ISLAND OF DESPAIR.

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXIV, Issue 18845, 7 April 1931, Page 2

ISLAND OF DESPAIR.

RED RUSSIA’S ARCTIC PRISON. “MEN WHO DO NOT DIE QUICKLY ENOUGH.” Solovki, or the Solovietzky Islands, lying in the White Sea in the extreme north of Russia, are the Russian equivalent of the French Guiana, only a far mare cruel one. Upon them is the prison of the Ogpu ( the Soviet political police), which probably is the largest prison in the worM and which is famous throughout Russia for the extreme severity of its regime. “One cannot rise from one’s grave; one cannot return from Solovki”—it is so that the people speak of it. Solovki is not merely a prison; it is literally a whole little prison world. Prison settlements or “camps” are scattered not only in the islands, but also on the continent between Kem and Murmansk, near Archangel, etc. In 1929 the total number of Solovietzky convicts was estimated at about 45,000 men, women and children. Since then it has been quickly increasing. A Zatyldan and N. Malyshev, who fled from Solo/ki last July, assert that now this number has risen to about 300.000. Solovki enjoyed a wide fame before the revolution, too, but is was a different fame. The largest of the islands, Solovietzky Island proper, for centuries has been the site of one of the most remarkable Russian monasteries, with which numberless poetic legends and historical reminiscences arc connected. In Czarist days thousands of pilgrims flocked to it every summer. The walls of the monastery’s “Kremlin” (fortress), with their eight towers impress by their mammoth massiveness; but af enormous, uneven blocks of granite, '♦’hey are twenty feet thick and forty-five feet high. For as the monastery grew over the tombs of its founder, politics intruded even here. During the sixteenth century it became Muskovia’s stronghold in the north. The Swedes besieged it time after time, but never took it, and even as recently as 1854, during the Crimean War, the British fleet bombarded it, but could not destroy it. “Slaves of the State.” Now the monastery is the administrative centre of the Solovietzky prison world. In its solid buildings are the headquarters of Ogpu, and there the Red Army units guarding the convicts and the Uslon (or U.S.L.O.N.) —that is to say, the administration of Solovietzky camps—are quartered. The monastery’s seven churches, stripped of their splendour and of their valuable anciei.i; ikons, have been converted into prison barracks, “clubs,” storage houses, etc. For, of course as soon as the Soviets took possession of Solovki the monks were partly arrested and shot and partly chased out. Only a small percentage of convicts live, however, in the islands themselves Thus, even in the main island, where within the monastery’s walls the Soviets inherited from hard-working monks a little tannery, a tailoring shop, an electric power station, and other such enterprises, there are only 10,000 men. A great majority of the convicts are quartered on the continent; it is there that convict labour is needed most. Solovietzky convicts are literally outlaws, “the slaves of the State.” They have no legal protection of any kind. j The prison, administration’s authority j over them is unlimited. A commander of a camp, or even a mere Ogpu agent, can inflict any punishment upon them, or even shoot them for the slightest offence. They live in large, unheated wooden barracks without any sanitary accommodation. They are so herded that at night the seven or tight rows of bunks and the earth floor of the barracks look like one solid mass of filthy, weltering, groaning and swearing bodies. The air is fetid; those in the upper bunks nearly suffocate. In winter the cold is terrific. “Often,” Mr Grube who recently escaped from there, says (in "Novoyne Russkoye Slovo”) “in the morning the bodies of convicts frozen to death would be found along the barrack's outer walls.” At daybreak they are driven to work. They fell trees in snow-covered forests; in summer they load them to exportation or cut them for various purposes. Ruthless Hatred. Generally speaking, the average length of a Solovietzky convict’s life does not outlast two or three years. They are all doomed men, and the/ know it. Those who do not die on the Ukhtinsky highroad will die of spotted typhus (for spotted typhus and other diseases carry away thousands after thousands), and those whom from even spotted typhus spares will succumb from exhaustion and undernourishment. "One cannot rise from one's grave; one cannot return from Solovki.” Where lies the cause of this at the first sight absurd cruelty? First of all, in the “social composition” of the convicts. Among Solovietzky convicts there are criminal offenders. But they are very few. As in Ivan the Terrible’s days, Solovki is chiefly a political prison From ex-aristocrats and clergymen (many of the late Patriarch Tikhon’s supporters died here; to “sabotaging technical experts,” workmen who permitted themselves to strike and “nepmen” —that is to say, new business men who were allowed to trade by Lenin but were rearrested and banished by Stalin—all sorts of Soviet “enemies” are represented. Lately thousands of “kulaks”—that is, peasants who opposed collectivisation—have been sent here with their families (it is they, by the way, who have raised the number of Solovietzky convicts to its* present enormous figure). Thus, from the Soviet viewpoint, Solovki holds the most “harmful” human element—those whom, even in their official statements, Soviet leaders describe as “men who do not die out quickly enough.” It is true that after a month of stay here all lose their "ideological” and “class distinction.” Covered with insects and ulcers, all revert to type; an ex-aristocrat becomes indL»tinguishable from a bandit. But that makes no difference. They are, or at least they were, the proletariat’s “class enemies. It would be silly to stand on ceremony with them. Mr Grube says that up to 1928, when convicts were transported from the islands to the continent in open ships (special prison ships were introduced only later), men daily jumped overboard and, of course, were shot. He himself escaped hi a similar way “by miracle”; near Kem he dived into the sea and swam to a little German ship which lay not far off; he spoke German and the crew helped him to hide. The Ogpu guards searched the ship only superficially, apparently they believed that he had drowned.