Hospitals Without Drugs — "Prisoners Must Not be Ill" — A Madwoman in Command — Mortality among Prisoners Encouraged — A Kindly Tchekist.
The "Medpomoshtsh"[34] (medical help) in the Solovetsky Islands is in fact medical helplessness. Owing partly to lack of resources, partly to the ill-will of the administration of the camps and the secret instructions of the Moscow Gpu, there is in the Solovky only one really effective cure for illness — death.
The sanitary conditions in the camps are horrible. Not only are huts, kitchens, latrines, etc., in an incredible state of filth, but the Solovetsky "hospitals" themselves can truthfully be called breeding-places for epidemics. The damp, marshy locality, the bad water, and the millions of mosquitoes and lice all render powerful assistance in creating and spreading disease.
The prisoners have no change of linen, no soap, no proper clothes or boots. Their organisms, debilitated by permanent under-nourishment and hard work, are not in a state to resist disease.
There is a "hospital" in the Kremlin of the Solovetsky Monastery. The word should be placed within quotation marks, because this hospital has no drugs of any kind, the beds are indescribably dirty, the patients are given the ordinary starvation ration, and the place is very often unheated.
The doctor in charge of it, himself a prisoner, has repeatedly attempted to persuade the Natchuslon that in the absence of drugs, bed linen (the patients lie on bare boards), soap, eatable food, and a latrine in the hospital itself (the patients have to go out in the yard in all temperatures, even in winter), the "treatment" of the prisoners is nothing else than deliberate murder. But the Solovetsky administration has always refused his demands. Fresh thousands arrive in the Solovky every year, and the huts must be cleared of "superfluous elements." Once Nogteff actually said:
"Prisoners have no business to be ill!"
The "hospital" on Popoff Island may serve as another fairly good specimen of Solovetsky "medical help." A woman is in charge of it, by name Lvova (Maria Nikolaevna). She is a highly-trained doctor. Before she was sent into exile she was in the Red Cross, and served on literally every front in the Great War and the civil war. Subsequently she was a "seksotka" (secret woman agent for the Gpu) but was ascertained to have "talked indiscreetly about secret Gpu affairs," and was sent to the Solovky for five years.
This woman, perhaps not bad in the depths of her heart, has been shattered by her work for the Gpu and the life in the Solovky. She has lost all self-control. No one in the Solovky, even the most disreputable common criminals, curses with such complete mastery of the art, applies such foul terms of abuse to men and God Himself, as the directress of the hospital. Criminals often go to the hospital just to listen to Lvova's swearing and introduce her latest gems of obscenity into their own talk.
No one in the Solovky drinks so much, or drinks him- or herself into such a swinish condition, as Maria Nikolaevna. She has reached the lowest pitch of moral disintegration. And her care of the sick is what might be expected of a person in such a state. Human life, for her, has ceased to have the slightest value. The hospitals of the Solovetsky Islands are in themselves almost a guarantee that the patients who enter them will die en masse. Lvova accelerates the patient's death by her roughness, her complete indifference to their sufferings, the cruelty of a person on the verge of insanity. When patients complain of the horrible state of things in her hospital, she always replies:
"The worse the better; all the more of you'll kick the bucket" — followed by a quite unprintable oath.
But I will not raise my hand to throw a stone at this woman; from living in insane conditions she herself has become insane. But have Nogteff and the other "administrators" of the Solovetsky Islands neither eyes nor ears? Why have they put a madwoman at the head of the medical service on Popoff Island?
I gave the answer to this question at the beginning of the chapter. The central authorities of the Gpu, and under them the Solovetsky Tchekists, are deliberately increasing the mortality in the Solovky. A further proof of this is in the fact that prisoners are not allowed to send for a doctor from Kem even at their own expense. The Kem doctor attends only the Solovetsky Tchekists.
The "K.R.'s" and politicals fear the Solovetsky hospitals like the plague. If prisoners of these categories fall ill, and cannot cure themselves by "home remedies," they die in the huts, begging not to be taken to hospital. Only the shpana, who, like Lvova, set no value either on their own lives or other people's, go to hospital of their own accord. In consequence, the ordinary criminals die in dozens daily, mainly of scurvy.
The water of the Solovetsky Islands has in it some quality which ruins the teeth, and the consequent toothache is intensified by cold and the draughts in the huts. A dentist is urgently needed in the camps. It is true that there is a dentist in the Kremlin of the Solovetsky Monastery — Malivanoff, known to the reader as an A.R.A. worker, punished by the Bolsheviks in return for his services — but he has no drugs or instruments.
On Popoff Island this question is decided in a radical manner. There is a man named Brusilovsky in the camp. Before the Revolution he was a feldsher, or local surgeon; after the Revolution — a Tchekist belonging to the Gpu of Elisavetgrad, in what is now the Government of Odessa, formerly the Government of Kherson. He was sent to the Solovky under Clause 76 of the Criminal Code — "armed banditism." Despite his profession of Tchekist, Brusilovsky is a very nice, sympathetic fellow. He decided to do what he could for the victims of toothache, and somehow got hold of an ordinary blacksmith's pincers, with which he pulls out teeth.
Of course, nothing can be done to cure the teeth while they are decaying, for there is nothing to do it with, neither drugs nor instruments; all that can be done is to pull them out, to which the sufferers always readily consent. Brusilovsky never takes any money for his services. He has a huge practice, especially among the shpana, whose teeth he pulls out rows at a time. The first time he pulled out quite sound teeth too, for practice.
This compassionate Tchekist treats syphilis too. His method of dealing with this complaint is also the last word in Solovetsky science. A compound of infusions of herbs, spirit and something else is injected with an ordinary syringe. He evidently still needs practice in this branch, for syphilis is on the increase in the camps, and the mortality from it is growing steadily.
[34] Meditsinskaya pomoshtsh.