THING
When the convicts are brought to the camp, they are sent to the bathhouse, where the naked women are examined as goods. Whether there will be water in the bath or not, an examination "for lice" is required. Then the men - the camp workers - stand on the sides of the narrow corridor, and the newly arrived women are allowed into the corridor naked. Yes, not all at once, but one at a time. Then it is decided between the men who takes whom …”(from the memoirs of the GULAG prisoners).
And - a huge sign at the entrance to the camp: “Who was not - that will be! Who was - will not forget!"
Forcing female prisoners into cohabitation was common in the Gulag.
Cattle
“For the headman of the Kemsky camp, Chistyakov, women not only cooked dinner and cleaned their shoes, but even washed it. For this, the youngest and most attractive women were usually selected … In general, all of them on Solovki were divided into three categories: “ruble”, “half-ruble” and “fifteen-kopeck” (“five-kopeck”). If someone from the camp administration asked for a pretty young convict from the new arrivals, he would tell the guard: “Bring me a“ruble”…
Each Chekist on Solovki had from three to five concubines at the same time. Toropov, who in 1924 was appointed assistant to the Kemsky commandant for the economic part, established a real harem in the camp, constantly replenished according to his taste and order. From among the prisoners, 25 women were selected daily to serve the Red Army soldiers of the 95th division, which was guarding Solovki. They said that the soldiers were so lazy that the prisoners even had to make their beds …
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A woman who refused to be a concubine was automatically deprived of the "improved" ration. And very soon she was dying of dystrophy or tuberculosis. On Solovetsky Island, such cases were especially frequent. There was not enough bread for the whole winter. Until the navigation began and new food supplies were brought in, the already meager rations were cut by almost half …”(Shiryaev Boris. An inextinguishable lamp.)
When violence met resistance, those in power took revenge on their victims not only by hunger.
“Once a very attractive girl was sent to Solovki - a Polka of about seventeen. Which had the misfortune to attract the attention of Toropov. But she had the courage to refuse his harassment. In revenge, Toropov ordered her to be brought to the commandant's office and, putting forward a false version of “concealing counterrevolutionary documents,” stripping naked and in the presence of all the camp guards carefully felt the body in those places where, as he said, it was best to hide documents …
One day in February, several drunken guards led by the Chekist Popov entered the women's barracks. He unceremoniously threw the blanket off the prisoner, who once belonged to the upper circles of society, dragged her out of bed, and the woman was raped in turn by each of those who entered …”(Malsagov Sozerko. Hellish Islands: Soviet prison in the far North.)
Gulag. The fate of women “enemies-people” (Danzig Baldaev “Gulag in Drawings”).
PUNISHMENT
In order to break the will of the prisoner, turning her into an obedient "brute", or knock out the "confessions" necessary to extend the term of imprisonment, various kinds of torture were invented, as well as punitive actions to intimidate the rest. Here are just a few of them:
1) Pointless labor.
This is when, for failure to fulfill the plan (and it was incredibly difficult for emaciated and sick women to fulfill it), the prisoner was forced, say, to pour water from an ice hole into an ice hole or drag heavy logs from one place to another and back. To the physical suffering, moral was added here …
2) The punishment cell.
“Anya was convicted of espionage … There was no limit to her indignation. In her own way, she fought: defiantly did not get up when the authorities came in, spoke loudly, opened the window without permission. Naturally, she ended up in a punishment cell. And the conditions in the punishment cell were as follows: a room without windows; food - 400 g of bread a day and two mugs of hot water; the trestle bed is brought in for 6 hours, the rest of the time you have to stand or walk on a two-meter cold room or sit on the floor flooded with water. The punishment cell was given for a period of 4 to 20 days. She must have angered her boss a lot that he gave this poor girl all 20 days. For the first time in my camp life, I faced such a period. Usually, even after five days they went out sick.
After that, Anya lived with us for a month. She got worse and worse, and one night she started bleeding from the throat. Anya was taken to the hospital. She died two days later. She was only 21 years old …”(from the memoirs of the GULAG prisoner Adamova-Sliozberg OL).
And this is the testimony of another prisoner, cited by A. I. Solzhenitsyn in the "Gulag Archipelago":
“The pole-ax. This means - Sekirnaya Mountain. There are punishment cells in the two-story cathedral. They are kept in a punishment cell like this: from wall to wall, hand-thick poles are reinforced. The punished are told to sit on these poles all day. The height of the pole is such that you can't reach the ground with your feet. It is not so easy to maintain balance, all day long a convict or a convict is struggling to keep up. If it falls down, the guards jump up and beat the poor fellow. This is at its best. And then they lead outside to a staircase of 365 steep steps (from the cathedral to the lake, the monks built), tie a log to the back for weight - and push down. And the steps are so steep that a log with a person does not linger on them, it rolls to the very bottom. As a result, bloody rags remain from people …"
3) Freezing people.
“On the business trip“Krasnaya Gorka”, in Solovki, there was a chief named Finkelstein. Once he put thirty-four prisoners (among whom were women) on the ice of the White Sea at -30 degrees below zero for the night for not fulfilling the plan. All of them subsequently had to amputate their frostbitten legs. Most of them died in the infirmary. A few months later I had to participate in a medical commission, which testified to this Chekist. He turned out to be a severe psychoneurotic hysterical. (Professor IS (under this pseudonym, apparently, wrote Professor Ivan Lukyanovich Solonevich, who escaped to Finland from Medvezhyegorsk, where he was transferred from the Svirsk concentration camp). Bolshevism in the light of psychopathology. Revival magazine. №9. Paris. Paris. 1949)
4) Eating by rats.
Huge rats lived in one of the basements. A prisoner or a prisoner was put in a cage and fastened with rods so that the poor fellow could not move. The openings between the bars were wide. The rats freely entered the cage and gnawed at the person. And sometimes they ate him alive …
5) And this will remain a black spot in the history of our country for many years. The Chekists found a way to “crush” the woman, who more firmly than the man endured the hard life and physical abuse of herself. The so-called "child torture" was invented.
The events described by the above-mentioned professor I. S. took place in the city of Lodeynoye Pole, where the main administration of the Svir camps was located.
“During my stay as a psychiatrist in the Solovetsky and Svirsky concentration camps, I had to participate in medical commissions that periodically examined all the GPU employees who worked there … I examined one of the guards. Before that, she was introduced to me by the investigator: "A good worker, and suddenly she went crazy, pouring boiling water over her head."
A woman of about fifty brought to me struck me with her gaze: her eyes were full of horror, and her face was stone. When we were alone, she suddenly spoke - slowly, monotonously, in a kind of underground voice: “I'm not crazy. I was a party member. And now I don’t want to be in the party!” And she told how she once witnessed the following: one of the Chekists broke his fingers to a boy of about ten years old, promising to stop this torture if the mother of the child, who was right there with the baby in her arms, broke only one little finger for her baby … Her ten-year-old son shouted so that the guards holding the woman “rang in their ears” … And when another crunch was heard (the third finger was already broken), she could not stand it and broke her baby's finger … They said that later, in the barracks, she went crazy …
I don't remember, - the professor writes further, - how I left this examination … I almost went crazy myself … (Professor IS Bolshevism in the light of psychopathology. The Renaissance magazine. No. 9. Paris. 1949).
SHOOTING
Those sentenced to camp work for a serious offense or attacks against Soviet power could be sentenced again (without trial or investigation). Including the “highest measure of social protection”.
“They kill alone every day. This is done in the basement under the bell tower. From the revolver … You go down the steps into the darkness and … And the executions are carried out in parties at night at the Onufriev cemetery. The road there goes past our barrack, this is a former hospice. We named this road Rastrelli Street … Tell us about it there, it's very important. It is important that there - there! - knew about this as many people as possible, otherwise they will not stop …"
And these are the revelations of the opposite side - one of the GULAG Chekists, who worked in the women's camps:
“The one you are leading to shoot must have her hands tied behind with wire. You tell her to follow along, and you follow her with a revolver in his hand. When necessary, you command “right”, “left”, until you bring to the place where sawdust or sand are prepared. There she was blowing to the back of the head and trrrh! And at the same time you give a hard kick in the ass. This is so that the blood does not splatter the shirt and that the wife does not have to wash it again and again”.
Author: Vladimir Kuzin