[10] i.e. Province.

PART II
THE SOLOVETSKY ISLANDS

CHAPTER I
THE FORERUNNERS OF THE "SOLOVKY"

Conditions in Earlier Camps — The "White House" — 100,000 Shot — Mass Drownings — A Commission of Inquiry — Survivors Removed to Solovetsky Islands.

Until late in 1922, Kholmogory[[11]] and Portaminsk performed the function now discharged by the Solovky. When I reached the Solovky at the beginning of 1924, I met a number of men, the survivors of the "K.R." prisoners in the concentration camps at these places. They had been transferred to the Solovky in August, 1922. I should like to state briefly what these men, who had remained alive by a miracle, told me.

The concentration camps at Kholmogory and Portaminsk were established by the Soviet Government at the end of 1919. The people sent to them from every part of Russia had to live in hastily-run-up hutments. These were never heated, even at the height of winter, when in these far northern latitudes the thermometer often falls to -50° or -60° Celsius (90 to 110 degrees of frost Fahrenheit).

The prisoners were given the following ration: one potato for breakfast, potato peelings cooked in hot water for dinner, and one potato for supper. Not a morsel of bread, not an ounce of sugar, not to speak of meat or butter. And these people, driven by the pangs of hunger to eat the bark of trees, unable to stand from exhaustion, were compelled by tortures and shootings to perform hard labour — digging up tree-stumps, working in the stone-quarries, floating timber.

They were absolutely forbidden to correspond with their families in any way or to receive from them parcels of clothes or food. All letters were destroyed, food and other things sent were consumed or used by the camp guards.

After the defeat of the armies of General Denikin and General Wrangel, at the end of 1919 and 1920 respectively, captured White officers and men and civilian inhabitants of the territories wrested from the White armies — men, women and children — were sent to Kholmogory, convoy after convoy. And after the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion in April, 1921, all the sailors taken prisoner by the Bolsheviks, about 2,000 in number, were sent there. The remnants of Koltchak's army, various Siberian and Ukrainian chieftains, peasants from the Tamboff Government who had belonged to Antonoff's bands, tens of thousands of members of the intelligentsia of all nationalities and religions, Kuban and Don Cossacks, etc. — all flowed in a broad stream to Kholmogory and Portaminsk.

The higher administration of these camps was appointed by Moscow and carried out the instructions received thence. The middle and lower personnel consisted of imprisoned Tchekists, who had been transported for too open robbery, taking of bribes, drunkenness and other breaches of duty. These fellows, having no one else on whom to avenge their removal from their lucrative duties in the Extraordinary Commissions of Central Russia, treated the prisoners in the camps with indescribable cruelty.