Gulag

But although we cannot be certain of what he actually did or saw on the island, we can read the essay he wrote afterward, which took the form of a travel sketch. Gorky praised the natural beauty of the islands, and described the picturesque buildings and their picturesque inhabitants. On the boat ride to the island, he even met some of the old Solovetsky monks. “And how does the administration treat the monks?” he asks them. “The administration wants everyone to work. We work,” they reply.¹⁰

Gorky also writes admiringly of the living conditions, clearly intending his readers to understand that a Soviet labor camp was not at all the same thing as a capitalist labor camp (or a Czarist-era labor camp), but a completely new kind of institution. In some of the rooms, he writes, he saw “four or six beds, each decorated with personal items . . . on the windowsills there are flowers. There is no impression of life being over-regulated. No, there is no resemblance to a prison, instead it seems as if these rooms are inhabited by passengers rescued from a drowned ship.”

Out on the work sites, he encounters “healthy lads” in linen shirts and sturdy boots. He meets few political prisoners and, when he does, he dismisses them as “counter-revolutionaries, emotional types, monarchists.” When they tell him they have been unfairly arrested, he presumes them to be lying. At one point, he seems to hint at the legendary encounter with the fourteen-year-old boy. During his visit to a group of juvenile delinquents, he writes, one of them brought him a protest note. In response, there were “loud cries” from the children, who called the young man a “squealer.”

But it was not just the living conditions that made Solovetsky, in Gorky’s description, a new type of camp. Its inmates, the “rescued passengers,” were not just happy and healthy, they were also playing a vital role in a grand experiment: the transformation of criminal and asocial personalities into useful Soviet citizens. Gorky was revitalizing Dzerzhinsky’s idea that the camps were to be not mere penitentiaries but “schools of labor,” specially designed to forge the sort of worker required by the new Soviet system. In his view, the experiment’s ultimate goal was to ensure the “abolition of prisons”—and it was succeeding. “If any so-called cultured European society dared to conduct an experiment such as this colony,” Gorky concluded, “and if this experiment yielded fruits as ours had, that country would blow all its trumpets and boast about its accomplishments.” Only the “modesty” of the Soviet leaders had, he reckoned, prevented them from doing so before.

Later, Gorky allegedly said that not a single sentence of his essay on Solovetsky had been left “untouched by the censors’ pen.” We do not know, in fact, whether he wrote what he did out of naïveté, out of a calculated desire to deceive, or because the censors made him do it.¹¹ Whatever his motivations, Gorky’s 1929 essay on Solovetsky was to become an important foundation stone in the forming of both public and official attitudes to the new and far more extensive system of camps which were conceived in that same year. Earlier Bolshevik propaganda had defended revolutionary violence as a necessary, albeit temporary evil, a transitory cleansing force. Gorky, on the other hand, made the institutionalized violence of the Solovetsky camps seem a logical and natural part of the new order, and helped to reconcile the public to the growing, totalitarian power of the state.¹²

As it turned out, 1929 would be remembered for many things other than Gorky’s essay. By that year, the Revolution had matured. Nearly a decade had passed since the end of the civil war. Lenin was long dead. Economic experiments of various kinds—the New Economic Policy, War Communism—had been tried and abandoned. Just as the ramshackle concentration camp on the Solovetsky Islands had become the network of camps known as SLON, so too had the random terror of the Soviet Union’s early years subsided, giving way to a more systematic persecution of the regime’s perceived opponents.

The Revolution had also acquired, by 1929, a very different sort of leader. Throughout the 1920s, Josef Stalin had bested or eliminated first the Bolsheviks’ enemies, and then his own enemies, partly by putting himself in charge of Party personnel decisions, and partly by making liberal use of secret information gathered on his behalf by the secret police, in which he took a particular personal interest. He launched a series of Party purges, which at first meant Party expulsions, and arranged for them to be announced at emotional, recriminatory mass meetings. In 1937 and 1938, these purges would become lethal: expulsion from the Party would often be followed by a camp sentence—or death.