In the First Circle

by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

  Whether or not God existed only God knew.

  Most probably he did not. Because if he did, he was extraordinarily complacent. And lazy. To have such power . . . and put up with it all? Never once interfere in earthly matters? How could that be? Leaving aside the deliverance of 1941, Stalin had never noticed anyone but himself making things happen, never felt anyone at his side, elbow to elbow.

  But suppose God did nonetheless exist, suppose he had power over souls. . . . Stalin must make his peace before it was too late. In spite of the heights he had reached. His need, in fact, was all the greater because of that. Because there was emptiness all about him—no one beside him, no one near him, the rest of mankind was somewhere far beneath him. So that God was, perhaps, nearer to him than anybody. And also lonely.

  It had given Stalin real pleasure in recent years that the church in its prayers proclaimed him the Chosen of God. That was why the Monastery of Saint Sergius was maintained at the Kremlin’s expense. No great power’s prime minister got such a warm reception from Stalin as did his docile and doddering Patriarch; he went as far as the outer door to meet the old man and put a hand under his elbow when he took him in to dinner. He had even been thinking of looking perhaps for some little property, a little town house of some sort, and presenting it to the Patriarch. People used to make such gifts, to have prayers said for their souls.

  Stalin knew that a certain writer was a priest’s son but concealed the fact. He had asked him, when they were alone once, whether he was Orthodox. The man had turned pale and lost his tongue. “Come on, cross yourself! Do you know how?” The writer had crossed himself, thinking that he was done for. “Well done!” said Stalin, clapping him on the shoulder.

  There was no getting away from it: In the course of a long and difficult struggle, Stalin had occasionally overdone things. It would be nice to get together a splendid choir and have them sing over his coffin, “Lord, now lettest thou they servant . . .”

  In general, Stalin had begun to notice in himself a curious predilection not just for Orthodoxy. Now and again he felt the tug of a lingering attachment to the old world, the world from which he himself had come but which he had now spent forty years destroying in the service of Bolshevism.

  In the thirties, for purely political reasons, he had revived the word “motherland,” obsolete by then for fifteen years and almost obscene to the ear. But as the years went by, he had begun to take genuine pleasure in using the words “Russia” and “motherland.” It somehow helped to put his own power on a firmer basis. To sanctify it, so to speak.

  In earlier days he had carried out Party policy without counting how many of those Russians were expended. But gradually he had begun to take more notice of the Russian people and to like them, a people that had never betrayed him, had gone hungry for as long as it was necessary, had calmly faced all difficulties—even war, even the camps—and never once rebelled. They were devoted; they were pure in heart. Like Poskryobyshev, for instance. After the victory Stalin had said quite sincerely that the Russian people had a clear mind, strength of character, and staying power.

  In fact, as the years went by, Stalin’s own wish was to be taken for a Russian himself.

  He found some enjoyment, too, in playing with words reminiscent of the old world: instead of “school heads” let’s have “directors”; instead of “command personnel” let’s have “officer corps”; instead of All-Union Central Executive Committee, Supreme Soviet (“supreme” was a very fine word); let officers have orderlies; let secondary-school girls be educated separately from the boys, and wear aprons, and pay for their special lessons; let every civil service department have its own uniform and marks of distinction; let Russians rest, like all other Christians, on Sunday, and not on nondescript days that were just numbers; let only legal marriage be recognized, as under the tsar—never mind that he himself had once paid dearly for it, and never mind what Engels thought. And although he had been advised to shoot Bulgakov and burn his White Guardist play The Days of the Turbins, some power had jogged his elbow, and he had written, “Performance permitted in one Moscow theater.”

  Right there, in his night study, he had stood before the mirror to see how old-fashioned Russian epaulets went with his tunic—and had enjoyed doing it.

  In the last analysis there was nothing intrinsically objectionable about a crown as the highest mark of distinction. The old world, after all, was a tried and tested world, a stable world that had lasted three hundred years. Why not borrow what was best in it?

  At the time, the surrender of Port Arthur could only gladden the heart of the young Stalin, a Revolutionary on the run from exile in Irkutsk Province, but after the defeat of Japan in 1945 he had told a bit of a fib, claiming that the surrender of Port Arthur forty years earlier had always been a stain on the pride of older Russians like himself. Yes, yes, older Russians. It was no accident, Stalin sometimes reflected, that the man to establish himself as ruler of that country and win all hearts in it was Stalin and no other, not one of those illustrious loudmouths or pointy-bearded Talmudists, people without kin, without roots, without substance.

  There they were, there they all were, on his shelves, unbound, in pamphlets dating from the twenties: those who had choked on their own eloquence, been shot or poisoned or burned, died in car crashes or committed suicide! Removed from all libraries, declared anathema, excluded from the canon—but there they all were, lined up for his inspection! Every night they offered their pages to him, wagging their little beards, wringing their hands, spitting at him, shouting themselves hoarse, yelling out from the shelves, “We warned you!” “You should have done things differently!” Nitpicking was easy; you didn’t need brains for that! The reason why Stalin had assembled them there was to sharpen his temper at night when he had decisions to make. Somehow it always turned out that the opponents he had destroyed had not been altogether wrong. Stalin listened cautiously to those hostile voices from beyond the grave, and he occasionally adopted some of their ideas.

  Their conqueror, in his generalissimo’s uniform, with his low, retreating pithecanthropoid brow, shuffled along the shelves, clawing at his enemies, grabbing now one, now another, reordering their ranks.

  The invisible band that had accompanied his marching played a few false notes and stopped.

  By now his legs were aching and threatened to give way. A heavy surf pounded in his head. The chain of his thoughts slackened and snapped. He had quite forgotten why he had gone over to the bookshelves. What had he just been thinking about?

  He sank onto the nearest chair and buried his face in his hands.

  A dog’s life. . . . Old age. Without friends. Without love. Without belief. Without desire.

  Even his beloved daughter was useless to him, a stranger.

  The feeling that his memory was impaired, that his mind was growing dim, that he was cut off from all living beings, filled him with impotent dread.

  He looked around the room with clouded eyes and could not have said whether the walls were near or far away.

  On the occasional table near him stood another locked decanter. Stalin felt for the key, which was attached to his belt by a long chain (when he was feeling faint, he might drop it and take a long time to find it), unlocked the decanter, poured, and drank his stimulant.

  He sat for a while with closed eyes. He began to feel better in himself. Better still. Quite well.

  His eyes cleared and fell upon the telephone, and the thing that had eluded him all night wriggled through his memory again. He caught a brief glimpse of it, like the vanishing tip of a snake’s tail.

  There was something he should have asked Abakumov. Whether Gomulka had been arrested? . . .

  Aha! That was it! He rose, shuffled over the carpet, reached his desk, took a pen, and wrote on his desk diary “secret telephone.”

  They kept reporting that the best experts had been brought together, that they had all the necessary equipment, that morale was good, that there was keen competition
between teams, so why couldn’t they finish it? Abakumov, damn his insolence, had sat there a solid hour, the dog, and said not a word!

  They were all the same, in every department, every one of them out to deceive his Leader! How could they possibly be trusted? How could he ever take a night off?

  His breakfast was still more than ten hours away.

  He rang for his dressing gown. His country could sleep, free from care, but there was no sleep for its Father!

  Chapter 23

  Language as an Instrument of Production

  EVERYTHING, SURELY, had been done to ensure his immortality.

  But to Stalin it seemed that his contemporaries, though they called him Wisest of the Wise, were less ecstatic in their praise than he deserved. Their enthusiasm was superficial; they had not appreciated the full depth of his genius.

  Of late he had been nagged by the thought that, in addition to winning the third world war, he ought also to perform some great scientific feat, make his own brilliant contribution to a branch of learning other than history and philosophy.

  He could, of course, make such a contribution to biology, but he had entrusted work in that area to that honest and energetic man of the people, Lysenko.* In any case, Stalin found mathematics or perhaps even physics more alluring. All the Founding Fathers had fearlessly tried their strength in those sciences. He could not help envying Engels when he read his bold ratiocinations on zero, or on the square of minus one. Stalin was equally enthralled by the resolute way in which Lenin had plunged into the thickets of physics and left neither hide nor hair of the scientists, proving that matter could not be converted into any form of energy.

  He himself, though, however often he paged through Kiselev’s Algebra or Sokolov’s Physics for Upper Forms, found them uninspiring.

  But just recently a happy inspiration, though in quite another field, that of philology, had been fortuitously provided by Professor Chikobava of Tiflis. Stalin vaguely remembered Chikobava, as he remembered all Georgians of any importance; he had frequented the house of the younger Ignatoshvili, the Tiflis lawyer, a Menshevik, and was himself the sort of awkward customer by now inconceivable except in Georgia.

  Having reached an age, and a level of skepticism, at which a man begins to care little for the things of this world, Chikobava in his wisdom had written what appeared to be a heretical, anti-Marxist article arguing that language was certainly not “superstructural” and that there were no such things as bourgeois and proletarian languages but only national languages. And he had dared to attack Academician Marr himself by name.

  Both Chikobava and Marr were Georgians, so the response came in a Georgian university bulletin, a dingy unbound copy of which, in ligatured Georgian script, now lay before Stalin. Several Marxist-Marrist philologists had assailed the impudent creature with accusations, after which all that remained for him was to await the MGB’s knock in the night. It had already been hinted that Chikobava was an agent of American imperialism.

  Nothing could have saved him if Stalin had not picked up the receiver and let him live. He let Chikobava live but decided to write an imperishable exposition of his homely provincial thoughts, perfected by a genius.

  True, he would have caused more of a stir by refuting the reactionary theory of relativity, say, or wave mechanics. But affairs of state left him simply no time for that. Philology, after all, was next door to grammar, and grammar had always seemed to Stalin a near neighbor of mathematics in point of difficulty.

  It could be written vividly, eloquently (he was already sitting and writing). “Take the language of any one of the Soviet nationalities—Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian, Uzbek, Kazakh, Georgian, Armenian, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Moldavian, Tatar, Azerbaijani, Bashkir, Turkmen . . . .” (Damn! As time went by, it got more and more difficult for him to stop once he started listing things. Why stop, anyway? The reader would get the point more readily and wouldn’t feel like arguing. . . .) “It is obvious to everybody that. . . .” And then say whatever was so obvious.

  What, though, was it? The economy was the base, social phenomena the superstructure. And, as always in Marxism, there was no third possibility.

  Stalin, however, had learned from experience that you couldn’t manage without a third possibility. There were, after all, neutral countries (to be finished off piecemeal, later on) and neutral parties (not in our country, of course). In Lenin’s time, if you’d said, “Who is not with us is not necessarily against us,” or something of that sort, you would have been expelled from the Party that very minute.

  Well . . . that was the Dialectic for you. It was the same here. Stalin had pondered over Chikobava’s article, struck by a thought that had never occurred to him before: If language is superstructural, why does it not change from one social epoch to another? If it is not superstructural, what is it? Part of the base? Of the mode of production?

  Strictly speaking, the mode of production consisted of “forces of production” and “relations of production.” To call language a “relation of production” was probably wrong.

  So, was language a “force of production”? The “forces of production” were tools, materials, and people. And although people used language, language was not people. It was a hell of a problem, a blind alley if ever there was one.

  The most honest thing to do would be to recognize language as an instrument of production, like, say, machine tools, railways, the mails. And, of course, telecommunications. Lenin had said it: “Without the mails there can be no socialism.” Nor, obviously, without language.

  But come straight out with the thesis that language is an instrument of production, and the giggling would begin. Not here at home, of course.

  There was no one he could consult about it.

  It could, of course, be put cautiously, something like this: “In this respect language, which is essentially distinct from the superstructure, does not differ from the instruments of production, from, say, machines, which are as indifferent to class as is language.”

  “Indifferent to class!” Another thing you wouldn’t have said earlier on. . . .

  He wrote a period. Folded his hands behind his head, yawned, and stretched. He hadn’t done very much thinking, but he was tired already.

  Stalin rose and began walking about his study. He went over to a small window, which had two thicknesses of transparent yellowish bulletproof glass with a shield of compressed air between them. The windows looked out on a little walled garden, where the gardener puttered about under surveillance during the morning and no one else appeared at any hour of day or night.

  Beyond the unbreakable glass, mist hovered in the garden. The country, the earth, the universe, were alike invisible.

  In these night hours, when there was not a sound to be heard, not a human being in sight, Stalin could not be sure that his country existed at all.

  He had traveled south several times since the war and seen nothing but one great dead-looking empty space. No sign of a living Russia, although he had journeyed thousands of kilometers overland (he did not trust planes). If he went by car, an empty highway unrolled before him, with an unpopulated zone beside it. If he went by train, the stations were lifeless, and at each stop only his retinue and very carefully vetted railwaymen (most probably security police) walked along the platform. He was beginning to feel that he was alone not only in his villa at Kuntsevo but in Russia as a whole, that the whole of Russia was a figment (extraordinary that foreigners believed in its existence). Luckily, though, this lifeless expanse regularly supplied the state with grain, vegetables, milk, coal, iron, all in the prescribed quantities and at the prescribed time. The same empty space provided excellent soldiers. (Stalin had never set eyes on these divisions, but to judge by the cities they took—which he hadn’t seen either—they undoubtedly existed.)

  Stalin felt so lonely because he had no one to try out his thoughts on, no one to measure himself against.

  Still, half the universe was there in his breast, all
order and clarity. Only the other half, what was called objective reality, was lost in the swirling mist that covered the world.

  From where he now was, in his fortress-like, heavily guarded night study, Stalin had no fear at all of that other half; he felt that he had the power to twist it into any shape he liked. It was only when he had to step into objective reality on his own two legs, when, for instance, he had to attend a banquet in the Hall of Columns, where he had to cross on his own two legs the space between car and door, then on his own two legs go up a staircase, cross a much too spacious foyer, and see the guests standing to either side of him, thrilled, respectful, but far too numerous—that was when Stalin felt wretched and didn’t even know what to do with his hands, which had long ceased to be of use for self-defense. He would fold them on his belly and smile. The guests thought that the Omnipotent One was smiling to be nice to them, but he was really smiling in embarrassment. . . .

  Space he himself had called “the fundamental condition of the existence of matter.” But having mastered one-sixth of the world’s dry space, he had begun to fear it. The good thing about his night study was that there was no space.

  Stalin closed the metal shutter and stomped back to his desk. He swallowed a tablet and sat down again.

  He had been unlucky all his life, but he must keep working. Posterity would appreciate him.

  How had it come about, this “Arakcheev regime” in philology? Nobody dared say a word against Marr. Strange people! Timid people! You spend your life teaching them the meaning of democracy, you chew it up for them, put it in their mouths, and they spit it out!

  He had to do it all himself. Yet again.

  In a fit of inspiration, he wrote a few sentences:

  “The superstructure is created by the base precisely in order to. . . .” “Language is created precisely in order to. . . .”