That success soon became the central argument for the restructuring of the entire Soviet prison system. If it was to be achieved at the cost of worse rations and poorer living conditions for prisoners, no one much cared.74 If it was to be achieved at the price of poor relations with local authorities, that bothered no one either.
Within the camp itself, few doubted who was responsible for this alleged success. Everyone firmly identified Frenkel with the commercialization of the camp, and many equally firmly hated him for it. At a rancorous meeting of the Solovetsky Communist Party in 1928—so rancorous that part of the meeting’s protocols were declared too secret to keep in the archive, and are unavailable—one camp commander, Comrade Yashenko, complained that SLON’s Economic-Commercial Department had accrued far too much influence: “everything lies in its competence.” He also attacked Frenkel, “a former prisoner who was freed after three years’ work because at that time there were not enough people [guards] to work at the camp.” So important had Frenkel become, complained Yashenko (whose language contains a strong whiff of anti-Semitism), that “when a rumor came around that he might leave, people were saying, “we can’t work without him.”
Yashenko hated Frenkel so much, he confessed, that he had contemplated murdering him. Others asked why Frenkel, a former prisoner, received priority service and cheap prices in the SLON shops—as if he were the owner. Still others said SLON had become so commercial that it had forgotten its other tasks: all re-educational work in the camp had been halted, and prisoners were being held to unfair work standards. When prisoners mutilated themselves to escape work norms, their cases were not investigated.75
But just as SLON was to win the argument against the Karelian authorities, so Frenkel was to win the argument, within SLON—perhaps thanks to his contacts in Moscow—about what kind of camp Solovetsky should become, how prisoners were to work in it, and how they should be treated.
As I have already mentioned, Frenkel probably did not invent the notorious you-eat-as-you-work system, by which prisoners were given food rations according to the amount of work they completed. Nevertheless, he did preside over the development and flowering of that system, which grew from a slapdash arrangement in which work was sometimes “paid” with food, into a very precise, regulated method of food distribution and prisoner organization.
In fact, Frenkel’s system was quite straightforward. He divided the prisoners of SLON into three groups according to their physical abilities: those deemed capable of heavy work, those capable of light work, and invalids. Each group received a different set of tasks, and a set of norms to fulfill. They were then fed accordingly—and the differences between their rations were quite drastic. One chart, drawn up between 1928 and 1932, allotted 800 grams of bread and 80 grams of meat to the first group; 500 grams of bread and 40 grams of meat to the second group; and 400 grams of bread and 40 grams of meat to the third group. The lowest category of worker, in other words, received half as much food as the highest.76
In practice, the system sorted prisoners very rapidly into those who would survive, and those who would not. Fed relatively well, the strong prisoners grew stronger. Deprived of food, the weak prisoners grew weaker, and eventually became ill or died. The process was made more rapid and more extreme because work norms were often set very high—impossibly high for some prisoners, particularly for city people who had never worked digging peat or cutting trees. In 1928, the central authorities punished a group of camp guards because they had forced 128 people to work in the forest all night during winter, in order to fulfill the norm. A month later, 75 percent of the prisoners were still seriously ill with severe frostbite.77
Under Frenkel, the nature of SLON’s work changed as well: he was not interested in fripperies such as fur farming, or the cultivation of exotic Arctic plants. Instead, he sent prisoners to build roads and cut trees, taking advantage of the free, unskilled labor that SLON possessed in abundance. 78 The nature of the work quickly changed the nature of the camp, or rather of the camps, for SLON now began to expand well beyond the Solovetsky archipelago. Frenkel no longer cared, particularly, whether prisoners were kept in a prison setting, in prison buildings, behind barbed wire. He sent teams of convict laborers all over the Karelian Republic and the Arkhangelsk region of the Russian mainland, thousands of kilometers away from Solovetsky, to wherever they were most needed.79
Like a management consultant taking over a failing company, Frenkel “rationalized” other aspects of camp life as well, slowly discarding everything that did not contribute to the camp’s economic productivity. All pretense of re-education was rapidly dropped. As Frenkel’s detractors complained, he had shut down the camp’s journals and newspapers, and halted the meetings of the Solovetsky Society for Local Lore. The Solovetsky museum and theater continued to exist, but solely in order to impress visiting bigwigs.
At the same time, random cruelty was becoming less common. In 1930, the Shanin Commission, a special delegation of the OGPU, arrived on the island to investigate rumors of ill-treatment of prisoners. Their reports confirmed the stories of excessive beating and torture on the island. In a stunning reversal of previous policy, the commission sentenced and executed nineteen of the OGPU perpetrators.80 Such behavior was now considered out of place in an institution that valued trudosposobnost—“work capability”—above all else.
Finally, under Frenkel’s leadership, the concept of “political prisoner” changed for good. In the autumn of 1925, the artificial lines that had been drawn between those with criminal sentences and those convicted of counter-revolutionary crimes were dropped as both groups were sent together to the mainland to work in the huge forestry projects and wood-processing plants of Karelia. SLON no longer recognized privileged prisoners, but rather saw all prisoners as potential laborers.81
The socialist residents of the Savvatyevo barracks presented a larger problem. Clearly, the socialist politicals did not fit into anyone’s idea of economic efficiency since they refused, on principle, to do any form of forced labor whatsoever. They even refused to cut their own firewood. “We have been exiled administratively,” one complained, “and the administration must provide us with all the necessities.”82 Not surprisingly, that position began to inspire resentment in the camp administration. Although he had personally negotiated with the politicals in Petrominsk in the spring of 1923, and had personally promised them a freer regime on Solovetsky if they would agree to go there peacefully, Commander Nogtev in particular appears to have resented their endless demands. He argued with the politicals about their freedom of movement, about their access to doctors, and about their right to correspond with the outside world. Finally, on December 19, 1923, at the height of a particularly bitter argument over prisoner curfews, the soldiers guarding the Savvatayevo barracks opened fire on a group of politicals, killing six of them.
The incident caused an uproar abroad. The Political Red Cross smuggled reports of the shooting across the border. Accounts appeared in the Western press even before they had appeared in Russia. Telegrams between the island and the Communist Party leadership went swiftly back and forth. At first, the camp authorities defended the shootings, claiming that the prisoners had broken the curfew and that the soldiers had given three warnings before firing.
Later, in April 1924, while not quite admitting that the soldiers had failed to give any warnings—and prisoners agree they did not—the camp administration provided a more elaborate analysis of what had happened. The politicals, their report explained, were of a “different class” from the soldiers assigned to guard them. The prisoners spent their time reading books and newspapers; the soldiers had no books and newspapers. The prisoners ate white bread, butter, and milk; the soldiers had none of these. It was an “abnormal situation.” Natural resentment had built up, the workers resenting the nonworkers, and when prisoners had defied the curfew, blood was inevitably spilled.83 To back up their conclusions, camp administrators read letters from prisoners aloud at a meeting of the
Communist Party Central Committee in Moscow: “I am feeling well, I am eating well . . . it isn’t necessary to send me clothes and food now.” Other letters described the beautiful views.84 When some of these letters later appeared in the Soviet press, prisoners insisted they had written these idyllic descriptions of life on the island only in order to calm the fears of their relatives.85
Indignant, the Central Committee took action. A committee led by Gleb Boky, the OGPU boss in charge of concentration camps, paid a visit to the Solovetsky camps and the transit prison in Kem. A series of articles in Izvestiya followed in October 1924. “Those who believe Solovetsky is a depressing, gloomy prison, where people sit and waste time in crowded cells, are deeply mistaken,” wrote N. Krasikov. “The whole camp consists of a huge economic organization of 3,000 laborers, working at the most varied types of production.” Singing the praises of Solovetsky’s industry and agriculture, Krasikov then went on to describe life in the socialists Savvatyevo barracks:
The life they lead can be characterized as anarcho-intellectual, with all of the negative aspects of that form of existence. Continued idleness, harping on political dissensions, family quarrels, factional disputes, and above all an aggressive and hostile attitude to the government in general and the local administration and Red Army guards in particular . . . all this combined makes these three hundred-odd people hostile to every measure and every attempt of the local authorities to introduce regularity and organization into their lives.86
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 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 write
r “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
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.”
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