Gulag

To begin with, one of the two main categories of prisoner on Solovetsky did not, at first, work at all. These were the approximately 300 socialist “politicals,” who had actually begun to arrive on the island in June 1923. Sent from the Petrominsk camp, as well as from Butyrka and the other Moscow and Petrograd prisons, they were taken upon arrival immediately to the smaller Savvatyevo monastery, several kilometers north of the main monastery complex. There, the Solovetsky guards could ensure that they were isolated from other prisoners, and could not infect them with their enthusiasm for hunger strikes and protests.

Initially, the socialists were granted the “privileges” of political prisoners that they had so long demanded: newspapers, books, and, within a barbed-wire enclosure, freedom of movement and freedom from work. Each of the major political parties—the Left Social Revolutionaries, the Right Social Revolutionaries, the Anarchists, the Social Democrats, and later the Socialist Zionists—chose its own leader, and occupied rooms in its own wing of the former monastery.⁹

To Elinor Olitskaya, a young Left Social Revolutionary arrested in 1924, Savvatyevo seemed, at first, “nothing like a prison,” and came as a shock after her months in the dark Lubyanka prison in Moscow. Her room, a former monks’ cell in what had become the women’s section of the Social Revolutionary wing, was light, clean, freshly washed, with two large, wide, open windows. The cell was full of light and air. There were, of course, no bars on the windows. In the middle of the cell stood a small table, covered in a white cloth. Along the wall were four beds, neatly covered with sheets. Beside each one stood a small night table. On the tables lay books, notebooks, and pens.

As she marveled at the surroundings, the tea served in teapots, and the sugar served in a sugar bowl, her cell mates explained that the prisoners had created the pleasant atmosphere on purpose: “we want to live as human beings.”¹⁰ Olitsksaya soon learned that although they suffered from tuberculosis and other diseases, and rarely had enough to eat, the Solovetsky politicals were notably well-organized, with the “elder” of each party cell responsible for storing, cooking, and distributing food. Because they still had special “political” status, they were also allowed to receive packages, both from relatives and from the Political Red Cross. Although the Political Red Cross had begun to have difficulties—in 1922 its offices were raided and its property confiscated—Ekaterina Peshkova, its well-connected leader, was personally still allowed to send aid to political prisoners. In 1923, she shipped a whole train wagon full of food to the Savvatyevo political prisoners. A shipment of clothes went north in October of the same year.¹¹

This, then, was the solution to the public relations problem posed by the politicals: give them what they want, more or less, but put them as far away from anyone else as humanly possible. It was a solution that was not to last: the Soviet system would not long tolerate exceptions. In the meantime, the illusion was easy to see through—for there was another, far larger group of prisoners on Solovetsky as well. “Upon landing on the Solovets soil, we all felt we were entering a new and strange phase of life,” wrote one political. “From conversations with the criminals, we learned of the shocking regime which the administration is applying to them . . . ”¹²

With far less pomp and ceremony, the main barracks of the Solovetsky kremlin were also filling up quickly with prisoners whose status was not so assured. From a few hundred in 1923, the numbers grew to 6,000 by 1925.¹³ Among them were White Army officers and sympathizers, “speculators,” former aristocrats, sailors who had fought in the Kronstadt rebellion, and genuine common criminals. For these inmates, tea in teapots and sugar in sugar bowls were much harder to come buy. Or, rather, they were hard to come by for some, easier for others; for, above all, what characterized life in the “criminal” barracks of the Solovetsky special camp in these very early years was irrationality, and an unpredictability which began at the moment of arrival. On their first night in the camp, writes the memoirist and former prisoner Boris Shiryaev, he and other new arrivals were greeted by Comrade A. P. Nogtev, Solovetsky’s first camp commander. “I welcome you,” he told them, with what Shiryaev describes as “irony”: “As you know, here, there is no Soviet authority, only Solovestsky authority. Any rights that you had before you can forget. Here we have our own laws.” The phrase “there is no Soviet authority, only Solovetsky authority” would be repeated again and again, as many memoirists attest. ¹⁴