ABSTRACT
The editors of SLON magazine endeavoured to convince its readers that even the most die-hard criminal could be reformed. An article by V. Belavin, A scientific study of the criminal world in prewar Europe, which maintained that any prison was but a half-measure. That everybody was always tense suited the warders very well. The rabble were reluctant to work and pulling the harness for them were the counter-revolutionaries, yet the thieves were ready at the first opportunity to strip their neighbours and make short shrift of them. Standing out against the background of ideological fraud, that is, deliberate misrepresentation, are two kinds of activity on the Solovki of the 1920s: publication of the journal SLON Solovetsky Islands and the theatre. The outstanding Russian actor Mikhail Chekhov, recalling the calamities of war and the sufferings of its victims, remarked, as if in passing, only a dearth of the imagination enables us to go on living.
