Gulag

From the start, the “special” prison system was meant to deal with special prisoners: priests, former Czarist officials, bourgeois speculators, enemies of the new order. But one particular category of “politicals” interested the authorities more than others. These were members of the non-Bolshevik, revolutionary socialist political parties, mainly the Anarchists, the Left and Right Social Revolutionaries, the Mensheviks, and anyone else who had fought for the Revolution, but had not had the foresight to join Lenin’s Bolshevik faction, and had not taken full part in the coup of October 1917. As former allies in the revolutionary struggle against the Czarist regime, they merited special treatment. The Communist Party’s Central Committee would repeatedly discuss their fate up until the end of the 1930s, when most of those who remained alive were arrested or shot.³⁸

In part, this particular category of prisoner bothered Lenin because, like all leaders of exclusive sects, he reserved his greatest hatred for apostates. During one typical exchange, he called one of his socialist critics a “swindler,” a “blind puppy,” a “sycophant of the bourgeoisie,” and a “yes-man of blood-suckers and scoundrels,” fit only for the “cesspit of renegades.”³⁹ Indeed, long before the Revolution, Lenin knew what he would do with those of his socialist comrades who opposed him. One of his revolutionary companions recalled a conversation on this subject:

“I said to him: ‘Vladimir Ilyich, if you come to power, you’ll start hanging the Mensheviks the very next day.’ And he glanced at me and said: ‘It will be after we’ve hanged the last Socialist-Revolutionary that the first Menshevik will get hanged.’ Then he frowned and gave a laugh.” ⁴⁰

But the prisoners who belonged to this special category of “politicals” were also much more difficult to control. Many had spent years in Czarist prisons, and knew how to organize hunger strikes, how to put pressure on their jailers, how to communicate between prison cells in order to exchange information, and how to organize joint protests. More important, they also knew how to contact the outside world, and who to contact. Most of Russia’s non-Bolshevik socialist parties still had émigré branches, usually in Berlin or Paris, whose members could do great damage to the Bolsheviks’ international image. At the third meeting of the Communist International in 1921, representatives of the émigré branch of the Social Revolutionaries—the party ideologically closest to the Bolsheviks (some of its members actually worked briefly in coalition with them)—read aloud a letter from their imprisoned comrades in Russia. The letter caused a sensation at the Congress, largely because it claimed prison conditions in revolutionary Russia were worse than in Czarist times. “Our comrades are being half-starved,” it proclaimed, “many of them are jailed for months without being allowed a meeting with relatives, without letters, without exercise.”⁴¹

The émigré socialists could and did agitate on the prisoners’ behalf, just as they had before the Revolution. Immediately after the Bolshevik coup, several celebrated revolutionaries, including Vera Figner, the author of a memoir of life in Czarist prisons, and Ekaterina Peshkova, the wife of the writer Maxim Gorky, helped relaunch the Political Red Cross, a prisoners’ aid organization which had worked underground before the Revolution. Peshkova knew Dzerzhinsky well, and corresponded with him regularly and cordially. Thanks to her contacts and prestige, the Political Red Cross received the right to visit places of imprisonment, to talk to political prisoners, to send them parcels, even to petition for the release of those who were ill, privileges which it retained through much of the 1920s.⁴² So improbable did these activities later seem to the writer Lev Razgon, imprisoned in 1937, that he listened to his second wife’s stories of the Political Red Cross—her father had been one of the socialist prisoners—as if to “an unbelievable fairy tale.”⁴³