Gulag (7 page)

The émigré socialists could and did agitate on the prisoners’ behalf, just as they had before the Revolution. Immediately after the Bolshevik coup, several celebrated revolutionaries, including Vera Figner, the author of a memoir of life in Czarist prisons, and Ekaterina Peshkova, the wife of the writer Maxim Gorky, helped relaunch the Political Red Cross, a prisoners’ aid organization which had worked underground before the Revolution. Peshkova knew Dzerzhinsky well, and corresponded with him regularly and cordially. Thanks to her contacts and prestige, the Political Red Cross received the right to visit places of imprisonment, to talk to political prisoners, to send them parcels, even to petition for the release of those who were ill, privileges which it retained through much of the 1920s.
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So improbable did these activities later seem to the writer Lev Razgon, imprisoned in 1937, that he listened to his second wife’s stories of the Political Red Cross—her father had been one of the socialist prisoners—as if to “an unbelievable fairy tale.”
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The bad publicity generated by the Western socialists and the Political Red Cross bothered the Bolsheviks a great deal. Many had lived for years in exile, and were therefore sensitive to the opinions of their old international comrades. Many also still believed that the Revolution might spread to the West at any moment, and did not want the progress of communism to be slowed by bad press. By 1922, they were worried enough by Western press reports to launch the first of what would be many attempts to disguise communist terror by attacking “capitalist terror.” Toward this end, they created an “alternative” prisoners’ aid society: the International Society to Aid the Victims of Revolution—MOPR, according to its Russian acronym—which would purportedly work to help the “100,000 prisoners of capitalism.”
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Although the Berlin chapter of the Political Red Cross immediately denounced MOPR for trying to “silence the groans of those dying in Russian prisons, concentration camps and places of exile,” others were taken in. In 1924, MOPR claimed to have four million members, and even held its first international conference, with representatives from around the world.
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The propaganda made its mark. When the French writer Romain Rolland was asked to comment upon a published collection of letters from socialists in Russian prisons, he responded by claiming that “There are almost identical things going on in the prisons of Poland; you have them in the prisons of California, where they are martyrizing the workingmen of the IWW; you have them in the English dungeons of the Andaman Islands ...”
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The Cheka also sought to ameliorate the bad press by sending the troublesome socialists farther away from their contacts. Some were sent, by administrative order, into distant exile, just as the Czarist regime had once done. Others were sent to remote camps near the northern city of Arkhangelsk, and in particular to one set up in the former monastery of Kholmogory, hundreds of miles to the north of Petrograd, near the White Sea. Nevertheless, even the remotest exiles found means of communication. From Narym, a distant part of Siberia, a small group of “politicals” in a tiny concentration camp managed to get a letter to an émigré socialist newspaper complaining that they were “so firmly isolated from the rest of the world that only letters dealing with the health of relatives or our own health can hope to reach their destination. Any other messages . . . do not arrive.” Among their number, they noted, was Olga Romanova, an eighteen-year-old Anarchist, who was sent to a particularly remote part of the region “where she was fed for three months on bread and hot water.”
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Nor did distant exile guarantee peace for the jailers. Almost everywhere they went, socialist prisoners, accustomed to the privileged treatment once given to political prisoners in Czarist jails, demanded newspapers, books, walks, unlimited right of correspondence, and, above all, the right to choose their own spokesman when dealing with the authorities. When incomprehending local Cheka agents refused—they were doubtless unable to tell the difference between an Anarchist and an arsonist—the socialists protested, sometimes violently. According to one description of the Kholmogory camp, a group of prisoners found that

. . . it was necessary to wage a struggle for the most elementary things, such as conceding to socialists and anarchists the ordinary rights of political prisoners. In this struggle they were subjected to all the known punishments, such as solitary confinement, beating, starving, throwing on to the wire, organized firing by the military detachment at the building, etc. It will suffice to say that at the end of the year the majority of the Kholmogory inmates could boast, in addition to their past records, hunger strikes totaling thirty to thirty-five days . . .
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Ultimately, this same group of prisoners was moved from Kholmogory to another camp at Petrominsk, another monastery. According to a petition they later sent to the authorities, they were greeted there with “rude shouts and threats,” locked six at a time into a tiny former-monks’ cell, given bunks “alive with parasites,” forbidden any exercise, books, or writing paper.
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The commander of Petrominsk, Comrade Bachulis, tried to break the prisoners by depriving them of light and heat—and from time to time by shooting at their windows.
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In response, they launched another endless round of hunger strikes and protest letters. Ultimately, they demanded to be moved from the camp itself, which they claimed was malarial.
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Other camp bosses complained about such prisoners too. In a letter to Dzerzhinsky, one wrote that in his camp “White Guards who feel themselves to be political prisoners” had organized themselves into a “spirited team,” making it impossible for the guards to work: “they defame the administration, blacken its name . . . they despise the honest and good name of the Soviet worker.”
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Some guards took matters into their own hands. In April 1921, one group of prisoners in Petrominsk refused to work and demanded more food rations. Fed up with this insubordination, the Arkhangelsk regional authorities ordered all 540 of them sentenced to death. They were duly shot.
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Elsewhere, the authorities tried to keep the peace by taking the opposite tack, granting the socialists all of their demands. Bertha Babina, a member of the Social Revolutionaries, remembered her arrival at the “socialist wing” of Butyrka prison in Moscow as a joyous reunion with friends, people “from the St. Petersburg underground, from my student years, and from the many different towns and cities where we had lived during our wanderings.” The prisoners were allowed free run of the prison. They organized morning gymnastic sessions, founded an orchestra and a chorus, created a “club” supplied with foreign journals and a good library. According to tradition— dating back to pre-revolutionary days—every prisoner left behind his books after he was freed. A prisoners’ council assigned everyone cells, some of which were beautifully supplied with carpets, on the floors and the walls. Another prisoner remembered that “we strolled along the corridors as if they were boulevards.”
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To Babina, prison life seemed unreal: “Can’t they even lock us up seriously?”
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The Cheka leadership wondered the same. In a report to Dzerzhinsky dated January 1921, a prison inspector complained angrily that in Butyrka prison “men and women walk about together, anarchist and counter-revolutionary slogans hang from the walls of cells.”
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Dzerzhinsky recommended a stricter regime—but when a stricter regime was brought in, the prisoners protested again.

The Butyrka idyll ended soon after. In April 1921, according to a letter which a group of Social Revolutionaries wrote to the authorities, “between 3 and 4 a.m., an armed group of men entered the cells and began to attack . . . women were dragged out of their cells by their arms and legs and hair, others were beaten up.” In their own later reports, the Cheka described this “incident” as a rebellion which had got out of hand—and resolved never again to allow so many political prisoners to accumulate in Moscow.
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By February 1922, the “socialist wing” of the Butyrka prison had been dissolved.

Repression had not worked. Concessions had not worked. Even in its special camps, the Cheka could not control its special prisoners. Nor could it prevent news about them from reaching the outside world. Clearly, another solution was needed, both for them and for all the other unruly counter-revolutionaries gathered in the special prison system. By the spring of 1923, a solution had been found: Solovetsky.

Chapter 2

“THE FIRST CAMP OF THE GULAG”

There are monks and priests,
Prostitutes and thieves.
There are princes here, and barons—
But their crowns have been taken away . . .
On this island, the rich have no home
No castles, no palaces . . .

—Anonymous prisoner’s poem written on the Solovetsky Islands, 1926
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LOOKING DOWN from the top of the bell tower in the far corner of the old Solovetsky monastery, the outlines of the Solovetsky concentration camp are still visible today. A thick stone wall still surrounds the Solovetsky kremlin, the central collection of monastery buildings and churches, originally built in the fifteenth century, which later housed the main administration of the camp and its central barracks. Just to the west lie the docks, now home to a few fishing boats, once crowded with the prisoners who arrived weekly and sometimes daily here during the short navigation season of the far north. Beyond them stretch the flat expanses of the White Sea. From here, the boat to Kem, the mainland transit camp from which prisoners once embarked for their journey, takes several hours. The ride to Arkhangelsk, the largest White Sea port and the regional capital, requires an overnight journey.

The Solovetsky archipelago, in the White Sea

Looking north, it is just possible to see the faintest outlines of Sekirka, the hilltop church whose cellars once contained Solovetsky’s notorious punishment cells. To the east stands the power station built by the prisoners, still very much in use today. Just behind it lies the stretch of land where the botanical garden used to be. There, in the early days of the camp, some of the prisoners grew experimental plants, trying to determine what, if anything, might usefully be harvested in the far north.

Finally, beyond the botanical garden, lie the other islands in the Solovetsky chain. Scattered across the White Sea are Bolshaya Muksalma, where prisoners once bred silver-black foxes for their fur; Anzer, site of special camps for invalids, for women with babies, and for former monks; Zayatsky Ostrov, the location of the women’s punishment camp.
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Not by accident did Solzhenitsyn choose the metaphor of an “archipelago” to describe the Soviet camp system. Solovetsky, the first Soviet camp to be planned and built with any expectation of permanence, developed on a genuine archipelago, spreading outward island by island, taking over the old churches and buildings of an ancient monastic community as it grew.

The monastery complex had served as a prison before. Solovetsky monks, faithful servants of the Czar, had helped incarcerate his political opponents— wayward priests and the odd rebel aristocrat among them—from the sixteenth century.
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The loneliness, high walls, cold winds, and seagulls that had once attracted a particular breed of solitary monk also appealed to the Bolshevik imagination. As early as May 1920, an article in the Arkhangelsk edition of the government newspaper
Izvestiya
described the islands as an ideal site for a work camp: “the harsh environment, the work regime, the fight against the forces of nature will be a good school for all criminal elements.” The first handful of prisoners began arriving that summer.
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Others, higher up the chain of command, were interested in the islands as well. Dzerzhinsky himself appears to have persuaded the Soviet government to hand the confiscated monastery property, along with the property of Petrominsk and Kholmogory monasteries, over to the Cheka—by then renamed the GPU, then the OGPU, or Unified State Political Administration—on October 13, 1923. Together they were christened the “camps of special significance.”
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Later, they would be known as “northern camps of special significance”:
Severnye Lagery Osobogo Naznacheniya
, or SLON. In Russian,
slon
means “elephant.” The name was to become a source of humor, of irony, and of menace.

In the survivors’ folklore, Solovetsky was forever after remembered as the “first camp of the Gulag.”
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Although scholars have more recently pointed out that a wide range of other camps and prisons also existed at this time, Solovetsky clearly played a special role not only in survivors’ memories, but also in the memory of the Soviet secret police.
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Solovetsky may have not been the only prison in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, but it was
their
prison, the OGPU’s prison, where the OGPU first learned how to use slave labor for profit. In a 1945 lecture on the history of the camp system, Comrade Nasedkin, then the system’s chief administrator, claimed not only that the camp system originated in Solovetsky in 1920, but also that the entire Soviet system of “forced labor as a method of re-education” began there in 1926.
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This statement at first appears odd, considering that forced labor had been a recognized form of punishment in the Soviet Union since 1918. It appears less odd, however, if we look at how the concept of forced labor evolved on Solovetsky itself. For although everyone worked on the island, prisoners were not, in the early days, organized into anything remotely resembling a “system.” Nor is there evidence that their labor was in any way profitable.

To begin with, one of the two main categories of prisoner on Solovetsky did not, at first, work at all. These were the approximately 300 socialist “politicals,” who had actually begun to arrive on the island in June 1923. Sent from the Petrominsk camp, as well as from Butyrka and the other Moscow and Petrograd prisons, they were taken upon arrival immediately to the smaller Savvatyevo monastery, several kilometers north of the main monastery complex. There, the Solovetsky guards could ensure that they were isolated from other prisoners, and could not infect them with their enthusiasm for hunger strikes and protests.

Initially, the socialists were granted the “privileges” of political prisoners that they had so long demanded: newspapers, books, and, within a barbed-wire enclosure, freedom of movement and freedom from work. Each of the major political parties—the Left Social Revolutionaries, the Right Social Revolutionaries, the Anarchists, the Social Democrats, and later the Socialist Zionists—chose its own leader, and occupied rooms in its own wing of the former monastery.
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To Elinor Olitskaya, a young Left Social Revolutionary arrested in 1924, Savvatyevo seemed, at first, “nothing like a prison,” and came as a shock after her months in the dark Lubyanka prison in Moscow. Her room, a former monks’ cell in what had become the women’s section of the Social Revolutionary wing, was light, clean, freshly washed, with two large, wide, open windows. The cell was full of light and air. There were, of course, no bars on the windows. In the middle of the cell stood a small table, covered in a white cloth. Along the wall were four beds, neatly covered with sheets. Beside each one stood a small night table. On the tables lay books, notebooks, and pens.

As she marveled at the surroundings, the tea served in teapots, and the sugar served in a sugar bowl, her cell mates explained that the prisoners had created the pleasant atmosphere on purpose: “we want to live as human beings.”
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Olitsksaya soon learned that although they suffered from tuberculosis and other diseases, and rarely had enough to eat, the Solovetsky politicals were notably well-organized, with the “elder” of each party cell responsible for storing, cooking, and distributing food. Because they still had special “political” status, they were also allowed to receive packages, both from relatives and from the Political Red Cross. Although the Political Red Cross had begun to have difficulties—in 1922 its offices were raided and its property confiscated—Ekaterina Peshkova, its well-connected leader, was personally still allowed to send aid to political prisoners. In 1923, she shipped a whole train wagon full of food to the Savvatyevo political prisoners. A shipment of clothes went north in October of the same year.
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This, then, was the solution to the public relations problem posed by the politicals: give them what they want, more or less, but put them as far away from anyone else as humanly possible. It was a solution that was not to last: the Soviet system would not long tolerate exceptions. In the meantime, the illusion was easy to see through—for there was another, far larger group of prisoners on Solovetsky as well. “Upon landing on the Solovets soil, we all felt we were entering a new and strange phase of life,” wrote one political. “From conversations with the criminals, we learned of the shocking regime which the administration is applying to them . . . ”
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With far less pomp and ceremony, the main barracks of the Solovetsky kremlin were also filling up quickly with prisoners whose status was not so assured. From a few hundred in 1923, the numbers grew to 6,000 by 1925.
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Among them were White Army officers and sympathizers, “speculators,” former aristocrats, sailors who had fought in the Kronstadt rebellion, and genuine common criminals. For these inmates, tea in teapots and sugar in sugar bowls were much harder to come buy. Or, rather, they were hard to come by for some, easier for others; for, above all, what characterized life in the “criminal” barracks of the Solovetsky special camp in these very early years was irrationality, and an unpredictability which began at the moment of arrival. On their first night in the camp, writes the memoirist and former prisoner Boris Shiryaev, he and other new arrivals were greeted by Comrade A. P. Nogtev, Solovetsky’s first camp commander. “I welcome you,” he told them, with what Shiryaev describes as “irony”: “As you know, here, there is no Soviet authority, only Solovestsky authority. Any rights that you had before you can forget. Here we have our own laws.” The phrase “there is no Soviet authority, only Solovetsky authority” would be repeated again and again, as many memoirists attest.
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Over the next few days and weeks, most of the prisoners would experience “Solovetsky authority” as a combination of criminal neglect and random cruelty. Living conditions in the converted churches and monks’ cells were primitive, and little care was taken to improve them. On his first night in his Solovetsky barracks, the writer Oleg Volkov was given a place on
sploshnye nary
, bunks that were in fact broad planks (of which we shall hear more later) on which a number of men slept in a row. As he lay down, bedbugs began falling on to him “one after another, like ants. I couldn’t sleep.” He went outside, where he was immediately enveloped by “clouds of mosquitoes . . . I gazed with envy at those who slept soundly, covered in parasites.”
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Outside the main kremlin compound, things were hardly better. Officially, SLON maintained nine separate camps on the archipelago, each one further divided into battalions. But some prisoners were also kept in even more primitive conditions in the woods, near the forestry work sites.
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Dmitri Likhachev, later to become one of Russia’s most celebrated literary critics, felt himself privileged because he had not been assigned to one of the many unnamed camp sites in the forest. He visited one, he wrote, “and became ill with the horror of seeing it: people slept in the trenches which they had dug, sometimes with bare hands, during the day.”
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On the outlying islands, the central camp administration exerted even less control over the behavior of individual guards and camp bosses. In his memoirs, one prisoner, Kiselev, described a camp on Anzer, one of the smaller islands. Commanded by another Chekist, Vanka Potapov, the camp consisted of three barracks and a guards’ headquarters, housed in an old church. The prisoners worked cutting trees, with no breaks, no respite, and little food. Desperate for a few days’ rest, they cut off their hands and feet. According to Kiselev, Potapov kept these “pearls” preserved in a large pile and showed them to visitors, to whom he also bragged that he had personally murdered more than 400 people with his own hands. “No one returned from there,” Kiselev wrote of Anzer. Even if his report exaggerates, it indicates the real terror which the outer camps held for the prisoners.
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