Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [26]
The Cheka also sought to ameliorate the bad press by sending the troublesome socialists farther away from their contacts. Some were sent, by administrative order, into distant exile, just as the Czarist regime had once done. Others were sent to remote camps near the northern city of Arkhangelsk, and in particular to one set up in the former monastery of Kholmogory, hundreds of miles to the north of Petrograd, near the White Sea. Nevertheless, even the remotest exiles found means of communication. From Narym, a distant part of Siberia, a small group of “politicals” in a tiny concentration camp managed to get a letter to an émigré socialist newspaper complaining that they were “so firmly isolated from the rest of the world that only letters dealing with the health of relatives or our own health can hope to reach their destination. Any other messages . . . do not arrive.” Among their number, they noted, was Olga Romanova, an eighteen-year-old Anarchist, who was sent to a particularly remote part of the region “where she was fed for three months on bread and hot water.”47
Nor did distant exile guarantee peace for the jailers. Almost everywhere they went, socialist prisoners, accustomed to the privileged treatment once given to political prisoners in Czarist jails, demanded newspapers, books, walks, unlimited right of correspondence, and, above all, the right to choose their own spokesman when dealing with the authorities. When incomprehending local Cheka agents refused—they were doubtless unable to tell the difference between an Anarchist and an arsonist—the socialists protested, sometimes violently. According to one description of the Kholmogory camp, a group of prisoners found that
. . . it was necessary to wage a struggle for the most elementary things, such as conceding to socialists and anarchists the ordinary rights of political prisoners. In this struggle they were subjected to all the known punishments, such as solitary confinement, beating, starving, throwing on to the wire, organized firing by the military detachment at the building, etc. It will suffice to say that at the end of the year the majority of the Kholmogory inmates could boast, in addition to their past records, hunger strikes totaling thirty to thirty-five days . . .48
Ultimately, this same group of prisoners was moved from Kholmogory to another camp at Petrominsk, another monastery. According to a petition they later sent to the authorities, they were greeted there with “rude shouts and threats,” locked six at a time into a tiny former-monks’ cell, given bunks “alive with parasites,” forbidden any exercise, books, or writing paper.49 The commander of Petrominsk, Comrade Bachulis, tried to break the prisoners by depriving them of light and heat—and from time to time by shooting at their windows.50 In response, they launched another endless round of hunger strikes and protest letters. Ultimately, they demanded to be moved from the camp itself, which they claimed was malarial.51
Other camp bosses complained about such prisoners too. In a letter to Dzerzhinsky, one wrote that in his camp “White Guards who feel themselves to be political prisoners” had organized themselves into a “spirited team,” making it impossible for the guards to work: “they defame the administration, blacken its name . . . they despise the honest and good name of the Soviet worker.”52 Some guards took matters into their own hands. In April 1921, one group of prisoners in Petrominsk refused to work and demanded more food rations. Fed up with this insubordination, the Arkhangelsk regional authorities ordered all 540 of them sentenced to death. They were duly shot.53
Elsewhere, the authorities tried to keep the peace by taking the opposite tack, granting the socialists all of their demands. Bertha Babina, a member of the Social Revolutionaries, remembered her arrival at the “socialist wing” of Butyrka prison in Moscow as a joyous reunion with friends, people “from the St. Petersburg