HOSPITAL HORRORS
_Hospitals Without Drugs — "Prisoners Must Not be Ill" — A Madwoman in
Command — Mortality among Prisoners Encouraged — A Kindly Tchekist._
The "Medpomoshtsh"[34] (medical help) in the Solovetsky Islands is in
fact medical helplessness. Owing partly to lack of resources, partly to
the ill-will of the administration of the camps and the secret
instructions of the Moscow Gpu, there is in the Solovky only one really
effective cure for illness — death.
The sanitary conditions in the camps are horrible. Not only are huts,
kitchens, latrines, etc., in an incredible state of filth, but the
Solovetsky "hospitals" themselves can truthfully be called
breeding-places for epidemics. The damp, marshy locality, the bad water,
and the millions of mosquitoes and lice all render powerful assistance
in creating and spreading disease.
The prisoners have no change of linen, no soap, no proper clothes or
boots. Their organisms, debilitated by permanent under-nourishment and
hard work, are not in a state to resist disease.
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.
The water of the Solovetsky Islands has in it some quality which ruins
the teeth, and the consequent toothache is intensified by cold and the
draughts in the huts. A dentist is urgently needed in the camps. It is
true that there is a dentist in the Kremlin of the Solovetsky Monastery
— Malivanoff, known to the reader as an A.R.A. worker, punished by the
Bolsheviks in return for his services — but he has no drugs or
instruments.
On Popoff Island this question is decided in a radical manner. There is
a man named Brusilovsky in the camp. Before the Revolution he was a
_feldsher_, or local surgeon; after the Revolution — a Tchekist
belonging to the Gpu of Elisavetgrad, in what is now the Government of
Odessa, formerly the Government of Kherson. He was sent to the Solovky
under Clause 76 of the Criminal Code — "armed banditism." Despite his
profession of Tchekist, Brusilovsky is a very nice, sympathetic fellow.
He decided to do what he could for the victims of toothache, and somehow
got hold of an ordinary blacksmith's pincers, with which he pulls out
teeth.
Of course, nothing can be done to cure the teeth while they are
decaying, for there is nothing to do it with, neither drugs nor
instruments; all that can be done is to pull them out, to which the
sufferers always readily consent. Brusilovsky never takes any money for
his services. He has a huge practice, especially among the _shpana_,
whose teeth he pulls out rows at a time. The first time he pulled out
quite sound teeth too, for practice.
This compassionate Tchekist treats syphilis too. His method of dealing
with this complaint is also the last word in Solovetsky science. A
compound of infusions of herbs, spirit and something else is injected
with an ordinary syringe. He evidently still needs practice in this
branch, for syphilis is on the increase in the camps, and the mortality
from it is growing steadily.
[Footnote 34: _Meditsinskaya pomoshtsh_.]