In 1922, Socialist-Revolutionary émigrés brought out in Germany, under the editorship of Victor Chernov, a volume of reports by survivors of Soviet prisons and camps. Included was a description of life in a concentration camp at Kholmogory, near Archangel, written in early 1921 by an anonymous female prisoner.
The camp had four compounds holding 1,200 inmates. The prisoners were housed in an expropriated cloister whose accommodations were relatively comfortable and well heated. The author describes it nevertheless as a “death camp.” Hunger was endemic: food packages, some sent by American relief organizations, were immediately confiscated. The commandant, who bore a Latvian name, had prisoners shot for the most trifling offenses: if a prisoner, while working in the fields, dared to eat a vegetable that he had dug up, he was killed on the spot and then reported as having tried to escape. The flight of a prisoner automatically led to the execution of nine others, bound to him by “collective responsibility,” as provided for by law; a recaptured escapee was killed as well, sometimes by being buried alive.
Source:
Pipes, Richard. "The Red Terror." The Russian Revolution. New York: Knopf, 1990. 836-37. Print.
Original Source Listed:
Cheka i materialy, 242-47.
Further Reading:
No comments, yet...