Open-mouthed crowds in Moscow's Supreme Court sat hour after hour last week on uncomfortable wooden benches while Soviet prosecutors and judges in ill-fitting business suits wove one of Red Russia's most exciting murder cases around the shifty-eyed figure of Konstantin Semenchuk, 49, for the past two years Governor of Wrangel Island. Murder is not a very serious crime in Russia, carrying a maximum penalty of only ten years imprisonment. Horrified as the testimony piled up against Semenchuk, prosecutors quickly changed the charge to "banditry," i.e., willful destruction of Soviet property, for which a firing squad provides the customary punishment.
Well above the Arctic Circle, Wrangel Island lies north of the northeastern tip of Siberia. In 1924 the Soviet Government clinched its title to the land by establishing a permanent white settlement there. Later the settlement of Wrangel Island became an important project in the grandiose Russian scheme to grow cabbages and potatoes in the brief Arctic summer, turn the frozen tundras into a truck farm. Loudest advocate of this scheme is Professor Otto Tulyevich Schmidt, heroic explorer who has been put in charge of the whole Red scheme for developing the Arctic.
In September 1934 a new group of white colonists was sent to Wrangel Island. Leader was Konstantin Semenchuk, who had been transferred from a comfortable diplomatic post in Iran. With him went his wife Nadejda, as strange and sultry a character as he. Colonists got their first inkling of what was coming when Governor Semenchuk assembled them upon arrival, shouted: "Up here I am everything. I have all the rights, up to shooting people!"
Outsiders got their first idea that everything was not right on Wrangel Island from a radio message relayed during the winter of 1935. Governor Semenchuk asked for another doctor to cope with an outbreak of typhus and scurvy. Professor Schmidt was puzzled. Balanced rations for two years should have prevented any outbreak of scurvy. He had never heard of typhus in the Arctic. Then Wrangel's radio operator passed on another message: Mrs. Wulfson, wife of the Island's doctor, was being returned as a "counterrevolutionary, a dangerous woman." Mrs. Wulfson had a fine record in the Communist party. Instead of sending another doctor, Professor Schmidt sent a G. P. U. investigator named Zherdiev.
Agent Zherdiev discovered enough material for a season of Grand Guignol. Crazy Governor Semenchuk and his sadistic wife had kept the entire colony in terror through two Arctic winters. Semenchuk indulged in long drunken orgies with a thick-headed sledge driver named Startzev, raped Eskimo girls, sent indignant Dr. Wulfson off on a long sledge expedition, sent Startzev after him to kill him, then tried to poison Startzev. The widow Wulf-son managed to administer a life-saving antidote to Startzev. Mrs. Semenchuk whipped Eskimo men, who were first forbidden to fish, then denied use of the Island's provisions.