Looking at a picture of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, (1918-2008), as he lay in state at the Russian Academy of Science, I was struck by the dignity in his features. With his grey hair and beard, they were those of a patriarch. And as I reflected on them, I was reminded that his greatness lay in what he had endured, rather than in what he wrote. For had he not been willing to endure, we might not have learned in such authoritative detail, of the fate of millions of his fellow countrymen, to say nothing of the additional millions of Soviet citizens.
And looking at him in death, when he had no more to give, it seemed extraordinary, that this one, flawed, human being, had single-handedly, defied and defeated the ruthless apparatus of the state, and in a manner that reminded all of us of our dignity as human beings.
Paradoxically, and following on the heels of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when nuclear war was averted by a hairs breath, we first heard Solzhenitsyn's voice. It came with the publication of One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich, first in the Soviet Union, and then in the West. And in context, the publication of such a book, was a momentous event. For as we say, "it lifted the lid" on some of the Soviet Union's darkest secrets: of life under Joseph Stalin: of how millions of Soviet citizens, during his three decades in power, were subjected to arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, in forced labour camps in Siberia. And of how many hundreds of thousands of those who survived their term of imprisonment, (and many hundreds of thousands didn't survive), were arbitrarily condemned to a life in exile. Alexander Solzhenitsyn was one of them; and the fact that One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich surfaced when it did, through a quagmire of state censorship, was the result of an act of pure political expediency.
When he came to power on the death of Stalin in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev, in an attempt to distance the Soviet Union from its past, embarked on a program of reform. In 1956, and as part of a process of "rehabilitation", Khrushchev quashed the sentences of those who had been condemned to live in exile: a move that allowed Solzhenitsyn, exiled in Kazakhstan, to return home to Russia. But not withstanding this more liberal approach, Solzhenitsyn had no expectation that his writing would be published in his lifetime. So when it came to pass that One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich was published, it came about in a manner that he could not possibly have imagined, while a prisoner in the sub-zero temperatures of Siberia.
Made aware of the Manuscript, Khrushchev read it, and was so impressed that he insisted that his politburo read it also. But when asked if it should be published and they failed to respond, Khrushchev, interpreting their silence as consent, approved its publication, in 1961, in the literary magazine Novi Mir.
For Khrushchev this was just what he had been looking for: further evidence that he could use to discredit his political opponents, the Stalinist's within the Communist Party. And as events were to unfold, it was no mean struggle: Within two years of its publication, Khrushchev had been toppled from power. Leonid Brezhnev was the new man in Moscow; and the process of reform was at an end. In 1966 the dissident writers Yuri Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky were prosecuted in an infamous show trial. Daniel, who had lied about his age so that he could fight on the Russian Front, was found guilty of ant-Soviet activity and sentenced to five years hard labour. Sinyavsky, on the same charge got seven. For a time and fearing that he too would be arrested, Solzhenitsyn was in hiding. And Czechoslovakia, a country that aspired to a more liberal form of communism, was, in 1968, invaded by a carefully orchestrated show of force by countries from the Warsaw Pact. Their leader Alexander Dubcek was removed from power and "the Prague spring" was at an end.
In this new atmosphere of oppression, and working in secret, Solzhenitsyn had two further novels published in the West: The First Circle and Cancer Ward. The first of these was based on his experience as a prisoner, who, because he was a mathematician, was removed from a regime of hard labour and required to work on research for the secret police. A novel in which he documents the dilemma that he and his fellow scientists faced: whether to cooperate, or refuse, and be returned to the brutality of the camps. Cancer Ward is also autobiographical, to the extent that it reflects Solzhenitsyn's own experience of, and successful treatment for cancer. But, as was well understood by the Soviet authorities, the book was more than that: for the title, Cancer Ward, was also a metaphor for soviet society.
When he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1970, rather than travelling to Stockholm, as was the custom, to collect the award, Solzhenitsyn stayed at home. For he believed that had he done otherwise he would not have been allowed to return to Russia. But matters came to a head in 1973, when the KGB seized a copy of the manuscript for another of his novels, The Gulag Archipelago. In response, Solzhenitsyn authorised its publication in the West: an action that resulted in his arrest on February 12th 1973 on a charge of treason. The following day and stripped of his citizenship, he was expelled from the Soviet Union: an exile that was to last for twenty years.
What the Soviet leaders feared, and could not stop, was the truth: that under Stalin, Communism was an ideology reinforced by terror, and on a scale unimagined, not just by people in the West, but by most Soviet citizens. So what Solzhenitsyn was doing in his writing, was building a monument to its victims, and pointing the way for future historians. For men such as Allan Bullock, who, in Hitler And Stalin: Parallel Lives, sought to quantify what Solzhenitsyn came to identify as The Gulag Archipelago.
Drawing attention to a fellow historian, Robert Conquest, Bullock quotes his updated research on the numbers of those shot, imprisoned, or sent to the camps in the later 1930s. In 1936, approximately "5 million" people were either in jail or in camps. Between "January 1937" and "December 1938", approximately "1 million" people had been shot, and "2 million" had died in the camps. And by late 1938, approximately "1 million" people were in jail and "7 million" people in the camps. Of those arrested in the period 1936-38, it is estimated that only "10 per cent survived". And quoting Andrei Sakharov, we learn that of the 600,000 Party members sent to the camps, 50,000 survived.
The archipelago was a vast network of islands populated by millions of Zek's, (prisoners) who, though they were a vital part of the soviet economy, were expendable, and under this reign of terror, were easily replaced. Among the most notorious of these were the gold mines on the Koloma river, where temperatures could fall to -70F, and where the prisoners employed there, were required to work until the temperature had reached -50F.
When in February 1945, Solzhenitsyn, then aged 27, was arrested on the Russian front, all that he could think to ask was "Why me? What for?" After all, he was a committed communist, a man who believed in the Russian Revolution of 1917. And in the context of service to his country and with German shells falling just two hundred yards away, he had been tried and tested. And he was proud of his status as an officer, a captain in charge of an artillery battery. So unsuspecting of any "evil intent" as asked, he handed his pistol to the Brigade Commander, at which point, two officers from counter-intelligence pounced: "four hands grabbed simultaneously" at the star on his cap, at his shoulder boards, at his officers belt and his map case, before telling him "somewhat theatrically", that he was under arrest. No longer a captain, but a prisoner, and - "an enemy of the people".
Surprised he might have been, but in time Solzhenitsyn would come to think of that moment as a double affront, coming as it did in the jaws of death: "in the face of which, all men were eqal;" But for now, and because of criticism of Stalin that he had expressed in letters to a friend, he was on his way to Moscow, to the notorious Lubyanka prison, to be interrogated:
"The office of my interrogator I. L. Yezepove was high ceilinged, spacious and bright, with an enormous window. (The Russyia Insurance Company had not been built with torture in mind.) And putting to use its seventeen feet of height, a full length vertical, thirteen foot portrait of that powerful Sovereign hung there, towards whom, I grain of sand that I was, had expressed my hatred. Sometimes the interrogator stood in front of the portrait and declaimed dramatically: "We are ready to lay down our lives for him! We are ready to lie down in the path of oncoming tanks for his sake." Face to face with the altar like grandeur of that portrait, my mumbling about some kind of purified Leninism seemed pitiful, and I myself seemed a blasphemous slanderer deserving only death."
It was a world of dislocation, as here, where he is describing his experience of the exercise yard:
"We used to walk in the shadow of that chimney, our exercise yard a boxlike concrete enclosure on the roof of the Big Lubyanka, six floors up. The walls rose up around us to approximately three times a man's height. With our own ears we could hear Moscow-automobile horns honking back and forth. But all we could see was that chimney, the guard posted in a seventh floor tower, and that segment of God's heaven whose unhappy fate it was to float over the Lubyanka."
The chimney that he is referring to here is that of the incinerator in the Lubyanka, in which, documents no longer needed as evidence against prisoners, or considered seditious (including Solzhenitsyn's diaries), were destroyed. An awareness of which, caused Solzhenitsyn particular dismay:
"Oh how many ideas and works had perished in that building - a whole lost culture? Oh soot, soot, from the Lubyanka chimneys! And the most hurtful thing of all was that our descendants would consider our generation more stupid, less gifted, less vocal, than in actual fact it was."
It was a truth that he could not escape, as here, when entering the room where he would be interrogated he noticed something different:
"In the gaps where the frost had melted, the rooftops of Moscow could be seen, rooftop after rooftop, and above them merry little puffs of smoke. But I was staring not in that direction but at a mound of piled up manuscripts - someone else's - covering the entire centre of the floor in the half-empty room, thirty six square yards in area, manuscripts which had been dumped there a little while before and had not yet been examined. In notebooks, in file folders, in homemade binders, in tied and untied bundles, and simply in loose pages. The manuscripts lay there like the burial ground of some internal human spirit, its comical top rearing higher than the interrogator's desk, almost blocking me from the view. And brotherly pity ached in me for the labour of that unknown person who had been arrested the previous night, those spoils from the search of his premises having been dumped that morning on the parquet floor of the torture chamber, at the feet of the thirteen foot Stalin. I sat there and I wondered: whose extraordinary life had they brought in for torment, for dismemberment, for burning?"
If it is true, as St. Augustine suggests, that, "he who sings prays twice," Solzhenitsyn, in using all his skills as a writer, was doing something similar here, where the factual detail is supported by powerful imagery. But more important than that, what helped to transform Solzhenitsyn from a victim, into an implacable opponent of the Soviet state, were the people that he met in prison and in the camps: Men of character, intellect, knowledge, courage and ideas, so much so, that he came to see all prisoners, regardless of their capacities, as millions of personal tragedies:
"The universe has as many different centres as there are living human beings in it. Each of us is a centre of the universe, and that universe is shattered when they hiss at you: You are under arrest."
At no time during his interrogation was Solzhenitsyn physically tortured, though the threat was there, and the Lubyanka he knew, had a notorious history in that regard. But what he had to endure was uncertainty, not knowing when he would be brought out for questioning, and especially if he would be summoned at night. In the Lubyanka there were no concessions to the night shift. If he was returned to his cell at five after hours of questioning, he had to rise with the other prisoners at six. And the greater psychological fear was, that he might unwittingly incriminate his friends. After all, if he had said such things about Stalin in letters to a friend, surely he must have discussed them with his friends when they met? But in the end, and not withstanding his anxiety, he succeeded in co-operating, just enough, to prevent his interrogator from combing his papers with zeal.
In the end, and under Article 58, Section 11, Solzhenitsyn, although investigated as an individual, was sentenced as a group. At first he protested, pointing out that his friend was also investigated as an individual at the front. Protested that is, until they threatened to send him to another place and begin the interrogation again.
On a charge of anti-Soviet propaganda and an attempt to create an anti-Soviet organisation, Solzhenitsyn was sentenced to eight years hard labour, and a life in perpetual exile. All the more extraordinary then, and inexplicable, that at the point where he was in danger of death from starvation and exhaustion, he was transferred to work in the intelligence research unit.
__________
Now the books that I would particularly like to focus on at this point are, One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich and Cancer Ward. And in doing so, my aim is to convey a sense of Solzhenitsyn the writer. But I will only be happy doing so when I have told you, that for every passage I have chosen to quote, or angle to cover, there were many nagging alternatives.
Drawing on his own experience, Solzhenitsyn, in One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich, chronicled a day in the lives of prisoners in one of the better camps in Siberia: a place where a former "Hero of the Soviet Union", before muster, climbing a thermometer pole declared to his disbelieving fellow prisoners below, that it was -27.
The central character is S854, otherwise known as Ivan Denisovich Shukhov. And the message at the outset is ominous, for we are told that Ivan Denisovich, who has been in the camp for eight years, has never forgotten the words of his first team leader, Kuziomin:
"Here lads, we live by the law of the taige. But even here people manage to live. D' you know who are the ones the camps finish off? Those who lick other men's left-overs, those who set store by the doctors, and those who peach on their mates."
Reveille is at 5 and on this morning there is a particular uncertainty:
"...Shukhov [Ivan Denisovich] remembered that this morning his fate hung in the balance: because they wanted to shift the 104th from the building-shops to a new site, the "Socialist Way Of Life" settlement. It lay in open country covered with snow-drifts, and before anything else could be done there, they would have to dig pits and put up posts and attach barbed wire to them. Wire themselves in, so that they wouldn't run away. Only then would they start building. There wouldn't be a warm corner for a whole month. Not a dog-kennel. And fires were out of the question. Where was the firewood to come from? Warm up with the work, that was your only salvation."
But Turin the team leader, who has been in the camp for 19 years, has done his job well. He has bribed the guards with an ample supply of fat, and the 104th will not be going to the Socialist Way of Life. As it is, and in preparation for the day ahead, Ivan Denisovich has bound his feet with cloths to try to keep warm; and for the evening on his return, he has concealed a crust of bread in his mattress, in the hope that it won't be discovered during the search in his absence. Under armed escort, they will march through the snow to the power station that they are building: march with their heads down and faces covered against the bitter chill. But before the march can get under way there is a tedious and debilitating process of counting and double counting the prisoners, and frisking them, until the guards are sure of the numbers. And not withstanding the wait, Ivan Denisovich is preoccupied with something else. For he has noticed that his team-mate Tsezar is smoking:
"That meant that he might be able to cadge a smoke. But he didn't ask straight away, he stood quite close up to Tsezar and, half turning, looked past him.
He looked past him and seemed indifferent, but he noticed that after each puff (Tsezar inhaled at rare intervals thoughtfully) a thin ring of glowing ash crept down the cigarette, reducing its length as it moved steadily to the cigarette holder.Fetiukov, that jackal, had come up closer too and now stood opposite Tsezar, watching his mouth with blazing eyes.
Shukhov, [Ivan Denisovich] had finished his last pinch of tobacco and saw no prospect of acquiring any more before evening. Every nerve in his body was taut, all his longing was concentrated in that fag-end - which meant more to him now, it seemed, than freedom itself: but he would never lower himself like that Fetiukov, he would never look at a man's mouth.
Tsezar was a hotch-potch of nationalities: Greek, Jew, Gipsy - you couldn't make out which. He was still young. He'd made films. But he hadn't finished his first when they arrested him. He wore a dark thick tangled mustache. They hadn't shaved it off in the camp because that was the way he looked in the photograph in the dossier.
"Tsezar Markovich," Slobbered Fetiukov, unable to restrain himself. "Give us a drag."
His face twitched with greedy desire.
Tsezar slightly raised his lids that drooped low over his black eyes and looked at Fetiukov. It was because he didn't want to be interrupted while smoking and asked for a drag that he had taken up a pipe. He didn't begrudge the tobacco, he resented the interruption to his chain of thought. He smoked to stimulate his mind and to set his ideas flowing. But the moment he lighted a cigarette he read in several pairs of eyes an unspoken plea for the fag-end. Tsezar turned to Shukhov and said:
"Take it Ivan Denisovich."
Shukhov started (though it was exactly what he had expected of Tsezar) and gratefully hurried to take the fag-end with one hand, while slipping the other hand under it to prevent it from dropping. He didn't resent the fact that Tsezar felt squeamish about letting him finish the cigarette in the holder (some had clean mouths, some had foul) and he didn't burn his hardened fingers as he touched the glowing end. The main thing was, he had cut out that jackal Fetiukov and could now go on drawing in smoke until his lips were scorched. Mmm. The smoke crept and flowed through his whole hungry body, making his head and feet respond to it.
Just at that blissful moment he heard a shout:
"They're stripping us of our undershirts."
Such was a prisoners life. Shukhov had grown accustomed to it. All they could do was look out they didn't leap at your throat."
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Cancer Ward, is much more all embracing. Besides being a specific place in the story, the book is also a critique of Soviet society. A grey impoverished world where, all but the Party cadre are living dreary lives. But from within this broad sweep, Solzhenitsyn digs out the best and the worst in the human condition.
The State is personified in the character of Pavel Nikolayevich who, though he is terminally ill, has no capacity to come to terms with the reality of death. Nor is he capable of responding to the reality of life as it is around him in the ward. He has learned to live with his past; and he clings doggedly to what he knows. And on his discharge from the hospital he has not heard the doctor's subtle prognosis. We know that in eight months he will be dead, but he has convinced himself, that it is his will and strength of character that has made him invincible. And they are all of a kind, pathetic: his family, when they escort him from the ward. Secure in themselves, and indifferent to the people they are leaving behind, they haven't an inkling as to what lies ahead.
The personification of the good citizen is not so easy. It could be Dontsova, who is fatigued by her work, and whom her colleagues and she, fear is succumbing to a disease that she has spent a lifetime trying to protect her patients from. Or Vevegnia Ustinovna, who lives on cigarettes, and whose work as a senior surgeon is gruesome. And who, though tired, is always sympathetic to the patients when she visits them on the ward. Or, whoever else you might care to select. The canvas is broad, but whoever you choose, you will feel inadequate:
But a more general sense of what is in store, is reflected in my notes on Chapter 3, entitled "Teddy bear".
"A more humane and agonizing passage that opens with a wry description of the women's ward and a good contrast in the characterization of the hospital staff. Nellya, the orderly who washing the floor is joining in the women's conversation. But she is lazy and a whore, living it up with the lorry drivers. But the passage becomes more intriguing when Oleg Kostoglotov [the central character] appears and engages Zoya in conversation. The doctors tell him nothing, so he pleads with Zoya to let him read her medical textbook. Refusing at first, she relents. And there is an increasing warmth as the exchanges between them progress, with the result that Kostoglotov discloses something of his past. The effect of suffering on Sharaf Sibgatov is well expressed and there is something of a metaphor in the routine of switching out the lights at night. There is an earthiness and humour in the characterisations".
The background to the whole story of course is the unrelenting and debilitating power of the state. Doctors on a whim in the past have been persecuted. And Elizeveta Anatolyevna, a night orderly, surely speaks for millions. Her husband, a prisoner in the camps, has not been heard from lately, and she reads novels in French, because they help her to escape from the daily realities of life in Russia.
But long before we get to this point, by Chapter II, the barriers between the patients who, understandably, are wary of one another, are coming down and tensions beginning to surface. Pavel Nikolayevich and Oleg Kostoglotov are at opposite ends of the spectrum. Pavel, as we have noted, is an unthinking conforming communist, while Kostoglotov a free thinker is challenging the status quo. Sitting in a window seat, Kostoglotov is holding forth, making a speech and quoting Descartes: "suspect everything". This brings a strong political response from Rusanov (the young geologist). And Oleg Kostoglotov goes on to explain that they shouldn't put all their faith in doctors. There is a link between tumours and the central nervous system, and there are cases, he reminds them, of self-induced healing. Yefrem Podduyev links this idea to a clear conscience, but Pavel Nikolayevich reacts strongly to the idea that conscience has anything to do with it. Rusanov, still reading his book, describes it differently, as the "psychology of optimism". Yefrem, reflecting on his treatment of women, is not optimistic for his prospects, while Pavel Nikolayevich sees the theory as so much religious rubbish. This brings an angry response from Kostoglotov. "What" he exclaims, "is so terrible about moral perfection". But Pavel Nikolayevich is sure of his ground. "The moral perfection of Leo Tolstoy and company was described once and for all by Lenin and comrade Stalin, and by Gorky". The idea that anything on earth can be said "once and for all", brings a further mocking response from Oleg Kostoglotov. And the discussion moves on to the subject of death.
But reading this work again after many years, the chapter that particularly made me sit up and take notice, and that stayed with me after the suspense of the final chapter, in which a promising love triangle is played out between Kostoglotov, the nurse Zoya and Dr. Vera Kornilyevna, (a narrative thiat is especially subtle), is where Shulubin and Oleg Kostoglotov, are comparing their lot in life, with Shulubin becoming increasingly angry at the betrayal of Soviet citizens. For me this was the high point in the story, seeking as it does to focus attention on the question of responsibility, and of how, in various ways, the whole of society was affected by this reign of terror. And what gives this passage its power, is the way in which Solzhenitsyn opens our eyes to the suffering and humiliation of those who were not in the camps.
Kostoglotov walking in the hospital grounds comes across Shulubin resting on a bench:
"Oleg wouldn't have minded joining Shulubin on the bench. He hadn't yet managed to have a proper talk with him, but he wanted to, because the camps had taught him that people who say nothing carry something within themselves. Besides, Oleg's sympathy and interest were aroused by the way Shulubin had supported him in the argument.
However, he decided to walk past him. The camps had also taught him that each man has a sacred right to be left on his own. He recognised this right and would not violate it.
He was walking past, but slowly, raking his boots through the gravel. Stopping him would be no problem. Shulubin saw the boots and his eye followed them up to see whose they were. He gave Oleg a look of indifference, implying no more than the recognition "We're from the same ward, aren't we?" Oleg had taken two more measured steps, before Shulubin suggested to him in a half-question, "Will you sit down?"
Shulubin was wearing a pair of high-sided house shoes, not the ordinary hospital slippers that just hung on your toes. It meant he could go outside for walks and sit outside. His head was uncovered; on it a few tufts of grey hair were sticking up.
Oleg turned towards the bench and sat down, giving the impression that it was all the same to him whether he sat or walked on, but, come to think of it, sitting down would be better.
However their conversation began he knew he could ask Shulubin one crucial question, and the answer would provide the key to the whole man. But instead he simply asked, "So, it's the day after tomorrow, is it, Aleksei Filippovich?"
He didn't need an answer to know that it was the day after tomorrow. The whole ward knew that Shulubin's operation was scheduled for then. The important thing, though, was that he had called him "Aleksei Filippovich?" No one in the ward had yet addressed the silent Shulubin in this way. It was spoken as though by one old soldier to another.
Shulubin nodded. "It's my last chance to get a bit of sunshine."
"Oh no, not the last," boomed Kostoglotov.
But looking at Shulubin out of the corner of his eyes he thought it might well be the last. Shulubin ate very little, less than his appetite demanded. He was preserving himself so as to diminish the pain he would feel after eating. But this undermined his strength. Kostoglotov already knew what Shulubin's disease was. "So it's decided, is it? They're diverting the excreta through one side?" he asked him.
Shulubin compressed his lips as though about to smack them then nodded again. They were silent for a while.
"Whatever you say there's cancer and cancer," Shulubin declared, looking straight ahead of him instead of at Oleg. There's one kind of cancer beats all the others. However miserable one is, there's always someone worse off. Mine's the sort of case you can't even discuss with other people, you can't ask their advice about it."
"Mine's the same, I think."
"No, mine's worse, whichever way you look at it. My disease is something especially humiliating, specially offensive. The consequences are terrible. If I live - and it's a very big "if" - simply standing or sitting near me, like you are now, for instance, will be unpleasant. Everyone will do their best to keep two steps away. Even if anyone comes closer I'll still be thinking to myself, "You see, he can hardly stand it, he's cursing me". It means I'll loose the company of human beings."
Kostoglotov thought about it for a while, whistling slightly, not with his lips but through his clenched teeth, absent-mindedly letting air out through them. "Well, its hard to work out which of us is worse off," he said; "it's even harder than competing over achievement or success. One's own troubles are always the worst. For instance, I might conclude that I've led an extraordinarily unlucky life, but how do I know? Maybe yours has been even harder. How can I judge from the outside?"
"Don't judge, you're sure to be wrong." Shulubin answered. At last he turned his head and peered at Oleg with his disturbingly expressive, round bloodshot eyes. "The people who drown at sea or dig the soil, or search for water in the desert don't have the hardest lives. The man with the hardest life is the man who walks out of his house every day and bangs his head against the top of the door because it's too low....As far as I can gather, you fought in the war and then you were in the labour camps is that right?"
"Yes, and a few more things: no higher education, no officer's commission, exile in perpetuity" - Oleg listed the points thoughtfully and uncomplainingly - "oh yes, and one more thing, cancer."
"Well, let's call it quits about the cancer." As regards the other things young man..."
"Who the hell's the young man! I suppose you think I'm young because I've got my original head on my shoulders or because I haven't had to get a new skin?"
"As regards the other things, I'll tell you something. You haven't had to do much lying, do you understand? At least you haven't had to stoop so low - you should appreciate that! You people were arrested, but we were herded into meetings to "expose" you. They executed people like you, but they made us stand up and applaud the verdicts as they were announced. And not just applaud, they made us demand the firing squad, demand it! Do you remember what they used to write in the papers? "As one man the whole Soviet nation arose in indignation on hearing of the unprecedented, heinous crimes of..." Do you know what that "as one man" meant for us? We were individual human beings, and then suddenly we were "as one man"! When we applauded we had to hold our big strong hands high in the air so that those around us and those on the platform would notice. Because who doesn't want to live? Who ever came out in your defence? Who ever objected? Where are they now? I knew one...Dima Olitsky - he abstained. He wasn't opposed, good heavens no! He abstained on the vote to shoot the Industrial Party's members. "Explain!" they shouted. "Explain!" He stood up, his throat was as dry as a bone. "I believe" he said, "that in the twelfth year of the Revolution we should be able to find alternative methods of repression...." Aaah, the scoundrel! Accomplice! Enemy agent! The next morning he got a summons to the G.F.U. and there he stayed for the rest of his life."
Shulubin twisted his neck and turned his head from side to side in that strange motion of his. Bent both forwards and backwards, he sat on the bench like a large bird on a perch it wasn't used to.
Kostoglotov tried not to feel flattered by what Shulubin had said. "Aleksei Filippovich" he said, "it all depends on the number you happen to draw. If the position had been reversed it would have been just the opposite: you'd have been the martyrs, we'd have been the time-servers. But there's another point: people like you who understood what was happening, who understood early enough, suffered searing agonise. But those who believed were all right. Their hands were bloodstained, but there again they weren't bloodstained because they didn't understand the situation.
The old man flashed him a sidelong searching glance. "Who are these people, the ones who believed?" he asked.
"Well I did. Right up to the war against Finland".
"But how many are they, these people who believed, the ones who didn't understand? I know you can't expect much from a young boy, but I just cannot accept that our whole people suddenly became weak in the head. I can't believe it, I won't! In the old days the lord of the manor stood on the porch of his mansion and talked a lot of nonsense, but the peasants only smirked quietly in their beards. The lord of the manor saw them, so did the bailiffs standing at his side. And when the time came to bow down, true they all bowed "as one man". But does that mean the peasants believed the lord of the manor? What sort of person do you have to be to believe?" Shulubin began to grow more and more angry. He had the kind of face which is violently changed and distorted by strong emotion, not one feature remaining calm. "What sort of man are we talking about?" he continued. "Suddenly all the professors and all the engineers turn out to be wreckers, and he believes it! The best civil-war divisional commanders turn out to be German and Japanese spies, and he believes it! The whole of Lenin's Old Guard are shown up as vile renegades, and he believes it! His own friends and acquaintances are unmasked as enemies of the people, and he believes it! Millions of Russian soldiers turn out to have betrayed their country, and he believes it all! Whole nations, old men and babies, are mown down, and he believes in it! Then what sort of man is he, may I ask? He's a fool. But can there really be a whole nation of fools? No, you'll have to forgive me. The people are intelligent enough, it's simply that they wanted to live. There's a law big nations have - to endure and so to survive. When each of us dies and History stands over his grave, and asks "What was he?" There'll only be one possible answer, Pushkin's
"In our vile times
... Man was, whatever his element,
Either tyrant or traitor or prisoner."
Oleg started. He didn't know the lines, but there was a penetrating accuracy about them. Poet and truth became almost physically tangible.
Shulubin wagged his great finger at him. "The poet had no room in the line for "fool", even though he knew that there are fools in this world. No, the fact is there are only three possibilities, and since I can remember that I've never been in prison, and since I know for sure that I've never been a tyrant, then it must mean..." Shulubin smiled, then started to cough. "It must mean..."
As he coughed he rocked back and forth on his thighs.
"Do you think that sort of life was any easier than yours? My whole life I've lived in fear, but now I'd change places with you."
Like Shulubin, Kostoglotov was rocking backwards and forwards, slumped on the narrow bench like a crested bird on a perch.
Legs tucked underneath, their slanting black shadows lay starkly on the ground in front of them.
"No, Aleksei Filippovich, you're wrong. It's too sweeping a condemnation. It's too harsh. In my view the traitors were those who wrote denunciations or stood up as witnesses. There are millions of them too. One can recon on one informer for every, let's say, two or three prisoners, right? That means there are millions. But to write every single person off as a traitor is much too rash. Pushkin was much too rash as well. A storm breaks trees, it only bends grass. Does this mean that the grass has betrayed the trees? Everyone has his own life. As you said yourself, the law of a nation is to survive."
Shulubin wrinkled up his face, so much so that his eyes disappeared and there was only a trace of his mouth left. One moment his great, round eyes were there, the next they had gone, leaving only puckered, blind skin.
He let his face relax. In his eyes were the same tobacco-brown irises, the same reddened whites, but there was a new a blurred look about them as well. He said, "All right then, let's call it a more refined form of the herd instinct, the fear of remaining alone, outside the community. There's nothing new about it. Francis Bacon set out his doctrine of idols back in the sixteenth century. He said people are not inclined to live by pure experience, that it's easier for them to pollute experience with prejudice. Those prejudices are the idols. "The idols of the tribe", Bacon called them, "the idols of the cave" ..."
__________
© Cormac Mc Closkey
Sources:
Wilkipedia
Encyclopaedia Britannica 1991
One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich:
Solzhenitsyn.
Penguin Books 1974
Cancer Ward: Solzhenitsyn.
Penguin Books 1969
The Gulag Archipelago:
Solzhenitsyn
Collins/Fontana 1974
Hitler And Stalin: Parallel Lives
Alan Bullock
Harper Collins 1991
Note: This blog, "Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and the rest of us - Part 1", was first published on Windows Live Spaces, by me, on 13th October 2008
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