Gulag

ON JUNE 20,1929, the ship Gleb Boky docked at the small port beneath the Solovetsky kremlin. High above, prisoners watched the scene with a great sense of anticipation. Instead of the silent, emaciated convicts who usually stepped off the Gleb Boky’s decks, a group of healthy and energetic men—and one woman—talked and gestured as they walked on to the shore. In the photographs taken that day, most appear to have been wearing uniforms: among them were several leading Chekists, including Gleb Boky himself. One of them, taller than the rest and with a heavy mustache, was dressed more simply, in a flat workman’s cap and a plain overcoat. This was the novelist Maxim Gorky.

Dmitri Likhachev was one of the prisoners watching from the window, and he recalled some of the other passengers too: “It was possible to see the knoll on which Gorky stood for a long time, together with an odd-looking person dressed in a leather jacket, leather jodhpurs, high boots and a leather cap. It was Gorky’s daughter-in-law, the wife of his son Maxim. She was dressed, clearly, in what was, in her opinion, the costume of an authentic ‘chekistka.’” The group then boarded a monastery carriage, drawn by “a horse from God knows where,” and went off on a tour of the island.²

As Likhachev well knew, Gorky was no ordinary visitor. At this point in his life, Gorky was the Bolsheviks’ much-lauded and much-celebrated prodigal son. A committed socialist who had been close to Lenin, Gorky had nevertheless opposed the Bolshevik coup in 1917. In subsequent articles and speeches, he had continued to denounce the coup and the subsequent terror with real vehemence, speaking of Lenin’s “crazy politics” and of the “cesspit” which Petrograd had become. He finally emigrated in 1921, leaving Russia for Sorrento, where he continued, at first, to fire off condemnatory missives and angry letters to his friends at home.

Over time, his tone changed, so much so that in 1928, he decided to return, for reasons that are not entirely clear. Solzhenitsyn rather meanly claims he came back because he had not become as famous as he had expected to in the West, and simply ran out of money. Orlando Figes notes that he was miserably unhappy in exile, and could not abide the company of other Russian émigrés, most of whom were far more fanatically anti-communist than himself.³ Whatever his motivation, once he had made the decision to return he appeared determined to help the Soviet regime as much as possible. Almost immediately, he set off on a series of triumphal journeys around the Soviet Union, deliberately including Solovetsky in his itinerary. His long interest in prisons dated back to his own experiences as a juvenile delinquent.

Numerous memoirists recall the occasion of Gorky’s visit to Solovetsky, and all agree that elaborate preparations had been made in advance. Some remember that camp rules were changed for the day, that husbands were allowed to see their wives, presumably to make everyone appear more cheerful. ⁴ Likhachev wrote that fully grown trees were planted around the work colony, to make it seem less bleak, and that prisoners were removed from the barracks so as to make them seem less crowded. But the memoirists are divided as to what Gorky actually did when he arrived. According to Likhachev, the writer saw through all of the attempts to fool him. While being shown around the hospital ward, where all of the staff were wearing new gowns, Gorky sniffed, “I don’t like parades,” and walked away. He spent a mere ten minutes in the work colony—according to Likhachev— and then closeted himself with a fourteen-year-old boy prisoner, in order to hear the “truth.” He emerged weeping, forty minutes later. ⁵

Oleg Volkov, on the other hand, who was also on Solovetsky when Gorky visited, claims the writer “only looked where he was told to look.”⁶ And, although the story of the fourteen-year-old boy crops up elsewhere— according to one version, he was immediately shot after Gorky’s departure—others claim that all prisoners who tried to approach the writer were repulsed.⁷ Certainly it appears as if prisoners’ letters to Gorky were later intercepted, and, according to one source, at least one of their authors was subsequently executed. ⁸ V. E. Kanen, a disgraced OGPU agent who had become a prisoner, even claims that Gorky visited the punishment cells of Sekirka, where he signed the prison’s journal. One of the Moscow OGPU chiefs who was with Gorky wrote, “having visited Sekirka, I found everything in order, just as it should be.” Below him, according to Kanen, Gorky added a comment: “I would say—it is excellent.”⁹