Every year there arrive at Kem some two thousand "K.R.'s," who are sent on to Solovetsky Island when navigation is possible. The arrivals are especially numerous during the months which immediately precede November 7th (October 25th, old style), the date of the Bolshevist Revolution of 1917.
Every year at this time the Vtsik — thus controverting "the malignant lies of the international bourgeoisie and the shameless émigrés" about the cruelty of the Soviet power — publishes a wide amnesty to "all enemies of the ruling proletariat." The presidents of the provincial and district branches of the Gpu, by way of carrying out the directions of the humane Vtsik, shoot half their prisoners a few days before the amnesty and send the rest to the concentration camps, to which the terms of the amnesty decree state that it is not extended.
Thus, in reality, nobody is amnestied on November 7th. The Vtsik is satisfied, the Gpu is satisfied too; "the lies of the shameless bourgeoisie" have been exposed.
I could fill several pages with the names of people who have been "amnestied" in this manner. I will quote, as an example, a case in which not only the individual who was stupid enough to believe in the good faith of the Tchekists, but his relations too, were "amnestied." At the end of 1923 a soldier of Denikin's army, a peasant from the Government of Poltava, returned to Russia on the strength of the amnesty proclaimed by the Soviet Government in November of that year. He was given a Soviet passport on the frontier, and on arriving at his home went to the provincial Gpu, was registered, was sent away again and spent several days with his family.
Result — at the beginning of 1924 the soldier was sent to the Narym region of Siberia for three years, while his father and father's sister were despatched by the Gpu to the Solovky for concealing a counter-revolutionary (Clause 68 of the Criminal Code)! At the time of my escape these peasants, the victims of this singular "amnesty," were still in the Solovky, waiting to be sent on to the Zyriansk region.
"Amnestied" émigrés are continually being sent to the Solovky. Just before my escape a large party of émigrés arrived, nine-tenths of them private soldiers; there were a few officers, among them a cavalry subaltern named Menuel and Saprunenko, who had been aide-de-camp to the Ukrainian hetman Skoropadsky.
The Soviet power extends a real amnesty only to people, whether émigrés or living in Soviet Russia, whose names can be used later as a decoy. Such gentlemen, for example, as ex-General Slastschoff and similar renegades can live in freedom and even occupy responsible posts so long as this suits the book of the Gpu, so long as the Gpu reckons that it can make use of the name of one of these "signal-changers"[[26]] to prove "the good faith of the Soviet power, which amnesties all repentant émigrés." But as soon as the renegade in question has "done his job," he can go away, or, to be more correct, he is sent away, to exile or to the next world. It is sufficient to recall the fate of the well-known Social Revolutionary Savinkoff, who was "amnestied" by the Bolsheviks — after which the Tchekists flung him from a fifth-floor window of his prison.
Ordinary émigrés who return are immediately sent to the Solovky or the Narym region — that is to say, if the "supreme measure of punishment" (shooting) has not already been applied to them. The latter fate, as a rule, awaits officers.
The Soviet Government, returning evil for good, sends to the concentration camps people who have "besmirched themselves" by working with organisations of which the unhappy Russian people will always retain a grateful memory. Among the prisoners at the Solovky is a dentist named Malivanoff, a Moscow Jew. Malivanoff gave active help to the A.R.A. (the American relief organisation for the benefit of the famine victims), with the result that he was sent to the Solovky for five years. As the Criminal Code of the U.S.S.R. does not at present provide any punishment for giving relief to famine victims, the clause relating to "economic espionage" was applied to Malivanoff! A number of other Russians who worked with the A.R.A. and famine relief organisations from other countries were sent by the grateful Gpu to Siberia, to the Narym and Petchersk regions.
Karpoff, well known as the stage manager of the Alexandrinsk Theatre in Petrograd, and subsequently of the Great and Little Theatres in Moscow, was sent to the Solovky in company with other artists — Jurovsky, Georges, etc. — on the charge of "counter-revolution." During my stay there he was sent on to another place of exile.