Gulag

The life they lead can be characterized as anarcho-intellectual, with all of the negative aspects of that form of existence. Continued idleness, harping on political dissensions, family quarrels, factional disputes, and above all an aggressive and hostile attitude to the government in general and the local administration and Red Army guards in particular . . . all this combined makes these three hundred-odd people hostile to every measure and every attempt of the local authorities to introduce regularity and organization into their lives.⁸⁶

In another journal, the Soviet authorities claimed socialist prisoners enjoyed better rations than those of the Red Army. Those prisoners were also free to meet relatives—how else could they be smuggling out information?—and had plenty of doctors, more than in normal workers’ villages. Sneeringly, the article also claimed that these prisoners demanded “rare and expensive patent preparations” as well as gold caps and gold bridges on their teeth.⁸⁷

It was the beginning of the end. After a series of discussions, during which the Central Committee considered and rejected the idea of exiling the politicals abroad—they were worried about the impact on Western socialists, particularly, for some reason, the British Labor Party—a decision was taken.⁸⁸ At dawn on June 17, 1925, soldiers surrounded the Savvatyevo monastery. They gave the prisoners two hours to pack. They then marched them to the port, forced them into boats, and packed them off to distant closed prisons in central Russia—Tobolsk in western Siberia, and Verkhneuralsk, in the Urals—where they found far worse conditions than in Savvatyevo.⁸⁹ One prisoner wrote of locked cells, the air of which is poisoned by the old, stinking toilet bucket; the politicals isolated from one another . . . our rations are worse than in Solovetsky. The prison administration refuses to recognize our starosta [group leader]. There is neither hospital nor medical aid. The prison consists of two floors: the cells of the lower floor are damp and dark. In these are kept the sick comrades, some of whom are consumptive . . . 90

Although they kept on fighting for their rights, kept sending letters abroad, kept tapping messages to one another through prison walls, and kept staging hunger strikes, Bolshevik propaganda was drowning out the socialists’ protests. In Berlin, in Paris, and in New York, the old prisoners’ aid societies began to experience greater difficulty collecting money.⁹¹ “When the events of 19 December occurred,” wrote one prisoner to a friend outside of Russia, referring to the shootings of the six prisoners in 1923, “it seemed subjectively to us that the ‘world would be convulsed’—our socialist world. But it appeared that it did not notice the Solovets events, and then a ring of laughter entered the tragedy.” ⁹²

By the end of the 1920s the socialist politicals no longer had a unique status. They shared their cells with Bolsheviks, Trotskyites, and common criminals. Within the decade politicals—or rather “counter-revolutionaries”

—would be considered not as privileged prisoners but as inferior ones, ranked lower in the camp hierarchy than criminals. No longer citizens with rights of the sort the politicals had defended, they were of interest to their captors only insofar as they were able to work. And only insofar as they were able to work would they be fed enough to stay alive.

Chapter 3

1929: THE GREAT TURNING POINT

When the Bolsheviks came to power they were soft and easy with their enemies . . . we had begun by making a mistake.Leniency towards such a power was a crime against theworking classes. That soon became apparent . . .

—Josef Stalin¹