant academic career continued at university where he received top marks in all his examinations. Simultaneously, finding his course very easy, he found time to develop a new love that was soon vying with literature for his extracurricular attention. This was the study of Marxism-Leninism. Along with his friends, he had passed with unquestioning ease from the Young Pioneers to the Komsomol in his tenth and final year at school. Then, from the age of seventeen onward, he threw himself into the study of Party doctrine with an almost religious zeaclass="underline" “[D]uring my years at the university, I spent a lot of time studying dialectical materialism, not only as part of my courses but in my spare time as well. Then and later… I read an enormous amount about it and got completely carried away. I was absolutely sincerely enthralled by it over a period of several years.”17
As Solzhenitsyn reached manhood, it seemed that he was determined to leave his childhood behind in every conceivable sense. He had come to the conclusion that the doubts, fears, and confusion of his childhood years were caused by the reactionary errors of his elders, who were unfortunately handicapped by their emotional attachment to old and discredited beliefs. With the self-assured audacity of youth, he had rejected old traditions and superstitions in favor of the brave new world presented by the Revolution. He had solved the psychological schism of his boyhood by rejecting the heresies of Russian Orthodoxy and embracing the orthodoxy of communism. It was all so easy: “The Party had become our father and we, the children, obeyed. So when I was leaving school and embarking on my time at university, I made a choice: I banished all my memories, all my childhood misgivings. I was a Communist. The world would be what we made it.”18
The banishment of memories must have been made difficult by the occasional reminders that dogged his years at university. In 1937, during his first year, some senior students were arrested and disappeared, and some of the professors were said to have disappeared as well. When Solzhenitsyn heard about this, it is hard to believe that the painful vision of Vladimir Fedorovsky’s arrest would not have returned to haunt him. Similarly, the wretched figure of Professor Trifonov scurrying nervously down the corridors and flinching whenever his name was called must have resurrected unwelcome childhood misgivings. “We learned later that he had been inside and if anybody called out his name in the corridor he thought perhaps the security officers had sent for him.”19 Is it feasible that the young communist student could have seen this broken wretch of a man without visions of his grandfather, half-maddened by constant persecution, walking the streets with a wooden cross hanging from his neck?
One suspects that the born-again communist nurtured a sneaking admiration for the celebrated mathematician Professor Mordukhai-Boltovskoi in spite of his anti-Marxist heresies, or perhaps even because of them. On one occasion, according to Solzhenitsyn, the elderly professor was lecturing on Newton when one of the students sent up a note which said, “Marx wrote that Newton was a materialist, yet you say he was an idealist. To which the professor replied, “I can only say that Marx was wrong. Newton believed in God, like every other great scientist.” On another occasion, when his students told him that there was an attack on him in one of the newspapers pasted to the walls of the university, he replied with weighted indifference, “My nanny told me never to read what was written on walls.”20 Not surprisingly, Mordukhai-Boltovskoi was purged from the university, but he was saved from prison by his age, his reputation as a famous mathematician, and allegedly by the personal intervention of Kalinin, chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR, to whom the professor had turned for help. As a result, he was reprieved and was merely “relegated” by being transferred to the teacher training college.
The professor was one of a small and very fortunate minority in being the recipient of state-sponsored leniency at this time. During the 1930s, Stalin had instituted a new reign of terror designed principally to eliminate all actual or potential rivals. At the Seventeenth Party Congress, “the Congress of Victors”, in 1934, Stalin had declared that the Party had triumphed over all opposition, promising the Party faithful a glorious and joyful future: “Life has become better, Comrades. Life has become gayer.” Of the two thousand delegates who applauded on that day, two-thirds were arrested in the course of the next five years. In 1934, Sergei Kirov was murdered in Leningrad, and a wave of show trials followed: the trial of Kamenev and Zinoviev in 1935, the Old Bolsheviks trial in 1936, the trial of Pyatakov and Radek in 1937, the trial of Rykov and Bukharin in 1938, and a host of lesser trials. In 1940, having been sentenced to death in his absence, Trotsky was murdered in exile. Yet the new reign of terror was not restricted to the higher echelons of Soviet power. It permeated downward, contaminating every stratum of society with an atmosphere of fear. In Leningrad alone, during the spring of 1935, between thirty and forty thousand people were arrested. Over the following three years, the total number arrested across the Soviet Union as a whole ran into millions. The purpose of Stalin’s murderous Machiavellianism was summed up succinctly by Michael Scammelclass="underline" “Soviet society was turned upside down and remade in Stalin’s image.”21