Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [40]
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 the working classes. That soon became apparent . . .
—Josef Stalin1
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