PAUL AVRICH were bent upon restoring the tsarist order, included dedicated revolutionaries - Mensheviks, Anarchists, Socialist Revolutionaries - who criticized the Bolsheviks for betraying the true principles of the Revolution and who demanded the restoration of industrial democracy, freely elected soviets, and freedom of speech, press, and assembly, all of which the new dictatorship had suppressed. Far from being granted political and civil liberties. however, these veteran revolutionaries, many of whom had served in prison under the tsar, found themselves the objects of a determined political manhunt. Denounced as « petty bourgeois and counter-revolutionary elements, » they were caught up in the dragnet of the Che.ka, the Bolshevik security pollee, and condemned anew to imprisonment or exile. Beginning in 1918, their book stores, printing offlces, and meeting places were shut down as wave after wave of political arrests swept, the country. Even the fohowers of Tolstoy, who preached the gospel of Christian nonviolence (they refrained, it was said, from killing the very lice they plucked from their beards), fell victim to the repressions, sorne belng shot when they refused to serve in the Red Army during the Civil War of 1918-20, others being banished or imprisoned in the years that followed. A number of oppositionists - the Menshevik leader Martov, the Left Socialist Revolutionary Natanson, the Anarchist Emma Goldman are examples - were allowed to emigrate to the West or were unceremoniously deported. But the majority were not so fortunate. Thousands filled the jails of Petrograd an Moscow (Liubianka, Taganka, Lefortovo, Butyrki - their names reverberate through Solzhenitsyn's writings), which had been emptied of political offenders after the collapse of the monarchy ; and thousands more were sent to concentration camps or to so-called « political isolators » which were unknown even under the tsars. (One of the most notorlous « politlcal isolators » was located in the medieval city ot Rlazan, where Solzhenltsyn went to live after his own ordeal in prlson and exile.) The ancient monastery on Solovetsky Island in the White Sea was converted lnto a prison whóse inmates staged repeated demonstratlons and hunger-strikes and in sorne cases resorted to self-lmmolation to protest their unwarranted confinement. Other revolutionaries, as well as ordlnary workers and peasants, were banished -to penal colonies in Slberla, the Ural 104
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