Invisible Allies - Softcover

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Isaevich

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1887178422 ISBN 13: 9781887178426

Publisher: Counterpoint, 1997

Synopsis

After his expulsion from Russia, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn secretly worked on a memoir that would acknowledge the courageous efforts of the people who hid his writings and smuggled them to the West. Before the fall of Communism, the very publication of Invisible Allies would have put these friends in jeopardy.

Now we are finally granted an intimate account of the extensive, ever-shifting network of individuals who risked life and liberty to ensure that Solzhenitsyn's works were kept safe, circulated in samizdat, and "exported" via illicit channels. These imperiled conspirators, often unknown to one another, shared a devotion to the dissident writer's work and a hatred of the regime that brought terror to every part of their lives. The circle included scholars and fellow writers and artists, but also such unlikely operatives as an elderly babushka who picked up and delivered manuscripts in her shopping bag.

With tenderness, respect, and humor, Solzhenitsyn tells us of the fates of these partners in intrigue: the women who typed distribution copies of his works late into the night under the noses of prying neighbors; the correspondents and diplomats who covertly carried the microfilmed texts across borders; the farflung friends who hid various drafts of Solzhenitsyn's works anywhere they could--under an apple tree, beneath the bathtub, in a mathematics professor's loft with her canoe. In this group of deftly drawn portraits, Solzhenitsyn pays tribute to the anonymous heroes who evaded the KGB to bring The Gulag Archipelago and his many other works to the world.

About this title

About the Author

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born on December 11, 1918 in Kislovodsk in the northern Caucusus Mountains. He received a degree in physics and math from Rostov University in 1941. He served in the Russian army during World War II but was arrested in 1945 for writing a letter criticizing Stalin. He spent the next decade in prisons and labor camps and, later, exile, before being allowed to return to central Russia, where he worked as a high school science teacher. His first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, was published in 1962. In 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1974, he was arrested for treason and exiled following the publication of The Gulag Archipelago. He moved to Switzerland and later the U. S. where he continued to write fiction and history.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Invisible Allies

By Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn

Counterpoint Press

Copyright © 1997 Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9781887178426

CHAPTER ONE

Nikolai Ivanovich Zubov

Every historical period produces its share of otherwiseinconspcious individuals who have the gift of preserving the past,though not by setting down their memoirs for posterity. Instead,they evoke it in conversation with their contemporaries; their recollectionscan be borne across decades even to the very youngestlisteners and when the narrator's own life is drawing to a close. Aswe stay receptive to its kindly silver-haired glow, we can continueto draw on its for the past its has preserved. But the use we make ofthese insights is then entirely up to us.

Nikolai Ivanovich Zubov had this special talent from an earlyage. At the time of the revolution, he was an observant twenty-two-year-oldwith a retentive memory, and he managed to preserveastonishing clear recollections of the Russian world that had beenirretrievably shattered in the space of a few short months. BecauseNikolai Ivanovich did not see the world in political terms, thoserecollections did not add up to a comprehensive picture of thewhole, but consisted of a myriad of brilliant fragments, any one ofwhich N.I. could readily extract from deep within his memory,well into old age. These might concern the organization of the railroads,local geographical features, the world of bureaucrats, dailylife in small-town Russia, or various other minor but fascinating aspectsof our history. He would always relate the kind of thing youcould not have deduced by yourself or have picked up from a book.Yet strangely enough he could say virtually nothing about theRussian Civil War, even though he had been its contemporary. Atthe time, he had lived far from the hub of events, he had not personallytaken part in the conflict, and it was as if his mind had refusedto absorb the chaos and horror of this bloody turmoil.

The life of any individual is so full of its own problems and eventsthat it can proceed in a direction completely unrelated to the flowof historical circumstances. N. I.'s father had died while he was stilla boy, and the early age at which he had been left fatherless had madean indelible impression on his personality. This was the source of hiseternally youthful outlook on life, his boyish pride in being goodwith his hands (he always carried a penknife), and his secretive,gentle, and timid attitude toward women. He loved and respectedhis mother to the end, never daring to flout her wishes, eventhough she was full of set ideas that she was determined to imposeon her son. One such notions was that he, as a delicate and overprotectedyoung intellectual, should marry a woman "of the people"and that in order to do so he should "go to the people."(*) Thus, assoon as N.I. had graduated from medical school, she packed himoff to the Novgorod region to work in a butter-producing cooperative.And indeed the young man learned enough about butter-makingand the Novgorod area to last a lifetime--but his choice of awife proved to be an utter disaster. By the time I met him, no one inN.I.'s home was willing to speak of this hysterical woman "from thepeople," and I know nothing about her, except that she made his lifesuch a misery that he was forced to leave her and take his three childrenwith him: a silent, expressionless son who grew up a stranger tohim and could not become N.I.'s successor in any way, and twodaughters who inherited their mother's mental instability.

In was this divorce with three variously handicapped childrenwhom the thirty-year-old Elena Aleksandrovna nevertheless choseto marry, even though she was still grief-stricken at the death of herfirst husband, a man who had been twenty-five years her senior andwith whom she felt she had experienced the pinnacle of earthlyhappiness. But now she fell under the sway of her new mother-in-law,for N.I. could never challenge his mother's will. So in theSoviet Union of the 1930s--decidedly not a time when womenwere content to be chained to hearth and home--E.A. successfullycame to terms with this new role, adapting to life under these"neofeudal" circumstances. Then the wrath of the almighty NKVDstruck, and both N.I. and his wife were cast into prison camps. (Irelated their story in The Gulag Archipelago, Part Three, Chapters Six,and in Cancer Ward, where they appear as the Kadmins.)

After his stint at butter production, N.I. had been able to returnto medicine, and had chosen gynecology as his specialty. There wasnothing accidental about this, since it brought together the delicatesensitivity of N.I.'s hands, his gentle yet persistent nature, and perhapssome aspect of his youthful indecision about all those creaturesof an alien gender with whom he shared the planet. I believed that hemust have made an extraordinary successful gynecologist, a joyand comfort to his patients. And indeed they retained a deep andlasting sense of gratitude toward him, while he continued to practicehis profession well into old age. Unable to draw his pension until hereached seventy (the years in camp were not counted toward thatgoal), N.I. remained eager to respond to calls involving difficult deliveriesor serious illnesses. And he was seventy-five when he finallyrealized a pet project of his: introducing a brief course for girls in thegraduating class of the local secondary school. The course concerned those "shameful" subjects that they needed to know aboutbut the their parents could not bring themselves to discuss openly;rather, the students would pick up what they could from each other,typically in vague and inadequate form, with disastrous results inlater life. N.I. wanted to write a book on the subject, a manual forteachers.

Being a doctor made it possible for N.I. to survive for ten yearsin a labor camp, and it allowed him to arranged for his wife to bea nurse at the same camp. But his versatility and skill at workingwith his hands continually inclined toward all manner ofhandicrafts, wit bookbinding a long-standing favorite. Before hisarrest he had owned all the equipment essential for this task--papertrimmer, vise, and so on--and in the camp he managed tohave these things produced for him during a quiet spell in theworkshop. Later, when living in exile, he once again contrivedto produce a set. He literally craved to bind books, particularlyvolumes he considered worthy. This was another manifestation ofhis delayed boyhood, as was his great love for Latin: in camp hebecame friendly with a noted Latinist, Dovatur, and used his positionas doctor to organize Latin lecturers for the nurses! This boyishenthusiasm also drew him to a game especially close to his heart:conspiracy. While N.I. cared little about politics and had no actualneed to engage in conspiracy (though a spell in the camps hasa way of setting people to thinking, and N.I. did have long discussionson Russian history with the quasi-Bolshevik M.P. Yakubovich(*)), he never tired of refining various conspirational techniquesin his spare time. For example, he devised a way of using the regularmails to set up a clandestine link with a distant correspondentunversed in subterfuge. His first message would include someharmless-looking poem and an ardent request for the recipient tocommit it to memory. Once he had confirmation that the messagehad been received, his second letter would reveal that the poemhad been an acrostic. Reading the first letter of each line, his correspondentwould get the words: "unglue envelope." When he didso, he would uncover a message written on the glued-down stripof this latest letter informing him about the next communication,which might come in the binding of a book, in the false bottom ofa box, or--the height of art--inside a simple postcard that, whensoaked in warm water, could be peeled apart. N.I. had hit upon abrilliant technique here. He would split apart an ordinary postcardwhile it was dry, write his message on the inner surface, then gluethe two halves back together (he had experimented with manytypes of glue). Finally he would write a message on the outside ofthe card, making sure that the new text covered the lines writteninside. Postcards are hardly every checked and are the easiest thingsto get past the censor. (But it must be said that Soviet "free" citizensshrank from such conspirational connections and generallypreferred not to respond.)

The whole technique was developed by N.I. while he was incamp, but he found no obvious application for it at first. Then hegot to know Alfred Stokli, a literary scholar from Moscow who wasa prisoner in the same camp. Stokli told him that if he could finda way to keep it hidden, he would write a novel set in the time ofSpartacus but drawing an analogy with the present (a favorite deviceof the daring spirits of Soviet literature) and basing the psychologyof the Roman slaves on his observations of zek(*) behavior. N.I.immediately offered him a brilliant method of safekeeping: ratherthan hiding individual sheets of the manuscript inside a binding(which would have required an awful lot of books), N.I. suggestedmaking the binding itself out of multiple layers of manuscript pages,glued together in such a way that they could be peeled apart withoutdamage to the writing. The method was tested and found towork perfectly, and Stokli began to write. Whenever her had enoughpages for one binding, N.I. would glue them together, keeping thenewly bound volume in full view of the wardens as they did theirroutine searches. Later Stokli was transferred to another camp, possibly after he already abandoned his novel. N.I. not only preserved everything he had written but also managed to take it out ofthe camp to his place of exile. He then wrote to Moscow, whereStokli now lived as a free man, inviting him to collect his novel.secret author, my fellow conspirator, and we decided that he wasmissing the hints in N.I.'s letters, thinking that his precious text hadbeen lost forever. In 1956, when I too headed for Moscow, N.I. asked me to look up Stokli and inform him of the situation directly.Alas, once rehabilitated, reinstated in his academic career, and installedin his former apartment in central Moscow, Stokli had lost allinterest in his camp scribblings: all this stuff about slavery--whoneeds it? The whole episode reminded me of the devoted butspurned Maksim Maksimych in Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time.

N.I. arrived in Kok-Terek, his place of exile, several months beforeI did. He had been separated from his wife when she was sentoff to the Krasnoyarsk region (not by any design of the secret policebut simply due to sloppy work at the Ministry of the Interior), andit was a year before she could rejoin him. N.I.'s aged mother, whowas the cause of the couple's arrest, dragged herself out there to joinhim, as did one of his daughters, already seriously deranged--but allthat lay ahead. For the being he was alone, quite silver-hiredyet as agile as a young man, wiry, small in stature, with a ready smileand clear-eyed gaze that was impossible to forget. We first met in thelocal hospital where I was admitted with an unidentified illness, amalady that struck me right after my release from prison camp.("This was cancer that had been spreading undiagnosed for an entireyear, and N.I. was in fact the first one to suspect what was wrong.)But N.I. was not my doctor, and we met as two fellow zeks.

At one point soon after I was discharged I recall walking withhim through our settlement and stopping at a teahouse for a glass ofbeer. There we sat, both of us without family: he was still waitingfor his wife to join him, mine had left me toward the end of mycamp sentence.(*) At the time he was almost fifty-eight (in a kind ofironic accord with the article of our criminal code that had broughtus here, these digits seemed to pop up everywhere!(*)) while I wasgoing on thirty-five, yet our new friendship had something youthfulabout it. Perhaps it was our lack of family ties, the youthfulbouyancy we both shared, and the feeling of a marvelous new beginningthat overhelms the sense of a released prisoner. To someextent it was also the spring on the Kazakh steppe, with the blossomingof the fragrant camel thistle--the first spring after the deathof Stalin, and Beria's last.(*)

But just N.I.'s was greater than mine, so too was his optimism.To think that he was getting ready to begin life at fifty-eight,as though the whole preceding period had counted for nothing!The past lay in ruins, but life had not yet begun!

I have always formed judgments about people at he very firstencounter, the moment our eyes meet. N.I. charmed me so completelyand was so successful in unsealing my tightly locked soulthat I quickly resolved to confide in him--the first (and last) suchconfidant during my years of exile. In the evenings we used to strollto the edge of the settlement, and there, seated on the edge of anold irrigation canal, I would recite selections from the verse andprose I had stored in my head, and would try to gauge his reaction.He was the ninth person in the course of my prison years to listento my works, but his reaction was unique. Rather than praising orcriticizing, he voiced sheer amazement that I should have been exhaustingmy brain by carrying this burden inside me for years.(*) Butin fact I could imaging no place other than my memory where Icould safely keep my works, and I had grown accustomed to thestrain this placed on me, as well as to the constant need to reviewwhat I had learned. But now N.I. undertook to lighten my load!And a few days later he presented me with his first contrivance,amazing in its simplicity, so unobtrusive that it could not arousesuspicion amid the barest of furnishings, and easily transportable toboot. It was a small plywood box of the type used for mailingparcels, something that could be cheaply acquired in the citieswhile being quite unavailable in a place like Kok-Terek, That madeit something that would be natural for an exile like me to hold onto in order to store small items; and it would not look out of placenext to my sorry-looking furniture and the earthen floor of my hut.The box had a false bottom, but the plywood did not sag and onlythe most sensitive hands--such as those of a gynecologist--couldascertain by touch alone that the inside and the outside surfaces didnot match. It turned out that two small nails had been insertedsnugly rather than being hammered home; they were easily removedwith the help of pliers. That released a locking crossbar andrevealed the secret cavity--those dark hundred cubic centimetersof space that I had dreamed about and that, though technicallywithin the U.S.S.R., were yet beyond the control of the Sovietregime. it was a quick task to pop in my texts, just as quick to retrievethem, and easy to ensure that the contents would not knockabout there was room enough to hold a transcription of everything Ihad composed during my five years of captivity. (In the originaledition of The Oak and the calf I mentioned "a fortuitous suggestionand some timely help" received from another person(*) andsuggested that this happened after my treatment in Tashkent. Thisdeliberate distortion was made to deflect suspicion from N.I. Fromthe day I received his gift in May of 1953, I gradually began settingdown on paper the twelve thousand lines of verse I had memorized--thelyrics, the long narrative poem, and my two plays.)

I was ecstatic. For me it was no less of a liberation than steppingout of the camp gates had been. N.I.'s eyes simply shone, and asmile parted his gray beard and whiskers: his passion for conspiracyhad not been in vain; he had found a use for it at last!

To think that in a settlement with barely forty political exiles (ofwhom fewer than ten were Russians) a do-it-yourself undergroundwriter would stumble upon a born do-it-yourself conspirator! Itwas nothing short of a miracle.

Later N.I. installed another secret hiding place in my crudeworking table. The storage capacity available for safekeeping keptgrowing, my work was now easy to get to, and one can imagine theboost this gave to my clandestine writing activities. I could stow mytexts away a few minutes before heading for school, quite unconcernedabout leaving everything for hours on end in my isolatedhut, protected by nothing but small padlock and windows fit fora dollhouse. There was nothing there to tempt a burglar, and asleuth from the command post would know what to look for.Despite my heavy (double) teaching load, I now managed to lookat my drafts daily and to add to them on a regular basis. Sundays Iwould work the whole day through, provided we were not herdedout to work on a collective farm, and I no longer had to spend aweek of every month on review and memorization as I had to dobefore. It last I also had a chance to polish my texts, reappraisingthem with fresh eyes without being afraid that making changeswould impair my ability to recall what I had memorized earlier.

N.I.'s help in the loneliest moments of my devastated life and thesympathy offered by Elena Aleksandrovna, who joined him in thefall, were a constant source of warmth and light; they served as asubstitute for the rest of humanity from whom I concealed my trueself. When E.A. arrived, I was waiting for permission to leave for acancer ward, with the prospect of almost certain death there.(*) It wasan austere meeting; we spoke in matter-of-fact tones about my impendingdeath and how they would dispose of my belongings. I decidedagainst leaving my manuscripts in their house so as not toburden them; instead I buried my camp poem and plays in a bottleon my plot of land, in a spot known only to N.I. From the Tashkentcancer clinic (and later from Torfoprodukt and Ryazan), I wrotethem frequent, long, and richly detailed letters, unlike any I haveever written to anyone else in my life.

The Zubovs belonged to the better half of the zek race, to thosewho remember their years in prison camp to their dying days andwho consider this period a supremely important lesson in life andwisdom. This made me feel as close to them as though we were relatedor, rather, because of our ages (N.I. was only slightly youngerthan my late father), as if they were my parents. For that matter, notmany people could have enjoyed as interesting and cheerful a timewith their natural parents as I did with the Zubovs, whether wecorresponded by means of notes inserted under a dog's collar (theirsmart little dog dashed back and forth between our two houses), attendedthe local movie house together, or sat in their clay gazebo atthe edge of the open steppe. There, with more frankness than onecould have with parents today, I talked about the deplorable factthat marrying would jeopardize my manuscripts, and together wepondered ways of getting around this problem.

In the spring of 1954, when I was blessed with a return to healthand wrote my play Republic of Labor(*) in a delirious surge of creativity,I had in mind virtually no one but the Zubovs as a potential audience,seasoned zeks and dear friends that they were. But staging areading of the play was no simple matter. They did not live alone,and trusting N.I.'s daughter was out of the question. Furthermore,their hut was wedged in between others, while I wanted to read ina natural voice, acting out each and every role. My own hut waswell placed in this regard, all the approaches being visible for a hundredmeters or so. But the text was enormous, longer by half againthan the version known today, and the reading would take a goodfive hours, counting intermissions. For the Zubovs to stay so longat my place during the day was to risk arousing the suspicion of theneighbors and of the command post. Besides, we had jobs to go toand household chores to take care of. There seemed to be no othersolution than for them to come by after dark and stay the night.

It was a steamy night in late June, majestically lit by moonlight ina way possible only on the open steppe. But we had to keep thewindows closed to muffle the sound, and there we sat in my miserablystuffy quarters breathing in the fumes of my kerosene lamp. Weaired the place during pauses in the reading, and I would step outsideto make sure no one had crept up to eavesdrop. In fact, theZubovs' dogs were lying close by; they would have barked at anyintruder. That night the life of the labor camps reappeared before usin all its vivid brutality. It was the same feeling that the world atlarge would experience twenty years later on reading The GulagArchipelago. When the reading was finished, we went outside. As before,the whole steppe was suffused with boundless light, only themoon had by now moved to the far side of the sky. The settlementwas fast asleep, and the predawn mist was beginning to creep in,adding to the fantastic setting. The Zubovs were deeply moved--notleast, perhaps, because for the first time they seriously believedin me and shared my conviction that what was being readied in thisramshackle hut would one day have explosive consequences. AndE.A.--already fifty and leaning on the arm of a husband soon tobe sixty--exclaimed, "I can't get over how young we feel! It's likestanding at the very summit of life!"

Life had not treated us zeks to many summits.

As soon as Nikolai Ivanovich and I had begun to earn salariesas "free" employees-salaries that were no longer on the measlyscale of the camp--we were like overgrown schoolboys fulfillinga long-held dream: we each bought a camera. (We went about it systematically,first reading up on the theory of photography; soon afterwardN.I. even sent the factory that had produced his camerasome critical comments on its construction.) But enjoyment of ournew craft did not distract us from our conspiratorial schemes; rather,it stimulated them further: how, we wondered, could photographybe harnessed to serve our goals? We studied up on the techniqueof photoreproduction; on my trips to Tashkent for follow-up-medicaltreatment I procured the more esoteric chemicals; and in duecourse I learned to make excellent photographic copies of my texts.A half-built clay shed with walls but no roof protected me from thewind and the prying eyes of neighbors. Whenever the sky becameovercast--which never lasted long in Kazakhstan--I would rush tomy shed, set up the portable equipment, and for as long as the lightremained steady, with no breaks in the cloud cover or sudden sprinkles,I would hurriedly photograph my tiny manuscript pages, noneof them bigger than five by seven inches. But the most importantand delicate task was then up to Nikolai Ivanovich. He had to removethe binding from an English-language book we happened tohave; create spaces inside the front and back covers, each largeenough to hold an envelope; pack the two envelopes with sectionsof film, four exposures to each strip; and then close up and reattachthe binding in such a way that the book seemed to have comestraight from the store. It was probably the most demanding bindingjob N. I. had never undertaken, but the result was a marvel to behold.(Our only misgiving was that the silver nitrate in the film made thebindings seem heavier than usual.) Now all that remained was tofind that noble Western tourist who should be strolling somewherein Moscow and who would accept this incriminating book thrust athim by the agitated hand of passerby. . . . But no such touristturned up, and in later years I reworked my texts, making the earlierversions out of date. I kept the book for a long time to commemoratethe astonishing workmanship of N. I., but at the time of my1965 debacle(*) I burned it. I can still see it in my mind's eye--a collectionof plays by George Bernard Shaw in English, published inthe Soviet Union.

The Zubovs and I had taken for granted that we would live inKok-Terek "in perpetuity," to use the phrase entered in our documents,but in the spring of 1956 the whole system of political exilewas abolished, and I immediately made plans to leave. The Zubovsstayed on, prisoners not of the Interior Ministry now but of theirdomestic burdens. It was no easy matter for them to uproot themselves,given their declining strength and the illness of NikolaiIvanovich's mother. To make matters more difficult still, N. I.'s derangeddaughter, wandering defenselessly through the settlement,had become pregnant (apparently by the chairman of the village soviet)and had saddled the Zubovs with a baby Kazakh before she herselfvanished forever into a mental institution. (The Kazakh heredityasserted itself in astonishing ways: the boy was brought up in aRussian family and was taken out of Kazakhstan while he was still aninfant, yet without prompting and with no examples to emulate, healways preferred to sit cross-legged in the Muslim fashion.) N. I.'sother daughter committed suicide a year later by jumping out of acommuter train in a Moscow suburb. The safekeeping system N. I. had devised was so light and so easilytransportable that he sent me another by ordinary post when Imoved to Torfoprodukt(*) in central Russia. I now had three of theseparcel boxes, and they were to serve me for many years to come; infact, I made occasional use of them right up to my expulsion fromthe Soviet Union. But when I moved to Ryazan(*) to be reunitedwith my first wife Natalya Reshetovskaya, the availability of a typewritermade a further expansion necessary. (Reshetovskaya hadthen been married to another man for six years and returning to herwas a false move on my part, one that would cost both of us dearly.)Typing three or four copies at a time rapidly increased the volumeof material to be stored, and I had to find more hiding places.Fortunately N. I. had taught me what to look for, so that I was ableto come up with some pretty decent ideas myself: installing a falseceiling in a wardrobe, for instance, or inserting manuscripts into thecasing of a record player that was already so heavy that the additionalweight would not be noticed.

Kok-Terek had seemed an extraordinary attractive place as longas getting a release from exile was hopelessly barred. We had actuallygrown to love it! But how swiftly it lost its charm once we weregranted the gift of freedom and people all around us started leaving.For the Zubovs there was no way of returning to the Moscow region.("You can't buy a ticket to the land of the past"--N. I. likedto repeat this melancholy aphorism born of his prison-camp experience.)"The Crimea, then!" his wife would urge. She had spenthappy years in Simferopol as a girl, and the Crimean peninsulaevoked treasured memories. While changing one's place of residencein the Soviet Union is painfully difficult even for ordinarycitizens, one can imagine the problems faced by a former zek, especiallyone not officially rehabilitated. (The authorities could notforgive the Zubovs for having briefly given shelter to a deserter.)Zeks are simply unwanted everywhere. Still, after lengthy correspondenceand endless inquiries, Dr. Zubov was finally allowed totake a position in Ak-Mechet (now renamed Chernomorskoye)--aremote settlement in the barren Crimean northwest. With greatdifficulty, the Zubovs made the move in 1958, but what they foundbore little resemblance to the popular image of Crimea, much lessto the Crimea E. A. remembered: there was empty steppe allaround, just as in Kok-Terek, and the sun-scorched barren landscapeactually resembled their place of exile. (I once joked that itwas simple Kok-Terek "next to a sea dug out by Komsomol enthusiasts"--butI realized at once that I had hurt their feelings.) Butthey did have a smooth beach, the real Black Sea, and, best of all, abench not far from their home with a view of the bay; the Zubovswould come here in the evenings arm in arm to watch the sun godown. With their astonishing ability to find joy within themselvesand to count even their tiniest blessings, the Zubovs declared this tobe a happy place, a spot from which they would not stir for the restof their lives. Although E. A. was still far from old, her mobility becameprogressively impaired, until eventually she was unable toreach that bench of theirs and was practically confined to her bed.But they had mastered the art of living the inner life--just the twoof them together beneath their tranquil roof, listening to music inthe evening and exchanging letters with friends. For them, it was aworld in its fullness.

Now that I had acquired a typewriter and could produce multiplecopies of all my works, it made sense not to keep them all in oneplace. I should not have imposed on the Zubovs, but I had no oneI could trust more. So in 1959 I traveled from Ryazan to leave themcopies of all my plays, as well as the narrative poem I had composedin camp and The First Circle (in the ninety-six-chapter version thatI then consider complete(*)). And N. I. once again set to work riggingup false bottoms and double walls in his rough kitchen furnitureand hid everything away.

From Ryazan I kept up a very warm correspondence with theZubovs, though I necessarily had to stay within the generalities appropriateto the postal censorship. When Tvardovsky(*) accepted myIvan Denisovich, there was no one with whom I was more anxious tospeak about it than the Zubovs, but no letter could capture everythingI wished to say. By Easter 1962 I had typed up a revised versionof The First Circle, and with a copy of this text in hand I dashedoff to see the Zubovs in the Crimea. There, in surroundings so familiarto me and at a round table that resembled my own back inKok-Terek, I told my favorite couple of the incredible developmentsat Novy Mir. As I talked, E. A. plucked a freshly butcheredrooster for a gala dinner, and now and then she would pause inamazement with her hands full of feathers. And because the wholescene was so reminiscent of the cozy chats the three of us had had inKok-Terek (the only difference now being the electric lighting), thefull significance of the miracle was brought home to me as never before:not even in our wildest dreams had we hoped to see anythinglike this in print during our lifetime. But then again, could we be sosure that we would this time?

I must digress briefly here in order to include a point that doesnot fit elsewhere. That spring, as I prepared for whatever might befallme after the publication of Ivan Denisovich, I made three sets ofmicrofilm containing absolutely everything I had written up tothen. Using a summer vacation trip with my wife as a pretext, I setoff to deposit them with friends from my prison days. One set wentto my dear friend, the incomparable Nikolai Andreyevich Semyonov,the fellow prisoner with whom I had composed "Buddha'sSmile" while sitting on a bunk in Moscow's Burtyrki prison.("Buddha's Smile" eventually became a chapter in The First Circle,and Semyonov figures in the novel as Potapov.) Semyonov, who wasworking at a hydroelectric station in Perm, accepted the film andsafeguarded it loyally until I burned it myself. The second set wassupposed to go to the Kizel area, to Pavel Baranyuk, a hero of theEkibastuz camp uprising(*) (in my plays Prisoners and Tanks Know theTruth he appears as Pavel Gai). When I went there I had no idea thatI would only be able to reach Pavel by vehicles provided by theInterior Ministry and that Pavel had himself become a sort ofprison-camp guard, something he had not admitted in his letters tome. This loss was as painful as a wound and has not been satisfactorilyexplained to this day, though it may be understandable enough,given the way they must have come down on him after the camp revoltwas crushed. With a capsule of microfilm that felt like a bombin my pocket, I roamed warily for a whole day around Kizel, one ofthe centers of the Gulag empire, fearful of being stopped by one ofthe numerous police patrols in a random check or due to a suspiciousmove on my part. I never did reach Pavel, and it is just as well.The third set of microfilm went to Ekaterinburg, to Yuri VasilyevichKarbe, a high-minded, unflappable, trusted friend from my Ekibastuzcamp days. Like Semyonov, he accepted the films and safeguardedthem faithfully, burying them somewhere out in the forest.He died in May 1968, almost on the same day as Arnold Susi.(*)(Both had heart disease, and this was a period of heightened sunspotactivity.) I can no longer recall whether Karbe eventually returnedthe films for me to destroy. Perhaps they are still buried somewherein a forest in the Urals.

After the publication of Ivan Denisovich, my circle of correspondentsand acquaintances expanded dramatically, as did my obligationsand my ability to collect materials. There was corresponding increase in the attention paid to me by the Unsleeping Eye. As a result I had less and less time for writing detailed letters to theZubovs, and the possibility of expressing myself fully continued todiminish. As far back as I can remember, I have been able to produceas much work as half a dozen other people, but while I remainedunderground, there had always been the occasional brief lull when I could get some letters written or chat with friends. Such opportunities now vanished entirely. True, in the summer of 1964 Nikolai Ivanovich came up from the Crimea to join my wife and me on thefirst trip we made in our car--from Moscow to Estonia. Theold intimacy and rapport were reestablished. But then he disappearedagain into his settlement, which had meanwhile becomepart of a "restricted zone" (some kind of naval base) and in effect now constituted an exile in reverse: in order to visit the Zubovs one now had to apply for a permit at the local Interior Ministry post.The Zubovs themselves grew ever less active: E. A. was largely confined to her bed, while N. I.'s progressive deafness cut him offfrom Western radio broadcasts. They shut themselves up in a staticworld, immersing themselves in the classics and noticing only therandom--and usually second-rate--works of new literature that happened to reach them. Our experiences and the rhythms of our lives were beginning to diverge, while censorship considerations made writing letters almost pointless: hints were misinterpreted or failed to register at all.

On the night in October 1964 when the news of Khrushchev's ouster first broke,(*) the Zubovs burned everything they had held for me and notified me of this action by a prearranged phrase in a letter.That was our agreement: if in their opinion they were seriouslythreatened, they were free to destroy everything. Nor were they alone in expecting a massive to begin in a few days. Atthe same time and for the same reason I took the film I had left overfrom Kizel and sent it abroad (with V.L. Andreyev). Consequently Iwas not too upset at the news of the Zubovs' bonfire, since I hadenough copies of my work elsewhere. The only problem was thatthere now remained only one copy of my play Victory Celebrations.

A year later when my papers were seized at the Teush apartment,(*)this fact took on painful significance: I had no more copiesof Victory Celebrations in my possession. It is true that the CentralCommittee had printed a private edition for their own purposes,(*)so the text might at least have survived in that form, but the loss wasnevertheless a biter one. In 1966 I met with N.I. in Simferopol (itwas impossible to visit him at home) and asked whether he had really burned absolutely everything. His reply left no room for doubt. The only item that had accidentally escaped the flames wasan early version of The First Circle, and the two of us burned it thenand there in a Simferopol stove.

In 1969 N.I. was briefly in Moscow and visited me in Rozhdestvo,(*)but he had nothing more to add to the story and now Iwas altogether certain that Victory Celebrations was lost forever. Butin 1970 a letter from him contained an unclear passage about an oldfriend of his in Moscow whom I really should look up. This was ahint I did not understand. (We were no longer on the same wavelengthin the way that we had been in Kok-Terek; in those days we had grasped each other's meaning at a word and had wondered at theobtuseness of our "free" correspondents. The years apart had nowbrought a measure of this obtuseness into our own relationship.) Idid not go to see his friend. Then in the spring of 1971, Natalya Reshetovskaya, from whom I was already separated, obtained a permitfrom the Interior Ministry to visit the Zubovs for a few days. Ihad myself sent them a letter requesting that they receive her; my hope was that their high-minded influence might have a mollifyingeffect. At the time I could not have imagined into whose clutchesour divorce would drive my wife nor that she was on the verge of becoming (or had already become) more dangerous to me than anyspy, both because she wa ready to collaborate with anyone againstme and because she knew so many of my secret allies. Earlier she hadtaken from N.I. almost all of my letters to the Zubovs, particularlythose dating from the time she had left me for another man; sheneeded them to fill the gaps in her memories. Now, suspecting any more than I did the direction in which Reshetovskaya was moving,N.I. entrusted her with passing the following sensitive news to me, and he spelled out an address to go wit it.

The news concerned the Zubovs' Kazakh grandson, born of N.I.'s deranged daughter in Kok-Terek and brought up by theZubovs with great difficulty. A retarded boy of thirteen with a vicious temper, he had come on a brief visit from his school for problem children. (Placing him in this institution had been an unbelievable struggle, involving endless rounds of begging and pleading.)He had quarreled violently with the Zubovs, threatening to kill them--not for the first time--and in a fit of rage had blurtedout to the woman next door that the old couple were "in hishands," that they were hiding anti-Soviet materials in their furniture,and that he had discovered it! One can only imagine the consequencesfor the Zubovs if the boy had had the chance to make areal denunciation. At the very least they would have been expelledfrom the environs of the naval base, a calamity for people of theirage and state of health. But the neighbor promptly warned N.I.,who after a frantic search discovered a forgotten hiding place containingVictory Celebrations, The Republic of Labor, and several shortitems. All the manuscripts were immediately hidden elsewhere. When the grandson discovered that they were gone, he cursed andraged. But N.I. now knew that he must save Victory Celebrations and at the same time he understood the danger of keeping it, since theboy might turn him in at any moment. But he had no way of notifying me and was unable to travel himself. So he fearlessly kept thenewfound cache for several months more. The conspiracy we had launched so merrily in Kok-Terek seventeen years earlier had dragged on a little too long and was now beyond his strength.

In the summer of 1970 a young Leningrad couple, Irina and Anatoly Kuklin, arrived in Chernomorskoye with their smalldaughter to spend their vacation. They were friends of friends of N.I. More precisely, Irina was a graduate student of the Latinist and classical historian Dovatur whom Zubov had befriended in prison-camp.The Zubovs' cordiality and warmth attracted the new arrivalsto them from the moment they met. Thus N.I. had no misgivings about entrusting my manuscripts to them, on the understanding that they would turn them over to me when they could, or destroythem if things should get out of hand. Soviet transportation rulesbeing what they are, it was impossible for the Kuklins to disembarkfrom the Crimea-to-Leningrad train when it passed through Moscow.Irina came to Moscow on another occasion and passed a noteto me through Mstislav Rostropovich, but the message was so crypticand so many people were then trying to see me on all sortsof frivolous grounds that I stuck to my work schedule and failed torespond.

In June 1971 my warily hostile former wife, who at that pointstill had some hope of winning me back (we were not yet at daggersdrawn), related the whole story to me, along with the Kuklin's addressin Leningrad. I tried not to let her see how much this meantto me. (Later, after my return from Leningrad, I told her, when sheasked, that I had made the trip for nothing, that they had burnedeverything long ago.) But in fact, I was in Leningrad only two dayslater, where this admirably fearless young couple had for a year keptmy seditious text safe in the damp clutter of their basement apartmenton Saperny Lane, undaunted by the torrents of abuse relentlesslypoured on my work through all the official channels. VictoryCelebrations was once again in my hands!

I grew to love these young people. Though they belonged to anentirely different generation (Elena Chukovskaya and I referred tothem in code as "the Infantes"), they had come into my quarter-century-oldliterary underground of their own accord. Theirs wasan episodic role--to save a play--but who could say that their livesmight not have been ruined as a result? They wished to help me further;professional historians both, they had grown sick of participatingin official lies and longed for a chance to clear their lungs.But there was little opportunity to do so, and in any case theywouldn't have been able to: they soon had a second daughter, theirbasement apartment was as hopelessly miserable as ever, Anatolydeveloped health problems, they were barely coping with their ownduties, and money was short. It wasn't for them to help me but forme to help them. The last I heard before deported was thatAnatoly had been harassed at work, though that may not have beenbecause of me.

But then again, perhaps it was. The special nature of my ties toN.I. was clear enough. It was made doubly so by Reshetovskaya,who in her rush to publish her memoirs about me during my lifetime(in the samizdat journal Veche in 1972) did not spare theZubovs, stating openly that they had been my closest friends duringmy Kok-Terek exile, had read all the works I had composed in camp,and had kept a copy of the First Circle for me. Furthermore I hadmyself maintained a correspondence with the Zubovs through theregular mails and had even sent parcels to them during the last yearbefore my expulsion. (Once N.I. directed a very amiable individual,one Andrei Dmitrievich Goliadkin, to me. He brought me a letterfrom N.I. and became one of the 227 witness whose accountswere used in The Gulag Archipelago. Later Goliadkin was the best manat my wedding to my second wife.(*) In this sense N.I. also participatedin the ceremony, indirectly playing that paternal role that hehad never been able to fulfill successfully in his own family.) Becauseof all their domestic problems, the Kuklins were unable to return toChernomorskoye for two or three years, but they made the tripagain in 1974, in the summer following my February expulsion.

That fall they brought back the following news, which eventuallyreached me in Zurich. On the very night I was arrested, in thewee hours of February 13, the Chekists descended on the Zubovhome with a search warrant. Dear God, how long will we have tosuffer these fiends? I don't know the details, but it is all too easy toimagine the knock on the door, the anxiety gripping the heart offormer prisoners, the helplessness of old age, the dressing gownshastily draped over frail shoulders. N.I. was almost stone deaf bynow and for forty, fifty, sixty years had witnessed over and overagain the same Chekists, the same ransacked homes. There werequestions about Solzhenitsyn. What do you have of his works? Theyrummaged through the place, confiscating letters (including thefew from Kok-Terek that had not been turned over to Reshetovskayabecause they were the most intimate ones) and probably othermessages from me that I had sent by private means, perhaps evenmy note of thanks for Victory Celebrations. (But no, they were morelikely to have burned all notes of that kind....)

As the proverb has it: a rope my have loops and twists aplenty,but it does have an end.

What could I have done to defend them? How could I havesaved them? By appealing to public opinion in the West? But was itnot already overburdened by all the grief beyond its own shores?

Perhaps the Chekists had heard of the double walls? They wouldthen have scrutinized every piece of furniture, every floorboard.That day they searched for the "principal hiding place" of my manuscriptsin a number of other locations besides the Zubov home,mostly in the remote provinces--for some reason they had concludedthat I kept everything hidden there. Their mistake! Themain depository of my papers was by now a safe in Zurich. Theyleft empty-handed, having accomplished little beyond making thepoor Zubovs miserable.

But perhaps this was the last major disruption that the Zubovshad to endure. N.I.'s obdurate mother had died some years earlier,the two daughters had gone to an early grave, the son was alive butnot present. E. A.'s only sister had moved away from the Crimea.Always so warm toward the younger generation, the Zubovs wereeffectively left without direct descendants. Every springs N.I. probablycontinues to give his brief course to the girls in the graduatingclass, hoping that their lives will not be ruined by ignorance. Attimes he is still summoned to help with deliveries in the maternityward. The rest of the time he goes about his household chores andtakes care of his wife, who can now scarcely ever leave her bed.

They did have a life. True, much of it had passed in prison, laborcamp, and exile, but it was a life. And not it was coming to an end.I sit down to write these pages and in my mind's eye all my loyalcompanions in arms, my collaborators, my helpers, almost all ofthem still alive and still in danger, gather around me like affectionateshadows. I see their eyes and listen intently to their voices--moreintently than I ever in the hear of battle.

Unknown to the world, they risked everything without receivingin recompense the public admiration that can mitigate evendeath. And for many of them the publication of these pages willcome too late.

The irony of it! Here I am safe and sound, while they continueto live with an ax suspended over their heads.

I do not have a presentment, a certainty, that I shall one day returnto Russia. But how many of them shall I still be able to see when Iarrive?

Continues...

Excerpted from Invisible Alliesby Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn Copyright © 1997 by Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Counterpoint
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 1887178422
• ISBN 13: 9781887178426
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 356