The Great Terror by Robert Conquest

Author:Robert Conquest
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Random House

A special category of prison consisted of the half-dozen “political isolators,” notably those at Suzdal, Verkhne-Uralsk, Yaroslavl, and Aleksandrovsk. These dated from earlier days of the regime, when they had been thought of as a comparatively humane method of removing factious Communists and other left-wing “politicals” from public life. Even in the early 1930s, treatment in these prisons was comparatively humane. During the purge, they sank to the normal level. A Soviet commentator says of the food in the Yaroslavl isolator in 1937 that it “contained no vitamins whatever. For breakfast we got bread, hot water, and two lumps of sugar, for dinner—soup and gruel cooked without any fat, and for supper—a kind of broth reeking of fish oil.”102 But the isolators still preserved some special characteristics. They mostly held no more than 400 to 500 prisoners. Typically at Verkhne-Uralsk, there were cells holding either 10 to 25 or 3 to 8 prisoners, with in addition a number of solitary cells. It was usual for important prisoners serving sentences, but not expendable—in that further trials were planned for them—to be held in these.

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