At last, on November 30th, 1923, i.e., seven months after I had been "amnestied" by the Batoum Tcheka, the examining judge of the Vladikavkaz Tcheka finally "amnestied" me in the following terms:
"By order of the administrative exile commission of the People's Commissariat for Home Affairs, Citizen S. A. Malsagoff, having been found guilty of offences against the State of the nature contemplated by Clauses 64 and 66 of the Criminal Code of the R.S.F.S.R. — Clause 64, 'organisation of terrorist acts in co-operation with persons outside Russia,' and Clause 66, 'espionage for the benefit of the international bourgeoisie' — is exiled to the concentration camp in the Solovetsky Islands for a term of three years."
I and several others who had been "amnestied" were sent north by easy stages. The first halting-place was Rostoff. Here I first met face to face the so-called shpana — the ordinary criminals who play so singular a rôle in all the Russian prisons, camps and places of exile.
Robbers on a large and a small scale, burglars, murderers, horse-thieves, coiners, vagabonds — are flung in whole divisions from one prison to another, serve their term or escape by bribing their guards, but soon get into gaol again. Almost all are completely destitute of clothing, always starving, and covered with lice. The guards beat them over the head with their rifle butts, they murder one another with bricks wrenched out of the prison walls. Completely bestialised, wherever they go they gamble away their modest payok (food ration) and their last pair of trousers at cards. This loss they make good by robbing newly-arrived prisoners belonging to the political categories. The stolen things are sold through the overseers of the prisons and camps, and the money obtained for them is spent on drink.
On entering the room allotted to us in Rostoff prison, I was struck dumb with consternation; we were met by nearly a hundred shpana with deafening yells and menacing cries. In a corner sat five men of the educated classes, including a colonel on the General Staff; the shpana had stripped them naked in one night.
Luckily there were men among us who had been through every imaginable experience. One of them drew a chalk line on the floor, dividing the room into two spheres of influence, political and criminal, and shouted to the shpana:
"If one of you crosses this line, I'll kill him!"
He was a man of gigantic stature; the shpana were intimidated. When night came, we posted sentries on the frontier of our sphere of influence. But for events taking this turn, the money and other things which our relations had managed to send us when on the way to Rostoff — by means of substantial bribes to the guards — would have been stolen from us.
From Rostoff we were sent to the Taganka in Moscow.
In the Taganka prison a noticeable degree of system prevails. There are separate rooms for "criminals" of different categories. In Moscow we made the acquaintance of the curious division of all "criminals" by the Soviet authorities not into two classes, "counter-revolutionaries" and "shpana," as in the Caucasus and Southern Russia, but into three.