Conditions in Earlier Camps — The "White House" — 100,000 Shot — Mass Drownings — A Commission of Inquiry — Survivors Removed to Solovetsky Islands.
Until late in 1922, Kholmogory[11] and Portaminsk performed the function now discharged by the Solovky. When I reached the Solovky at the beginning of 1924, I met a number of men, the survivors of the "K.R." prisoners in the concentration camps at these places. They had been transferred to the Solovky in August, 1922. I should like to state briefly what these men, who had remained alive by a miracle, told me.
The concentration camps at Kholmogory and Portaminsk were established by the Soviet Government at the end of 1919. The people sent to them from every part of Russia had to live in hastily-run-up hutments. These were never heated, even at the height of winter, when in these far northern latitudes the thermometer often falls to -50° or -60° Celsius (90 to 110 degrees of frost Fahrenheit).
The prisoners were given the following ration: one potato for breakfast, potato peelings cooked in hot water for dinner, and one potato for supper. Not a morsel of bread, not an ounce of sugar, not to speak of meat or butter. And these people, driven by the pangs of hunger to eat the bark of trees, unable to stand from exhaustion, were compelled by tortures and shootings to perform hard labour — digging up tree-stumps, working in the stone-quarries, floating timber.
They were absolutely forbidden to correspond with their families in any way or to receive from them parcels of clothes or food. All letters were destroyed, food and other things sent were consumed or used by the camp guards.
After the defeat of the armies of General Denikin and General Wrangel, at the end of 1919 and 1920 respectively, captured White officers and men and civilian inhabitants of the territories wrested from the White armies — men, women and children — were sent to Kholmogory, convoy after convoy. And after the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion in April, 1921, all the sailors taken prisoner by the Bolsheviks, about 2,000 in number, were sent there. The remnants of Koltchak's army, various Siberian and Ukrainian chieftains, peasants from the Tamboff Government who had belonged to Antonoff's bands, tens of thousands of members of the intelligentsia of all nationalities and religions, Kuban and Don Cossacks, etc. — all flowed in a broad stream to Kholmogory and Portaminsk.
The higher administration of these camps was appointed by Moscow and carried out the instructions received thence. The middle and lower personnel consisted of imprisoned Tchekists, who had been transported for too open robbery, taking of bribes, drunkenness and other breaches of duty. These fellows, having no one else on whom to avenge their removal from their lucrative duties in the Extraordinary Commissions of Central Russia, treated the prisoners in the camps with indescribable cruelty.
The assistant commandant of the Kholmogory camp, a Pole named Kvitsinsky, was particularly ferocious. This sadist-executioner has on his conscience the horrors of the so-called "White House," in the neighbourhood of Kholmogory. The "White House" was an estate abandoned by its owners, containing a white-painted building. Here for two years (1920-22) shootings took place daily at the direction of Kvitsinsky. The terrible reputation of the "White House" was doubled by the fact that the bodies of those executed were not taken away. At the end of 1922 all the rooms of the "White House" were filled with corpses right up to the ceiling. Two thousand sailors from Kronstadt were shot there in three days. The smell of the decomposed bodies poisoned the air for miles round. The stench, which never abated by night or day, stifled the prisoners in the camps and even made them faint. Three-quarters of the inhabitants of the town of Kholmogory were finally unable to endure it any longer and abandoned their homes.
Without the slightest doubt the Soviet Government knew of the horrors perpetrated at Kholmogory and Portaminsk; it could not help knowing. But, having an interest in the pitiless extermination of their opponents, real and supposed, the leaders of the Communist Party confined themselves to washing their hands of the whole business.
Executions were carried out at other places besides the "White House." The Tchekists used to come into the prisoners' enclosure and, having marked down the destined victims, point to one or another of the prisoners with the words: "One — two — three. . . . One — two — three. . . . "One" meant that the prisoner was to be shot the same day, "two" that he was to be shot to-morrow, and "three" the day after to-morrow. This was usually done when a fresh large party had arrived, and room had to be made in the camp for the newcomers.
According to the evidence of eye-witnesses, about 100,000 persons in all were shot at Kholmogory and Portaminsk. There is nothing astonishing in this figure, terrible as it is. For three years on end these camps constituted the chief prison of all Soviet Russia. To them, in addition to the large convoys, were sent, from every place in European and Asiatic Russia, all those whom it was for any reason undesirable or inconvenient to kill on the spot — for example, all those who had been "amnestied" by local Soviet authorities.
The executioners of Kholmogory and Portaminsk used another method of destroying their prisoners: they drowned them. Of a whole series of cases known to me I will mention only those which follow.
In 1921 four thousand former officers and soldiers of Wrangel's army were ordered to embark on board a barge, and the vessel was sunk at the mouth of the Dvina. The men who were able to keep themselves on the surface by swimming were shot.
In 1922 several barges were loaded with prisoners. The Tchekists sank some of them in the Dvina in sight of everyone. The unfortunate passengers on board the other barges, among whom were many women, were landed on one of the small islands near Kholmogory and shot down with machine-guns from the barges. Mass murders were carried out on this island very frequently. Like the "White House," it was heaped with bodies.
Those who escaped being shot the Tchekists hounded to death by compelling them to do work beyond their strength. The prisoners in receipt of the above-mentioned ration, among them old men and women, worked all round the clock. It was counted a piece of luck to find a rotten potato in the fields; it was greedily eaten on the spot, raw.
When the Tchekists noticed that the inhabitants of the region — Lapps, Zyrians and Samoyedes — were throwing bread to the crowd of prisoners as they passed their huts, they began to take them to their work by another route, through thick forest and marshes.
If a newly arrived prisoner was decently dressed, they shot him at once, in order to get his clothes sooner.
Early in the summer of 1922 a Kronstadt sailor who, by chance, had remained alive escaped from the Kholmogory camp. He succeeded in making his way to Moscow, where he used his former connections to obtain an audience of the "Vtsik"[12] (All-Russian Central Executive Committee), and said to Kalinin:
"Do what you like with me, but turn your attention to the horrors in the northern camps!"
At this time 90 per cent, of the prisoners had already been done to death. Communist humanity had been sufficiently proved, and the Vtsik, exchanging anger for clemency, lent a gracious ear to the escaped sailor's prayer. At the end of July, 1922, a commission started from Moscow for Kholmogory to inspect the Kholmogory and Portaminsk camps. Its president was one Feldman.
Feldman himself could not conceal his horror at what he saw and heard at these places. He had the camp commandants shot, and sent their assistants and the rest of the personnel to Moscow, nominally to be tried. All the Tchekists, however, were pardoned and placed in positions of responsibility in Gpu offices in Southern Russia. Fully understanding that the "White House" and its scores of thousands of corpses were a burden on the conscience of Moscow, Feldman determined to wipe out the traces of all that had happened there. He therefore ordered the place to be burned down.
Feldman's commission had been empowered by the Vtsik to amnesty the prisoners in both camps. Only the ordinary criminals, the shpana, however, received their liberty. None of the "counter-revolutionaries" were amnestied.
In August, 1922, the remaining "K.R.'s" were sent under a reliable guard from Kholmogory and Portaminsk to the Solovetsky Islands, via Kem.
[11] On the Dvina, 46 miles S.E. of Archangel.
[12] Vserossisky Tsentralnyi Ispolnitelnyi Komitet.