The first group, called "K.R.", comprises persons suspected of acts or propaganda of a Monarchist or, in general, a bourgeois, anti-Socialist tendency. In this comprehensive group you may meet an ex-Minister and an ex-doorkeeper, a young non-commissioned officer and a general, a big manufacturer and an assistant in a small shop, an ex-princess and her cook. The Soviet authorities allot to the "K.R." group the whole clergy en masse, without distinction of Church, the whole of the educated and semi-educated classes, all merchants and all officers.
To the second group, the so-called "politicals and party men," belong prisoners from the remnants of the pre-Revolution Socialist parties — Social Revolutionaries, Social Democrats, Anarchists, etc. — which have not yet been merged with the Communists.
The third category comprises the criminals proper, the so-called shpana.
The Soviet authorities maintain this same distinction in the Solovky and all the other concentration camps and places of exile or settlement.
In the Taganka we were placed in a room packed full of clerics. There were the Vladika Peter (Sokoloff), the Archbishop of Saratoff, the monks of the Kazan monastery, etc. Almost all were accused of concealing church treasures at the time when the Bolsheviks were robbing the churches to satisfy the needs of the Komintern.[[9]] These bishops, priests and monks, like us, were sent to the Solovky.
In Petrograd, where we arrived at the beginning of January, 1924, a group of twenty men, so-called "Casino-ites," were placed in the same room as ourselves in the "second passing-through prison," occupied exclusively by prisoners going on to some other place.
Not long before a fashionable gambling hell in Moscow for highly-placed Communists, called the Casino, had been shut on the ground of too high play, drunken orgies, immorality and debauchery. The unofficial head of this honourable institution was Madame Kameneff, wife of the President of the Executive Committee of the Moscow Government.[[10]] The Moscow Gpu, when closing the Casino, did not dare to arrest the spouse of the Communist Governor-General of Moscow, but the whole staff of the gambling hell, headed by the croupier Petroff, was sent to the Solovky for three years.
These fellows were also our companions on our journey to Kem. Subsequently the "Casino-ites," at the instance of Madame Kameneff, were sent from the Solovky to a voluntary settlement in the Petchersk region. Before our flight from the concentration camp I heard that Petroff and Co. were back in Moscow.
Convoys of prisoners are now sent north from Petrograd once a week, on Thursdays. On one of these Thursdays — January 14th, 1924 — I and a large number of other "K.R.'s," "politicals and party men," and shpana, left for the Solovky in prisoners' trucks.
[9] The Third, or Communist, International.