But the greatest blessing the politicals enjoy is that their wives and children are not compelled to associate with the women of the shpana. The company of these women is horrible.
There are at present about six hundred women in the Solovetsky camps. At the monastery they are quartered in the "Women's Building" in the Kremlin; on Popoff Island they occupy the whole of hut No. 1 and portions of other huts. Three-quarters of them are the wives, mistresses, relatives or simply the accomplices of the common criminals.
Women are officially transported to the Solovky (and to the Narym region) for "persistent prostitution." At regular intervals, in all the large towns of European and Asiatic Russia, raids against prostitutes are carried out in order that they may be sent to the concentration camps. The prostitutes, who under the Soviet regime have combined to form regular professional unions, from time to time organise street processions in Moscow and Petrograd by way of protest against the raids and the transportations; but this is of little avail.
The character and ways of the female shpana are so savage that a description of them, to anyone unacquainted with life in the Solovetsky prison, may sound like the delusions of a madman.
For example, when they go to the bath-house, they undress a long time before in their huts and walk about stark naked, to the accompaniment of roars of laughter and approving remarks from the camp personnel.
The female criminals are just as addicted to gambling card games as the men. If they lose, they hardly ever have any money, decent clothes or food with which to pay. In consequence, the most barbarous scenes may be witnessed every day in the camps. The women play cards on the condition that the loser must immediately go to one of the men's huts and give herself to ten men one after the other. This must take place in the presence of regular witnesses. The camp administration has never intervened to put a stop to this loathsomeness.
The influence the female criminals have on educated women, "K.R." prisoners, can be imagined. The foulest cursing, in which the names of God, Christ, the Virgin and all the saints are called upon, universal drunkenness, indescribable debauchery, thieving, filth, syphilis — all this must in the long run be too much for the most stubborn nature.
To send an honest woman to the Solovky is to turn her in a few months into something worse than a prostitute — a piece of dumb, dirty flesh, an object of barter, at the disposal first and foremost of the camp personnel itself.
Every Tchekist in the Solovky has from three to five concubines at the same time. Toropoff, who was appointed assistant to the Kem commandant on the administrative side in 1924, established a regular harem in the camp, continually replenished according to his choice and at his orders. The Red soldiers who guard the camp violate women unpunished.
According to the camp rules, twenty-five women — "K.R.'s" and shpana — are selected every day to act as servants to the Red divisions guarding the Solovky. The soldiers are so lazy that the prisoners even make their beds.