The "Distributing Hut" — Robbed the First Night — Criminals' Unwritten Code — Punishment of a Traitor — The Professor's Parcel — Successful Blackmail.
All newly arrived prisoners are sent first of all to the "distributing hut" of the camp on Popoff Island.
Hardly have you set foot on the now accursed soil of the Solovky before you feel the power of the shpana. When our party, consisting of "counter-revolutionaries" from the Caucasus, bishops and monks, a group of Casino-ites and many others, arrived at hut No. 6 (the "distributing hut"), we were met by armed Tchekists, themselves prisoners. They wanted to know first of all whether there were any Gpu employees or any criminal agents among us, for if so they might not go into the hut; the ordinary criminals would kill them at once. Several men stood aside.
The rest of us entered hut No. 6. It was a huge wooden shed, filled to overflowing with shpana. There were board-beds in two tiers, one above the other. The beds and the floor under the lower tier were covered with half-naked bodies. The stench was so awful that I nearly fell down. Drunken yells and drunken weeping, the most disgusting abuse. There was a feeble glow from a lamp in a corner.
I describe the "distributing hut" in some detail because all new arrivals have to go through this torturing stage of their captivity, and, further, because nothing could be more characteristic of the whole conditions in the Solovetsky camps.
Having been warned by our earlier experience at Rostoff, we lay down on our things, putting them under our heads. But this precaution proved to be inadequate. I was awakened during the night by a fearful noise. Staring into the semi-darkness, I perceived with horror that all our things had been stolen — our provisions plundered, our baskets, suitcases and boxes broken open. Yells resounded from one corner, where one of the shpana who had taken too much for himself was being sentenced to a beating by an assize of his fellow-criminals. In another corner three criminals were hitting one of their comrades over the head with pieces of wood; he was dripping with blood, but still refused to give up the linen he held tightly under his arm. On the upper tier of beds, close to the ceiling, the national card game, tri listika, was already being played with our money. At the door a knot of shpana were conducting trade negotiations with the sentry, exchanging somebody's rug for spirits.
We "K.R.'s" decided next morning that it was useless to make a complaint. But one of the politicals in our party, a Social Revolutionary, indignantly told the commandant about the behaviour of the shpana who had left him with only one shirt in winter time. The commandant, for form's sake, appeared in the hut and called in timid tones:
"Give back the things! What disgraceful conduct!"
The criminals answered with a roar of laughter; but the next night they would have killed the "S.R." if we had not defended him.
Next morning an old inhabitant of the camp, Bishop Illarion Trotsky, the right-hand man of the late Patriarch Tikhon, was ordered to conduct our party to hut No. 9.
An unwritten internal discipline binds the ordinary criminals together. These starving, half-naked gallows-birds, dying by scores daily from scurvy and syphilis, never take a risk. The peculiar favour and protection which all the authorities of the Solovky, without exception, extend to the shpana is very simply explained.
The hostility which the ordinary criminal instinctively feels towards the "K.R.", the educated barin, is felt in an equal degree by every Tchekist in the Solovky, though he also sees in each "K.R." a counter-revolutionary, a Monarchist, a bourgeois. A further reason why complaints against the shpana are fruitless is that a large part of the Solovetsky administration are closely connected with the criminal classes, not only in their mentality, but in their pre-Revolution antecedents.
When I arrived at Popoff Island, there were about 1,400 shpana in the camp; the number of "K.R.'s" could have been divided into this total several times, and there were only seventy "politicals and party men." The last-named, for reasons which I will explain later, do no work at all, and "Mother" was continually letting the shpana off labour of all kinds, so that the whole immense burden of the work to be done was placed upon the shoulders of the "K.R.'s."
This is still the case, although in a lesser degree: the shpana do little work, the politicals none at all, and the "K.R.'s" bear the whole burden.
The criminals' curious code of ethics combines all the shpana of the Solovetsky Islands into one indivisible unit. This code of ethics is ruthlessly applied. If the criminals discover that there is a sutchenyi among their number — this word means in their language a turncoat, a traitor, who is betraying their secrets to the authorities — he is immediately put to death in the most cruel manner. Nowhere is the principle "one for all and all for one" put into application in so high a degree as among the common criminals of the Solovky.
In the middle of 1924 a gang of footpads, who had for a long time evaded all attempts to capture them, were arrested in Moscow. Their leader was a bandit named Moiseiko; his fellow-robbers nicknamed him Petlura, for which reason the members of the band were called "Petlurists." These footpads had on their conscience, besides a number of armed robberies, many "wet affairs" (a "wet affair" means a murder in the thieves' language). One of the most active of the Petlurists, known as Avrontchik, turned sutchenyi, betrayed the gang and brought about its arrest.
The gang consisted of thirty-eight persons, both men and women. Thirty of them were "sent to the left" (thieves' jargon for "shot") in the Butyrka prison in Moscow. Eight men, among them Avrontchik, and four women (the wives of men who had been shot) were despatched to the Solovky. When the "traitor" arrived at the "distributing hut," the surviving Petlurists burst in and almost beat him to death. The male Petlurists were arrested and Avrontchik taken to hospital. But he was not safe even in hospital; the four women of the band entered the hospital hut and killed Avrontchik, smashing in his skull.
The affair was referred to Moscow. The Gpu replied briefly: "shoot." In November, 1924, the remaining Petlurists, men and women, fell to Tchekist bullets, confirming by their death the principles of the shpana.
If the shpana do not shrink from murdering persons objectionable to them, much less does the robbing of all and sundry seem to them a thing to be boggled at. Further, they are compelled to rob by continual hunger, cold — in the Solovky one quite often sees shpana prisoners absolutely naked — and their passion for cards and drink.
Their robberies, the victims of which are invariably "K.R.'s," are planned with quite professional ingenuity. As I have said, on our arrival at Popoff Island we were moved from hut No. 6 to hut No. 9. This hut is divided into four compartments by wooden partitions. In the first compartment lived the headman of the camp, in the second the Casino-ites, the third was the camp prison, and in the fourth were we "K.R.'s," having a common wall with the prison.
Several times the shpana played the following trick on us. They committed some offence more serious than usual, and so, intentionally, got into the prison; then they bored a hole in the wooden wall which separated the prison from our quarters, quite close to the floor, and at night, creeping noiselessly under the beds, stole our things, food and money. If anyone tried to recover the things, they beat him to death.
The shpana always shared their plunder with the prison guards and the headman, so that nobody paid any attention to our complaints, and once the headman declared that we ourselves had robbed each other.
Sometimes the robberies were followed by impudent blackmail, also with the close connivance of the personnel. For example, among the prisoners in our hut was Professor Krivatch-Niemanetz, a very old man, over seventy. He was a Czech by nationality and had been employed in the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs as a translator. He was sent to the Solovky (for ten years) by virtue of that clause of the Criminal Code under which foreigners are always sent there — Clause 66, "espionage for the benefit of the international bourgeoisie." Of course he was absolutely innocent. Krivatch-Niemanetz was very popular in the camp and profoundly respected, mainly because he could speak nearly all the languages in the world fluently, including Chinese, Japanese and Turkish, not to mention all the European languages.
The Professor had received a parcel of things from the "Political Red Cross," which was presided over by Madame Peshkova, the wife of Maxim Gorky, and extended its help only to "politicals and party men." It evidently regarded "K.R.'s" as simply bandits, delivered as such to the caprice of Fate, the Solovetsky administration and the shpana.
He was as delighted with the parcel as a child, but alas! not for long. The shpana had got into the prison again; once more they broke through the wall and stole our things, including Krivatch-Niemanetz's parcel. In the morning the criminals had recourse to blackmail, a method of theirs by this time familiar to us all; they sent to the Professor — by a Tchekist — a letter in which they offered to give him back his things for 6 tchervontsy (about £6). The Czech, freezing in the draughty hut, accepted the offer as genuine despite our warnings, and sent the shpana — through the same Tchekist — all the money he had, leaving himself literally without a kopek. As we expected, he never got either his things or his money back!
Some time after this a number of the shpana left the Solovky, among them the men who had robbed the Professor. On their way south they sent him a letter in which they promised "never to forget the dear Professor to their last day."
The criminals regard stripping the "K.R.'s" almost as a point of honour, but stripping their own comrades, their fellow-criminals, as a crime to be severely punished. There is a special hut on Popoff Island in which all the parcels for the "K.R.'s" and politicals on Solovetsky Island received during the autumn and winter are kept until navigation opens and it is possible to communicate with the monastery; when spring comes they are sent to the monastery by a special steamer. Several times members of the shpana broke into this hut, enjoyed the fruits of their pillage with impunity and received the full approval of their fellows. But once, when a party plundered the hut at a time when some parcels for ordinary criminals were there, they were cruelly man-handled by their comrades and two of them actually killed.