556
STEPHEN SPENDER
I have absorbed into myself my own eleven years there as not something
shameful nor as a nightmare to be cursed: I have come almost
to
love that
monstrous world, and now, by a happy turn of events, I have also been
entrusted with many recent reports and letters. So perhaps I shall be able
to
~ve
some account of the bones and flesh of that salamander-which
inCIdentally, is still alive.
By being arrested in February 1945 when he was an officer on the Baltic front
fighting the Germans, Solzhenitsyn gained entrance to this inferno. The
cause of his arrest was his correspondence with a friend, in which they had
exchanged comments critical of the regime. He was taken by three Soviet
counter-intelligence officers who handed over
to
him a map, by which he was
able to guide them to their headquarters. When they got to headquarters he
was introduced to this underworld by being put in a "temporary punishment
cell":
It
was the length of one human body and wide enough for three to lie
packed tightly, four in a pinch. As it happened, I was the fourth, shoved
m after mldmght. The three lying there blinked sleepily at me in the light
of the smoky kerosene lantern and moved over, givmg me enough space
to lie on my side, half between them, half on top of them, until gradually,
by sheer weight, I could edge my way in.
In a matter of fact way, Solzhenitsyn relates what happens to him, as a
thread providing sequence that runs through the book. He never shows the
slightest trace of self-pity. He is there as a witness. What he shows is mostly the
humanity of his fellow prisoners (who could sometimes of course be inhuman
also, as in the terrible description of the thieves in the railway cars on the
journey to the ports of the Archipelago). He is chiefly concerned however in
describing why, and how, this happened , and happened to so many millions.
He traces the terroristic punitive system back to the very beginnings of
the Revolution, remarking ironically "that even before there was any Civil
War it could be:: seen that Russia, due to the makeup of its population, was
obviously not suited for any socialism whatsoever." There are various senses
in which this might be true; but what Solzhenitsyn means is that Lenin and his
associates never trusted the Russian people.
There is, I think, something about the communist ideology which pro–
duces total distrust of anyone except the group of leaders who are in power.
This ideology presupposes that the true communists of the central committee
are totally right in all their decisions. They are much more infallible than the
Pope, because beyond the Pope there is God who might consider the Pope
wrong. But a communist leader, or group ofleaders in power, are not subject
