There is a "hospital" in the Kremlin of the Solovetsky Monastery. The word should be placed within quotation marks, because this hospital has no drugs of any kind, the beds are indescribably dirty, the patients are given the ordinary starvation ration, and the place is very often unheated.
The doctor in charge of it, himself a prisoner, has repeatedly attempted to persuade the Natchuslon that in the absence of drugs, bed linen (the patients lie on bare boards), soap, eatable food, and a latrine in the hospital itself (the patients have to go out in the yard in all temperatures, even in winter), the "treatment" of the prisoners is nothing else than deliberate murder. But the Solovetsky administration has always refused his demands. Fresh thousands arrive in the Solovky every year, and the huts must be cleared of "superfluous elements." Once Nogteff actually said:
"Prisoners have no business to be ill!"
The "hospital" on Popoff Island may serve as another fairly good specimen of Solovetsky "medical help." A woman is in charge of it, by name Lvova (Maria Nikolaevna). She is a highly-trained doctor. Before she was sent into exile she was in the Red Cross, and served on literally every front in the Great War and the civil war. Subsequently she was a "seksotka" (secret woman agent for the Gpu) but was ascertained to have "talked indiscreetly about secret Gpu affairs," and was sent to the Solovky for five years.
This woman, perhaps not bad in the depths of her heart, has been shattered by her work for the Gpu and the life in the Solovky. She has lost all self-control. No one in the Solovky, even the most disreputable common criminals, curses with such complete mastery of the art, applies such foul terms of abuse to men and God Himself, as the directress of the hospital. Criminals often go to the hospital just to listen to Lvova's swearing and introduce her latest gems of obscenity into their own talk.
No one in the Solovky drinks so much, or drinks him- or herself into such a swinish condition, as Maria Nikolaevna. She has reached the lowest pitch of moral disintegration. And her care of the sick is what might be expected of a person in such a state. Human life, for her, has ceased to have the slightest value. The hospitals of the Solovetsky Islands are in themselves almost a guarantee that the patients who enter them will die en masse. Lvova accelerates the patient's death by her roughness, her complete indifference to their sufferings, the cruelty of a person on the verge of insanity. When patients complain of the horrible state of things in her hospital, she always replies:
"The worse the better; all the more of you'll kick the bucket" — followed by a quite unprintable oath.
But I will not raise my hand to throw a stone at this woman; from living in insane conditions she herself has become insane. But have Nogteff and the other "administrators" of the Solovetsky Islands neither eyes nor ears? Why have they put a madwoman at the head of the medical service on Popoff Island?
I gave the answer to this question at the beginning of the chapter. The central authorities of the Gpu, and under them the Solovetsky Tchekists, are deliberately increasing the mortality in the Solovky. A further proof of this is in the fact that prisoners are not allowed to send for a doctor from Kem even at their own expense. The Kem doctor attends only the Solovetsky Tchekists.
The "K.R.'s" and politicals fear the Solovetsky hospitals like the plague. If prisoners of these categories fall ill, and cannot cure themselves by "home remedies," they die in the huts, begging not to be taken to hospital. Only the shpana, who, like Lvova, set no value either on their own lives or other people's, go to hospital of their own accord. In consequence, the ordinary criminals die in dozens daily, mainly of scurvy.