In the First Circle

by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

  In his eagerness to get the words down, he hung his ashen face with its big, burrowing nose low over the paper.

  The wretched Lafargue, who also fancied himself a theorist, spoke of “the abrupt linguistic revolution in the years 1789–1794.” (Had he checked with his father-in-law?)

  Revolution? What revolution? The language spoken before was French. And French it remained.

  It was time to put a stop to all this idle talk of revolutions!

  “Comrades obsessed with explosions should note that the law of qualitative change by way of explosion is not only inapplicable to the evolution of language but rarely applicable to other social phenomena.”

  Stalin leaned back and read over what he had written. It looked pretty good. Agitators must elucidate this passage with particular care, making it clear that at a certain stage revolutions come to an end and things develop only in an evolutionary way. It might even be that quantity no longer passes into quality. But that could wait till another time.

  “Rarely?” . . . No, it was still too soon to say that. Stalin crossed out “rarely” and wrote “not always.” Think of a neat little example.

  “We have progressed from the bourgeois individual peasant order” (a new term that, and a good one!) “to the socialist collective farm. . . .”

  He used a peroid, as anybody else would, thought a bit, and added “order.” This was the style he favored: Drive the nail home, then hit it again. If he repeated all the words, every sentence seemed somehow more easily understandable. His pen raced on: “However, this overturn was accomplished not by means of an explosion, that is to say, not by overthrowing the existing regime” (this was a passage which the agitators must explain with particular care) “and the creation of a new one” (no one must even think of that!) . . .

  Because of Lenin’s superficiality Soviet historians recognized only revolution from below and regarded revolution from above as imperfect, freakish, bad form. But the time had come to call things by their proper names.

  “We succeeded in this because it was a Revolution from above, an overturn accomplished on the initiative of the existing regime.”

  Stop. That didn’t look right. It suggested that the peasants had not taken the initiative in collectivizing.

  Stalin leaned back in his chair, yawned, and suddenly forgot entirely what he had just been thinking. The investigative zeal that had flared up a little while ago flickered out.

  Bent double, tripping over the long skirts of his dressing gown, the ruler of half the world shuffled through a second narrow door flush with the wall, into the narrow labyrinth again, and on to a narrow, windowless bedroom with concrete walls.

  He lay down, groaning, and tried to cheer himself with the thought that while neither Napoleon nor Hitler had been able to take Britain, because they each had an enemy on the Continent, he would have none. He would sweep straight from the Elbe to the Channel. France would crumble like wormy timber (the French Communists would help); he would take the Pyrenees in his stride. Blitzkrieg, of course, was a gamble. But there was no alternative to a lightning strike.

  We can start as soon as we have made enough atomic bombs and purged the home front thoroughly.

  He snuggled into his pillow and tried to collect his wandering thoughts. . . . We shall need a blitzkrieg in Korea, too. . . . With our tanks, artillery, and air force, we may manage without world revolution. . . .

  In fact the simplest route to world Communism was via a third world war: First unify the whole world; then establish Communism. Otherwise there were too many complications.

  No need for any more revolutions! We’ll put revolution behind us! Not a single revolution ahead!

  He sank into sleep.

  * * *

  * Lysenko: Trofim Lysenko (1898-1976), an agronomist, developed a pseudoscientific theory of heredity that denied the existence of genes. Stalin put Lysenko in charge of Soviet science with the mission of stamping out genetics as an ideologically unacceptable approach in the study of biology.

  Chapter 24

  The Abyss Beckons Again

  ENGINEER COLONEL YAKONOV LEFT the ministry by the side entrance in Dzherzhinsky Street, rounded the black marble prow of the building, walked through the Furkasov Street colonnade, and recognized his own Pobeda only when he was about to grab the door handle of someone else’s car. There had been thick fog all through the night. Snow had fallen fitfully and melted quickly. It had now stopped. Now, toward dawn, it was foggy only near the ground, and a film of brittle ice covered the puddles.

  It was getting colder.

  Nearly five o’clock, but the sky was still black. The only light was from the streetlamps.

  A first-year student who had spent the night in a doorway with his sweetheart looked enviously at Yakonov as he got into his car. Would he ever have a car himself? Would he ever take a girl for a drive? He had only ridden in a truck so far. And only in the back. On the way to a kolkhoz to help with the harvest.

  He couldn’t know how little he had to envy.

  “Home?” the driver asked.

  Yakonov stared unseeingly at the pocket watch in the palm of his hand. “Home?” the driver repeated.

  Yakonov started.

  “Eh? No.”

  “Marfino?” The driver was surprised. He was wearing felt boots and a sheepskin coat, but he was chilled to the bone after his long wait and wanted to get to bed.

  “No,” the engineer colonel answered, pressing his hand to his chest just above his heart.

  The driver looked at his chief’s face in the dull lamplight filtering through the windshield.

  This wasn’t the chief he knew. Yakonov’s lips, usually complacently relaxed, occasionally arrogantly pursed, were trembling helplessly.

  And he was still holding the watch on the flat of his hand uncomprehendingly.

  The driver had been waiting since midnight, furious with the colonel. Cursing into his sheepskin collar, remembering every dirty trick the colonel had played in the last two years. But he asked no more questions and drove off at random. His rage had subsided.

  Late night had passed into early morning. Only occasional cars passed them on the empty streets. No policemen, no muggers, no one to mug. The trolleys would be running soon.

  The driver looked round at the colonel several times, wondering what to do. By now he had sped as far as the Myasnitsky Gate, driven along the boulevards to Trubnaya Square, and turned into Neglinnaya Street. But he couldn’t keep this up till morning!

  Yakonov stared straight ahead, his eyes unblinkingly fixed on nothing.

  He lived on Bolshaya Serpukhovka. Calculating that once he saw his own neighborhood the colonel would want to go home, the driver made for Zamoskvoreche. He turned out of Okhotny Ryad onto Red Square, which was deserted and forbidding.

  There was frost on the battlements and the tops of fir trees along the Kremlin Wall. Mist clung to the roadway under the wheels of the car.

  Two hundred meters from them, behind the battlements that poets insisted on calling sacred, beyond the guardhouses, sentry boxes, patrols, and lookouts, dwelled, so those same poets said, the man they called the Unsleeping One, no doubt now nearing the end of his solitary night’s work. They drove past without giving him a thought.

  It was only when they had driven downhill past Vasily Blazhenny and turned left along the embankment that the driver braked and asked again:

  “Would you like to go home, Comrade Colonel?”

  That was certainly what he ought to do. For all he knew, the nights he would be spending at home could be counted on his fingers. But just as a dog runs off to die alone, Yakonov felt that he must go somewhere else, get away from his family.

  He drew the folds of his leather coat around him, got out of the Pobeda, and said to the driver: “Go home and get some sleep, old fellow. I’ll walk from here.”

  It wasn’t the first time he had called his driver “old fellow.” But there was such sadness in his voice that he seemed to be s
aying good-bye forever.

  Moscow River was shrouded in wreathing mist from bank to bank.

  With his overcoat unbuttoned and his colonel’s tall fur hat awry, Yakonov set off along the slippery embankment.

  The driver thought of calling out to him, or even going with him, then thought, High-ups like him don’t drown themselves, turned the car around, and drove away.

  Yakonov walked along an unbroken stretch of the embankment, with the river on his right and an endless wooden fence on his left. He kept to the middle of the asphalted path, his eyes fixed unblinkingly on the distant street lamps.

  When he had gone some way, he began to feel that this one-man funeral procession was giving him a simple enjoyment such as he had not experienced for a long time.

  When they were summoned to the ministry for the second time, the worst had happened. It was as though all the ceilings above had caved in on them. Abakumov had raged like a wild beast, springing at them, chasing them round the office, swearing obscenely, spitting at them, and landing a punch on Yakonov’s face that was obviously meant to hurt and that drew blood from his soft white nose.

  He had demoted Selivanovsky to the rank of lieutenant and sent him to an outpost in the polar regions. Oskolupov he had sent back to Butyrki Prison, where he had begun in 1925, to resume his career as an ordinary guard. Yakonov himself had been put under arrest for deception and repeated sabotage but sent back to Number Seven, to put on blue overalls, work beside Bobynin, and put the Scrambler in working order with his own hands.

  Then he had recovered his breath and given them a new, and final, deadline: the Lenin anniversary.

  The big, tasteless office swam before Yakonov’s eyes; the floor heaved. He tried to stem the nosebleed with a handkerchief. He stood before Abakumov helplessly, thinking of those with whom he spent only one hour in twenty-four but for whom alone he schemed and struggled and bullied every other hour of his waking day: two little girls, one eight, one nine, and his wife, Varyusha, who was all the more precious because it had been a late marriage. He had been thirty-six at the time and had barely emerged from the gates toward which the minister’s iron fist was pushing him again.

  After all this Selivanovsky had taken Oskolupov and Yakonov to his own office and threatened to put the two of them behind bars rather than incur demotion and relegation to the Far North.

  And then Oskolupov had taken Yakonov to his office and declared that henceforth he would always be conscious of the connection between Yakonov’s jailbird past and his present acts of sabotage.

  By now Yakonov had reached a high concrete bridge, over which on the right bank lay Zamoskvoreche. But instead of taking this way out, he went on under the bridge, where a militiaman was walking up and down on guard. The militiaman’s suspicious gaze followed the strange drunk wearing pince-nez and a colonel’s tall hat.

  Farther on, Yakonov crossed a short bridge over a narrow channel. He had reached the Yauza, where it falls into the Moskva, but he did not even look to see where he was going.

  Yes, they had been caught up in a crazy game, and now it was coming to an end. It wasn’t the first time Yakonov had witnessed and been drawn into an insane, an impossible scramble, in which the whole country—with its people’s commissars and oblast secretaries, scientists, engineers, directors and site managers, shop foremen and team leaders, workmen and women on collective farms—was swept off its feet. Whoever you are and whatever you set out to do, you very soon find yourself in the grip, the stranglehold, of arbitrary, impossible, crippling schedules! Give us more! Faster! Faster still! Fulfill the norm! Overfulfill the norm! Fulfill it three times over! Work a voluntary shift! Beat the deadline! Beat it by a bigger margin! Buildings and bridges collapsed, crops rotted in the fields or never came up at all, and the man who found himself in this mad whirl, which meant every single person, had no escape except to fall sick, get caught in the machinery, go mad, get run over so that he could have a rest at last in a hospital or health resort, let them forget about him, breathe forest air—then again, yet again, gradually slip back into harness.

  Only sick people alone with their illness (and not in a hospital!) could live an untroubled life in the Soviet Union.

  Yakonov, however, had always managed so far to skip nimbly from projects doomed by over-haste to others where life was quieter or which were at an early stage.

  Now, for the first time, he felt that he was trapped. The scrambler project couldn’t be salvaged in such a hurry. He had nowhere else to go. And he’d left it too late to fall sick.

  He stood at the parapet and looked over it. The fog had settled low on the ice, leaving it bare in places. Immediately below, Yakonov could see a dark patch where the ice had melted.

  It was as if the black hole of his prison years had opened up to receive him again.

  To Yakonov those six years were a hideous gap in his life, as if he had been stricken by plague, the greatest of catastrophes.

  He had been jailed in 1932, as a young radio engineer, after two trips abroad on official business, which were the reason for his imprisonment.

  He had then been one of the first convicts recruited by one of the early sharashkas.

  How he had longed to forget his prison past! And for others to forget it! For fate to forget it! How anxiously he had shunned all who reminded him of that disastrous time, all who remembered him as a convict!

  He tore himself away from the parapet, cut across the embankment, and for no good reason went up a steep rise. He came out onto a path that skirted the long fence around yet another construction site. A well-trodden path, where it was less slippery.

  Only the central card index at the Ministry of State Security knew that the ministry’s uniforms sometimes concealed former convicts.

  There were two others in the Marfino Institute, as well as Yakonov.

  He scrupulously avoided them, did his best not to get into conversation with them off duty, and never saw them alone in his office, in case people started imagining things.

  One of them, Knyazhenetsky, a septuagenarian professor of chemistry, had been Mendeleev’s favorite student. He had served the prescribed ten years and then, in recognition of a long list of scientific achievements, had been sent to Marfino. He had worked there as a “free” employee for three years, but then the whiplash of the “Instruction on the Reinforcement of the Rear” had caught even him. A telephone call summoned him to the ministry, and he did not return. Yakonov would always remember Knyazhenetsky descending the institute’s red-carpeted stairway, shaking his silvery head, wondering why he had been called in for half an hour, while as soon as his back was turned, Shikin, the security officer, had taken out a penknife and removed a photograph of the professor from the institute’s honors board on the upper landing.

  The other one, Altynov, was not distinguished, just efficient. His first term of imprisonment had made him taciturn, distrustful, as quick to suspect the worst as only the convict clan can be. So as soon as the “Instruction” began insinuating itself into every nook and cranny of the city, Altynov wangled his way into a heart clinic. He played the part so realistically and for so long that the doctors gave up on him, and his friends no longer lowered their voices in his presence, realizing that after thirty years of excruciating anxiety, his heart had simply given out. And now Yakonov, doomed a year ago as an ex-convict, was doomed yet again as a saboteur.

  The abyss was calling its children home.

  . . . YAKONOV WAS CLIMBING a path over waste ground, not noticing where he was going or that it was uphill.

  He stopped at last, out of breath. His tired feet ached from stumbling over uneven ground. As his vision cleared, he looked back downhill to take his bearings.

  In the hour since he had left his car, the waning night had grown much colder. The mist had cleared. The ground underfoot, strewn with rubble and broken glass, the tumbledown shed or watchman’s hut nearby, and a fence left standing around an abandoned building site down below were touched with white—
frost or snow?

  There were white steps set in this hillside, so close to the center of Moscow, yet so strangely desolate. Perhaps seven steps, then a gap, then more steps.

  These steps stirred a vague recollection. Yakonov, wondering, climbed them, followed the cinder path above, then up more steps. The building to which the steps led was not clearly visible. Its shape was so strange that it seemed to be in ruins yet miraculously preserved.

  Did it mark a spot where bombs had fallen? But all bomb damage in Moscow had been cleared away. What destructive force could have been at work here?

  A paved terrace had once separated the two flights of steps. Now great fragments of flagstones lay on the steps, making it difficult to climb them.

  The steps led up to wide iron doors, shut fast and blocked knee-deep by heaps of rubble.

  Of course! Of course! Yakonov winced under the lash of memory. He looked about him. Its course marked by rows of streetlights, the river wound its way down below, disappearing with a strangely familiar bend under a bridge and on to the Kremlin.

  But where was the bell tower? It was no longer there. Or were those heaps of stone what had been the bell tower?

  Yakonov’s eyes were smarting. He squinted.

  He sat down on the broken stones that littered the porch.

  Twenty-two years ago he had stood on this very spot with a girl named Agnia.

  Chapter 25

  The Church of Nikita the Martyr

  HE SPOKE HER NAME, and his pampered body shivered with the onrush of forgotten sensations.

  He had been twenty-six, Agnia twenty-one. She was a girl from some other world. Her misfortune was a sensitivity, a fastidiousness that made the normal life of human beings impossible for her. Sometimes, when she was talking, her brows and nostrils quivered as though she were about to take flight. No one had ever said so many harsh words to Yakonov, reproached him so sternly for behavior that might be thought perfectly ordinary but in which she, startlingly, discerned something base and ignoble. Strangely, the more faults she discovered in Anton, the more devoted to her he became.