A short biography of the Russian anarchist Gershon Tarlovsky.
”According to my political convictions, I was and remain to this day an anarchist, and therefore I continue to be an ideological enemy of Soviet power.“ (under interrogation in 1938), then in the Russian Empire, later in Poland.
Gershon Tarlovsky was born May 15, 1893, to a Jewish family in Krinki, in Grodno province, then in the Russian Empire, later in Poland. His parents had their own house in the town of Krinki in Grodno province. His father, Yosel, worked as a cutter in a tannery. Gershon was educated at home, and his father taught him his trade. There were five other sons in the family, Mates, Solomon, Barukh, Abe, and Moishe who were scattered around the world by the revolution: some went to America, some to Poland, some to Uruguay. There was at least one sister as well, as Tarlovsky testifed that his sister was married to the anarchist Iakov Dubinsky (Jacques Doubinsky).
Gershon became an anarchist in 1908, at the age of fifteen. He went under the name of Gerasim Osipovich Tarlovsky within the movement. He was arrested by the Tsarist authorities for anarchist activity in 1911, and then again in 1915. He then appears to have been again arrested for anarchist activity in Hanover, Germany in 1916.
He served in the Red Army In 1918 and 1921 in the Vinnitsa flying detachment.
In 1921, he was in Poland, where he was repeatedly harassed by the police. His last arrest was in Bialystok, where he lived, where he took part in the strike movement there as an anarchist. After a short time in custody, he was among others released from custody pending trial and, without waiting for the trial, fled to Russia. He then worked until 1922 at the Salman plant in Minsk, then moved to Moscow to the Paris Commune plant, where he worked until July 1922.
On September 28th, 1922, Tarlovsky was arrested by the Soviet authorities in Moscow on charges of anarchist work, organising underground anarchist activity and harbouring the anarchist Ivan Akhtyrsky in his apartment. The arrest warrant was signed by the leading Chekist Yagoda. On January 29th 1923 he was sentenced to three and a half years of imprisonment.
Until mid-summer of that year he was in the Lubyanka prison in Moscow, and was then moved to the Pertominsk concentration camp. At the time of his arrest, Tarlovsky was living with the anarchist woman worker Vera Evgenievna Kevrik, then aged 29. At the time of his arrest, Vera was in the Marinskaya hospital after an appendectomy. She was being looked after by the anarchist underground activist Vera Nevrin alias Glezer alias real name Dora Moiseyevna Stepnaya.
Tarlovsky went on hunger strike in December of that year, ending it in early January, after demanding that clothes from his apartment be delivered to him. He was concerned about Vera, who he did not know had already been arrested. On January 26th, 1923, the GPU sentenced him to imprisonment in a camp for 3 years.
Pertominsk is on the White Sea, 180 kilometres from Arkhangelsk. The concentration camp there was set up by the Bolshevik government in 1919. It was a secret punishment base for prisoners from other northern camps set up by the Cheka. It was a fearsome place. Prisoners were housed in barracks not heated in even the worst cold. Out of 1,200 prisoners, 442 died within six months. Food was meagre, no bread was supplied and prisoners lived on an exclusive diet of dried fish. The middle and lower ranks of the Chekists guarding the camp were made up of Chekists who had been arrested for too blatant robbery of prisoners ,bribery, drunkeness and other misdemeanours. They took out their anger and frustration on the prisoners.
Some time later, Tarlovsky was transferred from the Pertominsk concentration camp to the special camp on one of the Solovetsky islands.
Then, like many other anarchists who were sentenced to the northern camps, the OGPU (new name for the Cheka) sentenced him in October 1925 to three years in the Verkhneuralsk political isolator. This had been built in 1914, but stood empty until spring 1925, when prisoners who had gone on hunger strike in the Solovetsky camps were transferred there. Their cells were locked, there was prohibited access to books, money, and other items between cells.
After completing his sentence in 1927, Tarlovsky was exiled to Arkhangelsk province for three years. There he met his future wife, Sofia “Sheyna” Farber. She was the daughter of the owner of the workshop where he worked upholstering furniture. There, while working in a workshop making upholstered furniture, he met his future wife, Sofya Farber, the daughter of the workshop's owner.
They had a son, Konstantin, in 1930. However, on February 5th, 1932, he and fifteen other anarchists were arrested by the OGPU. On February 9th, the OGPU stated : "On February 9, 1932, in the city of Arkhangelsk, a counterrevolutionary anarchist group was liquidated, whose goal was to create an anarchist organisation." Tarlovsky was described as one of two ideologists of the group and that he led participation in illegal meetings, organised the first illegal meeting at his flat, and established contact with anarchists abroad, considered a crime under the Criminal Code. On May 16th, 1932, Tarlovsky was exiled to Petropavlovsk in Kazakhstan for three years.
His wife and son followed him into exile, but Sofia contracted tuberculosis and in February 1937 Gerson and Sofia moved to Yalta on the Black Sea for health reasons.
Gershon Tarlovsky was again arrested in Crimea in 1938, and accused of all sorts of anarchist activity. He was “exposed as an active anarchist and conducts counter-revolutionary propaganda among workers.”
Sofia was told by the investigator handling the case that since their marriage was not officially registered, it would be better for her not to come anymore and not to tell anyone about her husband, otherwise he would have to arrest her too, and their minor son would be sent to an orphanage for children of enemies of the people.
At the beginning of 1939, Tarlovsky was sentenced to five years in a labour camp and sent to the Vyatlag camp, one of the biggest camps in the gulag system. During the period 1938-to 1956, more than 100,000 prisoners were sent there from 20 countries and 80 different nationalities. 18,000 of these never returned home.
Gershon Tarlovsky wrote to his wife that she should not wait for him, as he was sure that he would never be released.
Sofia died on December 12th, 1942, during the Nazi occupation of Karachay-Cherkessia in the Caucasus.
During the five years of Tarlovsky’s imprisonment, his son, who was now living in Kirov with his grandparents, corresponded with him. This abruptly ended in 1943. The commandant of Vyatlag wrote to Konstantin that his father had been sentenced to five more years "without the right to correspondence" and sent to another camp "in the north". In fact, "without the right to correspondence" means execution and Konstantin remains convinced that his father died in 1943. Konstantin’s daughter Elena Podzeeva has carried out intensive research on her grandfather, and most of the above is based on her detective work.
She received a certificate from the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Udmurt Republic that her grandfather had died on May 17th, 1945 in the Arkhangelsk region, but with no further indication as to where this was.
She finally received a death certificate that recorded that Gershon had died at Nyandoma, at the age of 52.
Elena wrote that “Dad thinks that Grandpa died in Vyatlag, because he wrote his last letters to him from there. And he was already sick then, very weak. So maybe he died of tuberculosis there, or maybe he was shot. We don't even know how his life ended and where.”
Nick Heath
Sources:
https://www.chayka.org/node/10641
https://www.chayka.org/node/11538
https://www.chayka.org/node/14328
https://www.chayka.org/node/13814
https://www.severreal.org/a/vnuchka-ischet-mogilu-repressirovannogo-deda/31536773.html
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