The uncut First Circle

When after opening my Solzhenitsyn Reader, one of the first sections I looked at was the excerpts from First CIrcle. And I got a real shock. It turns out that the First Circle, as I have known and loved it for years, was not what Solzhenitsyn originally wrote. He shortened it by several chapters, and made two major plot changes to make it more likely for Soviet censorship to approve its publication (which it never did). I think I must have been aware of this fact, but it hadn't fully registered, at any rate I had no idea of the extent of the change.

The big plot change is right at the beginning of the story. Innokenty Volodin, a young Soviet diplomat makes a phone call to warn an old family doctor of his impending arrest, is later arrested himself. This is the cut version. In the uncut version, Volodin has learned specifics of a Soviet plot to get US atomic secrets, and calls the US embassy to warn them (and doesn't get an intelligent response from the Americans). Immensely different.

My first reaction was just like any book fan when the Hollywood version changes a key plot point -- dismay and shock. The problem with this reaction, is the change wasn't from some sappy director, it was from Solzhenitsyn himself, and the familiar version was actually not the original.

As I thought about it further, I could see that this alternate version could possibly work, but I'm still not totally convinced. What works better in the uncut version, is Rubin is a more sympathetic character. He is now cooperating with the MGB in trying to find someone betraying real Soviet secrets to a foreign power, not someone helping a friend avoid arrest. Also, in the uncut chapter 1, Solzhenitsyn develops the image of the Lubyanka as a battleship further, with Volodin imagining himself sending a torpedo to sink the battleship.

But here's why I think its implausible. First, even if Volodin is MGB instead of foreign service (as the uncut excerpts make clear), I think it would be highly unlikely he'd know details of getting US atomic secrets. Surely the operation would be more compartmentalized than that. Second, the timing doesn't really work. First Circle is set in December 1949, and the Soviet Union already had their first sucessful atomic bomb test earlier that year. So for Volodin to think of warning the US about Soviets getting their atomic secrets, thinking to himself 'If the communists got the atom bomb, the planet was doomed', doesn't quite fit. Soviet espionage into western bomb secrets obviously did continue after the first successful Soviet bomb, but it would be unlikely for someone to think of saving humanity by denying the USSR those later atomic secrets, I would think.

"But implausible or not, that's what really happened" is one counterargument to my objections. Both D.M. Thomas in his biography, and someone on the Solzhenitsyn Yahoo list pointed out the same thing -- this is factual. Kopelev (the basis for Rubin) was assigned to analyzed voice prints to track down someone who called the US and Canadian embassies to warn about Soviet attempts to get atomic secrets. But a novel with an incident truly based on fact can still appear implausible, and could still be a weakness in the novel. Although in consideration, maybe I will limit my objection to this. It comes across as unrealistic for Volodin to be thinking 'If the communists got the atom bomb, the planet was doomed' in December 1949 when the Soviets had already had a successful bomb test. But if he had thought 'If the communists got the atom bomb, the planet was doomed. Maybe it was already too late, but maybe that first test was luck and they couldn't build another', my objection about the chronology would be answered.