SOVIET TIMBER CAMPS

Evening Post, Volume CXI, Issue 33, 9 February 1931, Page 9

SOVIET TIMBER CAMPS

ADDITIONAL EVIDENCE

POLITICAL PKISONERS

United Press Association —By Electric Tele-

graph—Copyright.

LONDON, 7th February. Commander Bellairs has sent a letter to Mr. Bamsay Mac Donald, drawing attention to Lord Ponsonby's attitudo in the- House of Lords in contending that the evidence of slavery in Soviet timber camps was insufficient, and showed that only 60,000 prisoners were labouring in the forests. . He! forwarded nine affidavits- from escapees, including an ex-official of the O.G.P.U:, declaring. that there were 662,200 prisoners in the timber-camps on sth January of last year. The affidavit of Nicholas Malysheff, a medical assistant in-'the Bed Army, who was sentenced to three years' imprisonment for anti-Soviet propaganda, and spent a year in the Solovki camp, asserts that the barrack floors are merely earth and practically an ice-block throughout the year. The ceilings are leaky and the barracks are unheated. The prisoners, who .are all politicals, sleep on bare planks unless they possess their own bedding. There is terrible' overcrowding, and a typhus epidemic has/killed tens of thousands. >. IWdffck in .the winter, times lasts from five in'the tnorning until eight in the evening. The prisoners are each forced to fell and strip thirty-five trees daily. In many eases they are freezing owing to lack of clothing. Lads from fifteen to seventeen years of age get the same tasks as men.. The hospitals are overcrowded and tho patients lie' on. the floors. The mortality is 15 per cent. Another relates that his- convoy consisted of 137 men and women who we're sent to the camp near Parantola., The convicts, working in groups of three, hand-fell and trim fifty largo .trees da,ily, and a proportionate* number of' smaller ones. . . ■ , A third affidavit states, that; out of 290,000 prisoners at Solovetsk, 19,000 died of typhus in May-of last year.