In the First Circle

by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

  Amantai Bulatov took off his glasses, and without their bold, mischievous twinkle, his eyes were quite sad.

  He, Pryanchikov, Potapov, and several others among the prisoners crowding around had been imprisoned for “betraying their country” in precisely the same way: surrendering “voluntarily.”

  “Furthermore,” the prosecutor thundered, “I wish to draw special attention to the disgusting behavior of the accused in the Polovtsian camp. Prince Igor has no thought at all for his motherland, only for his wife:

  Thou art alone, my dove, my pretty one,

  Thou art alone. . . .

  “Analytically this is entirely understandable, since his Yaroslavna is a young wife, and his second, and obviously such a female is not greatly to be relied on, but the fact is that Prince Igor stands revealed as an utterly selfish man. Anyway, for whom, I ask you, were the Polovtsian dances danced? For him, of course! And his odious offspring promptly enters into a sexual liaison with Konchak’s daughter, although Soviet subjects are categorically forbidden by the relevant competent organs to marry foreign women! And this at a time when Soviet-Polovtsian relations were strained to the utmost—”

  Kagan piped up from his bunk: “Just a moment! How does the prosecutor know that the Soviet regime already existed in Russia at that time?”

  Nerzhin hammered for order: “Bailiff! Remove that venal agent of a foreign power!” But before Bulatov could move, Rubin deftly parried the thrust.

  “Allow me to reply! Dialectical analysis of the text gives convincing proof. Read what the Author of the Lay says: ‘Red banners flap in the breeze at Putivl.’ That seems clear enough. The noble prince Vladimir Galitsky, head of the Putivl district office of the Commissariat of War, is recruiting a people’s militia, consisting of Skula and Yeroshka, to defend their native city at the very time when Prince Igor is ogling the naked limbs of Polovtsian women. I readily concede that we can sympathize with him here, but then Konchak invites him to choose ‘whichever beauty pleases thee.’ Why, then, does the wretch not avail himself? Who among you here present can believe that a man would voluntarily deny himself a woman? We find hidden here the ultimate cynicism; expose it, and the accused has not a leg to stand on. I mean his so-called escape from captivity and his ‘voluntary’ return to the motherland! Who can believe that a man who has been offered ‘whichever horse thou wouldst, and gold’ would voluntarily abandon all that and return to his motherland? How could it possibly be so?”

  That very question had been put to returning ex–prisoners of war, Spiridon among them, by their interrogators: Why would you be returning, unless they’ve recruited you?

  “There can be only one explanation: Prince Igor had been enrolled by the Polovtsian intelligence service and planted to disrupt the Kievan state! Comrade Judges! I, like you, am seething with noble indignation. I humanely demand that you sentence the son of a bitch to be hanged! Or rather, since capital punishment has been abolished, that you clobber him with twenty-five years inside, followed by five years’ deprivation of civil rights. In addition, I ask for a special recommendation of the court that the opera Prince Igor be banned as completely amoral and tending to popularize treasonable attitudes among Soviet youth! Borodin, A. P., a witness in this case, should face criminal charges and be put under arrest to curb his activities. Others who should be called to account are the aristocrats (a) Rimsky and (b) Korsakov,** since if they had not put the finishing touches to this misbegotten opera, it would never have been staged. I have no more to say!”

  Rubin jumped heavily down from the locker. Speech had become a painful effort to him.

  No one was laughing now.

  Without waiting to be called, Pryanchikov rose from his chair and spoke to the hushed room in a low, faltering voice: “Tant pis, gentlemen! Tant pis! Is this the twentieth century or the Stone Age? What do we mean by treason? In the age of nuclear fallout! semiconductors! the electronic brain! Who has the right to judge a fellow man, gentlemen? Who has the right to deprive him of freedom?”

  “Excuse me, have we got to defense counsel’s plea already?” Professor Chelnov intervened politely, and everybody turned toward him. “I should like first as supervisory prosecutor to adduce certain facts omitted by my esteemed colleague, and—”

  Nerzhin encouraged him. “Of course, of course, Vladimir Erastovich! We are always in favor of the prosecution and against the defense, and always prepared to countenance any breach of judicial procedure. Please go on!”

  A restrained smile hovered on Professor Chelnov’s lips. He spoke very quietly, and if he could be heard easily, it was only because he was listened to respectfully. His faded eyes seemed to stare at something beyond his audience, as though the pages of a chronicle were being turned for him. The pom-pom on his woolen cap made his face seem still sharper and more dubious.

  “I wish to point out,” said the professor of mathematics, “that Prince Igor should have been unmasked before he was appointed commander in the field and when he first filled in our personal data form. His mother was a Polovtsian, the daughter of a Polovtsian prince. Himself half Polovtsian by blood, Prince Igor was allied with the Polovtsians for many years. He had been ‘an ally true, a trusty friend’ to Konchak before the expedition! In 1180 when he was routed by the sons of Monomakh, he and Khan Konchak fled from them in the same boat! Later on, Svyatoslav and Ryurik Rostislavich summoned Igor to join in the great all-Russian expeditions against the Polovtsians, but Igor declined, making the ‘black ice’ his excuse: ‘Thick was the rime.’

  “Perhaps this was because Konchak’s daughter Svoboda was already betrothed to Igor’s son Vladimir? Finally, who helped Igor to escape in the year with which we are concerned, 1185? Another Polovtsian.

  “The Polovtsian Ovlur, whom Igor then ‘made mighty.’ And Konchak’s daughter afterward brought Igor his grandson. . . . For suppressing these facts, I propose that the Author of the Lay also be called to account, together with the music critic Stasov, who overlooked the treasonable tendencies in Borodin’s opera, and finally Count Musin-Pushkin, who must surely have had a hand in the burning of the only manuscript of the lay? It is obvious that someone who stood to gain by doing so has tried to cover the tracks.”

  Chelnov then gave way, indicating that he had concluded.

  The same faint smile hovered on his lips.

  There was silence.

  “Is nobody going to speak for the accused?” Isaak Kagan sounded indignant. “The man needs a defender!”

  “There’s nothing to be said for the rat,” Dvoetyosov shouted. “Put him up against the wall!”

  Sologdin frowned. What Rubin had said was very amusing, and he had still more respect for Chelnov’s knowledge, but Prince Igor was a representative of ancient Russian chivalry, of the most glorious period in Russian history, and should therefore not be made even indirectly a figure of fun. It had left a bad taste in Sologdin’s mouth.

  “No, no, say what you like, I shall speak for the defense.” Isaak, growing bolder by the minute, craftily surveyed his audience. “Comrade Judges! As an honorable member of the bar, I fully associate myself with all the arguments of the state prosecutor.” He spoke with a drawl and slurred his words. “My conscience tells me that Prince Igor should not only be hanged but quartered as well. True, capital punishment has not been on our humane statute book for nearly three years, so we are compelled to find a substitute for it. Nonetheless, I fail to understand why the prosecutor is so suspiciously softhearted. (It suggests that he, too, should be looked into!) Why does he miss one gradation on the penal scale and arrive at twenty-five years’ hard labor? There is, as you know, a punishment in our Criminal Code only slightly less severe than the death sentence, a penalty much more fearful than twenty-five years at hard labor.”

  Isaak paused to heighten the effect.

  There were cries of “What penalty, Isaak?” The more impatient they were, the slower he spoke, the more innocent he looked.

  “Article 20, subsection A.”<
br />
  Many of those present were rich in experience of prison, but no one had ever heard of such an article.

  There were shouts of “What’s it say?” and indecent suggestions from around the room. “Cut his . . . off?”

  “Very nearly,” Isaak assented, with a straight face. “To be precise, spiritual castration. Article 20, subsection A, prescribes as punishment that the criminal be declared an enemy of the toiling masses and expelled from the USSR! Let him die like a dog out there in the West! I have no more to say.”

  Modestly averting his head, looking smaller and shaggier than ever, he went back to his bed.

  An explosion of laughter shook the room.

  “What! What!” Khorobrov roared, choking with laughter, and making his customer flinch, as the clippers jumped in his hand. “Expulsion? Is there really such an article?”

  There were cries of “Why don’t you ask for a stiffer sentence, then?”

  Spiridon smiled a crafty peasant smile.

  They all started talking at once and wandering around the room.

  By now Rubin was lying on his belly again, trying to make headway with his Mongolian-Finnish dictionary. He cursed his idiotic habit of showing off. He was ashamed of the act he had just put on.

  His sarcasm was aimed only at unjust judges, but people did not know where to stop and made fun of the most precious of all things, the idea of socialism itself.

  * * *

  ¶¶¶¶¶ Poem and opera: The poem is The Lay of Igor’s Campaign, the anonymous Russian epic composed near the end of the twelfth century. The opera is Alexander Borodin’s Prince Igor, composed in the nineteenth century. In 1185, Igor Svyatoslavich, Prince of Novgorod-Seversk, led an undermanned raid against the invading Polovtsians, a nomadic Turkic tribe; he lost and was captured but later escaped. The famous work inspired other renditions of the story, including the opera by Borodin. In the present version, told as travesty, the joke is that Igor is being tried according to the ideological standards of the Soviet system of justice.

  ** Rimsky and Korsakov: Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, a famous nineteenth-century Russian composer, joined with Alexander Glazunov to complete Alexander Borodin’s opera Prince Igor. The joke here is that the speaker thinks Rimky-Korsakov is two persons.

  Chapter 56

  Winding Up the Twentieth

  ABRAMSON, MEANWHILE, lay as before, shoulder and cheek snug against a plump pillow, greedily devouring The Count of Monte Cristo. He had turned his back on the proceedings. Courtroom comedy did not appeal to him. He did look around briefly when Chelnov spoke, because the details were new to him. At one time Abramson was easily aroused to a frenzy of eloquence and could hold forth endlessly without getting hoarse. But twenty years of exile, transit prisons, investigation centers, solitary confinement, labor camps, and sharashkas had left him insensitive and indifferent to suffering—his own and that of those around him.

  The mock trial that had just taken place was dedicated to the fate of the 1945–46 “stream.” Abramson could acknowledge theoretically that the fate of former POWs was tragic, but they were only one stream, one of many, and not the most remarkable. Insofar as the ex–prisoners of war were interesting, it was because they had seen many foreign lands (“real live false witnesses,” Potapov jokingly called them); but, all in all, their “stream” was an undistinguished one; they were merely helpless victims of war, not people who had voluntarily chosen political struggle as their way of life.

  Every stream of zeks into the NKVD pool, like each new generation of people on earth, has its own history and its own heroes.

  And it is difficult for one generation to understand another.

  As Abramson saw it, these people could not possibly be compared with titans like himself who, at the end of the twenties, voluntarily chose banishment to the Yenisei when they could have retracted what they had said at Party meetings and gone on living comfortably. They were all given the choice. But these were people who could not bear the distortion and degradation of the Revolution and were ready to sacrifice themselves to sanitize it. This “youthful tribe unknown” had entered the cells thirty years after the October Revolution and simply repeated, with a sprinkling of peasant obscenities, the very things for which the Cheka’s execution squads had shot, burned, and drowned people in the Civil War.

  So Abramson, although he felt no personal hostility to particular ex-POWs and never argued with them individually, did not like the breed as a whole.

  In any case he had (or so he assured himself) long since ceased to react to arguments, confessions, and eyewitness accounts from fellow prisoners. He had long lost the curiosity he may have felt in his youth about what was being said in another corner of the cell. Once he had lived for his work, but his enthusiasm had long ago burned itself out. He could not live for his family because he was not from Moscow, he was never allowed visitors, and letters that came to the sharashka had been unwittingly drained of the juices of real life by their writers before the censor ever saw them. Nor did he let the newspapers hold his attention: A glance at the headlines made it obvious what the paper would be saying. He could listen to music on the radio for not more than one hour a day, and his nerves could simply not stand programs consisting of words or lying books. So that although somewhere deep inside himself, beyond seven defensive barriers, he had preserved not just a lively but a painfully acute interest in what was happening in the world, and to the creed to which he had dedicated his life, externally he affected total indifference to everything around him. The Trotskyist who had survived his turn to be shot, starved to death, or harried into the grave now preferred not books red-hot with truth but those that diverted him and helped to while away his interminable sentence.

  Ah, but in 1929, out in the taiga, on the Yenisei, they had not been reading Monte Cristo. Pretending that it was to celebrate the New Year, they flocked to the distant village of Doshchany on the Angara, which was reached by a three-hundred-verst sledge track through the taiga, from places a hundred versts deeper into the forest for a conference of exiles on their country’s situation, international and domestic. It was more than fifty-eight degrees below zero. The slow-but-sure iron stove in the corner was quite inadequate to warm the exaggeratedly spacious Siberian hut; the built-in Russian stove was in ruins (which was why the hut had been given to the exiles). The walls of the hut were frozen through. At intervals in the dead of night, the timbers would emit a sharp sound like a rifle shot.

  The conference opened with a report by Satanevich on the policy of the Party in the countryside. He took off his cap, releasing an unruly black forelock, but kept on his short fur coat with the eternal English phrase book (“We must know our enemy”) sticking out of one pocket. Satanevich always assumed the role of leader. He was, so it was said, subsequently shot during a strike at Vorkuta.

  In his report, Satanevich recognized the rational kernel of the Party’s policy. The conservative peasantry had to be curbed by draconian Stalinist methods, or else the tide of reaction would inundate the cities and drown the Revolution. (It was time now to admit that the peasantry had overwhelmed the cities anyway, drowned them in a petit-bourgeois flood, drowned even the Party apparatus that had been sapped by purges, and so destroyed the Revolution.)

  Alas, the more passionate the debates were, the more they damaged the unity of the puny group of exiles. It became clear that there were not just two opinions, not just three, but as many as there were people. Toward morning, too tired to go on, they would wind up the official part of the conference without agreeing on a resolution.

  Then they ate and drank from the state’s crockery, decoratively nestling among fir twigs that hid the ruts and ragged splinters of the table. The thawing twigs smelled of snow and resin and pricked people’s hands. They drank moonshine liquor. They proposed toasts and swore that none of those present would ever capitulate and sign a recantation. A political storm would break in the Soviet Union any month now!

  Then they sang famous Revolutionary s
ongs: “La Varsovienne,” “Our Banner Flutters Over the Whole World,” “The Black Baron.” . . .

  And they went on arguing about anything and everything.

  Roza, who had worked in a Kharkov tobacco factory, had sat on her feather mattress (she had brought it with her from the Ukraine to Siberia and was very proud of the fact), smoking one cigarette after another and scornfully tossing her short curly hair: “I can’t stand intellectuals! They revolt me with their ‘fine distinctions’ and ‘complications.’ Human psychology is much simpler than pre-Revolutionary writers chose to portray it. Our task is to free humanity from its superfluous spiritual burdens!”

  Somehow or other they got around to women’s jewelry. One exile, Patrushev, formerly a public prosecutor in the Crimea, whose fiancée had in fact recently come from Russia to see him, exclaimed defiantly, “Why do you want to make the society of the future poorer than it need be? Why shouldn’t I dream of a time when every girl will be able to wear pearls? When every man will be able to crown the bride of his choice with a diadem?”

  What an uproar this had created! How furiously they had pelted him with quotations from Marx and Plekhanov, from Campanella and Feuerbach.

  The society of the future! How confidently they talked about it!

  The sun rose on the new year, the one thousand nine hundred and thirtieth, and they all went outside to admire it. It was a bracing, frosty morning with columns of pink smoke rising straight toward the pink sky. Women were driving cattle along the broad, white Angara to their watering place, a hole in the ice with fir logs around it. The men of the village and their horses were nowhere to be seen. They had been packed off to fell and haul timber.

  Two decades went by. The causes they had toasted lost their bloom and their relevance. Those who remained firm to the end were shot. And those who capitulated were shot just the same. Abramson was left behind with his memories—and an understanding of those years that matured unseen in one sharashka after another, like a sapling under a bell jar.