Horrible Companionship — How Card Losses are Paid — A Tchekist's Harem — "Rouble" and "Half-rouble" Women — Venereal Diseases.
But the greatest blessing the politicals enjoy is that their wives and children are not compelled to associate with the women of the shpana. The company of these women is horrible.
There are at present about six hundred women in the Solovetsky camps. At the monastery they are quartered in the "Women's Building" in the Kremlin; on Popoff Island they occupy the whole of hut No. 1 and portions of other huts. Three-quarters of them are the wives, mistresses, relatives or simply the accomplices of the common criminals.
Women are officially transported to the Solovky (and to the Narym region) for "persistent prostitution." At regular intervals, in all the large towns of European and Asiatic Russia, raids against prostitutes are carried out in order that they may be sent to the concentration camps. The prostitutes, who under the Soviet regime have combined to form regular professional unions, from time to time organise street processions in Moscow and Petrograd by way of protest against the raids and the transportations; but this is of little avail.
The character and ways of the female shpana are so savage that a description of them, to anyone unacquainted with life in the Solovetsky prison, may sound like the delusions of a madman.
For example, when they go to the bath-house, they undress a long time before in their huts and walk about stark naked, to the accompaniment of roars of laughter and approving remarks from the camp personnel.
The female criminals are just as addicted to gambling card games as the men. If they lose, they hardly ever have any money, decent clothes or food with which to pay. In consequence, the most barbarous scenes may be witnessed every day in the camps. The women play cards on the condition that the loser must immediately go to one of the men's huts and give herself to ten men one after the other. This must take place in the presence of regular witnesses. The camp administration has never intervened to put a stop to this loathsomeness.
The influence the female criminals have on educated women, "K.R." prisoners, can be imagined. The foulest cursing, in which the names of God, Christ, the Virgin and all the saints are called upon, universal drunkenness, indescribable debauchery, thieving, filth, syphilis — all this must in the long run be too much for the most stubborn nature.
To send an honest woman to the Solovky is to turn her in a few months into something worse than a prostitute — a piece of dumb, dirty flesh, an object of barter, at the disposal first and foremost of the camp personnel itself.
Every Tchekist in the Solovky has from three to five concubines at the same time. Toropoff, who was appointed assistant to the Kem commandant on the administrative side in 1924, established a regular harem in the camp, continually replenished according to his choice and at his orders. The Red soldiers who guard the camp violate women unpunished.
According to the camp rules, twenty-five women — "K.R.'s" and shpana — are selected every day to act as servants to the Red divisions guarding the Solovky. The soldiers are so lazy that the prisoners even make their beds.
The headman of the Kem camp, Tchistakoff, not only has his dinner cooked and his boots cleaned by women, but they even have to wash him!
The youngest and prettiest women are usually chosen, and the Tchekists are free to treat them as they please.
All the women in the Solovky are officially divided into three categories: (1) a rouble woman (rublevaya), (2) a half-rouble woman (poltinitchnaya), and (3) a fifteen kopek woman (piatialtynnaya).
If one of the camp authorities requires a "first-class" woman, i.e., a young "K.R." who has not been long in the camp, he says to the sentry: "Bring me a rouble woman."
Honest women who refuse the "improved ration" which the Tchekists give their concubines very soon die of under-nourishment or tuberculosis. Such cases are particularly frequent on Solovetsky Island, where the bread usually does not last through the winter — i.e., till navigation begins and fresh supplies can be brought — and the already miserable rations are cut down by a half.
The Tchekists and the shpana infect the women with syphilis and other venereal diseases. How widespread these diseases are in the Solovky may be judged from this fact. Until recently the syphilitics, both male and female, were quartered on Popoff Island, in a special hut (No. 8). But their number increased to such an extent in the few months before I escaped that hut No. 8 would not hold them all, and the administration could think of no better solution of the problem than to put the patients in other huts, occupied by uninfected persons. Of course, this only led to a still more rapid increase in the number of cases.
If their solicitations meet with resistance, the Tchekists do not shrink from heaping insult on their victims. I will mention two out of a number of such cases known to me.
At the end of 1924 a very pretty Polish girl of seventeen was brought to the Solovky. She had been sentenced to be shot, along with her father and mother, for "espionage in the interests of Poland." The parents were shot, but as the girl was under age, the supreme penalty was in her case commuted to transportation to the Solovky for ten years.
The girl had the misfortune to attract Toropoff, but had the pluck to refuse his disgusting proposals. Thereupon Toropoff ordered her to be brought to the commandant's office, accused her of concealing "counter-revolutionary" documents on her person, stripped her naked and searched her under the eyes of the whole camp guard — examining with care those parts of her body where it seemed to him that the "documents" might best be concealed.
One day in February, 1925, a Tchekist named Popoff appeared in the women's hut very drunk, accompanied by a number of other Tchekists, also drunk. He went up to Madame X's bed. This lady belonged to the highest social circles and had been sent to the Solovky for ten years after her husband had been shot. Popoff dragged her out of bed and said:
"Won't you come outside the wire with us?" (It was there that women were violated.)
Madame X was in a state of raving hysteria till the next morning.
Uneducated and half-educated "K.R." women are exploited by the Tchekists without scruple. Particularly lamentable is the fate of the many Cossack women, whose husbands, fathers and brothers have been shot and they themselves transported.