John Hospers

The
First Circle
ry, of failing mind, of loneliness ad-
THE FIRST CIRCLE. By Aleksandr I. vancing on him like a paralysis, filled
Solzhenitsyn. New York: Bantam him with helpless terror."
Books. 1969. 675 pp. $1.50 (pb). He was haunted too by the memory
of those whom he had killed, whose
books were now on the shelves beside
In The First Circle there occurs a him. "Here they were, on these
portrait of Josef Stalin in his final shelves-choked, shot, ground into ma-
years-a portrait more unforgettable nure in the camps, poisoned, burned,
than any historian's biography. We see killed in automobile accidents or by
the dictator ensconced in a secret resi· their own hand .... Every night they
dence outside Moscow, reading and re- offered him their pages, they shook
flecting until dawn, justifying his place their little beards, they wrung their
in history, ordering the arrest and im· hands, they spat on him, they
prisonment of others on the barest sus- wheezed, they cried out to him from
picion or no grounds at all except the shelves: 'We warned youl you
spite, and taking utmost precautions should have done it another way!' "
for his own safety. Like Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn has a re-
The aging dictator's vanity, his elab- markable ability to reproduce every
orate justifications to himself of his relevant visual and auditory detail. Of
own behavior, his suspicion of every- all the things one has read about Stal-
one, his paralyzing fear of death, his in's life, only Solzhenitsyn's portrait ce1vmg only censored mail (at infre-
fear lest perhaps his rejected childhood remains vivid and compelling, seared quent intervals), able to visit their
religion be true after all, his growing into the reader's memory forever. If wives only once a year for a half-hour
forgetfulness and senility-all this is The First Circle had accomplished period in the presence of a guard, con-
mercilessly portrayed, down to the last nothing but this, it would be well demned to a life of constant labor dur-
idiosyncratic detail of his mental proc- worth reading. ing their entire prison sentence-a sen-
esses and behavior. "The left side of But the portrait of Stalin is only a tence that is usually 25 years. The men
his head," writes Solzhenitsyn (p. very small part of the novel, no more have no hope at all of rejoining their
134), "seemed to be tightening at the noteworthy than any other. The novel families during their most fruitful
temple and pulling in that direction. Is about the inmates of a large prison, years; their children will grow up never
His chain of thoughts disintegrated. Mavrino, on the outskirts of Moscow seeing them; and in many cases their
With an empty stare he circled the (time: Christmas season 1949), in wives divorce them in order to have
room, hardly seeing the walls. Growing which several hundred trained men, some kind of life before old age
old like a dog. An old age without chiefly engineers and electricians, have comes.
friends. An old age without love. An been incarcerated for the purpose of The First Circle is a tale of lost
old age without faith. An old age with- making technological breakthroughs to youth, wasted energies, life under
out desire. He did not even need his be used by the Soviet government. The senseless and innumerable regulations
beloved daughter any longer, and she novel is about these men, their histo- and pointless tyranny. The only way
was permitted to see him only on holi- ries, their life in prison, their inter- Stalin comes into the story is that one
days. That sensation of fading memo- actions with one another. of the inmates discovers a process for
The prison rules are highly restric· whose approval a higher officer is
tive, and yet this is among the best of needed, who in turn needs the approv-
Contributing editor John Hospers is a all Soviet prisons: it is, in the language al of Abukamov, the assistant to Stal-
professor of phiiosophy at the Univer- of Dante's Inferno, the first (upper- in, who in tum must clear it with "the
sity of Southern California, and a lead- boss" himself. And thus, for some
ing libatarian scholar. He is the author
most) circle of hell-hence the title of
the book. Here the prisoners labor day pages, the moving finger of the narra·
uf Libertarianism and a number of
other books, and serves as an editor of after day, without compensation, un•· tive turns to Stalin, and then away
The Personalist, a philosophical jour- der constant threat of deportation, again.
nal. guarded carefully day and night, re- The structure of the novel is a thing
20 REASON/NOVEMBER 1976
of wheels within wheels. There are at and unforgettable. mean, not guilty?" is the reply (p.
least 30 major characters, whose histo- From it, we know not only the his- 592); "not guilty of anything at all?
ries cross and criss-cross throughout torical facts of what happened but The security organizations will find
the novel. Solzhenitsyn does not, as how it felt to the people involved in something." A couple of chapters la-
Dostoyevsky often does, introduce a it-from the dictator who ordered it ter, Volodin is arrested and taken to
character by devoting a whole chapter and the bureaucrats who administered the Lubiyanka, and there in a few hor·
to his background and history and it to the millions of victims whom it rifying chapters we learn of the tech-
then (as often as not) hardly bothering left lifeless or homeless. We learn how niques used, in windowless, airless
to reintroduce him again. Solzhenitsyn it feels to be imprisoned for a 25-year cells, to force compliance of prisoners
usually introduces a charjlcter quite sentence and never to see one's family and extract confessions from them be-
off-handedly through conversation again, to fear every knock at the door fore their execution. Any reader could
with another, already familiar, charac- of one's home, to be thrown into the be challenged to read these chapters
ter. He shows him in action for some Lubiyanka, into months of solitary and still be able to fix his mind on
time, and then he will devote a chapter confinement under blazing lights, anything else during the next few
to him (usually on his life before pris- one's personality gradually stripped days, so shattering is the impact of
on) that makes the character come away, leaving only a feeble organism Solzhenitsyn's description. And quite
alive before us and brings all his ac- who will do anything, tell anything, incidentally we learn that the other
tions previously depicted into sharp iust to receive a single bowl of thin suspect, who is innocent, has also been
and sudden focus. Each character is a soup or a promise not to be tortured arrested and executed.
continuing strand in the novel; once for a single day. In following through the many in-
introduced, he is usually not heard of The novel opens with a dramatic in- terrelated threads that constitute the
again for some time, during which cident in which a young diplomat, tapestry of this great novel, we learn
other actions and characters are por- Volodin, makes a telephone call to a many things about the Soviet Union
trayed. university professor warning him that that cannot help but shock us, though
The structure of the book is like he will soon be arrested. The connec- they are mentioned only in passing.
that of the later novels of Dostoyevsky For example: ( 1) Prisoners were sup-
(The Possessed, The Brothers Kara- posed to protest the conditions of po-
mazov) except that it is more carefully litical prisoners in Greece (p. 162).
organized: the fabric is just as com- who were sending telegrams from their
plex, but less given to character details Of all the things one cells about their sufferings to the parli-
that are irrelevant to the thrust of the aments of the world and the United
action. Every detail in Solzhenitsyn has read about Stalin's Nations, while even in the best prison
counts, and all the apparently loose life, only Solzhenitsyn's in Russia ("the first circle") the pris-
ends are tied together in the end. But oners were not permitted to send so
in his manner of description and char- portrait remains vivid much as a postcard to their wives.
acterization he is much more like the and compelling, seared (2) We learn (p. 387) how one of
Tolstoy of War and Peace, the novel the prisons was suddenly sterilized,
that this one most closely resembles. into the reader's carpeted, and otherwise sanitized,
In Dostoyevsky we get a vivid por- memory forever. ikons put on the wall, and the prison-
trayal of the inner life of the char- ers returned to this refurbished cell for
acters, but very little conception of ex- one day only, while an American rep-
ternal details-the look, the feel, and resentative of the United Nations came
the smell of the Russian earth in win- to visit. Much-impressed by the reli-
ter and in spring, the facial and gestur- tion is cut off, and Volodin suspects gious freedom she concluded existed
al details of the various characters, a that the secret police have tapped the in Russia from seeing the ikons and
feeling of the Russian landscape and line. The fear of it dogs his steps from impressed also by the cleanliness of
the changes of the seasons. Both Tol- that moment on, but we hear no more the cells and the lack of complaints by
stoy and Solzhenitsyn have a vivid eye of him for many pages. Fourteen chap- prisoners (they had been threatened
for this kind of detail. Solzhenitsyn is, ters later, we learn that the principal with Siberia if any of them dared com-
indeed, a 20th-century Tolstoy; that is new project at the Mavrino prison is plain), she returned to America to give
the quickest way to summarize him the phonetic separation of recorded a glowing account of Soviet prison
with any accuracy. sounds so that each individual's voice conditions-after which the prisoners
Just as Tolstoy's subject matter in pattern can be isolated. Volodin does were returned to the cell, 60 to a cell
his greatest novel was the impact on not reappear as a character in the dra- made for 20, meanwhile uncarpeted
Russian Iife of the Napoleonic invasion ma until some 400 pages later, when again, with the ikons removed.
of 1812, so Solzhenitsyn's in this nov- he is shown trying to drown his fears (3) One of the engineers at Mavrino
el is the impact on Russian life of the in alcohol at.a large diplomatic party. is called in by the warden on account
Stalin era, including the war, the col- In the next chapter, when the scene of his .wife's letters. The wife, being
lectivization of the land, and most of switches back to Mavrino and the married to a prisoner, can obtain no
all the secret police-the arrests in the speech-pattern project, we learn that legal employment; her diet and that of
night, the incarcerations and interro- among five suspects in the case of the her children consists of a few potatoes
gations, the prisons and the labor phone call to the professor, two voices a day; there is no fuel for the winter
camps strung out like an archipelago (of which Volodin's is one) may be- ("coal doesn't go to the people but to
of islands ("The Gulag Archipelago,'' long to the guilty person. The prose- the bo$585"). The commandant's ad-
to which Solzhenitsyn makes frequent cutor in charge says that in that event vice to ''the engineer, after demanding
reference in this novel) throughout the both will be arrested and executed. that he keep his wife from complain-
5,000-mile breadth of the Russian "But one of them is not guiltyl" says ing, is: "Tell her she should believe in
north. His picture of it is devastating the project's engineer. "What do you God. Why not? Otherwise what is all
NOVEMBER 1976/REASON 21
this? Where is it leading? Calm her only reprieved to Mavrino in order to A person of tremendous energy and
down, tell her you'll be coming soon." become an Informer within the prison. intelligence, Nerzhin tries to keep his
(4) We learn again and again about Ruska is supposed to report all conver- mind alert and uncorrupted through
the actual grounds of imprisonment in sations that could be construed as anti· the prison years, to survive as a full
Soviet Russia. One of the engineers in Soviet, but, being a warm, outgoing human being under the most impossi-
Mavrino had been "imprisoned for human being, he is unable to inform ble conditions. He helps other prison-
anti-Soviet propaganda, the result of a on them other than with tales so pre· ers to the limit of his ability. But in
denunciation cooked up by some posterous that the authorities see the end he too is defeated, shipped off
neighbors who wanted his apartment, through them. At last he announces to to a slave labor camp in the Arctic,
and afterward got it. It became clear his fellow prisoners that he is an in· where death in a short time is a virtual
subsequently that he had not engaged former, and his usefulness to the com- certainty. "Write I" entreats one of the
in any such propaganda, though he mandants is at an end. Finally he is prisoners as Nerzhin leaves. But "they
could have, since he listened to the taken from Mavrino, interrogated, both laughed .... In prison this re-
German radio. Then it turned out that beaten, and shipped back to Vorkuta, quest was a mockery. Correspondence
he didn't listen to the German radio, on a labor detail guaranteed soon to between the islands of Gulag did not
but he could have listened to it since end his life through starvation or freez- exist." (p. 660.) "We shall meet
he had a forbidden radio receiver at ing or exhaustion, in spite of his tre- again!" cries another, for whose rights
home. And when it appeared that he mendous energy and zest for life. as a prisoner Nerzhin had fought, even
didn't have any such radio receiver, it Most tellingly portrayed of all, per· at the price of hunger and punishment.
was still true that he could have had haps, is the mathematician Gleb "Where shall we meet again?" Nerzhin
one since he was a radio engineer by Nerzhin, 31, one of the most talented sighs. "At the Kotlas transit prison? At
profession." (p. 549.) And on the basis among the prisoners at Mavrino. We the lndigirika mines? I can hardly be-
of this last allegation he was first see him, interwoven among the lieve we'll run into each other strolling
imprisoned for 25 years. other characters, a reservoir of enor- along a city sidewalk, can you?"
Even more than the mastery of a mous energy, determined to keep his And so it is goodbye forever.
complex story, it is the gallery of char- mind and body functioning at full ca- "Yes," writes Solzhenltsyn (p. 673),
acterizations drawn by Solzhenitsyn "the taiga and the tundra awaited
that is unforgettable. One aspect of his them, the record cold of Oymyakon
genius is that, in spite of the large and the copper excavations of
number of characters and the absence Dzhezkazgan; pick and barrow; starva-
of any one of them from the narrative Solzhenitsyn is a tion rations of soggy bread; the hospi·
for long stretches, each one is indelibly tal; death. The very worst. But there
etched upon the mind of the reader by
20th-century was peace in their hearts. They were
the time the story is over. It is impos- Tolstoy-that is the filled with the fearlessness of those
sible in a brief review to provide even a quickest way to who have lost everything, the fearless-
sketch of the important characters; ness which it is not easy to come by,
but through them we learn of Russian summarize him with but which endures."
And so we say goodbye to the true
life during World War II, of what hap-
pened to those in the path of the Ger-
any accuracy. heroes of Russia, their greatness lost
man armies who (believing anything to forever through death in prisons, in
be better than Stalin's tyranny) joined mines, in labor camps. What grieves
the other side, of the grinding poverty the reader most is the thought of what
and mass starvation, of the fear and pacity even under prison conditions. could have been. The tragedy of The
dread of every family that one of them Gradually we learn of Nerzhin's in- First Circle, like all great tragedies
might at any moment be arrested and tense love for his wife, of the depth of from Aeschylus to the present, is the
never heard from again. his silent despair at his 25-year sen- tragedy of waste-the needless waste
One will not soon forget, for exam- tence. of human energy, human potential,
ple, the janitor at Mavrino prison, Spir- "Nerzhin had since adolescence been human life.
idon Yegorov, who weaves in and out hearing a mute bell-all the groans, There is no doubt, however, where
of the narrative until (pp. 452 ff.) two cries, shouts of the dying, carried by a Solzhenitsyn places the blame. It is
chapters are devoted to him: intelli- steady insistent wind away from hu- not with the bureaucrats who carry
gent, impervious to political propa- man ears .... At the age of 12 he had out the orders; it is not even with Stal-
ganda, devoted totally to his wife and gone through an enormous pile of in; it is with the intellectuals, the uto-
family, he does anything he is told, to lzvestiya as tall as he was, and he had pian theorists of socialism. In a little-
keep his family together. At last he is read about the trial of the saboteur en- noted passage (p. 267), Ruska Doronin
separated from his family: he and his gineers. From the very first, the boy declares: ''If I cried about everything,
wife and two children are sent in sepa- did not believe what he read. He did I wouldn't have enough tears. I'm not
rate railway cars to various Arctic la- not know why ... but he could clearly the only one. They sent me to
bor camps; he never hears from any of see that it was all a lie. He knew engi- Vorkuta-and what a bunch of thugs
them again. Because of his engineering neers in his friends' families, and he they have there! ... All Vorkuta de-
background he is transferred to Mav- could not imagine them committing pends on prisoners, the whole North-
rino, where .in "the first circle" he sabotage." (p. 234.) And so the main land. It's the fulfillment of Thomas
escapes the death that presumably purpose of his life becomes to under· More's dream."
overtakes the rest of his family. stand why-why it should be like this, "Whose dream? I'm sorry, there's
Unforgettable also is Ruska why it had happened, and how to stop so much I don't know."
Doronin, at 23 the youngest inmate of it. "He went about dreaming of the "Thomas More, the old fellow who
Mavrino, who spent part of his adoles- day he would aort everything wrote Utopls. He had the conscience
cence in Arctic labor camps and Is out,,.," to admit that society would always re-
22 REASON/NOVEMBER 1978
quire various kinds of menial and hard cow (for shipment to the labor "Bread.'' At the very end of the novel,
labor. No one would be willing to per- camps), in large windowless cars. But, a correspondent for a French news-
form them. Who should? More says Solzhenitsyn (p. 670), "the time paper, on the way to attend a hockey
thought about it and found the solu· had long since passed when lead-grey match in a Moscow stadium, sees the
tion: obviously there would be people or black prison vans poked through car that Is driving Nerzhin and the
in a socialist society, too, who dis· city streets, creating terror among the other prisoners to their doom. Having
obeyed the rules. They would get the citizens. After the war, the idea of seen several such can that day, he
menial and especially tough jobs. So building Black Marlu exactly like the writes for his Paris newspaper: "On
the camps were thought up by Thomas grocery vans had been born in some the streets of Moscow one often sees
More; It's an old Idea." genlut' mind, and they were painted vena filled with foodstuffs, very neat
As a final ironic touch, the prison· the same orange and light blue, with a and hygienically Impeccable. One can
ers are shipped from Mavrino to the algn letter on the side In four fan· only conclude that the provisioning of
various interrogation centers In Mos- guagea," reeding either "Meet'' or the capital is excellent." [iJ

NATIONAL SUICIDE:
MILITARY AID TO THE
SOVIET UNION
James J. Martin
more crucial in determining the effi·
NATIONAL SUICIDE: MILITARY cient staying power of an enemy'~
AID TO THE SOVIET UNION. By 1ntirt1 armed forces, or textile mach in·
Antony Sutton. New Rochelle: Arling- ery, which makes possible the ada·
ton House. 1973. 289 pp. $8.95. quate clothing of his total population.
Even toys may be defined as "war
goods" as a consequence of their
In 1937 and 1938 I was employed potential contribution to armament
as a paper handler in a major magazine workers' morale and productivity via
printing factory. The most interesting pacification of their children. The
member of the gang could, over a glass point in raising these matters is that
or two of grappa when the shift was Sutton's book provokes far more ques·
over, be induced to talk rather animat· tions than it answers.
edly about his experiences in Soviet SuttoJ1's account of the tidal wave
Russia a decade earlier, installing in of engineering genius and products
Communist textile mills the famous from the United States to the U.S.S.R.
knitting machines produced in a small is impressive, though one might be·
New Hampshire city. It was my first come confused as to whose "suicide"
near-direct contact with the subject in- he is suggesting-among those supply-
volved in a more special fashion in ing the Soviets with military and naval
Antony C. Sutton's National Suicide: muscle are most of the other industrial
Military Aid to the Soviet Union. countries of the world as well.
In one sense the supply of any pro- He also is not clear anywhere as to surely have more than casual impact
duct to someone construed as an which segment of the American sys- on this program. (The entry of Big
enemy can be designated as of ulti· tem is responsible for this. At one Agriculture into the picture is a recent
mate military consequence, as in the place he charges the executive: "All development, though the pressure to
British blockade against Napoleon, for presidential administrations, from that engage in massive grain exports to the
instance. It may therefore be rather of Woodrow Wilson to that of Richard Communists is the most obvious of all
sophistical to discriminate between the Nixon, have followed a bipartisan the "special interests" in action.)
supply of machine guns as against pro- foreign policy of building up the News that Americans were building
saic foodstuffs, which can be even Soviet Union." In other places he finds the largest truck manufacturing plant
the State, and Commerce Departments in the world a few hundred miles east
the key factors, and at still another the of Moscow on the Kama River was
James J. Martin received his M.A. and Congress is found to be making the followed early this year by a release
Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. basic decision& resulting in massive from the Senate Committee on
He is the auth01 of a number of works supply of strategic goods to the Foreign Relations, listing nearly 600
of revisionist history, including Ameri- U.S.S.R. major firms now trading with Soviet
can Liberalism and World Politics, and
he recently edited (with Leonard Though he names scores of firms in· Russia. The firms are fronted by a
Liggio) a collectzon of essays on New volved in this enterprise, Sutton is ex- prestigious committee of 26 top fig-
Deal foreign policy, Watershed of Em· tremely gentle in deeling with Big ures In U.S. business and finance, in·
pire. Business and Big Finance, force• thet eluding the heads of the U.S. Chamber
NOVEMBER 1976/REASON 23

'•,''.