CHAPTER IV
BOUND FOR THE "SOLOVKY"
Finally "Amnestied!" — The "Shpana" — A Lucky Escape — Classification of Prisoners — Madame Kameneff's Protegees.
At last, on November 30th, 1923, i.e., seven months after I had been "amnestied" by the Batoum Tcheka, the examining judge of the Vladikavkaz Tcheka finally "amnestied" me in the following terms:
"By order of the administrative exile commission of the People's Commissariat for Home Affairs, Citizen S. A. Malsagoff, having been found guilty of offences against the State of the nature contemplated by Clauses 64 and 66 of the Criminal Code of the R.S.F.S.R. — Clause 64, 'organisation of terrorist acts in co-operation with persons outside Russia,' and Clause 66, 'espionage for the benefit of the international bourgeoisie' — is exiled to the concentration camp in the Solovetsky Islands for a term of three years."
I and several others who had been "amnestied" were sent north by easy stages. The first halting-place was Rostoff. Here I first met face to face the so-called shpana — the ordinary criminals who play so singular a rôle in all the Russian prisons, camps and places of exile.
Robbers on a large and a small scale, burglars, murderers, horse-thieves, coiners, vagabonds — are flung in whole divisions from one prison to another, serve their term or escape by bribing their guards, but soon get into gaol again. Almost all are completely destitute of clothing, always starving, and covered with lice. The guards beat them over the head with their rifle butts, they murder one another with bricks wrenched out of the prison walls. Completely bestialised, wherever they go they gamble away their modest payok (food ration) and their last pair of trousers at cards. This loss they make good by robbing newly-arrived prisoners belonging to the political categories. The stolen things are sold through the overseers of the prisons and camps, and the money obtained for them is spent on drink.
On entering the room allotted to us in Rostoff prison, I was struck dumb with consternation; we were met by nearly a hundred shpana with deafening yells and menacing cries. In a corner sat five men of the educated classes, including a colonel on the General Staff; the shpana had stripped them naked in one night.
Luckily there were men among us who had been through every imaginable experience. One of them drew a chalk line on the floor, dividing the room into two spheres of influence, political and criminal, and shouted to the shpana:
"If one of you crosses this line, I'll kill him!"
He was a man of gigantic stature; the shpana were intimidated. When night came, we posted sentries on the frontier of our sphere of influence. But for events taking this turn, the money and other things which our relations had managed to send us when on the way to Rostoff — by means of substantial bribes to the guards — would have been stolen from us.
From Rostoff we were sent to the Taganka in Moscow.
In the Taganka prison a noticeable degree of system prevails. There are separate rooms for "criminals" of different categories. In Moscow we made the acquaintance of the curious division of all "criminals" by the Soviet authorities not into two classes, "counter-revolutionaries" and "shpana," as in the Caucasus and Southern Russia, but into three.
The first group, called "K.R.", comprises persons suspected of acts or propaganda of a Monarchist or, in general, a bourgeois, anti-Socialist tendency. In this comprehensive group you may meet an ex-Minister and an ex-doorkeeper, a young non-commissioned officer and a general, a big manufacturer and an assistant in a small shop, an ex-princess and her cook. The Soviet authorities allot to the "K.R." group the whole clergy en masse, without distinction of Church, the whole of the educated and semi-educated classes, all merchants and all officers.
To the second group, the so-called "politicals and party men," belong prisoners from the remnants of the pre-Revolution Socialist parties — Social Revolutionaries, Social Democrats, Anarchists, etc. — which have not yet been merged with the Communists.
The third category comprises the criminals proper, the so-called shpana.
The Soviet authorities maintain this same distinction in the Solovky and all the other concentration camps and places of exile or settlement.
In the Taganka we were placed in a room packed full of clerics. There were the Vladika Peter (Sokoloff), the Archbishop of Saratoff, the monks of the Kazan monastery, etc. Almost all were accused of concealing church treasures at the time when the Bolsheviks were robbing the churches to satisfy the needs of the Komintern.[9] These bishops, priests and monks, like us, were sent to the Solovky.
In Petrograd, where we arrived at the beginning of January, 1924, a group of twenty men, so-called "Casino-ites," were placed in the same room as ourselves in the "second passing-through prison," occupied exclusively by prisoners going on to some other place.
Not long before a fashionable gambling hell in Moscow for highly-placed Communists, called the Casino, had been shut on the ground of too high play, drunken orgies, immorality and debauchery. The unofficial head of this honourable institution was Madame Kameneff, wife of the President of the Executive Committee of the Moscow Government.[10] The Moscow Gpu, when closing the Casino, did not dare to arrest the spouse of the Communist Governor-General of Moscow, but the whole staff of the gambling hell, headed by the croupier Petroff, was sent to the Solovky for three years.
These fellows were also our companions on our journey to Kem. Subsequently the "Casino-ites," at the instance of Madame Kameneff, were sent from the Solovky to a voluntary settlement in the Petchersk region. Before our flight from the concentration camp I heard that Petroff and Co. were back in Moscow.
Convoys of prisoners are now sent north from Petrograd once a week, on Thursdays. On one of these Thursdays — January 14th, 1924 — I and a large number of other "K.R.'s," "politicals and party men," and shpana, left for the Solovky in prisoners' trucks.
[9] The Third, or Communist, International.
[10] i.e. Province.