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"The circular upper hall with its white cupola is bathed in electric light, and from the depths of the station, along two parallel escalators, Muscovites rise to meet us in serried ranks. They all seem to look at me as if expecting me to shout at least one word of truth. Why am I silent? ... Because these Muscovites standing on the escalator stairs are not numerous enough; my cry would be heard by 200, perhaps 400 people. But what about my 200,000,000 compatriots? I have a vague premonition that one day I will scream out to all those 200,000,000. But for the moment I do not utter a sound, and the escalator carries me irresistibly to the nether world."
Bitter Paradox. Gifted with near-total recall, Solzhenitsyn set out to develop his powers of observation while in captivity. In the monotonous daily routine of his first weeks in Lubyanka, he noted that "the events are tiny, but for the first time in your life you learn to examine them under a magnifying glass." For the first time, too, he encountered the victims of Soviet terror whom he would meticulously interview for the next 23 years. He was struck by a bitter paradox: prison offered the possibility of discussing freely what was unthinkable "outside." Meetings with prisoners led him, for the first time, to question his faith in Marx and Lenin. One old-time convict, a former associate of Lenin's, told him: "You're a mathematician. Don't forget Descartes. Subject everything to doubt. Everything."
Solzhenitsyn also became aware at that time of alternatives to Communism. From an Estonian lawyer he heard about the democracy that was finally crushed by the Soviets in 1944. "I had never before dreamed that I would become interested in Estonia or bourgeois democracy," he writes. "It was not clear why, but I began to like it all, and the new information was stored away in my mind." His education continued as he learned of the mass arrests that had swept millions of peasants, as well as hundreds of thousands of party members and Soviet intellectuals into prison camps in the 1920s and '30s. He memorized hundreds of grim stories told by the survivors. He also noted the methods of police interrogators, often so cynical that they did not even bother to disguise their disbelief in the confessions they wrung out of their victims.
Scope of Evil. After a few weeks in Lubyanka, the seeds of doubt had been planted in the mind of the fervent young Marxist. But it was only after he was transferred from Lubyanka to another Moscow prison, Butyrki, that Solzhenitsyn began to perceive the scope of the evil that had befallen his country. In Butyrki, he met the first contingent of Russian soldiers and civilians who had been captured by the Germans during the war. These people were now being repatriated—straight into Stalin's prisons and camps. Nearly 2 million of the 5.7 million prisoners of war had died of hunger and mistreatment in the Nazi camps.
Now Solzhenitsyn began to hear the appalling stories of the survivors. Recalling one of the horrors recounted to him by an ex-prisoner, Solzhenitsyn writes, "A crazed P.O.W. might have crawled up to me, too, as I was dying, and gnawed the flesh off my elbow ... Listening to such things, the story of my own arrest seemed to me insignificant."