Gulag (76 page)

How to talk about the camps—and how much to talk about the camps—with one’s friends and family was another source of torment for former prisoners. Many tried to protect their children from the truth. The daughter of the rocket designer Sergei Korolev was not told her father had been in prison until her late teens, when she had to fill out a form which asked whether any of her relatives had ever been arrested.
⁵⁰
Many prisoners were asked, upon leaving their camps, to sign documents forbidding them to say anything about them. This frightened some into speechlessness, although others were not cowed. Susanna Pechora refused outright to sign these papers upon leaving her camp and has, in her own words, “been talking about it ever since.”
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Others found that their friends and family, if not exactly uninterested, did not want to know in any great detail where they had been or what had happened to them. They were too afraid—not just of the ever-present secret police, but of what they might learn about the people they loved. The novelist Vasily Aksyonov—Evgeniya Ginzburg’s son—penned a tragic but horribly plausible scene in his trilogy,
The Generations of Winter
, describing what happened when a man and his wife encounter one another after both have spent years in concentration camps. He immediately notices that she looks too healthy: “First tell me how you managed not to become ugly . . . you haven’t even lost weight!” he says, knowing too well all of the ways in which it was possible for women to survive in the Gulag. That night, they lie in bed far apart, unable to speak: “Melancholy and grief had burned them to the ground.”
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The writer and folk poet Bulat Okudzhava has also written a story describing a man’s encounter with his mother who has spent ten years in camps. The man anticipated his mother’s return with pleasure, believing he would pick her up at the train station, take her home for dinner after a tearful but joyful reunion, tell her of his life, maybe even go and see a film. Instead, he found a woman with dry eyes and a detached expression: “She looked at me but didn’t see me, her face was hardened, frozen.” He had expected her to be physically frail, but was totally unprepared for emotional damage—an experience that millions must have shared.
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True stories were often as bleak. Nadezhda Kapralova wrote of meeting her mother after thirteen years, having been separated from her at the age of eight: “We were the closest of possible people, mother and daughter, and yet we were strangers, we spoke of irrelevancies, mostly crying and remaining silent.”
⁵⁴
Another prisoner, Evgeny Gnedin, was reunited with his wife after fourteen years, but found they had nothing in common. He had, he felt, “grown” in those years, whereas she had remained the same.
⁵⁵
Olga Adamova-Sliozberg had to tread carefully when she was reunited with her son in 1948: “I was afraid to tell him anything of what I had learned ‘on the other side.’ No doubt I could have convinced him that there was a great deal wrong with our country, that Stalin, his idol, was actually far from perfect, but my son was only seventeen. I was afraid to be completely frank with him.”
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Yet not everyone felt at odds with Soviet society either. Perhaps surprisingly, many of the returnees came back eager to rejoin the Communist Party, not merely for the sake of privileges and status but in order to feel, once again, full members of the Communist project, as it were. “Allegiance to a belief system can have deep, non-rational roots,” is how the historian Nanci Adler tries to explain the feelings of one prisoner when he was reinstated in the Party:

The most important factor that secured my survival in those harsh conditions was my unflinching, ineradicable belief in our Leninist Party, in its humanist principles. It was the Party that imparted the physical strength to withstand their trials . . . Reinstatement in the ranks of my native Communist Party was the greatest happiness of my entire life.
⁵⁷

The historian Catherine Merridale goes a step further, arguing that the Party, and the collective ideology of the Soviet Union, actually helped people to recover from whatever trauma they had suffered: “Russians really do seem to have lived with their histories of unspeakable loss by working, singing, waving the red flag. Some laugh about it now, but almost everyone is nostalgic for a collectivism and a common purpose that have been lost. Up to a point, totalitarianism worked.”
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Even though at some level they knew this struggle to be a false one; even though they knew the nation was not as glorious as its leaders claimed; even though they knew that whole Soviet cities had been built on the bones of people unjustly condemned to forced labor—even then, some camp victims still felt better when they were part of the collective effort, and no longer excluded from it.

Either way, the enormous tension between those who had been “there” and those who had stayed home could not remain confined in bedrooms and locked behind doors forever. Those responsible for what had happened were still alive. Finally, at the Twenty-second Party Congress in October 1961, Khrushchev, now fighting for influence within the Party, began naming them. He announced that Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, and Malenkov were all “guilty of illegal mass repressions against many Party, Soviet, military and Komsomol officials and bear direct responsibility for their physical destruction.” More ominously, he also hinted darkly at the “documents in our possession” which would prove this guilt.
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Yet Khrushchev did not, in the end, publish any such documents in the course of his struggle against the Stalinists who opposed his reforms. Perhaps he was not really powerful enough to do so—or perhaps such documents would have revealed his own role in Stalinist repressions as well. Instead, Khrushchev deployed a new tactic: he widened the public discussion of Stalinism even further, broadening it beyond internal Party debates—spreading it to the literary world. Although Khrushchev probably was not much interested in Soviet poets and novelists for their own sake, he had seen, by the early 1960s, that they could play a role in his bid for power. Slowly, vanished names began to reappear in official publications, without explanation of why they had gone and why they were being allowed back. Characters hitherto unacceptable in Soviet fiction—greedy bureaucrats, returning camp inmates—began to appear in published novels.
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Khrushchev saw that such publications could conduct his propaganda for him: literary writers could discredit his enemies by tarring them with the crimes of the past. That, at any rate, appears to have been the reasoning behind his decision to allow the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
, the most famous of all Gulag novels.

For his literary significance, as well as for the role he played in publicizing the existence of the Gulag in the West, Alexander Solzhenitsyn would certainly deserve special mention in any history of the Soviet camp system. But his brief career as a famous, widely published, “official” Soviet author is also worth telling because it marks an important moment of transition. When
Ivan Denisovich
first appeared in print, in 1962, the Thaw was at its height, political prisoners were few, and the Gulag seemed a thing of the past. By the summer of 1965, when a Party journal described
Ivan Denisovich
as “an undoubtedly controversial work, both ideologically and artistically,” Khrushchev had been ousted, the backlash had begun, and the number of political prisoners was rising with ominous speed. By 1974, when
The Gulag
Archipelago—
Solzhenitsyn’s massive, three-volume history of the camp system—had appeared in English, Solzhenitsyn had been expelled from the country, and his books could only be published abroad. The institution of the Soviet prison camp had been firmly reestablished, and the dissident movement was in full swing.
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Solzhenitsyn’s prison career had begun in a manner typical for
zeks
of his generation. After entering officers’ training school in 1941, he fought across the western front throughout the autumn and winter of 1943, penned some poorly disguised criticism of Stalin in a letter to a friend in 1945—and was arrested soon after. Hitherto a more or less true communist believer, the young officer was stunned by the brutality and crudity with which he was treated. Later, he would be even more shocked by the harsh treatment meted out to Red Army soldiers who had fallen into Nazi captivity. These, he felt, were men who should have returned home as heroes.

His subsequent camp career was perhaps slightly less than typical, only because—thanks to some undergraduate math and physics—he served some of his time in a
sharashka
, an experience he later recorded in his novel
The First Circle.
Other than that, it is fair to say that he served in a series of unremarkable
lagpunkts
, including one in Moscow, and one in a special camp complex in Karaganda. He was also an unremarkable prisoner. He flirted with the authorities, served as an informer before seeing the light, and wound up working as a bricklayer. Bricklaying was the career he later gave to Ivan Denisovich, the
zek
“Everyman” who was the hero of his first novel. After his release, he went to teach at a school in Ryazan, and began to write about his experiences. That too was not unusual: the many hundreds of Gulag memoirs that have been published since the 1980s are ample testimony to the eloquence and talent of Soviet ex-prisoners, many of whom wrote in secret for years. What made Solzhenitsyn truly unique, in the end, was the simple fact that his work appeared in print, in the Soviet Union, while Khrushchev was still in power.

Many legends surround the publication of
One Day in the Life of Ivan
Denisovich,
so many that Michael Scammell, Solzhenitsyn’s biographer, has written that the tale “has acquired such embellishments along the way that it is sometimes hard to disentangle fact from fiction.” The book’s route to literary fame was a slow one. Before it became famous, the manuscript of
Ivan Denisovich
passed through the hands of Lev Kopelev—a Moscow literary figure, and one of Solzhenitsyn’s camp comrades—and a copy editor at
Novyi Mir.
Excited by her find, the copy editor passed it to Alexander Tvardovsky, the editor-in-chief of
Novyi Mir.

Tvardovsky, so the story goes, began reading
Ivan Denisovich
while lying in bed. After a few pages, however, he was so impressed by the manuscript that he felt he had to get up, get dressed, and read the story sitting upright. He spent an entire night reading it, and then rushed into his office as soon as dawn broke, howling for the typists to make up extra copies so that he could distribute the book to his friends, all the while hailing the birth of a new literary genius. Whether or not all of this really happened, Tvardovsky certainly told people it had. Later, Solzhenitsyn wrote to him of how happy he had felt when he learned that Tvardovsky found
Ivan
Denisovich “worth a sleepless night.”
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The novel itself was straightforward enough: it recorded a single day in the life of an ordinary prisoner. Reading it now, it can, in fact, be hard for contemporary readers, even contemporary readers in Russia, to understand why it created such a furor in the Soviet literary world. But to those who read it in 1962, the novel came as a revelation. Instead of speaking vaguely about “returnees” and “repressions,” as some other books did at the time,
Ivan Denisovich
directly described life in the camps, a subject which had not, until then, been discussed in public.

At the same time, Solzhenitsyn’s style—particularly his use of camp slang—and his descriptions of the dullness and unpleasantness of prison life, made a stunning contrast to the usual empty, phoney fiction then being published. The official Soviet literary creed of that time, “socialist realism,” was not realism at all, but rather the literary version of Stalinist political doctrine. Prison literature, such as it was, had not changed since Gorky’s day. If there was a thief in a Soviet novel, he saw the light and converted to the true Soviet faith. The hero might suffer, but in the end the Party showed him the light. The heroine might shed tears, but once she had learned the value of Work, she would find her proper role in society.

Ivan Denisovich,
by contrast, was genuinely realistic: it was not optimistic, and it was not a morality tale. The sufferings of its heroes were pointless. The work they did was exhausting and draining, and they tried to avoid it. The Party did not triumph in the end, and communism did not emerge the victor. This honesty, so unusual for a Soviet writer, was precisely what Tvardovsky admired: he told Solzhenitsyn’s friend Kopelev that the story had “not a drop of falsehood in it.” Which was precisely what would upset many readers, particularly those in the Soviet establishment. Even one of
Novyi Mir
’s editors found the story’s frankness disturbing. In his comments on the novel he wrote that “it shows life too one-sidedly, involuntarily twisting and upsetting the proportions.” For people used to simplistic conclusions, the novel seemed horrifyingly open-ended and amoral.

Tvardovsky wanted to publish it, but knew that if he simply had the story typeset and sent off to the censors, they would ban it immediately. Instead, he offered
Ivan Denisovich
to Khrushchev, to be used as a weapon against his enemies. According to Michael Scammell, Tvardovsky wrote a Preface that presented the story’s usefulness in precisely this light, and then began giving it to people whom he hoped would hand it to Khrushchev himself.
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After much back and forth, much debate, and a few changes to the manuscript—Solzhenitsyn was persuaded to add at least one “positive hero,” and to include a token condemnation of Ukrainian nationalism—the novel did finally reach Khrushchev. He approved. He even praised the book for having been written “in the spirit of the Twenty-second Party Congress,” which presumably meant that he thought it would annoy his enemies. Finally, in the November 1962 issue of
Novyi Mir
, it appeared in print. “The bird is free! The bird is free!” Tvardovsky is alleged to have shouted as he held the first proof copy in his hands.