THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD
Russia in Chains is the most remarkable book yet written by a Russian about the Soviet regime. MM. Gide and Cline, Sir Walter Citrine, Mr. W. H. Chamberlin, and Mr. Lyons have written more or less effective exposures of the " Great Experiment " within the last few years. But all these observers are foreigners. Mr. Solonevich differs from them not only in his nationality, but in the range of his experience.
Here is no privileged visitor or foreign correspondent, permitted to see something of the facade and to peep through its interstices at the grim interior. Ivan Solonevich escaped from Russia in 1934, after spending fifteen years in the service of the Soviet Government as " sanitarian, fisherman, stevedore, book-keeper, co-operator, photographer, sports instructor, and sports journalist." In that Government's service he had travelled all over Russia, from Karelia on the Finnish border to Middle Asia. He had been eleven times arrested by the G.P.U. He had " graduated in the highest school of Russian life—the concentration camp." It is obvious that the evidence of such a man must carry more weight than- that of the best equipped and most impartial foreigner. No foreigner can possibly have seen, felt, or lived through so much.
It will be said that Mr. Solonevich is prejudiced. Of course he is, if it be prejudice to condemn an indefensible and insufferable regime. It should be noted that he ,was sent to a concentration camp because he attempted to escape in the first place. It was not, therefore, " the conditions of life in concentration camps which impelled his escape, but the general atmosphere in Russia itself." Here is a man who spent fifteen years covering, usually with a notebook, nearly all of Soviet Russia. " What I then endured and what I then saw made it morally impossible for me to remain."
Let no one think that this is a book written for sensation or for cheap effect. It is far too solid, too detailed, too temperately put together for that. Parts of it are extremely funny. There is no rhetorical padding. There are only the facts, set out with the elocruence of a man of talent, character, and feeling. I have no space here to do full justice to Mr. Solonevich or to his book. Anybody who wishes to form an honest opinion about the U.S.S.R. must read it for him or herself. A few instances must suffice to illustrate the importance of the indictment.
In his " free " days, when the author was travelling as a writer on sports subjects (Mr. Solonevich is a distinguished athlete), he was constantly being confronted with this sort of problem, anywhere from Moscow to Daghestan or Kirghizia. " The censor will delete the slightest hint to the effect that the population is being exterminated by malaria " ; " what I saw was the appalling ruin of the livestock industry . . the misery of the concentration camps . . . and the deported, tattered, and hungry Kulaks from the Ukraine ; all dreadful things that I could not write about." Even " friends of the Soviet Union " may perhaps understand that it was increasingly difficult for Mr. Solonevich to produce enthusiastic articles in such conditions year after year.
The concentration camp at any rate delivered him from this necessity. At the same time it provided him with one more first-rate chance of observing the Soviet system at' work. As an employee of the Planning and Statistical Sections of two camps near the Finnish border, he had to deal with the transfer of prisoners from camp to camp all over Russia. He puts the figure for the camps of the White Sea-Baltic Combine, which administered most of the " autonomous republic " of Karelia, at z86,000 in July, 1934 ; the figure for the whole Soviet Union at not less than five million, or to per cent. of the adult male population ! This was in 1934 ; does anyone suppose that with the reign of terror that prevails at present in the Soviet Union that figure has decreased ?
The best proof that this is a shattering book came a few weeks ago. Russia in Chains was published in London on January 25th : on February 3rd a bomb was exploded in Ivan Solonevich's flat in -Sofia and his wife and secretary were
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