Grakholsky's chief claim to celebrity was the part he took in the famous rebellion in the Butyrka prison in Moscow in the winter of 1923. The prisoners, who had been kept in prison for years without any charge being brought against them, became desperate and started a rebellion under the direction of the politicals (Social Revolutionaries). One fine day all Moscow was awakened by wild yells. The prisoners, three thousand in number, disarmed the inner guard of the prison, smashed all the windows, and demanded that their cases should be dealt with immediately by Kalinin, the president of the Vtsik, and the dismissal of the public prosecutor of the Republic, the notorious Armenian, Katanian. They hung out of the windows and yelled till all Moscow heard them, chanting: "We — want — Ka-li-ni-i-i-n! Ka-li-ni-i-i-n! We don't want Ka-ta-nian!"
The whole city flocked to the prison. The streets leading to it were packed with people, many of them cheering. Neither persuasion nor threats could stop the demonstration. The yelling went on for nearly two hours. At last the Gpu used force. Two regiments of Gpu special troops ("tchon")[[18]] broke down the resistance offered and forced their way into the prison. The Gpu exacted a cruel punishment for the rebellion. Its organisers were shot in the prison yard the same day; all the other prisoners were beaten with ramrods. There was no heating at all in the prison for a fortnight, although it was freezing hard and all the windows were broken; the prisoners had their blankets taken away from them and were put on "starvation rations." Some of the men, who had howled louder than the others, were sent to the Solovky for five years. Grakholsky was one of these. Vasto, however, declared, six months later, that he had not only yelled loudly, but had also been one of the instigators of the demonstration; and he was accordingly shot.
Kvitsinsky, who was sent to Moscow for trial by Feldman after the Kholmogory inquiry, is already known to the reader. He was not punished in any way for his hideous crimes and is now in the Solovky, perpetuating the glorious traditions of the "White House" and continually wielding the "Smolensky sticks."
Until the "change of cabinet" in the spring of 1924 the commandant of the Kem camp was, as I have mentioned, Gladkoff, the patron of the common criminals. They found an even more potent defender of their interests in Gladkoff's wife, a simple peasant woman from Kaluga, who had her husband completely under her thumb. Her official title was "administratrix," but the whole camp called her "Mother," the name given her by the grateful shpana. And she was in truth a mother to the criminals. She allowed them to do no work, released them from the cells, and shielded them when they robbed and maltreated the other prisoners. It was absolutely useless to complain to Gladkoff that the criminals had robbed you of your last pair of trousers. The commandant of the "Kem distributing centre" invariably gave the same answer, plus a few unprintable terms of abuse:
"I don't care if they do rob you. My shpana have got nothing, and you're bourgeois."
Under the regime of Gladkoff and "Mother" the criminals exercised a dictatorship in the camps; in fact, to this day they are a privileged caste, the aristocracy of the Solovetsky Islands.
The assistant of the Kem commandant until the "change of cabinet" was Klimoff, a Tchekist prisoner. Before he entered the service of Dzerzhinsky's institution he had been commandant of the Kremlin in Moscow, and later of Trotsky's train. On being transferred to the Gpu he displayed such brilliant capacities for receiving bribes that he soon began to take the bread out of the mouth of the president of the provincial Gpu in which he was employed, and his chief got rid of him by sending him to the Solovky for ten years.
Men of talent come to the front everywhere. At the Solovky, Klimoff continued to occupy himself with his speciality, taking bribes. The Casino-ites[[19]] brought large sums of money with them to the realms of the Slon and received a further supply every month from Madame Kameneff. They simply showered money on Klimoff, and in return were continually being let off work of some sort.
In 1924, instead of being brought to trial, Klimoff was transferred to the Solovetsky Monastery to take over the duties of director of the "Vokhra"[[20]] (internal security service). A man named Provotoroff came to Kem in his place, but soon left again to become commandant of Kond Island, close to Popoff Island.
The assistant of Gladkoff and "Mother" on the economic side was a Tchekist prisoner named Mamonoff, a young man of twenty-two or twenty-three. He had been sent to the Solovky for ten years for the virtuous actions which all Tchekists commit — taking bribes, drunkenness and maltreating arrested persons.