Gulag

Over the next few days and weeks, most of the prisoners would experience “Solovetsky authority” as a combination of criminal neglect and random cruelty. Living conditions in the converted churches and monks’ cells were primitive, and little care was taken to improve them. On his first night in his Solovetsky barracks, the writer Oleg Volkov was given a place on sploshnye nary, bunks that were in fact broad planks (of which we shall hear more later) on which a number of men slept in a row. As he lay down, bedbugs began falling on to him “one after another, like ants. I couldn’t sleep.” He went outside, where he was immediately enveloped by “clouds of mosquitoes . . . I gazed with envy at those who slept soundly, covered in parasites.” ¹⁵

Outside the main kremlin compound, things were hardly better. Officially, SLON maintained nine separate camps on the archipelago, each one further divided into battalions. But some prisoners were also kept in even more primitive conditions in the woods, near the forestry work sites.¹⁶ Dmitri Likhachev, later to become one of Russia’s most celebrated literary critics, felt himself privileged because he had not been assigned to one of the many unnamed camp sites in the forest. He visited one, he wrote, “and became ill with the horror of seeing it: people slept in the trenches which they had dug, sometimes with bare hands, during the day.”¹⁷

On the outlying islands, the central camp administration exerted even less control over the behavior of individual guards and camp bosses. In his memoirs, one prisoner, Kiselev, described a camp on Anzer, one of the smaller islands. Commanded by another Chekist, Vanka Potapov, the camp consisted of three barracks and a guards’ headquarters, housed in an old church. The prisoners worked cutting trees, with no breaks, no respite, and little food. Desperate for a few days’ rest, they cut off their hands and feet. According to Kiselev, Potapov kept these “pearls” preserved in a large pile and showed them to visitors, to whom he also bragged that he had personally murdered more than 400 people with his own hands. “No one returned from there,” Kiselev wrote of Anzer. Even if his report exaggerates, it indicates the real terror which the outer camps held for the prisoners.¹⁸

All over the islands, disastrous hygienic conditions, overwork, and poor food naturally led to illness, and above all to typhus. Of the 6,000 prisoners held by SLON in 1925, about a quarter died in the winter of 1925–26, in the wake of a particularly vicious epidemic. By some calculations, the numbers stayed this high: from a quarter to one half of the prisoners may have died of typhus, starvation, and other epidemics every year. One document records 25,552 cases of typhus in the (by then much larger) SLON camps in the winter of 1929–30.¹⁹

But for some prisoners, Solovetsky meant worse than discomfort and illness. On the islands, prisoners were subjected to the kind of sadism and pointless torture of a sort found more rarely in the Gulag in later years when—as Solzhenitsyn puts it—“slave-driving had become a thought-out system.”²⁰ Although many memoirs describe these acts, the most thorough catalogue is found in the account of an investigating commission sent from Moscow later in the decade. During the course of their investigation, the horrified Moscow officials discovered that Solovetsky guards had regularly left undressed prisoners in the old, unheated cathedral bell towers in the winter, their hands and feet tied behind their backs with a single piece of rope. They had also put prisoners “to the bench,” meaning they were forced to sit on poles for up to eighteen hours without moving, sometimes with weights tied to their legs and their feet not touching the floor, a position guaranteed to leave them crippled. Sometimes, prisoners would be made to go naked to the baths, up to 2 kilometers away, in freezing weather. Or they were deliberately given rotten meat. Or they were refused medical help. At other times, prisoners would be given pointless, unnecessary tasks: to move huge quantities of snow from one place to another, for example, or to jump off bridges into rivers whenever a guard shouted “Dolphin!” ²¹

Another form of torture specific to the islands, mentioned in both archives and memoirs, was to be sent “to the mosquitoes.” Klinger, a White Army officer who later made one of the few successful escapes from Solovetsky, wrote that he once saw this torture inflicted on a prisoner who complained because a parcel sent to him from home had been requisitioned. Angry prison guards responded by removing all of his clothes, including his underwear, and tying him to a post in the forest, which was, in the northern summer, swarming with mosquitoes. “Within half an hour, his whole unlucky body was covered with swelling from the bites,” wrote Klinger. Eventually, the man fainted from the pain and loss of blood.²²