Student Activist Diary

‘How can you expect a man who’s warm to understand one who’s cold?’ – Solzhenitsyn, from One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Solzhenitsyn

“Free speech” and our right to it is a fundamental human right which, too often, I don’t really think about. If something threatens it, I’ll join everyone else who’s up in arms, but for the rest of the time it just exists, like air or water or cups of tea or other things I don’t spend as much of my time being thankful for as perhaps I should. But we’ve been reading some fascinating thoughts about the UK’s take on the subject here at Student Activist Diary this weekend, courtesy of Tom Kemp, and it seemed like the perfect opportunity to look at a man who wrote extensively and wonderfully in defence of human rights, and in defence of free speech, in a country where those things could not be taken for granted.

The basic history of Communist Russia is pretty common knowledge, I think, but just so we’re all starting on the same page, so to speak, here’s a brief rundown. (Here’s an even briefer one, in song. It’s much rhymier than mine.) In February 1917, a series of workers’ strikes at factories in Petrograd led to an uprising. When the Tsar, Nicholas II, called in the troops to suppress it, there was a mutiny. The Tsar was deposed, and a Provisional Government took over.

But the Provisional Government proved an ineffectual power, and in October of that year the Bolshevik party, led by Vladimir Lenin, organised a second revolution. Unlike the first, this was organised: it wasn’t the natural conclusion of years of unrest and inequality, it was a coup intended to take power from the Provisional Government. And – of course – it succeeded.

The years that followed, first under Lenin’s rule and later Stalin’s, were a perfect example of Communism collapsing on itself and becoming a cruel totalitarian diktat. Marx’s ideals were all but forgotten as the country struggled onwards, its leaders, despite their supposed comradeship, as pitiless and brutal as any Tsar could have been. As last week’s subject, George Orwell, famously wrote in his viciously satirical Animal Farm: ‘the creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.’

Political undesirables, including those who were considered to be simply ‘class-alien’, were sent to gulags, forced labour camps where they were made to work in horrific conditions, often until death. Fair trials rapidly became a distant dream as troikas – commissions of three people who were allowed to pass sentence without trial – became an increasing part of the political landscape, along with ‘show trials’ in which alleged conspirators ‘confessed’ to their crimes and were executed or imprisoned.

It was a climate of fear, uncertainty and anxiety which it is impossible to explain fully in just four hundred words. People were executed, imprisoned or sent to the gulags in their thousands; Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was just one man in this mass of tormented human life, but he has become justly famous as a chronicler of their experiences.

Solzhenitsyn was arrested in 1945, whilst serving in East Prussia as part of the Red Army. His crime was writing derogatory statements about Stalin in a letter to a friend, which – under Article 58 of the Soviet criminal code – was a crime which carried a harsh sentence. After being beaten and interrogated, he was sentenced to eight years in the gulags.

Much of the work he would later publish – including his two most famous books, The Gulag Archipelago and One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich – was inspired by his experiences in the labour camps. The Gulag Archipelago is a three-volume epic which combines historical discussion, testimony and philosophical reflection to describe the Soviet labour camp system in all its unrelenting horror; it is credited with being the book that alerted the West to what was happening behind the Iron Curtain. It’s well worth a read if you have time: it’s a massively important book – but I won’t pretend that it will be a light-hearted, joyous experience.

Ivan Denisovich, on the other hand, is a much shorter account. It’s more reader-friendly, though no less chilling to read, and it is the book that I want to focus on today. Starting with  the five o’clock ‘morning reveille’ and concluding with the end of the day, it literally depicts a single day in the life of Ivan Denisovich Shukhov (called Shukhov in the text, and therefore here, too), a political prisoner in an unnamed gulag.

The most startling thing about the book is just how evocative it is. (I last read it on a fairly cold day, and ended up wrapped in several layers of blankets with my teeth chattering). Solzhenitsyn goes into great detail about Shukhov’s life, and the lives of the prisoners and guards with whom he shares his space. Take, for instance, this passage in which Shukhov receives his morning bread ration: ‘A spoonful of granulated sugar lay in a small mound on top of the hunk…though he was in a hurry, he sucked the sugar from the bread with his lips, licked it under his tongue…and took a look at his ration, weighing it in his hand and hastily calculating whether it reached the regulation fifty-five grammes….He, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short.’

Each part of Shukhov’s day is described in the same detail, detail that might be excruciating in the hands of a lesser writer, but here serves only to prevent us from forgetting for even a moment the horror and desolation of the conditions in which he finds himself.

So what prevents this book from being a mere festival of misery? Certainly, it’s very difficult to read in parts, and not least because it is so clearly based on the real experiences of the author. Yet Shukhov himself, our protagonist, does not always share our feelings. Rather than his interior monologue taking the form of a constant set of complaints, Shukhov’s thoughts are tempered with a quiet stoicism.

Prisoners going to a Soviet work camp.

At the end of the day, for example, he reflects: ‘He’d had many strokes of luck that day: they hadn’t put him in the cells; they hadn’t sent the team to the settlement; he’d pinched a bowl of kasha at dinner…And he hadn’t fallen ill. He’d got over it. A day without a dark cloud. Almost a happy day’. It allows us, as readers, the time to sit back and reflect on what is actually happening, to draw our own horrified conclusions: time that is vital, given the political message the book conveys.

So Shukhov survives another day: just one, of the ‘three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days like that’ which make up his time in the camps. But what of Solzhenitsyn? Released in 1953, he was exiled for life to Kok-Terek, a remote area of Kazakhstan. However, suffering from a vicious cancer, he was allowed to go to Tashkent for treatment in 1954, an experience which informed his later, equally bleak novel Cancer Ward.

‘During all the years until 1961, not only was I convinced that I should never see a single line of mine in print in my lifetime, but, also, I scarcely dared allow any of my close acquaintances to read anything I had written because I feared that this would become known.’ Solzhenitsyn wrote later, after winning the Nobel Prize.

In 1961, however, things began – slowly – to change. Novy Mir, a literary journal which had previously kept to the party line, began to take up a more rebellious position. Under the editorship of Aleksandr Tvardovsky, the journal agreed to publish One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich; the novella appeared in November 1962.

But Solzhenitsyn’s manuscripts were seized and the printing banned. He was forced to go into hiding at his friend’s house, for fear of being exiled, executed or returned to the labour camps. It was here that he finished The Gulag Archipelago and cemented his reputation as one of Soviet Russia’s finest dissident writers. A reputation that had begun to be formed with One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich.

For, perhaps, obvious reasons, there is a strong tradition of politics in twentieth-century Russian literature – a topic to which this column might yet return. But One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich is one of the most immediate, chilling depictions of life under the Soviet Union. Spare the couple of hours to read it – it’s a slim volume, no more than 141 pages – and you’ll not be disappointed. Shocked, saddened, appalled. But not disappointed.

Next week: Zadie Smith – the voice of modern Britain? White Teeth and Multiculturalism