A Wife and her Husband — Annual "Amnesty" Swindle — Boris Savinkoff's Terrible End — Famine Relief a Crime — Dzerzhinsky in a New Light — An Indefatigable Vermin-hunter — Aged Hostages Tortured.
The grounds for which people have been transported to the Solovky are so various, and very often so completely baseless, that one cannot help supposing them to be pure inventions of the Tchekist "jurisprudence."
For example, among the prisoners there is the aged Countess Frederiks. During the war, as a Red Cross nurse, the old lady performed admirable service in tending wounded officers and men. And now, in the camp, she receives no parcels from the Red Cross, gives what help she can to the sick, and lives in a state of permanent semi-starvation, ceaselessly subjected to jeers and insults. She was transported for no other reason than that she had the misfortune to be the sister of Count Frederiks, who was Minister of the Imperial Court under the murdered Tsar, and was well-known as an intimate counsellor of Nicholas II. And while she was sent to the Solovky, the Count himself, a very old man of nearly a hundred, was until lately living in freedom in Petrograd; only quite recently was he given permission to leave for Finland.
In one of the cells on Solovetsky Island (the so-called Women's Building) the wife of a prominent minister of the old regime is perishing of under-nourishment and unaccustomed hard bodily labour. The official note of the decision in her case ran: "Transported to the Solovky for five years, as being the wife of a minister of Bloody Nicholas!" The minister himself fills a conspicuous post at Moscow under the Soviet Government!
A locksmith named Timoshenko was sent from Voronesh to the Solovky for two years. He was a simple workman and had had nothing whatever to do with politics. He continually endeavoured to obtain from Vasko an answer to his question — for what offence he had been sent to a concentration camp. Not till 1925, when his term of two years expired, was he accused of belonging to the "Savinkoff counter-revolutionary organisation" and sent to cool his heels for three years more in the Narym region.
At the same time other "Savinkoffists" were sent to the Solovky from Novokhopersk, a district town in the Government of Voronesh. They were: Vrashnikoff, former agent of Count Vorontsoff-Dashkoff's property in the Caucasus; Savinoff, a technician; Krivjakin, the business manager of a Soviet institution, and others. To these were added an engineer named Novitsky, from the Government of Poltava, and a crowd of peasants from the Government of Voronesh. Many of the peasants, when told at the Solovky that they were charged with complicity in "Savinkoff's conspiracy," asked doubtfully:
"Savinkoff?[25] Who's he? A general?"
When I was in the Solovky, one Epstein arrived there; he had been sentenced to three years. When he asked why he had been transported, he received from the examining judge the answer:
"Because you're a business man!"
Exactly the same answer was received by another criminal, a Jew tailor named Gurieff, who kept a ready-made clothes shop. (He is now in charge of the tailors' workshop in the Kem camp.)
Not long ago two Poles, named Minitch and Vintovsky, fled to Russia from Poland. The frontier authorities gave a ceremonial reception to the men, who had "escaped from cruel imprisonment by the Polish Pans," but the Moscow Gpu sent them to the Solovky for three years. The two Poles are now cursing the day when they decided to cross the frontier of the "freest Government in the world!"
Every year there arrive at Kem some two thousand "K.R.'s," who are sent on to Solovetsky Island when navigation is possible. The arrivals are especially numerous during the months which immediately precede November 7th (October 25th, old style), the date of the Bolshevist Revolution of 1917.
Every year at this time the Vtsik — thus controverting "the malignant lies of the international bourgeoisie and the shameless émigrés" about the cruelty of the Soviet power — publishes a wide amnesty to "all enemies of the ruling proletariat." The presidents of the provincial and district branches of the Gpu, by way of carrying out the directions of the humane Vtsik, shoot half their prisoners a few days before the amnesty and send the rest to the concentration camps, to which the terms of the amnesty decree state that it is not extended.
Thus, in reality, nobody is amnestied on November 7th. The Vtsik is satisfied, the Gpu is satisfied too; "the lies of the shameless bourgeoisie" have been exposed.
I could fill several pages with the names of people who have been "amnestied" in this manner. I will quote, as an example, a case in which not only the individual who was stupid enough to believe in the good faith of the Tchekists, but his relations too, were "amnestied." At the end of 1923 a soldier of Denikin's army, a peasant from the Government of Poltava, returned to Russia on the strength of the amnesty proclaimed by the Soviet Government in November of that year. He was given a Soviet passport on the frontier, and on arriving at his home went to the provincial Gpu, was registered, was sent away again and spent several days with his family.
Result — at the beginning of 1924 the soldier was sent to the Narym region of Siberia for three years, while his father and father's sister were despatched by the Gpu to the Solovky for concealing a counter-revolutionary (Clause 68 of the Criminal Code)! At the time of my escape these peasants, the victims of this singular "amnesty," were still in the Solovky, waiting to be sent on to the Zyriansk region.
"Amnestied" émigrés are continually being sent to the Solovky. Just before my escape a large party of émigrés arrived, nine-tenths of them private soldiers; there were a few officers, among them a cavalry subaltern named Menuel and Saprunenko, who had been aide-de-camp to the Ukrainian hetman Skoropadsky.
The Soviet power extends a real amnesty only to people, whether émigrés or living in Soviet Russia, whose names can be used later as a decoy. Such gentlemen, for example, as ex-General Slastschoff and similar renegades can live in freedom and even occupy responsible posts so long as this suits the book of the Gpu, so long as the Gpu reckons that it can make use of the name of one of these "signal-changers"[26] to prove "the good faith of the Soviet power, which amnesties all repentant émigrés." But as soon as the renegade in question has "done his job," he can go away, or, to be more correct, he is sent away, to exile or to the next world. It is sufficient to recall the fate of the well-known Social Revolutionary Savinkoff, who was "amnestied" by the Bolsheviks — after which the Tchekists flung him from a fifth-floor window of his prison.
Ordinary émigrés who return are immediately sent to the Solovky or the Narym region — that is to say, if the "supreme measure of punishment" (shooting) has not already been applied to them. The latter fate, as a rule, awaits officers.
The Soviet Government, returning evil for good, sends to the concentration camps people who have "besmirched themselves" by working with organisations of which the unhappy Russian people will always retain a grateful memory. Among the prisoners at the Solovky is a dentist named Malivanoff, a Moscow Jew. Malivanoff gave active help to the A.R.A. (the American relief organisation for the benefit of the famine victims), with the result that he was sent to the Solovky for five years. As the Criminal Code of the U.S.S.R. does not at present provide any punishment for giving relief to famine victims, the clause relating to "economic espionage" was applied to Malivanoff! A number of other Russians who worked with the A.R.A. and famine relief organisations from other countries were sent by the grateful Gpu to Siberia, to the Narym and Petchersk regions.
Karpoff, well known as the stage manager of the Alexandrinsk Theatre in Petrograd, and subsequently of the Great and Little Theatres in Moscow, was sent to the Solovky in company with other artists — Jurovsky, Georges, etc. — on the charge of "counter-revolution." During my stay there he was sent on to another place of exile.
If the Tchekists want to transport somebody, but cannot find a handle for doing so, Clauses 68 ("concealing a counter-revolutionary") and 72 ("ecclesiastical counter-revolution") serve their purpose most conveniently.
One of the most peculiar cases is that of a man named Witte, from Petrograd, who was transported because he bore "a counter-revolutionary name!"
There are Communist engineers — e.g., one Osipoff, who was famous throughout the camp for the incredible quantity of lice on his body — naval officers who had been "seksoty,"[27] jewellers, hair-dressers, landowners, followers of Makhno (the Ukrainian guerilla leader), "economic bandits," commanders of the Gpu troops, watchmakers — in short, prisoners of every conceivable profession, position, rank and designation.
The case of the brothers Myshelovin, watchmakers, was a curious one. They were both accused of forging and uttering notes, although the evidence given before the examining judge and the results of a domiciliary visit showed that while one of the two brothers had actually uttered counterfeit notes, the other was completely innocent. And what was the decision of the Gpu? It sent the guilty brother to the Solovky for three years — and the innocent one for ten years!! The motives of Tchekist "courts" in pronouncing such sentences as this must always be a mystery to us all.
A very interesting figure was the technical engineer Krasilnikoff (Nicholas Dimitrievitch). He had been sent to the Solovky for "ecclesiastical counter-revolution," but in reality he had had no connection with anything of the kind. Before the Revolution he had been well known in Petrograd as an able and vehement opponent of Socialism of all shades. When the Bolsheviks came into power, Volodarsky sent for him several times and tried to persuade him to stop preaching counter-revolution. But the truculent engineer, taking advantage of his immense authority among the workers, continued to make speeches and publish his pamphlets. He soon migrated to Moscow and there continued his activities, the tendency of which was, as in pre-Revolution days, to discredit Socialism of all kinds.
Dzerzhinsky himself was interested in Krasilnikoff and sent for him. The engineer appeared at the Gpu headquarters, and there, in the study of the President of the Extraordinary Commission, Dzerzhinsky and Krasilnikoff disputed for hours on end about Socialism and its Utopian aims. It must have been almost the only time in his life that Dzerzhinsky permitted freedom of speech — and that in the very offices of the Gpu! Krasilnikoff — a brilliant speaker — endeavoured to persuade the head Tchekist to abandon all hope of being able to make a reality of such nonsense as Socialism. Dzerzhinsky would not agree, but put forward arguments on the other side.
The night wore on. Dzerzhinsky offered the engineer a camp bed in his study, and in the morning ordered that he should be given coffee and allowed to go. Soon after, however, he was arrested by subordinate Tchekists and sent to the Solovky.
In the camp, Krasilnikoff was literally eaten up by lice. I myself, having passed through dozens of prisons on my way north, possessed the experience of a lifetime in the matter of vermin; but never and nowhere have I seen such multitudes of lice as on the engineer. Every morning and every evening he used to kill vermin in incredible quantities, remarking every time he caught one:
"Aha, got him — that's another!"
The Solovky swallow up old and young alike. In February, 1925, fifty students and schoolboys from Theodosia, Sevastopol, Simferopol and Yalta, in the Crimea, arrived at Popoff Island. They had all got three years for organising a "counter-revolutionary conspiracy in complicity with the foreign bourgeoisie." The latter was alleged to be directing the conspiracy from Constantinople, but the whole thing was quite unproved. Besides adult students, the party included some twenty pupils of the middle and upper classes in the secondary schools, quite boys still.
Not long before I came to the Solovky, the Gpu of the Trans-Caucasian Soviet Republic had sent thither forty Tchetchentsy,[28] very old men. One of them looked out of the window of a hut, which is forbidden by some Tchekists, on which the whole party were sent to the Sekirova hill — notorious at the Solovky as the place of torture —, put into "stone sacks" (an operation described in a later chapter) and flogged with "Smolensky sticks" till they fainted. One of these aged men was 110 years old.
These old Tchetchentsy had been transported as hostages for their sons, grandsons and great-grandsons who had joined guerilla bands and were waging a ceaseless war with the Bolsheviks — a war which is still going on. They themselves had not committed any kind of offence.
The practice of taking hostages, and of carrying out violent reprisals on the relations and even the acquaintances of rebels and émigrés, has been developed by the Soviet power into an elaborate system of terror, which shrinks from nothing that may help it to attain the object in view — the submission of the entire Russian people to the will of the leaders of the Communist Party.
[25] Boris Savinkoff, the well-known Social Revolutionary leader, see p. 109.
[26] Smienoviekhovtsy, "signal-changers" — a name popularly given to people, formerly of anti-Soviet opinions, who have changed their political course and become reconciled to the Bolshevist Government.
[27] Sekretnye sotrudniki; secret collaborators (with the Gpu).
[28] A Caucasian nationality.