In the First Circle

by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

  “Lev Grigorievich! I’m consumed with curiosity; what have you come up with?”

  This was not an order from a superior. Roitman seemed to be pleading with Rubin, afraid that he would refuse. When his better feelings were allowed to show, Roitman was very likable, in spite of his ungainly appearance and thick lips, which were always parted because of the polyps in his nose.

  “It’s just a beginning! Just preliminary conclusions, Adam Veniaminovich.”

  “And what are they?”

  “Some of them may be disputable, but one is incontrovertible: The science of phonoscopy, born today, has a rational core.”

  “You aren’t letting yourself get carried away, are you, Lev Grigorievich?”

  Roitman was as eager to believe as Rubin, but his own training told him that in an “arts man” like Rubin enthusiasm might prevail over scientific rigor.

  “When did you ever see me carried away?” Rubin asked rather huffily, smoothing his untidy beard. “All the work we’ve been doing as a team for nearly two years now, all these phonetic and stylistic analyses of Russian speech, our study of sound pictures, classification of voices, examination of national, group, and individual intonations, all that Anton Nikolaich regarded as an idle pastime—and, let’s admit it, we ourselves felt doubt creeping in at times!—all that is now yielding its cumulative results. Maybe we should get Nerzhin over here; what do you think?”

  “If the business expands, by all means. But for the present we have to show that we deserve to survive by completing our first assignment.”

  “First assignment! That first assignment is half of an entire science! It can’t be done in a hurry.”

  “But . . . Lev Grigorievich . . . you mean, . . . Surely, you realize how urgently necessary it all is?”

  He understood all right. Lyovka Rubin, member of the League of Communist Youth, had grown up with those words ringing in his ears. They were written large in the slogans of the thirties. There was no steel, no electricity, no bread, no textiles. There were needs, and there was urgency—and blast furnaces were erected, steel mills set rolling. Then, before the war, Rubin the scholar, blissfully engrossed in the study of the leisurely eighteenth century, had become soft. But the old rallying cry—“urgently needed!”—of course still awakened a response and compelled him to follow through to the end any task he undertook.

  “Urgently needed!” Who could doubt it when there was a risk that this greatest of traitors might slip through the net?

  The light from outside was fading. They lit the overhead lamp, sat down at the worktable, and examined the sample passages marked on the audiovisual tapes with blue or red pencil: characteristic sounds, consonant combinations, lines showing intonations. They did this together, just the two of them, ignoring Smolosidov. He had not left the room for a single minute all day long. He sat now over a magnetic tape, guarding it like a sullen black dog, looking at the backs of their heads, and this unwavering hard stare pressed on their skulls and brains. Smolosidov deprived them of something very small but supremely important—unconstraint; he witnessed their vacillations, and he would witness their confident report to higher authority.

  They took turns to affirm and deny. Roitman was inhibited by his mathematical training but spurred on by hope of promotion. Rubin’s disinterested desire to establish the new science on solid foundations was sobering, but he risked being carried away by his Five-Year Plan training and his duty to the Party. In the end, they settled for a short list of five suspects, agreeing without much discussion that there was no need to tape the voices of the four detained at Sokolniki underground station—they had been arrested too late anyway—nor those of the handful of Ministry of State Security personnel offered by Bulbanyuk as a last resort. They also ruled out, as psychologically implausible, the supposition that the caller was not the person who knew the facts but someone acting for him.

  Even with just five, they had their work cut out. They listened to all five voices live and compared them with that of the culprit. Then they repeated the process, using audiovisual tapes.

  “Look what a great help audiovisual analysis is!” Rubin declared enthusiastically. “You can tell that the criminal begins by trying to disguise his voice. But how does the change show on the audiovisual tape? All that happens is that the frequencies are lower, but the characteristic vocal tune hasn’t changed! That is our main discovery—the vocal tune. Even if the criminal had tried to disguise his voice throughout, he could not have concealed its most distinctive features.”

  “But we still don’t know enough about the limits within which voices can be changed,” Roitman insisted. “It may be that the range of variability in microintonations is very wide.”

  Just listening to them, you might be unsure whether these were two different voices or the same one, but on the audiovisual tapes differences in volume and frequency seemed to show up more clearly. (Unfortunately, their audiovisual recording apparatus was still crude; it distinguished too few frequency bands and tended to indicate volume in unreadable smears. Their excuse must be that it had not been intended for such crucial work.)

  Of the five suspects, Zavarzin and Syagovity could quite confidently be excluded (if indeed the nascent science allowed conclusions to be drawn from a single conversation). Petrov, too, could be tentatively excluded (Rubin, flushed with enthusiasm, rejected him outright). The voices of Volodin and Shchevronok, however, resembled that of the criminal in the frequency of their basic tone and shared with it certain phonemes (o, r, l, and sh) and were similar in their specific speech tunes.

  The similarity of these voices should provide a starting point for the development of their new science—phonoscopy—and the elaboration of its methods. Study of the fine distinctions between them should enable them to devise and perfect the sensitive apparatus of the future. Rubin and Roitman leaned back in their chairs with the triumphant air of creators. They could foresee an organization similar to that which existed for fingerprints: an All-Union Voice Library, where the voice patterns of all who had ever come under suspicion would be on record. Any criminal conversation could be recorded, referred to the audiovisual archive—and the criminal would instantly be identified as surely as the thief who leaves his fingerprints on the door of a safe.

  At this point, Oskolupov’s adjutant looked around the door to warn them that his boss would be along shortly.

  This brought them to their senses. Science was all very well, but right now they must formulate their conclusions and defend them with a single voice before the head of the department.

  Roitman believed, in fact, that what they had achieved was important enough in itself. But knowing that his masters liked certainties not hypotheses, he gave in to Rubin, agreed to consider Petrov’s voice above suspicion and to report to the major general that Shchevronok and Volodin were the only suspects remaining. These two must be further examined in the next few days.

  There was one complicating factor; according to information received, two of the three rejected, Syagovity and Petrov, didn’t know a word of any foreign language, whereas Shchevronok spoke English and Dutch, and Volodin spoke French like a native, fluent English, and a little Italian. It seemed improbable that at the critical moment when mutual incomprehension threatened to terminate the conversation, a man who knew his listener’s language would have uttered not so much as an impatient exclamation in it.

  “In addition to everything else, Lev Grigorievich,” Roitman mused, “we must not overlook the psychological aspect. We must try to imagine what sort of man could bring himself to make such a telephone call. What was his motive? Then compare our imaginary picture of him with the concrete images we have of the suspects. We must ensure that in future we phonoscopists are supplied not only with a suspect’s voice and name but with a brief account of his position, his activities, his lifestyle, perhaps even a curriculum vitae. I think I could construct some sort of psychological sketch of our criminal right now. . . .”

  But Rubin, who onl
y the night before, arguing with the artist, had said that objective knowledge is uncolored by emotional preconceptions, had already decided in favor of one of the two suspects.

  “I have, of course, already given some thought to the psychological aspects, Adam Veniaminovich, and they seem to tip the balance in favor of Volodin. In his conversation with his wife . . .” (Volodin’s conversation with his wife had influenced Lev more than he realized. Her musical telephone voice had troubled his senses. If anything was to be appended to the tape, Lev would have opted for a photograph of Volodin’s wife) “. . . in his conversation with his wife, Volodin seems notably listless, subdued, apathetic even, and this is very characteristic of a criminal afraid that he is under observation. There’s nothing of the sort in Shchevronok’s cheerful Sunday chatter, I quite agree. But a pretty pair we will look if we start relying from the word ‘go’ on extraneous considerations rather than the objective data of our science. I’ve got quite a lot of experience of work with audiovisual records by now, and you must believe me: A number of subtle indications convince me beyond doubt that the criminal is Shchevronok. Only shortage of time has prevented me from measuring these clues on the tape and translating them into the language of numbers.” (Something for which this “arts man” never had time!) “But if somebody took me by the throat here and now and told me to mention just one name and swear that he’s the criminal, I would almost without hesitation name Shchevronok!”

  “But that’s not what we’re going to do, Lev Grigorievich. Let’s get to work with the gauge and do our translation into the language of numbers; then we can talk.”

  “Think how long it will take! It’s supposed to be urgent!”

  “But if the truth demands it?”

  “Look for yourself, then; just look for yourself!”

  Rubin fingered the tapes again, showering ash on them, heatedly insisting on Shchevronok’s guilt.

  Oskolupov found them engaged in this when he stomped in authoritatively on his short legs. They all knew him well, and the hat pulled down over his brow and the curl of his upper lip told them that he was acutely dissatisfied.

  They jumped up, and he sat in a corner of the sofa, thrust his hands into his pockets, and growled at them.

  “Well?”

  It was an order.

  Rubin behaved correctly and left it to Roitman.

  As Roitman made his report, Oskolupov’s flabby face was expressive of deep thought, his eyelids were sleepily lowered, and he didn’t even rise to look at the specimens of tape presented to him.

  Rubin listened to Roitman, and his heart sank. Even in the carefully chosen words of this clever man, the essence, the inspiration of his research had been missed. Roitman summed up by saying that Shchevronok and Volodin were the suspects, but further recorded conversations were needed to make a final judgment possible. After which, he looked at Rubin and said, “But perhaps Lev Grigorievich wants to add something or make a correction?”

  Rubin regarded Oskolupov as a blockhead, pure and simple. But then and there he was also the eye of the state, the representative of Soviet power, and the unwitting representative of all those forces of progress to which Rubin had surrendered himself. So Rubin spoke passionately, flourishing tapes and albums of audiovisual recordings. He begged the general to understand that although their present conclusion left two possibilities, there was nothing uncertain about the science of phonoscopy itself; it was just that the time allowed was too short for a definitive conclusion, and more recordings were needed; but his personal tentative conclusion was that. . . .

  The boss, no longer half asleep, listened for a while with a contemptuous frown before interrupting Rubin’s explanation.

  “I don’t need all this if-ing and but-ing. I don’t give a damn for your so-called science. I want to catch the criminal. Give it to me straight. You’ve got the criminal here, on this table, right? He isn’t walking around scot-free? Somebody else—not one of these five?”

  He glowered at them while they stood before him with nothing to support them. The paper tapes Rubin was holding trailed on the floor. Behind their backs, Smolosidov crouched over the tape recorder like a black dragon.

  Rubin felt deflated. He had expected the conversation to go quite differently.

  Roitman, who was more accustomed to the manners of the boss class, plucked up courage and said, “Yes, Foma Guryanovich. I really am . . . we really are. . . . We’re sure that . . . it’s between these five.”

  (What else could he say?)

  Oskolupov screwed up his eyes more tightly.

  “You take full responsibility for what you’re saying?”

  “Yes, we . . . yes . . . we take responsibility. . . .”

  Oskolupov struggled up from the sofa.

  “I didn’t force you to say it, mind. I’m going straight to the minister to make my report. We’ll arrest both the sons of bitches!”

  (From the way he said it and the hostile look he gave them, Rubin and Roitman might as well be the two to be arrested).

  Rubin protested.

  “Wait a bit longer. Just another twenty-four hours. Give us a chance to prove it conclusively.”

  “Well, when the interrogation begins, we’ll put a microphone on the interrogator’s desk and you can record them for three hours at a time if you like.”

  “But one of them has to be innocent!” Rubin exclaimed.

  “What’s that mean—innocent?” Oskolupov’s green eyes opened wide in surprise. “Not guilty of anything at all? Security will know how to deal with it; they’ll find something.”

  He left with never a kind word for the adepts of the new science.

  That was Oskolupov’s managerial style: Never praise your subordinates if you want them to work harder. It was not a style he himself had invented. It had been handed down from on high, by the Man himself.

  They sat down on the very chairs on which not so long ago they had dreamed of a great future for their embryonic science. And were silent.

  It was as though what they had constructed with such precision and delicacy of touch had been trampled underfoot. As though phonoscopy were not wanted at all.

  If two could be arrested instead of one, why not all five to make absolutely sure?

  Roitman felt keenly how precarious the new group was, remembered that half of the Acoustics Lab had been disbanded, remembered yet again his uneasy feeling in the small hours that the world was a bleak place and he was alone in it.

  As for Rubin, the enthusiasm that had kept him working, hour after hour, lost to the world, had burned itself out. He remembered his aching liver, his aching head, remembered that his hair was falling out, that his wife was getting older, that he still had five years to serve, that with every year the apparatchiks, damn them, were driving the Revolution deeper and deeper into the morass—and now they’d made a pariah of Yugoslavia.

  Both Roitman and Rubin kept their thoughts to themselves and sat there in silence.

  Smolosidov, with his eyes on the backs of their heads, was also silent.

  Rubin had been quick to pin up a map of China on the wall, with the territory held by the Communists colored with a red pencil.

  This map, at least, was heartwarming. In spite of everything, in spite of everything—we are winning!

  A KNOCK AT THE DOOR SUMMONED ROITMAN. The joint Party and Komsomol political education session was just beginning.

  He had to round up his subordinates and put in an appearance himself.

  Chapter 88

  The Leading Ideology

  MONDAY WAS THE DAY APPOINTED by the Central Committee of the Party for political study, not just in the Marfino special prison but throughout the Soviet Union. Every Monday schoolchildren in the top classes, housewives in housing cooperatives, veterans of the Revolution, and gray-haired academicians sat at desks from six to eight in the evening and unfolded the notes they had made on Sunday. (It was the Leader’s adamant wish that citizens be required not only to answer questions from memo
ry but also to produce their own written synopses of each lesson.)

  Year after year, beginning on October 1, they studied in depth the errors of the Populists, the errors of Plekhanov, and the struggle of Lenin and Stalin against Economism, Legal Marxism, Opportunism, Tailism, Revisionism, Anarchism, Recallism, Liquidationism, God-seeking, and Spineless Intellectualism. They lavished time on the elucidation of Party statutes half a century old (and long since superseded), on the difference between the old Iskra and the new Iskra,* on “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back,” on Bloody Sunday, and arrived at last at the famous chapter of the Short Course in the History of the Communist Party that expounds the philosophical foundations of Communist ideology—and that was where for some reason every political study group got ingloriously stuck. Since this could not be explained by flaws or muddle in Dialectical Materialism itself or by obscurities in the author’s exposition (the chapter was written by Lenin’s Best Pupil and Friend), there were only two possible reasons: the difficulties of dialectical thinking for the backward and ignorant masses and the unstoppable onset of spring. In May, when the battle with chapter 4 was at its hottest, the toilers ransomed themselves by subscribing to the State Loan, and politics classes were discontinued.

  When the study circles reassembled in October, in spite of the explicit and enduring wish of the Great Helmsman to move on quickly to the burning questions of our own time, its deficiencies and determinant contradictions, they had to reckon with the fact that the toilers had forgotten everything during the summer and that chapter 4 was still waiting, and propagandists were told to begin all over again with the errors of the Populists, the errors of Plekhanov, the struggles with Economism and with Legal Marxism. . . .

  So it went on, here, there, and everywhere, year in and year out. What made today’s lecture at Marfino particularly important was that it was meant to finish off chapter 4, touch on the genius Lenin’s dazzling Materialism and Empiriocriticism, break out of the vicious circle, and at long last launch the Marfino Party and Komsomol study groups along the high road of modernity, beginning from “the work and struggle of our Party in the period of the First Imperialist War and of Preparation for the February Revolution.”