Pun Salad

As a good young conservative, I read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle at some point in the late 60's/early 70's. As it turns out, that was a version that Solzhenitsyn himself censored in hopes that it could get published in the Soviet Union. That didn't happen, but it did make it out to the West. But it wasn't the story he really wanted to tell.

This slightly-retitled version is the restored original, with some revisions. I was prompted to buy it when it was selected by Russ Roberts for the EconTalk Book Club. And, although this wasn't part of my decision, we also just celebrated the 100th anniversary of Solzhenitsyn's birth. Due to that, there's been a lot of other recent web content relevant to the book and its author. See, for example:

• Solzhenitsyn's 'In The First Circle' A Surprisingly Appropriate Advent Read by Michael Sikorski at the Federalist;
• Solzhenitsyn’s Literary Ascent by Jessica Hooten Wilson at Law and Liberty;
• Solzhenitsyn: A Centennial Tribute ; Reflections on totalitarianism's greatest critic Daniel J. Mahoney at City Journal

The book is set in the final few days of 1949, mostly around the inhabitants Marfino sharashka, a special prison on the outskirts of Moscow where technically-skilled prisoners are imported from the far reaches of Gulag Archipelago to work on projects for the state. It's relatively endurable, but it is the "First Circle" of Hell (see Dante), where the prisoners ("zeks") are always under the explicit threat of being returned to the Gulag if they fail to cooperate.

Most notably: in the first chapter, a disillusioned diplomat, Volodin, has been informed of an upcoming transfer of US atomic bomb secrets to a Soviet agent. He doesn't want to see that technology in the hands of Stalin, so he makes a desperate call from a public phone booth to the US embassy in Moscow. Unfortunately, the call is being monitored, taped, and nearly immediately terminated by Soviet security.

So the technical problem is dumped on the zeks of Marfino: here's the tape, here are the suspects, can you match up the voice to the guy we should arrest?

Well, we kind of know how things turned out: the Soviets got the A-bomb (although they already tested it by the timeframe of the book). And the world got a lot more dangerous.

The novel is told from a number of perspectives: Volodin's, the zeks', the families, and even Joe Stalin's. (You will not be shocked, I hope: Solzhenitsyn's take on Stalin is devastatingly bleak.)

Somewhat surprisingly, the book contains a lot more humor than I remembered. It's very dark, bitter, sarcastic humor, but nonetheless. There's an episode where Eleanor Roosevelt is duped by a Potemkin-village prison; another where a van transporting prisoners off to the Gulag, disguised as a food delivery truck, fools a rosy-eyed reporter for Libération, a fellow-travelling French newspaper.

Here's a description of how one hapless prisoner, Ivan Feofanovich Dyrsin, wound up at the sharashka:

His original conviction was itself an absurdity. He had been jailed early in the war for "anti-Soviet agitation," denounced by neighbors who coveted his apartment (and subsequently obtained it). It became clear that he had engaged in no such agitation—ah, but he might have done so, since he listened to German radio. He had in fact never listened to German radio—but he might have done so, since he had an illegal German radio in the house. In fact, he had no such radio—but he might very well have had one, since he was a radio engineer, and information received led to the discovery of a box containing two valves [vacuum tubes] in his apartment

It's not an easy book to read: 741 very dense pages, dozens of characters. And there's the normal problem with Russian literature: each character has a variety of patronymic names, good luck keeping them straight. (There's a cast of characters at the beginning of this edition, and you might want to bookmark it.)