In the First Circle REVIEW
“War gives stupidity legitimate power over intelligence.”
“In the literature they studied, the world was full of everything but what you saw with your own eyes all around you.”
“But the charge brought against a man and his actual offense did not necessarily coincide; if he was towheaded, you could accuse him of blackheadedness—and give him just as long a sentence.”
“There, under the bedboards in the Butyrki Prison, the robot for the first time in his life began to wonder—which, as everybody knows, is bad for robots.”
“He had confessed—so obviously he was guilty! The summa summarum of Stalinist justice!”
Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel explores just what effect an unrestrained and unrestrainable totalitarian government can do to the humanity of millions of people, one individual person at a time. For this reason, it can be a difficult novel to follow, for it endeavors to trace the lines of totalitarianism’s impact upon dozens of different lives. We are given a glimpse into the damage done to the lives those on the top of the system, those managing the system, those coopted by the system, and those being exploited or abused by the system. No one goes unscathed. As a keen observer who lived through the catastrophe of Stalinism, Solzhenitsyn’s “dark gift” is his ability to expose that system and its destructiveness in minute detail and in a white-hot light, not only as a disaster for an entire community collectively, but as a disaster for each soul subjected to it personally. Totalitarianism destroyed people in very unique and personal ways.
In Solzhenitsyn’s short novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich he provides access into the lives of political prisoners in one of Stalin’s many Siberian gulags. In the First Circle, the same author focuses his gaze on Stalin’s sharashkas, places where highly capable engineers and men and women of talent were sentenced to go and work for no wages on projects of interest to the totalitarian regime. In this particular case, prisoner-engineers are working on ways to increase Stalin’s ability to spy on and imprison Soviet citizens. The title, In the First Circle, is a reference to the outer circle of hell in Dante’s Inferno – the place where Dante Alegre relegated ancient and noble, but unbaptized, philosophers and humanists.
“Maybe I’m dreaming? I feel as though I am in heaven!” says one of the prisoners in The First Circle, comparing the sharashka to the harsher conditions of the gulags. “No, my dear sir, you are still in hell,” his colleague responds,
“Only you’ve ascended to its highest and best circle—the first. You were asking what a sharashka is. You could say it was invented by Dante. He was at his wits’ end as to where to put the ancient sages. It was his Christian duty to consign those heathens to hell. But a Renaissance conscience couldn’t reconcile itself to lumping those luminaries in with the rest of the sinners and condemning them to physical torment. So, Dante imagined a special place for them in hell.”
What becomes clear from the many different biographical stories embedded in this novel is that whatever the quest for some cosmic justice that Karl Marx had hatched with his Communist Manifesto, it had been transformed into a soul destroying anti-humanistic juggernaut of injustice by the time Stalin had co-opted it. What one can learn from the whole debacle is that it may always be a mistake to give a government totalitarian power simply because *they say* they will make your world perfect if you do. Solzhenitsyn is unsparing in his indictment. “Professors get forty grams of the best butter, engineers twenty,” one of his characters says, “From each according to his ability, to each according to what is available.”
We can start at the very top. In one of his chapters, Solzhenitsyn brings us right into the world of comrade Stalin himself. Solzhenitsyn’s descriptions of Stalin are full of an acerbic wit detailing the cult of personality that Stalin built in the guise of social justice. “This man’s name burned on the parched lips of prisoners of war and the swollen gums of convicts,” Solzhenitsyn writes,
“It had replaced the previous names of a multitude of cities and squares, streets and avenues, palaces, universities, schools, sanatoriums, mountain ranges, ship canals, factories, mines, state farms, collective farms, warships, icebreakers, fishing boats, cooperative cobblers’ shops, nurseries—and a group of Moscow journalists had even suggested renaming the Volga and the moon after him.”
Solzhenitsyn lays the wood to the monstrosity of ego that was Joseph Stalin:
“His infallible knowledge of men had enabled the celebrant to collect a good team of authors for his biography. But however thorough they are, however they slave at it, no one else can write about your deeds, your leadership, your qualities as cleverly, with as much feeling, and as truthfully as you can yourself. So, Stalin sometimes had to summon this or that member of the team for a leisurely talk in order to inspect their manuscript, gently indicating where they had gone wrong and suggesting improvements in the wording. As a result, the book was now a great success. This second edition had come out in five million copies. For such a huge country? Not nearly enough. The third edition must be boosted to ten million, or twenty. It must be on sale in factories, schools, collective farms. It should be distributed to them directly, according to the number of employees.”
“Nobody knew as well as Stalin did how much his people needed this book. His people could not be left without continual instruction and edification. His people must not be kept in uncertainty. The Revolution had left them orphaned and godless, and that was dangerous. Stalin had spent twenty years doing his best to correct that situation. This explained the millions of portraits throughout the country (it was not Stalin himself who needed them; he was modest), the constant thunderous repetition of his glorious name, the unfailing mention of him in every article. The Leader himself had absolutely no need of all this; it no longer gave him any pleasure; he had grown sick of it long ago; it was his subjects who needed it, the simple Soviet people. As many portraits, as many repetitions of his name as possible. But he himself must appear seldom and say little …”
We can imagine Stalin building his own “Truth Social” or creating a “Disinformation Board” to protect his image. Earlier in the book, Solzhenitsyn writes of the portraits of Stalin that would be found in offices all over the Soviet Union.
“Even in the offices of simple investigators he was portrayed much larger than life, and in Abakumov’s office, the Leader of Mankind had been painted by a member of the school of Kremlin realists on a canvas five meters high, full length from his shoes to his marshal’s cap, ablaze with all his decorations, which in real life he never wore, most of them conferred on himself by himself …”
Listen to Solzhenitsyn’s indictment of Stalin as a prototype of personality cults before and since.
“It is rightly said that we reach maturity at forty. Only then do we finally understand how to live and how to behave. Only then did Stalin become aware of his greatest strength: the power of the unspoken verdict. Your mind is made up, but the person whose head depends on your decision must not learn it too soon. Time enough for that when his head rolls! Another strength was his habit of disbelieving what others said and attaching no importance to his own words. Say not what you mean to do (you may not know it until the moment comes) but what puts the other person at ease. A third rule for the strong man is never to forgive anyone who betrays you, and if your teeth are in someone’s throat, never to let go, though the sun rises in the west and portents appear in the heavens. A fourth rule for the strong man is not to rely on theory. Theory never helped anyone; you can always produce some sort of theoretical justification after the event. What you must always keep in mind is what fellow traveler you need for the present and at which milestone you must part company.”
And this:
“What made Stalin terrifying was that any slip in dealing with him was like mishandling a detonator: You would do it only once in your life; there was no chance to correct it. What made Stalin terrifying was that he never listened to excuses; he did not even make accusations. One end of his mustache twitched slightly, and sentence was passed somewhere inside there, but the condemned man was not informed of it; he went peacefully on his way, was arrested that night and shot before morning.”
Everything that happens to the lives of the dozens of people in the novel (and the millions of people that those people represent) is a consequence of this decision to elevate this single person to a position of unregulated authority. Trickledown misery. Why do human beings continue to think that authoritarianism will ever wind up working out any differently? In The First Circle, a step below Stalin in the chain of command is the character Abakumov. Once a month, he is required to report to Stalin about issues of state security. Despite his power and status and its attendant benefits, Abukumov lives in abject fear, constantly kicking himself for having risen so high that every benefit he enjoys is granted him at the price an equivalent terror.
“But once a month the Autocrat [Stalin] liked to sample in the flesh the man to whom he entrusted the defense of the world’s most advanced social order. Those interviews, an hour at a time, were the heavy price which Abakumov paid for all his power, all his high-and-mightiness. He lived, he enjoyed life, only from one interview to the next. When the appointed time came, his heart died within him; his ears turned to ice; he handed over his briefcase not knowing whether he would ever get it back; he bowed his bull head at Stalin’s office door, uncertain whether he would be able to raise it in an hour’s time."
A step below Abakumov is the character Innokenty Velodin, a Soviet diplomat who lives with all the benefits of his lofty position but who therefore lives in a constant state of moral crisis. Having access to the world outside of Stalin’s web of propaganda, Innokenty becomes painfully aware of how this empire he represents is an empire of lies and injustice. The novel begins as he struggles over a simple moral question: Should he tell the Americans that their nuclear secrets are about to be handed over by American spies to Stalin? Does he have a moral obligation to, as the German dissident, Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it, stop “bandaging the wounds of those ground under the wheels of injustice,” and “drive a spoke into the wheel itself”?
Several characters in the novel come to moments of enlightenment where they realize that they have been conscripted into a cult of injustice. Innokenty is one of them. His “come to Jesus” moment is initiated by reading old letters written by his own mother.
“He almost forgot that he was reading and seemed to hear clearly his mother’s frail voice. “What is the most precious thing in the world? I see now that it is the knowledge that you have no part in injustice. Injustice is stronger than you, it always was and always will be, but let it not be done through you.”
Solzhenitsyn documents what it is like to stop being a sheep and start being a human when describing the conversion of people like Innokenty Velodin. “The great truth for Innokenty used to be that we are given only one life,” we are told,
“Now, with the new feeling that had ripened in him, he became aware of another law: that we are given only one conscience, too.”
Conscience, it appears, will almost always be the first casualty of accepting totalitarianism.
One of the novel’s characters that evokes the most pathos is the political prisoner, Lev Rubin. Rubin is a rather pathetic case because, in spite of the fact that he has been unjustly incarcerated in this sharashka - and forced to work for nothing, he continues to believe that his status as a prisoner is a mere unintended and unfortunate accident. He still believes in the justice of the communist cause and makes it his mission to “convert” skeptics among the prisoners he works alongside. His idealism results in his obtuse blindness to what is actually going on in his own life and in the lives of his peers.
“As usual, they asked Rubin for the latest news. But he would have felt awkward offering a review of the past month. He could not let himself become a neutral purveyor of information, could not give up hope of reeducating these people. All he could do was to select for them, as he did for History (and, without realizing it, for himself), only those current events that confirmed that the high road had been accurately predicted, ignoring those that seemed likely to divert it into a quagmire.”
Truth and self-awareness, like conscience, are also the first casualties of totalitarianism. Rubin is always ready to defend the system that has been so unjust to him. “And anyway, you aren’t fair to the Bolsheviks,” he says in one political argument,
“You’ve never taken the trouble to read their most important books. They show the greatest respect and concern for world culture. They stand for an end to the tyranny of man over man, for the empire of reason. Above all, they are for equality! Imagine it: universal, total, absolute equality. No one will be more privileged than anyone else. No one will enjoy special advantages, either in income or in position. What could be more attractive than a society like that? Isn’t it worth making sacrifices for?”
Rubin judges the communists by what they say they will do; not by what they actually do. Rubin is that epitome of humans – the man who cannot see what is right in front of him because of the ideology that lays between his eyes and his critical faculties. Rubin is a true communist, a man who believes that he will write a document that outlines a plan for creating a moral foundation under this government – a government that is so obviously founded upon a complete and utter contempt for morality altogether. Solzhenitsyn provides a window into the idealism of the naïve Rubin in the following paragraph by letting us into Rubin’s thought processes.
“Yes, the foundations of morality had been sapped, and people, especially the younger generation, were losing their feel for what was right and noble. Societies, like fish, go rotten from the head. Who was there to set an example for the young? In older societies, people knew that a moral code needs safeguards: a church and a priest with authority. What Polish peasant woman even now takes any serious step in life without consulting her parish priest? As things were, the preservation of moral standards was perhaps much more important to the land of the Soviets than the Volga-Don Canal or the Angara Hydroelectric Station. What could be done about it? His ‘Proposal for the Establishment of Civic Places of Worship,’ already completed in first draft, was Rubin’s contribution.”
The only “civic places of worship” that would have stood a chance of governmental support in Stalinist Russia would have had a portrait of Stalin over the alter. But Rubin cannot see that. Nerzhin both pitties and respects him. Gleb Nerzhin is another character (modelled on Solzhenitsyn himself) a mathematician who has been put into the sharashka for actually seeing what Rubin is in denial about. Solzhenitsyn supplies us with this bit of background.
“Nerzhin was one of us, a Soviet man, only he had spent his whole youth poring over books, reading himself silly, and had got it into his muddled head that Stalin had distorted Leninism. No sooner had Nerzhin recorded this conclusion on a scrap of paper than he was arrested.”
Nerzhin is a man who, like millions of others, had fought in a patriotic war for his country against a Nazi government that threatened its existence. As a reward for being captured and then repatriated, he was prosecuted for being a German spy and sent to work in the camps. Solzhenitsyn observes that the Stalinists state had thus used the pretext of “defending the communist state” and the pursuit of some Quixotic cosmic justice to create a class of people who did the work for nothing and another class of people who did nothing for work but watch the imprisoned workers. Stalin did something thought impossible. He brought slavery back to a world that thought such a thing was banished. “Strictly speaking he was not capable of work but only of management,” the author describes one apparatchik.
“In accordance with the Constitution, free personnel had a great variety of rights, among them the right to work. This right, however, was limited by the eight-hour day and by the fact that their labor created no added value, consisting solely in watching prisoners. Whereas the prisoners, though deprived of all other rights, had an ampler right to work—up to twelve hours a day.”
In Stalinist Russia, Nerzhin notes, compliance is a virtue while competence is often a handicap (if it is expressed without compliance). “His whole career had worked out in such a way that thinking had always brought setbacks,” we read of the earlier mentioned bureaucrat, Abukumov, who realizes that “zealous subordination had always brought gain.” “Abakumov,” the novel records, “therefore tried to avoid mental exertion as far as possible.” “Russia, taking off for the first time toward a freedom never before seen,” Solzhenitsyn asserts, “immediately came to an abrupt stop and plunged into the worst of tyrannies. No one has ever managed it at the first attempt.” This is a society where people at the top can kill you for telling them the truth or for lying to them and so you tell the truth or tell lies based on which grants more prospective survival value to you in that very moment. Nadya, Nerzhin’s wife is used as a representative of what a system based on constant lies and lying does to people.
“She [Nadya] used to be so cheerful! But five years of lying leaves its mark. Five years of continually wearing a mask that cramps and pinches your face, hardens your voice, and numbs your thought.”
Solzhenitsyn is unsparing in his warnings to the West through this novel. His is a rather conservative perspective crying like a voice in the wilderness, “Do not ignore what the framers of your Constitution knew about humans and power.” “There are no unexplored countries on the planet Philosophy,” his character Nerzhin says, “I turn the pages of the wise men of old, and I find my own most recent thoughts.” “Once the bell stops ringing, once the tuneful sounds fade, you can never call them back,” one of the characters says of Stalin’s destruction of the Orthodox church, “But all the music is in them. Do you understand?” Solzhenitsyn insists that in a totalitarian state, there will always be people worse off and better off than you but neither group will be free. One gets inequality in human society. Period. Full stop. The question is, “will it be inequality with or without freedom?” Those are the only two choices. The best that the system of sharashkas offered these thousands of people of merit was a temporary reprieve from frostbite, hunger, and deprivation. Toward the end of the novel, as the investigation into Innokenty’s betrayal narrows down the potential sources, Stalin’s “justice department” expresses its utter disregard for justice. “Arrest every one of the bastards,” the man in charge of the investigation says of the half dozen possible suspects, “Why beat your brains out over it? What are seven people? Ours is a big country; we won’t run out of population!” And on the outskirts of Moscow, a prison enslaves some of the most brilliant of Russian engineers and mathematicians and innovators giving them almost nothing besides an impoverished existence separated from their families as a reward.
“Suburban Muscovites or strollers in Ostankino Park could have no idea how many remarkable lives, thwarted ambitions, aborted passions . . . and secrets of state were crammed together in a red-hot, smoldering mass in that isolated old building on the edge of town.”
Having fulfilled their purpose, the engineers that have provided the tools for Stalin’s police state to apprehend even more dissenters, the prisoners of the sharashka, are shipped off to Siberia in food trucks that reporters from the West do not realize are actually prison transports. While “the news anchor’s histrionic voice boomed out from loudspeakers, . . . Gleb’s fellow citizens huddled together on the pavement like trusting sheep” Solzhenitsyn writes of what happened to him and his country. But, Lev Rubin insists that the totalitarianism that so ruthlessly oppresses everyone is only a temporary thing and not the thing itself.
“Look, my friend,” said Rubin more gently, “look at it in historical perspective.”
“To hell with your perspective!” says Nerzhin,
“I want to live now, not ‘in the long term’! I know what you’re going to say! It’s just a matter of bureaucratic distortions; this is a transitional period, a temporary state of-affairs—but this transitional order of yours makes my life impossible; it tramples my soul underfoot; that’s what your transitional system does, and I won’t defend it, not being an imbecile!”
At one point in time, a debate erupts between the prisoners about the sacrifices that they are all making. On one side are the idealists led by Lev Rubin. On the other side are the realists led by Gleb Nerzhin and a prisoner by the name of Sologdin. The argument centers on whether or not the whole idea of equality is a chimera and a ruse, justifying an inequality greater than nature itself allows for. Here is what that debate sounds like:
“Nerzhin defended himself. “Don’t blame me, friends! Look, when I was growing up there were red banners flapping overhead, with ‘Equality’ in golden letters! ‘Equality.’ Since when, of course—”“Oh no, not equality again!” Sologdin growled.“What have you got against equality?” Abramson looked indignant.“Nothing, except that it doesn’t exist in the natural world! People are not ‘born equal’; that’s a myth invented by those idiots . . . those . . . those know-italls” (you had to guess that he meant the Encyclopedists). “They had not the least understanding of heredity. People are born unequal spiritually, unequal in willpower, unequal in ability.”“Unequal in possessions, unequal in social status.” Abramson took up the tale, mimicking Sologdin. “Well, where did you ever see equality of possessions? Where did you ever manage to create it?” Sologdin was getting heated. “There never was such a thing, and there never will be! It’s unattainable except by beggars and saints!”
Lev Rubin tries to get Nerzhin to surrender his skepticism. Nerzhin tries to get Lev Rubin to surrender his idealism.
“’When you enter the classless society, your hatred will still prevent you from recognizing it.’ Rubin challenges. “But right now—is it classless now?” Nerzhin responds angrily. ‘Give me a straight answer just this once! Just for once, don’t dodge the question. Is there or is there not a new class, a ruling class?’How difficult Rubin found it to answer that very question! He could see for himself that there was such a class. And that if it entrenched itself, it would deprive the Revolution of all sense and meaning. But no shadow of weakness, no hint of uncertainty, troubled the lofty brow of this true believer.‘It doesn’t take much intelligence to realize that this is a transitional bureaucratic group, and that as the state withers away—' Rubin interjects.‘Wither away?’ Sologdin yelled. ‘Those people? Voluntarily? They won’t go away till they’re slung out by the scruffs of their necks!’”
Solzhenitsyn seeks to ring alarm bells with this novel. To awaken people from whatever dull stupor has caused them to hand their brains over to the will of people like Stalin. His voice, spoken below in the experience of Innokenty Volodon is the voice of Socrates, of Martin Luther, of Immanuel Kant, of Frederick Douglas, and Gandhi, and Martin Luther King and a small host of prophets throughout history who have said to us, “Buy the truth and sell it not” (Proverbs 23:23)
“He found, though, that even reading was a special skill, not just a matter of running your eyes along the lines. He discovered that he was a savage, reared in the caves of social science, clad in the skins of class warfare. His whole education had trained him to take certain books on trust and reject others unread. From boyhood he had been sheltered from erroneous books and had read only those that were warranted sound, so that he had got into the habit of believing every word, of submitting without question to the author’s will. When he began to read authors who contradicted one another, his resistance was low, and he could not help surrendering to whichever of them he had read last. What he found most difficult of all was to lay down his book and think for himself.”
“All that was left to him, Nerzhin decided, was to be himself,” Solzhenitsyn tells us of his own journey (through the character of Nerzhin) to a life of dissent and eventually exile. And in so doing, he tells us exactly what Ralph Waldo Emerson told Americans 200 years ago in his essay, Self Reliance..
“Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”
There is much more to be gleaned from this novel than has been represented above. It took over 30 hours to listen to it. There were many more characters whose lives are used as a foil for examining totalitarian government. There is a line in the novel where Solzhenitsyn observes that real people living real lives are always more complicated than fictional people in novels. It may well be that the complexity of this novel’s character arcs, while prohibitive to most readers, is essential to his point in the end. There is great danger in trying to over-simplify life, to reduce it to absolute black and white so as to be understood completely by the lazy. “All questions having to do with society are answered by analysis of the class situation,” the characters in this novel had been educated to believe. They would have been taught that everything works in a dialectic. There are exploiters and the exploited. Nothing between. What I call “the prison of two alternatives.”
“In Lenin’s time, if you’d said, ‘Who is not with us is not necessarily against us,’ or something of that sort, you would have been expelled from the Party that very minute. Well . . . that was the Dialectic for you.”
Totalitarianism thrives on the criminalization of nuance. There is a reason why the framers of the American Constitution made freedom of religion, speech, the press, and assembly the cornerstone of American rights. And there is a reason we should protect it as though our lives depended on it for as Solzhenitsyn asks in the novel, “If we live in a state of constant fear, can we remain human?”
Question for Comment: Is the offer of a perfect world in exchange for a life without or with less freedom ever to be trusted? Or is the defense of freedom simply a rationalization for a desire to freely exploit others with impunity?
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