Finally, beyond the botanical garden, lie the other islands in the Solovetsky chain. Scattered across the White Sea are Bolshaya Muksalma, where prisoners once bred silver-black foxes for their fur; Anzer, site of special camps for invalids, for women with babies, and for former monks; Zayatsky Ostrov, the location of the women’s punishment camp. 2 Not by accident did Solzhenitsyn choose the metaphor of an “archipelago” to describe the Soviet camp system. Solovetsky, the first Soviet camp to be planned and built with any expectation of permanence, developed on a genuine archipelago, spreading outward island by island, taking over the old churches and buildings of an ancient monastic community as it grew.
The monastery complex had served as a prison before. Solovetsky monks, faithful servants of the Czar, had helped incarcerate his political opponents— wayward priests and the odd rebel aristocrat among them—from the sixteenth century.3 The loneliness, high walls, cold winds, and seagulls that had once attracted a particular breed of solitary monk also appealed to the Bolshevik imagination. As early as May 1920, an article in the Arkhangelsk edition of the government newspaper Izvestiya described the islands as an ideal site for a work camp: “the harsh environment, the work regime, the fight against the forces of nature will be a good school for all criminal elements.” The first handful of prisoners began arriving that summer.4
Others, higher up the chain of command, were interested in the islands as well. Dzerzhinsky himself appears to have persuaded the Soviet government to hand the confiscated monastery property, along with the property of Petrominsk and Kholmogory monasteries, over to the Cheka—by then renamed the GPU, then the OGPU, or Unified State Political Administration—on October 13, 1923. Together they were christened the “camps of special significance.” 5 Later, they would be known as “northern camps of special significance”: Severnye Lagery Osobogo Naznacheniya, or SLON. In Russian, slon means “elephant.” The name was to become a source of humor, of irony, and of menace.
In the survivors’ folklore, Solovetsky was forever after remembered as the “first camp of the Gulag.”6 Although scholars have more recently pointed out that a wide range of other camps and prisons also existed at this time, Solovetsky clearly played a special role not only in survivors’ memories, but also in the memory of the Soviet secret police. 7 Solovetsky may have not been the only prison in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, but it was their prison, the OGPU’s prison, where the OGPU first learned how to use slave labor for profit. In a 1945 lecture on the history of the camp system, Comrade Nasedkin, then the system’s chief administrator, claimed not only that the camp system originated in Solovetsky in 1920, but also that the entire Soviet system of “forced labor as a method of re-education” began there in 1926.8 This statement at first appears odd, considering that forced labor had been a recognized form of punishment in the Soviet Union since 1918. It appears less odd, however, if we look at how the concept of forced labor evolved on Solovetsky itself. For although everyone worked on the island, prisoners were not, in the early days, organized into anything remotely resembling a “system.” Nor is there evidence that their labor was in any way profitable.
To begin with, one of the two main categories of prisoner on Solovetsky did not, at first, work at all. These were the approximately 300 socialist “politicals,” who had actually begun to arrive on the island in June 1923. Sent from the Petrominsk camp, as well as from Butyrka and the other Moscow and Petrograd prisons, they were taken upon arrival immediately to the smaller Savvatyevo monastery, several kilometers north of the main monastery complex. There, the Solovetsky guards could ensure that they were isolated from other prisoners, and could not infect them with their enthusiasm for hunger strikes and protests.
Initially, the socialists were granted the “privileges” of political prisoners that they had so long demanded: newspapers, books, and, within a barbed-wire enclosure, freedom of movement and freedom from work. Each of the major political parties—the Left Social Revolutionaries, the Right Social Revolutionaries, the Anarchists, the Social Democrats, and later the Socialist Zionists—chose its own leader, and occupied rooms in its own wing of the former monastery.9
To Elinor Olitskaya, a young Left Social Revolutionary arrested in 1924, Savvatyevo seemed, at first, “nothing like a prison,” and came as a shock after her months in the dark Lubyanka prison in Moscow. Her room, a former monks’ cell in what had become the women’s section of the Social Revolutionary wing, was light, clean, freshly washed, with two large, wide, open windows. The cell was full of light and air. There were, of course, no bars on the windows. In the middle of the cell stood a small table, covered in a white cloth. Along the wall were four beds, neatly covered with sheets. Beside each one stood a small night table. On the tables lay books, notebooks, and pens.
As she marveled at the surroundings, the tea served in teapots, and the sugar served in a sugar bowl, her cell mates explained that the prisoners had created the pleasant atmosphere on purpose: “we want to live as human beings.”10 Olitsksaya soon learned that although they suffered from tuberculosis and other diseases, and rarely had enough to eat, the Solovetsky politicals were notably well-organized, with the “elder” of each party cell responsible for storing, cooking, and distributing food. Because they still had special “political” status, they were also allowed to receive packages, both from relatives and from the Political Red Cross. Although the Political Red Cross had begun to have difficulties—in 1922 its offices were raided and its property confiscated—Ekaterina Peshkova, its well-connected leader, was personally still allowed to send aid to political prisoners. In 1923, she shipped a whole train wagon full of food to the Savvatyevo political prisoners. A shipment of clothes went north in October of the same year.11
This, then, was the solution to the public relations problem posed by the politicals: give them what they want, more or less, but put them as far away from anyone else as humanly possible. It was a solution that was not to last: the Soviet system would not long tolerate exceptions. In the meantime, the illusion was easy to see through—for there was another, far larger group of prisoners on Solovetsky as well. “Upon landing on the Solovets soil, we all felt we were entering a new and strange phase of life,” wrote one political. “From conversations with the criminals, we learned of the shocking regime which the administration is applying to them . . . ”12
With far less pomp and ceremony, the main barracks of the Solovetsky kremlin were also filling up quickly with prisoners whose status was not so assured. From a few hundred in 1923, the numbers grew to 6,000 by 1925.13 Among them were White Army officers and sympathizers, “speculators,” former aristocrats, sailors who had fought in the Kronstadt rebellion, and genuine common criminals. For these inmates, tea in teapots and sugar in sugar bowls were much harder to come buy. Or, rather, they were hard to come by for some, easier for others; for, above all, what characterized life in the “criminal” barracks of the Solovetsky special camp in these very early years was irrationality, and an unpredictability which began at the moment of arrival. On their first night in the camp, writes the memoirist and former prisoner Boris Shiryaev, he and other new arrivals were greeted by Comrade A. P. Nogtev, Solovetsky’s first camp commander. “I welcome you,” he told them, with what Shiryaev describes as “irony”: “As you know, here, there is no Soviet authority, only Solovestsky authority. Any rights that you had before you can forget. Here we have our own laws.” The phrase “there is no Soviet authority, only Solovetsky authority” would be repeated again and again, as many memoirists attest. 14
Over the next few days and weeks, most of the prisoners would experience “Solovetsky authority” as a combination of criminal neglect and random cruelty. Living conditions in the converted churches and monks’ cells were primitive, and little care was taken to improve them. On his first night in his Solovetsky barracks, the writer Oleg Volkov was given a place on sploshnye nary, bunks that were in fact broad planks (of which we shall hear more later) on which a number of men slept in a
row. As he lay down, bedbugs began falling on to him “one after another, like ants. I couldn’t sleep.” He went outside, where he was immediately enveloped by “clouds of mosquitoes . . . I gazed with envy at those who slept soundly, covered in parasites.” 15
Outside the main kremlin compound, things were hardly better. Officially, SLON maintained nine separate camps on the archipelago, each one further divided into battalions. But some prisoners were also kept in even more primitive conditions in the woods, near the forestry work sites.16 Dmitri Likhachev, later to become one of Russia’s most celebrated literary critics, felt himself privileged because he had not been assigned to one of the many unnamed camp sites in the forest. He visited one, he wrote, “and became ill with the horror of seeing it: people slept in the trenches which they had dug, sometimes with bare hands, during the day.”17
On the outlying islands, the central camp administration exerted even less control over the behavior of individual guards and camp bosses. In his memoirs, one prisoner, Kiselev, described a camp on Anzer, one of the smaller islands. Commanded by another Chekist, Vanka Potapov, the camp consisted of three barracks and a guards’ headquarters, housed in an old church. The prisoners worked cutting trees, with no breaks, no respite, and little food. Desperate for a few days’ rest, they cut off their hands and feet. According to Kiselev, Potapov kept these “pearls” preserved in a large pile and showed them to visitors, to whom he also bragged that he had personally murdered more than 400 people with his own hands. “No one returned from there,” Kiselev wrote of Anzer. Even if his report exaggerates, it indicates the real terror which the outer camps held for the prisoners.18
All over the islands, disastrous hygienic conditions, overwork, and poor food naturally led to illness, and above all to typhus. Of the 6,000 prisoners held by SLON in 1925, about a quarter died in the winter of 1925–26, in the wake of a particularly vicious epidemic. By some calculations, the numbers stayed this high: from a quarter to one half of the prisoners may have died of typhus, starvation, and other epidemics every year. One document records 25,552 cases of typhus in the (by then much larger) SLON camps in the winter of 1929–30.19
But for some prisoners, Solovetsky meant worse than discomfort and illness. On the islands, prisoners were subjected to the kind of sadism and pointless torture of a sort found more rarely in the Gulag in later years when—as Solzhenitsyn puts it—“slave-driving had become a thought-out system.”20 Although many memoirs describe these acts, the most thorough catalogue is found in the account of an investigating commission sent from Moscow later in the decade. During the course of their investigation, the horrified Moscow officials discovered that Solovetsky guards had regularly left undressed prisoners in the old, unheated cathedral bell towers in the winter, their hands and feet tied behind their backs with a single piece of rope. They had also put prisoners “to the bench,” meaning they were forced to sit on poles for up to eighteen hours without moving, sometimes with weights tied to their legs and their feet not touching the floor, a position guaranteed to leave them crippled. Sometimes, prisoners would be made to go naked to the baths, up to 2 kilometers away, in freezing weather. Or they were deliberately given rotten meat. Or they were refused medical help. At other times, prisoners would be given pointless, unnecessary tasks: to move huge quantities of snow from one place to another, for example, or to jump off bridges into rivers whenever a guard shouted “Dolphin!” 21
Another form of torture specific to the islands, mentioned in both archives and memoirs, was to be sent “to the mosquitoes.” Klinger, a White Army officer who later made one of the few successful escapes from Solovetsky, wrote that he once saw this torture inflicted on a prisoner who complained because a parcel sent to him from home had been requisitioned. Angry prison guards responded by removing all of his clothes, including his underwear, and tying him to a post in the forest, which was, in the northern summer, swarming with mosquitoes. “Within half an hour, his whole unlucky body was covered with swelling from the bites,” wrote Klinger. Eventually, the man fainted from the pain and loss of blood.22
Mass executions seemed to take place almost at random, and many prisoners recall feeling terrified by the prospect of arbitrary death. Likhachev claims to have narrowly escaped execution in one mass murder in late October 1929. Archival documents do indeed indicate that about fifty people (not 300, as he wrote) were executed at that time, having been accused of trying to organize a rebellion.23
Nearly as bad as direct execution was a sentence to Sekirka, the church whose cellars had become the Solovetsky punishment cells. Indeed, although many stories were told about what went on in the church’s cellars, so few men returned from Sekirka that it is difficult to be certain of what conditions there were really like. One witness did see one of the brigades being marched to work: “a line of terrified people, with an inhuman look, some dressed in sacks, all barefoot, surrounded by heavy guard . . .”24
As Solovetsky legend would have it, the long flight of 365 wooden steps which lead down the steep hill from the Sekirka church also played a role in group killings. When, at one point, camp authorities forbade guards from shooting the Sekirka prisoners, they began to arrange “accidents”—and threw them down the steps.25 In recent years, the descendants of Solovetsky prisoners have erected a wooden cross at the bottom of the steps, to mark the spot where these prisoners allegedly died. It is now a peaceful and rather beautiful place—so beautiful that in the late 1990s, the Solovetsky local history museum printed a Christmas card showing Sekirka, the steps, and the cross.
While the reigning spirit of irrationality and unpredictability meant that thousands died in the SLON camps in the early 1920s, the same irrationality and unpredictability also helped others not just to live but—quite literally—to sing and dance. By 1923, a handful of prisoners had already begun organizing the camp’s first theater. At first the “actors,” many of whom spent ten hours a day cutting wood in the forests before coming to rehearsal, did not have scripts, so they played classics from memory. The theater improved greatly in 1924, when a whole group of former professional actors arrived (all sentenced as members of the same “counter-revolutionary” movement). That year, they put on productions of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya and Gorky’s Children of the Sun.26
Later, operas and operettas were performed in Solovetsky’s theater, which also hosted acrobatic performances and films. One musical evening included an orchestral piece, a quintet performance, a chorus, and arias from a Russian opera.27 The repertoire for March 1924 included a play by the writer Leonid Andreev (whose son Danil, another writer, would later be a Gulag prisoner), a play by Gogol, and an evening dedicated to the memory of Sarah Bernhardt.28
Nor was theater the only form of culture available. Solovetsky also had a library, which eventually numbered 30,000 books, as well as the botanical garden, in which prisoners experimented with Arctic plants. Solovetsky captives, many former St. Petersburg scientists among them, also organized a museum of local flora, fauna, art, and history.29 Some of the more elite prisoners had use of a “club” which—at least in photographs—appears positively bourgeois. The pictures show a piano, parquet floors, and portraits of Marx, Lenin, and Lunacharsky, the first Soviet Culture Minister, all very cozy-looking.30
Using the monks’ old lithography equipment, the Solovetsky prisoners also produced monthly magazines and newspapers featuring satirical cartoons, extremely homesick poetry, and surprisingly frank fiction. In the December 1925 edition of Solovetskie Ostrova (the name means “Solovetsky Islands”) one short story described a former actress who had arrived on Solovetsky, was forced to work as a washerwoman, and was unable to accustom herself to her new life. The story ends with the sentence “Solovetsky is cursed.”
In another short story, a former aristocrat who had once known “intimate evenings at the Winter Palace” finds comfort in his new situation only by visiting another aristocrat and talking of old times.31 Clearly, the clichés of social realism were not yet mandat
ory. Not all of the stories have the happy ending which later became obligatory, and not all of the fictional prisoners joyfully adapted to Soviet reality.
Solovetsky journals also contained more learned articles, ranging from Likhachev’s analysis of criminal gambling etiquette, to works on the art and architecture of Solovetsky’s ruined churches. Between 1926 and 1929, the SLON printing house even managed to put out twenty-nine editions of the work of the Solovetsky Society for Local Lore. The society conducted studies of island flora and fauna, focusing on particular species—the northern deer, the local plants—and published articles on brick production, wind currents, useful minerals, and fur farming. So interested did some prisoners become in the latter subject that in 1927, when the economic activity of the island was at its height, a group of them imported some silver-black “breeder” foxes from Finland to improve the quality of the local herds. Among other things, the Society for Local Lore carried out a geological survey, which the director of the island’s local history museum still uses today.32
These more privileged prisoners also participated in the new Soviet rites and celebrations, occasions from which a later generation of camp inmates would be deliberately excluded. An article in the September 1925 edition of Solovetskie Ostrova describes the First of May celebration on the island. Alas, the weather was poor:
On the First of May, flowers are blooming all over the Soviet Union, but in Solovetsky, the sea is still filled with ice, and there is plenty of snow. Nevertheless, we prepare to celebrate the proletarian holiday. From early morning, there is agitation in the barracks. Some are washing. Some are shaving. Someone is repairing his clothes, someone is shining his boots ...33
Even more surprising—from the perspective of later years—was the long persistence of religious ceremonies on the islands. One former prisoner, V. A. Kazachkov, remembered the “grandiose” Easter of 1926:
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