Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [25]
“I said to him: ‘Vladimir Ilyich, if you come to power, you’ll start hanging the Mensheviks the very next day.’ And he glanced at me and said: ‘It will be after we’ve hanged the last Socialist-Revolutionary that the first Menshevik will get hanged.’ Then he frowned and gave a laugh.” 40
But the prisoners who belonged to this special category of “politicals” were also much more difficult to control. Many had spent years in Czarist prisons, and knew how to organize hunger strikes, how to put pressure on their jailers, how to communicate between prison cells in order to exchange information, and how to organize joint protests. More important, they also knew how to contact the outside world, and who to contact. Most of Russia’s non-Bolshevik socialist parties still had émigré branches, usually in Berlin or Paris, whose members could do great damage to the Bolsheviks’ international image. At the third meeting of the Communist International in 1921, representatives of the émigré branch of the Social Revolutionaries—the party ideologically closest to the Bolsheviks (some of its members actually worked briefly in coalition with them)—read aloud a letter from their imprisoned comrades in Russia. The letter caused a sensation at the Congress, largely because it claimed prison conditions in revolutionary Russia were worse than in Czarist times. “Our comrades are being half-starved,” it proclaimed, “many of them are jailed for months without being allowed a meeting with relatives, without letters, without exercise.”41
The émigré socialists could and did agitate on the prisoners’ behalf, just as they had before the Revolution. Immediately after the Bolshevik coup, several celebrated revolutionaries, including Vera Figner, the author of a memoir of life in Czarist prisons, and Ekaterina Peshkova, the wife of the writer Maxim Gorky, helped relaunch the Political Red Cross, a prisoners’ aid organization which had worked underground before the Revolution. Peshkova knew Dzerzhinsky well, and corresponded with him regularly and cordially. Thanks to her contacts and prestige, the Political Red Cross received the right to visit places of imprisonment, to talk to political prisoners, to send them parcels, even to petition for the release of those who were ill, privileges which it retained through much of the 1920s.42 So improbable did these activities later seem to the writer Lev Razgon, imprisoned in 1937, that he listened to his second wife’s stories of the Political Red Cross—her father had been one of the socialist prisoners—as if to “an unbelievable fairy tale.”43
The bad publicity generated by the Western socialists and the Political Red Cross bothered the Bolsheviks a great deal. Many had lived for years in exile, and were therefore sensitive to the opinions of their old international comrades. Many also still believed that the Revolution might spread to the West at any moment, and did not want the progress of communism to be slowed by bad press. By 1922, they were worried enough by Western press reports to launch the first of what would be many attempts to disguise communist terror by attacking “capitalist terror.” Toward this end, they created an “alternative” prisoners’ aid society: the International Society to Aid the Victims of Revolution—MOPR, according to its Russian acronym—which would purportedly work to help the “100,000 prisoners of capitalism.”44
Although the Berlin chapter of the Political Red Cross immediately denounced MOPR for trying to “silence the groans of those dying in Russian prisons, concentration camps and places of exile,” others were taken in. In 1924, MOPR claimed to have four million members, and even held its first international conference, with representatives from around the world. 45 The propaganda made its mark. When the French writer Romain Rolland was asked to comment upon a published collection of letters from socialists in Russian prisons, he responded by claiming that “There are almost identical things going on in the prisons of Poland; you have them in the prisons of California, where they are