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"What could we do? If there had been two it might have been different." Calmly, Solzhenitsyn packed a razor, a toothbrush and warm winter clothes and kissed baby Stepan goodbye. The men took him to Moscow's Lefortovo Prison, familiar to readers of Gulag as one of the most terrible of Russia's prisons.
What followed was like a scene from Gulag. Solzhenitsyn was first stripped and searched, then dressed in prison garb. He was questioned for several hours by a team of interrogators but refused to answer questions or sign the usual official report of the interrogation.
He was told that the charge against him was treason, for which the maximum punishment is death. Just as another great Russian writer, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, was placed before a sham firing squad 125 years ago, so was Solzhenitsyn subjected to a similarly cruel mockery.
Although the Soviets planned all along to deport him to the West, he was locked in a cell that night under the threat of the death penalty. At 1 p.m. the following day, he was ordered to dress in prison-issue street clothes and driven to Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport. Only when the jet landed in Frankfurt did he know his destination.
Four and a half hours before Solzhenitsyn's departure, Soviet Ambassador to Bonn Valentin Falin had called on the West German Foreign Ministry to inform them of Solzhenitsyn's banishment and formally ask if the writer would be accepted. Bonn quickly agreed, and indeed there was speculation that the arrangement might have been worked out in advance between Moscow and Bonn. Only twelve days earlier, in a curious aside in a speech about freedom of expression, Chancellor Willy Brandt had stated: "Solzhenitsyn would be able to live freely and work unhampered here."
Solzhenitsyn's host in Germany was a friend and fellow Nobel prizewinner, Novelist Heinrich Boll. The morning after he arrived in Germany, Solzhenitsyn posed for photographers and even autographed copies of Gulag that were thrust at him by newsmen. Still, he refused to answer questions. "Genug, genug [Enough]," he said in German, adding in Russian, "I have given enough in my own country. There I spoke. Here I remain silent."
Among his first visitors was Dimitri Panin, who had been in prison with him and was the model for the character Sologdin in Solzhenitsyn's novel The First Circle. Panin, who now lives in Paris, later talked with TIME Correspondent David Tinnin. He said he found the author "very nervous, tired and restlessly pacing up and down," but that he seemed to relax somewhat after managing to get a telephone call through to his wife in Moscow. After two days in Langenbroich, Solzhenitsyn took a train to Zurich with his Swiss lawyer, Fritz Heeb. Although the writer chose to remain silent about his plans, Heeb told reporters that he thought the Solzhenitsyns would ultimately settle somewhere in Scandinavia.