ABSTRACT
For the first few days of his journey, Solzhenitsyn retraced the route that he had followed three years earlier in coming to Ekibastuz, only this time in reverse: north to the old-fashioned prison of Pavlodar, north-east to Omsk, with its shades of Dostoyevsky, and east to Novosibirsk. Again there were the same surly armed guards, the howling dogs, the crowded Stolypins. It was hard to believe that all this presaged release. But in Omsk a good-natured warder, marvelling at their good fortune, informed five of them that they were being sent south. And in Novosibirsk they were put on a train that did indeed crawl south—through the dusty wilderness of east Kazakhstan, skirting Lake Balkhash, to Alma-Ata. From there they travelled due west to the regional administrative centre of Dzhambul, on the very border of Kirghizia, midway between Alma-Ata and Tashkent.
