Text taken from the dzen.ru page of Aleksandr Stepanov
In passing, for some reason, I got into Wikipedia and opened an article about the "Solovki Special Purpose Camp". At the beginning, it even pleased me, since it honestly states that the Soviet government on Solovki did not come up with anything. The prison in this place, and a terrible prison, existed for several centuries of Russian history.
And in general, the first camp on Solovki was created back in February 1919 by the white government of Miller-Tchaikovsky, supported by Western democracies: its decree stated that citizens “whose presence is harmful ... can be arrested and extrajudicially deported to places where referred to in paragraph 4 of this resolution". The specified paragraph read: "The place of expulsion is the Solovetsky Monastery or one of the islands of the Solovetsky group, where the settlement of the deportees is possible"
There is also a story about the atrocities of the whites in the article: “In the exile-convict prison in Yokang, prisoners were beaten, starved, tortured, exterminated by a slow painful death from hunger and cold ... By the time the prison was liberated from the Whites, a little more than a third of the prisoners remained alive, 205 of them could no longer move.”
However, further comes the stunning information that in 1919 the Cheka established a number of forced labor camps in the Arkhangelsk province: in Pertominsk, Kholmogory and near Arkhangelsk. The camps had to exist on self-supporting basis without the support of the center:
The authors of the article do not know history and geography? From the summer of 1918 to February 1920, this entire territory was under the control of the Russian White Guards and the troops of the Entente. Insidious Chekists managed to create "Gulags" behind enemy lines? Yes, and self-supporting!!! Well, this is just aerobatics ...
But seriously, it reminded me of a funny story with a certain Mr. Latyshev, whom our opponents in the blogosphere still manage to quote.
This "historian" many years ago told a heartbreaking story about how Dzerzhinsky in December 1919 proposed to Lenin to kill a million captured Cossacks: "In the Novocherkassk region, more than 200 thousand Cossacks of the Don and Kuban troops are being held captive. In the cities of Shakhty and Kamensk - more than 500 thousand Cossacks. In total, about a million people are in captivity. I ask for sanctions. Lenin then imposed a resolution on him: "Shoot every one, December 30, 1919."
Moreover, Latyshev assured that he personally saw this letter from Dzerzhinsky with Lenin's resolution. The nuance is that in December 1919 these cities were under the control of whites. This is easy to learn from sources about the civil war. Where could captured White Cossacks appear in the rear of the White Army?
(c) A.Stepanov
https://dzen.ru/a/ZIgEIOlZqQ4Ht2qQ - zinc