SOLZHENITSYN Mountains, and Central Asia, where they were beaten, degraded, and robbed of their self-respect, and where many were doomed to an early death from scurvy, typhus, and consumption. A few, such as the Left Socialist Revolutionary leader Maria Spiridonova, who had spent a decade in tsarist prisons, were placed « for observatlon , in mental instltutions, a technlque greatly expanded under the present Soviet leadership. Letters from lmprisoned Anarchists, dating from the Civil War perlod and now preserved in Western archives, bear such annotations as « shot by Kiev Cheka, , « beaten for resisting forced feeding, , « fate unknown. , Olga Taratuta, for example, released from tsarist prison in 1917, was arrested again by the Bolsheviks, beaten by her jailers in Butyrki, afflicted by scurvy in the Orel « politlcal isolator, , and finally sent lnto Siberian exile, where she disappeared without a trace. In a letter to Lenin of December 21, 1920, Kropotkin denounced such methods as « a return to the worst periods of the Middle Ages and religious wars., They have « nothing in common with socialism or communism,, he wrote, but are « survivals of the old order and old deformities of unlimited omnivorous authority. , For Lenln, however, the place for rival revolutionary groups was « behind bars or in exile, , side by slde wlth the White Guards. « Liberty, , he told Alexander Berkman, « is a luxury not to be permitted at the present stage of development. , War was waged on the very idea of libertarian socialism, and democratic tendencies within the Communist Party ltself were rooted out. « The time has come, , Lenln told the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921, while rebellion was raglng at Kronstadt, « to put an end to opposition, to put the lid on it. We have had enough opposition. , So the arrests and executions went on. Take the case of Aaron and Fanny Baron, who returned to Russia from America in 1917. In the United States, too, workers and revolutlonaries were then being imprlsoned for criticizing the policies of the government. Arrests, searches, and deportations were daily occurrences as a Red Scare swept the country comparable to the White Scare in Soviet Russia. Aaron Baron had escaped to America from Siberia after the 1905 Revolution and had spent the early years of World War I in Chicago, where he edited The Alarm with Lucy Parsons, the widow of the Haymarket martyr. He and bis wlfe Fanny were arrested and beaten by the Chicago pollee for taking part in a protest demonstration 105
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