The Solovki special camp (later the Solovki special prison), was set up in 1923 on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea as a remote and inaccessible place of detention, primarily intended for socialist opponents of Soviet Russia's new Bolshevik regime. At first, the anarchists, Mensheviks, and Socialist Revolutionaries enjoyed a special status there and were not made to work. Gradually, prisoners from the old regime (priests, gentry, and White Army officers) joined them and the guards and the ordinary criminals worked together to keep the "politicals" in order.
This was the nucleus from which the entire Gulag grew, thanks to its proximity to the first great construction project of the Five-Year Plans, the White Sea–Baltic Canal. In one way, Solovki and the White Sea Canal broke a basic rule of the Gulag: they were both far too close to the border.Dmitriev comment This facilitated a number of daring escapes in the 1920s; as war loomed in the late 1930s, it led to the closure of the Solovki special prison. Its several thousand inmates were transferred elsewhere, or shot on the mainland and on Solovki.
In common parlance, the word "Solovki" initially referred to the Solovetsky Islands or the Solovetsky Monastery, but since these times it came to denote the Solovki prison camp.
History
From monastery to concentration camp
Historically, the Solovetsky Islands were the location of the famous Russian Orthodox Solovetsky Monastery complex. It was a centre of economic activity with over three hundred monks, and also a forepost of Russian naval power in the North, repelling foreign attacks during the Time of Troubles, the Crimean War, and the Russian Civil War.
Solovki were used as a concentration camp as early as in 1919 by the anti-Bolshevik Provisional Government of the Northern Region. In 1920 the area was seized by the Bolsheviks and they re-used the area for the POW camp of the prisoners in Russian Civil War. In 1922 Solovki were designated as a place for exile of "socially undesirabes". In May 1923 Iosif Unshlikht proposed the creation of a forced labor camp on Solovki for political and criminal prisoners. The first shipload of 300 prisoners was delivered from Arkhangelsk and Pertominsk concentration camps on the ship Pechora on June 6 1923.
The secret decreeЮрий Моруков, Соловецкий лагерь особого назначения (1923-1933 гг.) of 2 November 1923 led to the conversion of the monastery into the Solovki "special" camp: the Solovetsky lager osobogo naznachenia or SLON in RussianСоловецкий лагерь особого назначения (СЛОН). (tr. "Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp (SLON)") (the acronym is a play on the Russian word for elephant). One of the first "forced labor camps", Solovki served as a prototype for the Gulag as a whole.Gulag by Anne Applebaum. New York: Anchor Book, 2003. p.20. In early 1924, it was sometimes given a double name, Severnye (Solovetskiye) Lagerya OGPU (Northern (Solovki) camps of OGPU).СОЛОВЕЦКИЙ ИТЛ ОГПУ (Соловецкие лагеря особого назначения, Соловецкий лагерь принудительных работ особого назначения ОГПУ, СЛОН, СЛАГ, Соловецкие и Карело-Мурманские лагеря, СКМИТЛ) (tr. "SOLOVETSKY ITL OGPU (Solovki camps for special purposes, Solovetsky forced labor camp for special purposes OGPU, SLON, SLAG, Solovetsky and Karelian-Murmansk camps, SKMITL)") Memorial
Its remote situation made escape almost impossible and in Tsarist times the monastery had been used, on occasion, as a political prison by the Russian imperial administration. The treatment of the prisoners in the Soviet-era camp attracted much criticism in Western Europe and the United States after a book came out in England, An Island Hell, by S. A. Malsagoff. After a thorough clean-up and careful staging, the Soviet government sent the proletarian writer Maxim Gorky there in an attempt to counter this negative publicity. He wrote a very favourable essay, which praised the beauty of nature on the islands, but some authors believe he understood the real conditions he was witnessing. See pp. 242–243. See p.188. See pp. 116-118.
The Baltic-White Sea Canal
The exact number of prisoners sent to Solovki from 1923 to the closure of its penitentiary facilities in 1939 is unknown. Estimates range between tens and hundreds of thousands."Forced Labor Camps" , on-line exhibition at the Blinken Open Society Archives.
In 1923, Soloviki contained "no more than 3,000" prisoners; by 1930, the number had jumped to "about 50,000", with another 30,000 held on the mainland at the nearest railhead of Kem. In the early 1930s, many of the prisoners from the camp were transferred to the newly established Belbaltlag to man the construction of the White Sea – Baltic Canal.
A Special Prison, 1936–1939 In 1936, the Solovki camp was renamed a "special" prison (SLON, an acronym that means "Elephant" in Russian) and from then until its closure in 1939 it served as a holding area for many prisoners subsequently executed, there or on the mainland, during the Great Terror of 1937–1938."The Victims at Sandarmokh", The Dmitriev Affair website .
Until documents confirming their execution were found in 1996, it was long thought that a transport of over one thousand prisoners, a quota for "1st category arrests" (executions), died from drowning after the barges on which they were travelling were deliberately sunk in the White Sea. It is now known that they were shot on the mainland in late October and early November 1937; subsequent quotas for execution came too late in the year to sail across the White Sea and were shot on the islands, near Sekirnaya Hill.A 12 October 2017 news item by Meduza, includes footage of Yury Dmitriev supervising work to clear the burial pits at Sekirnaya gora.
All but five of the 1,116 prisoners sent from Solovki across the White Sea on 27 October 1937 were executed by NKVD Captain and senior executioner Mikhail Matveyev at Sandarmokh between that date and 10 November 1937, when he reported his task complete. Among those killed were 289 members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, the Executed Renaissance.
A further transport was prepared to sail to the mainland for execution, but it was too late in the year to cross the frozen sea. Instead, between 200 and 300 prisoners were shot on Solovki itself, near the Sekirnaya Hill.A. Razumov (n.d.), Skorbny put, pp. 13-14 One of the many victims was Yelizaveta Katz, an engineer, who was 8 months pregnant. She was due to be shot with the others on 17 February 1938, but was allowed to give birth, then shot three months later on 16 May, aged 28.A. Razumov (n.d.), Skorbny put, pp. 14-16
In 1939, the prison was closed. It was situated too close to the border with Finland, and the Second World War was imminent. The buildings were transformed into a naval base and a cadet corps was deployed there. (One of its students was the future author Valentin Pikul.)
World Heritage and a disputed legacy
In 1989, a permanent exhibition, "The Solovki special camp", was added to the museum on the islands, the first anywhere in the USSR to be devoted to the Gulag. In June of that year, the first Days of Remembrance for Victims of Political Repression were held on the islands; in subsequent years this event would take place in August.
The Orthodox Church reestablished the monastery in 1992, and that year the ensemble was added to UNESCO's World Heritage List.
Between 1989 and 2014 a memorial square including memorials to different victims who were imprisoned in the special camp and prison was created.
In 2015, human rights activists expressed disquiet that the authorities were "gradually removing all traces of the labor camp". In January 2016 the Gulag section in the Solovki Museum was closed by its new director, Vladimir Shutov who, as Archimandrite Porfiry, was head of the monastery.
In August 2017, the local authorities asked police to investigate the 29th annual Days of Remembrance as an "unauthorised" gathering. Early in 2018, a court in the Arkhangelsk Region heard an unsuccessful plea by Archimandrite Porfiry to annul a contract concluded in 2011 with the head of the now disbanded Gulag section of the museum and evict its former head, Olga Bochkaryova, and her daughter from their two-room apartment.
The author of several books about Solovki, Yury Brodsky, was accused by an Orthodox website of displaying "religious hatred" in his latest publication.
Notable prisoners
Members of the intelligentsia, representing both Tsarist Russia and the post-revolutionary USSR, were prominent among the prisoners on Solovki.Application for UNESCO World Heritage Site , 1991, p. 11.
The 1920s In the 1920s many of those sent to Solovki were released, but often arrested and imprisoned (or exiled) a second time.
Frantsishak Alyakhnovich, Belarusian writer, a citizen of interwar Poland, who wrote the first book-length witness-account about Gulag, titled, In the Claws of the GPU; imprisoned 1927–1933, in 1933 exchanged with Poland for Branislaw Tarashkyevich. Vladimir Artemyev, inventor: imprisoned 1923–1925 Osip Braz, Russian-Jewish realist painter: imprisoned 1924–1926 Boris Shiriaev writer, author of La veilleuse de Solovki - 1889 - 1959 imprisoned in 1923 Leonid Feodorov, Bishop and Exarch of the Russian Greek Catholic Church: imprisoned 1923–1929 Konstantine Gamsakhurdia, Georgian writer: imprisoned mid-1920s G.J.Gordon, historian Yuri Bezsonov, cavalry commander, one of the very few people who succeeded in escaping the camp , poet: sent to Solovki (?) in 1929 Jamo bey Hajinski, State Controller and Minister of Transportation, Postal Service and Telegraph of Azerbaijan Democratic Republic: imprisoned 1925–1928 Archimandrite , Professor of the Moscow Theological Academy: imprisoned 1924–1929 , Professor of the Moscow Theological Academy: imprisoned 1925-1927 , historian and ethnographer: imprisoned 1925–1928, shot at Sandarmokh on 8 January 1938, aged 61
The First Five-Year Plan, 1928–1932
Naftaly Frenkel was a prisoner on Solovki who became a leading cadre in the security services during the First Five-Year Plan.
Arrested by the OGPU in 1923, he was sentenced to ten years imprisonment and sent to Solovki. There his sentence was reduced and in 1927, he was released and appointed head of production at SLON before being sent as representative of the camp to Moscow in 1929. Soon he was in charge of production throughout the Gulag and oversaw work on the White Sea Canal. N.V. Petrov and K.V. Skorin, The leading cadres of the NKVD, 1934-1941, Memorial: Moscow, 1999 Entry for Naftaly Aronovich Frenkel (1883-1960). His activities in the Gulag paralleled the forced industrialisation and collectivisation of agriculture throughout the Soviet Union.
The mass shooting on Solovki in 1929 described by Dmitry Sergeyevich Likhachov (it forms a key episode in Marina Goldovskaya's 1987 film, Solovki Power) was a sign of the harshening regime.
Nikolai Antsiferov, historian: imprisoned 1929–1933 Academician Dmitry Likhachov, philologist: imprisoned 1928–1931, then worked on White Sea Canal until 1932 Vladimir V. Tchernavin, ichthyologist: imprisoned 1931, then transferred to Kem. From Kem he escaped to the West and wrote about his experiences in his book, I Speak for the Silent Prisoners of the Soviets. Vladimir N. Beneshevich, historian, paleographer: imprisoned 1928–1933 , writer: imprisoned 1928–1929, 1931–1936 Mirjaqip Dulatuli, Kazakh writer: imprisoned 1928–1935 (died in Solovki) Klym Polishchuk, Ukrainian journalist, poet and writer sentenced for 10 years in 1929, executed in 1937 Vera Baltz, Russian soil scientist, sentenced for 5 years in 1930, released early in 1933 on account of age Evgenia Iaroslavskaia-Markon, Russian journalist and anarchist, sentenced for 3 years in 1930, executed in 1931. Oleg Vasilyevich Volkov, Russian writer and translator, sentenced for 3 years in 1928 but released in 1929 and sent into inner exile.
The mid- to late 1930s