An island hell: A Soviet prison in the far north

by S. A. Malʹsagov

The "Solovetsky" concentration camp received its name from the Solovetsky Monastery, founded in 1429 by Saints Sabbatius and Hermann, while Saint Zosima built the first church in 1436. The island, seventeen miles long by eleven broad, on which the monastery stands, is one of a group known by the collective designation Solovetsky Islands; there are, besides the principal island, five other large ones — Ansersk, Great and Little Zajatsk, Great and Little Muksalm — and a number of small ones. They lie in the White Sea, at the entrance to the Gulf of Onega, and close to the western coast of the Archangel Government.

The Solovetsky Monastery, one of the most ancient and most held in honour of Russian monasteries, has long been noted for the peculiar ascetism of the life led by its inmates, the incalculable wealth of its churches and the large number of monks in the brotherhood, which is indicated by the fact that the number of boys sent by their relations to the monastery for a year reached in some years the figure of two thousand.

The monastery had, among other things, its own tannery, iron foundry, paper mill, match factory, saw mills, dozens of workshops of various kinds, a printing works (the workmen were all monks), a dock, a merchant fleet, and even a small navy for the defence of its shores. The monastery's infantry and artillery, consisting exclusively of monks, were also designed to serve this purpose.

The first years of the Revolution affected the organisation and economic strength of the monastery only to an insignificant degree, lying, as it did, to one side of the main road of Bolshevist pillage. Even at the time when the British were in these parts — it will be remembered that the Archangel and Murmansk areas were for a time occupied by a Russian anti-Soviet army, under General Miller, and British troops — the monastery still lived its old industrious life.

The Soviet power destroyed this highly cultured advanced post of Russia in the Far North with characteristic violence and cruelty. In the autumn of 1922 all the wooden buildings of the monastery were burnt. The Bolsheviks began by murdering half the monks, including the Igumen of the monastery; the remainder they sent to forced labour in Central Russia. The treasures were plundered by the first Tchekists who entered the precincts. The decorations of the ikons were torn off, the ikons themselves blasphemously chopped up with hatchets for fuel. The bells were flung down from all the belfries and the fragments sent to Moscow to be melted down.

Besides a multitude of objects precious in a religious and material sense, the Soviet Huns destroyed treasures of immense historical value. The Tchekists pillaged the library of the monastery, which during the five centuries of its existence had been filled with unique works. They heated the stoves with rare books, old documents and chronicles of the greatest antiquity. Finally, the dishonest methods of the new management, combined with the criminal plundering and inexperience of the Soviet administration, ruined the factories and workshops belonging to the monastery.

The ancient building was reduced to a heap of ruins. The Tchekists put up a barbed wire fence round it. The half-destroyed Kremlin, or main enclosure of the monastery, became the headquarters of the "Slon."[^[13]] All the branches of the Solovky are under the direction of the office in question, viz., the Solovky camp itself, the Kem camp (on Popoff Island), the camp on Kond Island, and the places of exile in the Petchersk and Zyriansk regions.

The Kem camp on Popoff Island (about a quarter of a mile from the shore and six miles from the town of Kem) is a base depot for the Solovky. In it are assembled, until navigation opens, thousands of new prisoners bound for the Solovky from all parts of Russia. The ordinary criminals who from time to time are amnestied are sent there from Solovetsky Island on their way south. Prisoners are continually being sent from the Kem camp to the monastery and from the monastery to Popoff Island for labour purposes — generally the latter, for most of the work is done on Popoff Island.

Before proceeding to a detailed account of the administration of the Solovky, I may mention that when I arrived in the domain of the Slon there were in the concentration camps over five thousand prisoners of the three categories defined in a previous chapter — "K.R.'s," "political and party men," and "shpana," or ordinary criminals.