Hardly have you set foot on the now accursed soil of the Solovky before you feel the power of the shpana. When our party, consisting of "counter-revolutionaries" from the Caucasus, bishops and monks, a group of Casino-ites and many others, arrived at hut No. 6 (the "distributing hut"), we were met by armed Tchekists, themselves prisoners. They wanted to know first of all whether there were any Gpu employees or any criminal agents among us, for if so they might not go into the hut; the ordinary criminals would kill them at once. Several men stood aside.
The rest of us entered hut No. 6. It was a huge wooden shed, filled to overflowing with shpana. There were board-beds in two tiers, one above the other. The beds and the floor under the lower tier were covered with half-naked bodies. The stench was so awful that I nearly fell down. Drunken yells and drunken weeping, the most disgusting abuse. There was a feeble glow from a lamp in a corner.
I describe the "distributing hut" in some detail because all new arrivals have to go through this torturing stage of their captivity, and, further, because nothing could be more characteristic of the whole conditions in the Solovetsky camps.
Having been warned by our earlier experience at Rostoff, we lay down on our things, putting them under our heads. But this precaution proved to be inadequate. I was awakened during the night by a fearful noise. Staring into the semi-darkness, I perceived with horror that all our things had been stolen — our provisions plundered, our baskets, suitcases and boxes broken open. Yells resounded from one corner, where one of the shpana who had taken too much for himself was being sentenced to a beating by an assize of his fellow-criminals. In another corner three criminals were hitting one of their comrades over the head with pieces of wood; he was dripping with blood, but still refused to give up the linen he held tightly under his arm. On the upper tier of beds, close to the ceiling, the national card game, tri listika, was already being played with our money. At the door a knot of shpana were conducting trade negotiations with the sentry, exchanging somebody's rug for spirits.
We "K.R.'s" decided next morning that it was useless to make a complaint. But one of the politicals in our party, a Social Revolutionary, indignantly told the commandant about the behaviour of the shpana who had left him with only one shirt in winter time. The commandant, for form's sake, appeared in the hut and called in timid tones:
"Give back the things! What disgraceful conduct!"
The criminals answered with a roar of laughter; but the next night they would have killed the "S.R." if we had not defended him.
Next morning an old inhabitant of the camp, Bishop Illarion Trotsky, the right-hand man of the late Patriarch Tikhon, was ordered to conduct our party to hut No. 9.
An unwritten internal discipline binds the ordinary criminals together. These starving, half-naked gallows-birds, dying by scores daily from scurvy and syphilis, never take a risk. The peculiar favour and protection which all the authorities of the Solovky, without exception, extend to the shpana is very simply explained.
The hostility which the ordinary criminal instinctively feels towards the "K.R.", the educated barin, is felt in an equal degree by every Tchekist in the Solovky, though he also sees in each "K.R." a counter-revolutionary, a Monarchist, a bourgeois. A further reason why complaints against the shpana are fruitless is that a large part of the Solovetsky administration are closely connected with the criminal classes, not only in their mentality, but in their pre-Revolution antecedents.