The glaciers came and went, the granite boulders littered the shores of the lakes; the lakes froze during Solovki winter nights, the sea howled under the wind and was covered with an icy sludge and in places froze; the northern lights blazed across half the sky; and it grew bright once again and warm once again, and the fir trees grew and thickened, and the birds cackled and called, and the young deer trumpeted – and the planet circled through all world history, and kingdoms fell and rose, and here there were still no beasts of prey and no human being.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
AT THE END I returned to Russia, where I had started, lured northwest by the turrets and domes on a 500-rouble note. Set among the fabled White Sea whitecaps, the Solovki monastery, according to generations of true believers, cradles the national soul. Beached in a polar hinterland more than six thousand miles from the Chukchi and their antlered herds, the medieval monastery represents the endurance of hope and faith and the survival of the human spirit against what once seemed like insuperable odds. But the price had been so high. In 1923 Red Guards threw the monks out after 500 years, tore down the icons and set up a prison, shipping in foes by the ten thousand. As the gulag system emerged from the chaos of the twenties, Solovki’s model of forced labour multiplied across the USSR. As Solzhenitsyn wrote, from the one cancer cell in that White Sea outpost, a tumour spread all over Russia.1 The monks have returned to chant, perhaps for the forgiveness of others. Just as dignified integrity outlasted cultural destruction among the Inuit, a sense of quiet redemption lived on among the bone yards of Stalin’s White Sea camp. It was a good place to end.
To reach Solovki I boarded a Number 22 sleeper train at Petersburg’s Ladoga Station for a sixteen-hour rock through the birch forest, though sixteen hours is a hop, in the Russian railway system. Overnight, the birches grew shorter and the air colder. Cars also shrank as the train raced north: rust-bucket Ladas instead of the BMWs of metropolitan mobsters. A sway at the curve before Begeza; gabled snowmobile lock-ups on the shore of Lake Vyg; and, at last, the White Sea port of Kem, half way between the Kandalaksha Gulf and Onega Bay. The landscape had just hung on through winter and was browned out and exhausted. There were no ruined factories here, and no toppled statues of Lenin sneering skyward in Ozymandian reproach. Just the noble rot of the backwoods, and a woman in a housecoat milking a goat. Riding a bus from the railway station to the coast for the three-hour crossing to Solovki, it was difficult not to notice that like the birch trees and the cars, the people too were smaller. These were a short, stubby lot, compared with their stringy Petersburg compatriots. But the paved road was a good one and the bus pressed on, through miles of more snowmobile lock-ups and depleted fences that swayed in the wind. Presently the road collapsed at a jetty. When the bus emptied, the wind dropped suddenly, as if it had been switched off. Four or five fishing boats lay still on the water like sledges on snow. On the churned-up mud of the empty shore, two German shepherds nosed around a motionless Caterpillar truck, its bucket frozen in mid-manoeuvre. And there was my boat: an old trawler.
Ninety devout Karelian pilgrims had already squeezed into the modest cabin. As soon as the captain weighed anchor, a priest and his assistant began intoning a service, both brandishing a large crucifix. The other women passengers whipped headscarves out of their string bags (everyone had a string bag). I like to think of myself as a well-prepared, culturally sensitive traveller, but one had not anticipated an act of worship on a ferry. A polar balaclava wasn’t quite the ticket when it came to the Orthodox head-covering rule. But it was all I had. So I put it on. Outside the porthole, the water sparkled in the morning sunshine. As the mainland shrank to a thin line, the rhythmic rise and fall of the ritual words, mirroring the swell of the sea, invoked the longing for God that played such a living role in old Russia, a country still recognisable up on the fringes of the Federation. The pilgrims intoned, a framed photograph of a saint was passed round to be kissed, and mobile phones trilled again, like the dawn chorus after the stillness of night. Folding her headscarf carefully into her string bag, my neighbour revealed a startling capacity to speak English. A native of the White Sea coast, she had accompanied her husband, a timber specialist, on a two-year professional exchange to Australia. Like everyone on board, she was making a pilgrimage to Solovki. Once she began talking, she could not stop. Having dealt with her extended family tree she moved on to the immanence of the Godhead. After a fraction of a second which was almost a pause, she said, a conspiratorial note entering her tone, ‘I have a bad case of govorukha.’ I said it sounded painful. In fact, govorukha describes a mix of garrulousness and taciturnity, an endemic condition in the Russian far north characterised by bursts of direct speech alternating with the silent reserve bred into those who live in geographical isolation.
Paper twists of boiled sweets went from hand to hand. The maritime roll combined with sporadic blasts of hot air from the engine ventilator to induce a drowsy fug. Hard by the Finnish border, the White Sea, Beloye More, forms the most southerly gulf of the Barents Sea and Arctic Ocean, a three-pronged embayment sheltered by the motherly arm of the Kola Peninsula. Named after its foamy rollers and known to sailors as ‘the bandit sea’, its waves gather at the whim of capricious winds that can whisk up five storms a day. The winds in the north have a name – Moryana, Obyednik, Polunoshrik. After two hours, perhaps longer, a dark sequence of turrets and domes rose from the distant waves, a low-lying, tightly self-contained silhouette pulling the currents into its own magnetic field. It seemed wondrous: it must have seemed a miracle to a medieval pilgrim. My own pilgrims reached into their string bags for bulky Horizon cameras, and streamed on deck to start snapping.
Between the Karelian coast and what Russians call the summer coast, the islands and islets of the Solovki archipelago lie half a degree south of the Arctic Circle. Although a microclimate sustains cherry trees and cabbages, as well as 600 lakes and swamps, Solovki winters are still long, dark and brutal. On Great Solovki, where we disembarked, a thousand civilians inured to hardship live alongside the holy fathers, servicing the pilgrim trade, harvesting salt and struggling to maintain a power supply. Beyond the coastal sorrel and Siberian cedars, violet mists curled through the larches, the scent of hagberries cut the air, and lakes shone through vertical slits between the forest trunks. The ubiquitous dun-coloured mud of the north spread inland in what Dostoevsky called ‘a sort of pea jelly’. My companions from the ferry vanished to a hostel in the forest, so I had lunch alone in my hotel. The waiter, a youth in an embroidered tunic, understood instinctively there was no point fooling around with incomprehensible menus. Without a word he brought a dish of minced perch and salted boletus mushrooms, and watched me as I ate. I had never had a better lunch, and told him so, the phrases translated by my empty dish.
The tour guide Anna was an old-style Russian who spoke wonderful English despite never having set foot outside the motherland. An Arkhangel-born historian and curator, she had worked in the monastic archives for many years, and her worn sheepskin coat, buttoned to the neck, gave her the look of a robust countrywoman. Above all, she radiated enthusiasm. ‘Oh it’s such a tremendous story,’ she said, setting off on the four-hour tour at an Olympic pace. ‘Solovki is the place where faith triumphs over death.’
The bulky, reddish-brown boulders at the base of the fortifications seemed to grow organically out of the shingle in a blaze of crystalline light. In a cobbled courtyard on the other side of the arched Holy Gates and the twenty-feet-thick walls, a monk with his soft black skufia hat pulled down over his ears was towing a wooden wheelbarrow. His earliest predecessors, St Savvatii and St German, settled on Solovki in 1429. The White Sea islands offered exceptional anchorage, plentiful fresh water, berries and limitless fishing, and the benefits of inaccessibility guaranteed isolation: the crossing from the mainland could only be made between June and August, and then it took two days rowing the stalwart medieval karbas. What Mount Athos and the Tibetan plateau offered in height, Solovki had in latitude. But it was more than a quiet place for contemplation. Following the path of St Anthony, Savvatii and German chose one of the harshest places on earth in which to wage spiritual warfare through prayer. Eastern Christian ascetics conceived monasticism as self-martyrdom, voluntarily killing the ego to become a vessel of divine light. On Solovki, the faithful sacrificed their earthly selves to battle the elemental darkness of winter and the bugs and storms of a White Sea summer. As an act of renewal within that context, in the middle of the fifteenth century St Zosima founded a monastery under the titular control of the archbishopric of Novgorod, the powerful mercantile city-state that vied with Moscow. Solovki was to become a mirror of the complex, shifting relationship between church and state.
Muscovite princes were at that time plotting against Novgorod, and once they had beaten its rulers into submission – in most cases literally – and taken over its fur trade (in 1478), they looked to Solovki to protect their empire on the northern borders of Rus. To that end, they lavished the monastery with endowments. The community prospered, accumulating wealth while its holy fathers in theory and often in practice relinquished both money and personal ambition. Savvatii and Zosima supplanted St Nikolas as patron saints of seafarers in the north, where the sea controlled life and death, and the Solovki monks promoted their cult to encourage patronage. In 1539 Ivan IV granted the monastery incomes from the villages along the Vyg River, and, later, from the Tersky coast of the Kola Penin sula and the settlements on two of its largest rivers. On the tour, Anna strode around the courtyard before pausing in front of the chipped white stone wall of a refectory. A group of monks hurried out of its heavy doors and crossed to an arched passageway, coughing into their black sleeves. ‘They try’, she said, ‘to maintain the isolation of their predecessors. When Putin visited in 2001 as president of the Federation, the abbot had to gather his flock in advance and explain who Putin was.’ This strained the limits of the credible. But it was an attractive notion of unworldliness. Putin had gone to Solovki to mark the tenth anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union. He used the visit to laud the achievements of the state and the contribution of Orthodox Christianity, ‘without which Russia could hardly exist’. Then he said that all peoples were equal before God, and that Russia had always guaranteed that equality. Now Solovki really had heard it all.
In 1555 Ivan commanded the abbot to set up a jail for exiled priests, part of an increasingly monomaniacal crusade to establish absolute power. According to one historian, Ivan’s oprichniki, or secret police, ‘felt no shame when killing defenceless people for fun or robbing and raping them . . . Ivan wallowed in orgies and debauchery and surrounded himself with reprobates, allowing them everything their licentiousness demanded.’ In the words of another scholar, and foreshadowing the future, to Ivan, ‘prayer and torture were but two aspects of piety’. Both found a legitimised place in Solovki. Later in the sixteenth century Tsar Fedor Ivanovich commissioned the monastery’s most distinctive architectural feature – its fortified walls. He wanted a mighty defensive barricade to ward off ‘the Germans and all warring people . . . because of how close the Swedish border has become’. The foundation stones were 7 metres long, and according to one source, ‘it took at least two or three hundred men to drag the largest’. Designed by a monk and a master builder from Vologda, the walls followed a pentagonal formation, with five corner towers and two side towers equipped with gun rooms and topped by wooden tent roofs and cupolas. The builders did not cut their stones, instead wedging small ones into gaps, thinning the walls as they rose and crowning the lot with bricks from the monastic works. Inside the Cathedral of the Transfiguration, Anna gestured to a portrait of Ivan. ‘From his time,’ she said, ‘Solovki was the focal point of economic, religious, and cultural life along the White Sea coast. Hundreds of craftsmen worked in sheepskin, copper and timber. But the salt trade was the most lucrative.’ Without its salt production, Solovki would have remained a minor monastery with little influence on Russian history. Even the name ‘Solovki’ derives from the Russian word for salt. Annual production peaked at 2 million kilograms, all of it extracted from highly salinated brine deep in the earth, a natural occurrence around the White Sea, which is itself exceptionally salty. Solovki was soon the second richest monastery in Old Russia, behind only Trinity Lavra in Sergiyev Posad.
The good times ended when the monks dug in against the infamous Nikonian reforms that split the Russian Church, an event which Solzhenitsyn claimed influenced the national destiny more than the Bolshevik Revolution. Promulgated by Patriarch Nikon, the 1653–56 reforms aimed to cleanse and improve spiritual practice. But Orthodox traditions were the beating heart of old Russia, and its rituals sacrosanct to those who linked change with western contamination. Conservatives considered the reforms heretical, and became known as Old Believers. They had always crossed themselves with two fingers, and were not minded to change when Nikon introduced the three-fingered cross to bring Russia in line with the Greek Church. Some cut off their index fingers; hundreds walled themselves up in their churches and immolated themselves; thousands settled in Siberia. Waves of dissenters headed north to the White Sea, where peasants and Solovki monks alike were among the most stubborn adherents of the old rituals. The north had a far higher number of tiny wayside chapels (tchasovnyi) than other parts of Russia, and no God-fearing man would ever pass without a prayer to the solitary icon that kept a freezing vigil.
Troops mustered to bring Solovki into line and the monks settled down for what turned into a seven-year siege. Anyone caught outside the fortified walls had a bad time of it. ‘So they mangled him and burned him’, according to the records of one monk apprehended by the military, ‘and tore out a rib from his half-burned body, shaved his head and poured cold water on it from a height, and after forty-eight hours of tortures beheaded him on the Saturday after Pentecost, and would not even let him be buried.’ When the end came, as it had to, many monks had already died of scurvy and others escaped to take alms in the villages dotting the White Sea coast where Old Believers had found their Arctic utopias. Sensing that the Nikonian reforms signalled imminent apocalypse, and perceiving themselves in flight from the decadence of European Russia, many true believers formed themselves into sects, the crazier the better. The Skoptsy cut off their testicles, reasoning that salvation lay in the association between the Russian words iskuplenie (redemption) and oskoplenie (castration). Castration sects continued to flourish in Russia in general and in the revived Solovki prisons in particular long after Nikon’s reforms (women joined in by chopping off their breasts and vulvas). But the Old Believers were not mad. They were sustained by deep religious consciousness and a refusal to compromise. Their crime was to walk out of step with the Enlightenment insistence on finding the most reasonable path to happiness. Beyond the sects, they consolidated into a broad social movement of religious and political dissent. Nineteenth-century sympathisers included Mussorgsky, who expressed the conviction in his opera Khovanshchina, sometimes translated as The Khovansky Affair, that Old Believers were the last authentic Russians; and the Cossack painter Vasily Surikov, who did the same thing in the tremendous Boyarynya Morozova (The Boyar’s Wife Morozova), a vast canvas, now in the Tretyakov, depicting a fierce-eyed heretic being sledged to her execution with her arm raised in the two-fingered sign. Meanwhile a fresh intake of monks arrived at Solovki and made overtures to the Tsar. The reformist, 6-foot 8-inch Peter the Great recognised the strategic potential of Solovki: besides wishing to intimidate unwelcome Swedish settlers in the region, he was looking for trade routes out of the White Sea.
Although the old ways never quite died at Solovki, prudence and secrecy prevailed and the monastery flourished once more, the fathers responding to one tsar after another in a fine display of Darwinian adaptation. Anna showed me the water mill, the icon-painting workshop and the kvass brewery, and, outside the kremlin walls, the rope works, the tar distillery and the canning factory, as well as a complex system of canals and reservoirs. In the nineteenth century, engineers from Arkhangel outfitted Solovki as a shipyard with northern Russia’s only dry dock. Long after their western counterparts had lost the struggle for wealth and influence to secular rivals, a mystical tradition persisted in the monasteries of the east, exerting a powerful hold over the elite. As a modern historian puts it, eastern monks ‘ringed a careworn society with the shimmering hope of paradise regained’. Visitors poured in to Solovki. In summer, pilgrims disembarked at the pier from a steamship, or from an overcrowded barge towed behind it. The monastery’s own steamship, captained by a sailor-monk, transported the devout on the seventeen-hour voyage from Arkhangel, third-class passage in the hold a test of the most robust faith. Guest houses sprang up to house the pilgrims and souvenir stalls to sell them a ten-kopek crucifix fashioned in monastic workshops. The most popular chapel held the relics of Savvatii and Zosima. ‘Countless offerings of candles were blazing around the tombs of the Solovetski saints,’ wrote a rare English visitor, ‘and the floor of the chapel, with its black and white pavements, was covered with a dense mass of kneeling humanity all worshipping towards the rich shrines glittering with gold – a contrast to the two simple old men who lie there.’ Others were less impressed, trotting back to Moscow with tales of boys and drink.
At least two millennia before the first monks cast anchor, about the time Celtic peoples brought ironwork to Britain and an elite emerged among the trading peoples of the lower Mississippi delta, the bountiful catch and safe harbours of the White Sea islands attracted nomadic fishermen and hunter-gatherers. Besides tools and burial mounds, they left a mysterious sequence of labyrinths, most of them on Bolshoi Zayatski, a turbulent forty-minute boat journey from Big Solovki. I had arranged another tour, and was expecting Anna to meet me at the wharf; but the young woman who approached me was not Anna. Except she was. She was another Anna, a younger museum employee. ‘Yesterday’s Anna’, the new version explained in flawless English, ‘is indisposed.’ Six Russians pressed indecorously into the cabin while Anna junior and I leant against the bow rail and shouted over the dyspeptic growl of the engine. Cheerful and lively, and formerly a military lawyer, Anna was born in Petrozavodsk and had been brought up speaking Karelian at home. In the 1937–8 campaign against non-Russians, Karelia was among the nations that virtually ceased to exist. ‘What made you decide to come here?’ I shouted. ‘God decided!’ she yelled back with a warm smile.
A tint of sage and cadmium overlaid the scene, as if the landscape had been washed. Boulders, juniper bushes, lichen – even the cranberries blushed green and yellow. Entirely different from its forested neighbour, the island was all tundra, the horizon a swathe of merged land and sea; the landscape was apocalyptic in its broad scope. Wanderers in the far north often write of being on the edge of the world, and of life. I could have laid out a cosmic labyrinth myself.
Across the open land, the aspen boards of a church had silvered in the fine rain and brown juices from the swampy earth seeped up the lower rows. Inside, stacked timber rose above my head. It was exceptionally cold that day, and the loons on the lakes had taken refuge in the sedge. A bank of cloud obscured the sun, but towards the end of the afternoon a thin line of orange light appeared along the lower edge of the cloud, like the line that glows after the flame on burning paper. The Bronze Age spirals we had come to see spread over the plain. Their fat mossy whorls – essentially rings of concentric circles – ranged from a metre in diameter to 25 metres; the moss and lichen that formed the rings had grown over carefully positioned stones, and rough pyramids of bare stones lay in random piles. Nobody knows who made the labyrinths, or why. Experts agree only that early nomadic hunter-fishers laid circular patterns to fulfil the requirements of customs, rituals or beliefs. It turns out that the labyrinth is among the oldest human symbols, and that ancient stone spirals exist on every continent except Antarctica. As well as the unidentified marine nomads, Sámi once fished the Solovki archipelago, and some historians believe they laid the Bolshoi Zayatski labyrinths and that the formations represented the one-way journey to the other world, which, according to Sámi belief, is a mirror image of this one. The ground formed the barrier between the here-and-now and the underworld, while the Solovki islands in the middle of the White Sea were, in Sámi mythology, a halfway stop on the journey to the grave. Anna picked out a route back to the tiny wharf. Before reboarding the bobbing boat, we both looked back over the tundra. Vaporous draughts of air blew in from the east and hung over the labyrinths. Anna had finished her history lesson, and stood in silence. The meaning of the patterns lay in a country beyond words. Like poetry, or music, or the aspen wood cross of a Christian ascetic, the sturdy stone rings ratified the transcendental impulse, that dark grope towards truth that lies at the heart of being human.
Arctic European Russia sweeps from the Finnish border to the Urals. It takes in the regions of Murmansk and Arkhangel, the White Sea, and the National Region of Nenets (Nenetskiy Avtonomnyy Okrug), which itself stretches along the coast from Kanin Nos at the mouth of the White Sea to the River Kara. The stunted birches of its tundra drown in oceans of mud and lakes like mirrors grown black with age, while to the south, fish-rich rivers curl through the taiga, their glides reflecting hatches of caddisflies and mosquitoes, the biblical locusts of the far north. The region was and remains isolated, culturally as well as geographically, an outpost that during the Revolution remained white in every sense of the word. In September 1918, 5,000 Americans landed in Arkhangel to shore up the Whites and protect the seaboard. The Great War had ceded to the Civil War and in a shifting sea of allegiances, foreign political leaders never quite answered the question frequently asked both on the home front and in the tundra camps, ‘Are we at war with the Bolsheviks?’ The Americans, mostly Michigan doughboys of the 339th Infantry Regiment, stayed on long after the Armistice in a cold winter during which they went out on snowshoe patrol and befriended local girls as well as fighting Bolsheviks who attacked their dug-in positions. They had been on the defensive from the moment they landed. Michigan-born Captain Robert Boyd expressed the frustrations of many in the 339th when he wrote to his commanding officers asking bluntly, ‘Why are we here?’ On 14 November, John Cudahy, a young lieutenant, led a counter-attack that routed 1,000 Bolsheviks who had fired on 600 American, Canadian and Royal Scots soldiers holding the village of Toulgas on the Northern Dvina River. But Cudahy later expressed his disillusionment with the campaign in his book Arkhangel: The American War with Russia. Still, the boys who made it home to Michigan took sentimental memories back with them from that cold and little known front. ‘This is Russia,’ wrote Cudahy of the landscape in which he served, ‘of the American soldier, a cluster of dirty huts, dominated by the severe white church, and encircling all, fields and fields of spotless snows; Russia, terrible in the grasp of devastating Arctic cold; the squalor and fulsome filth of the villages; the moujik [peasant], his mild eyes, his patient bearded face – the grey drudgery and gaping ignorance of his starved life; the little shaggy pony, docile and uncomplaining in winds icy as the breath of the sepulchre; Russia, her dread mystery, and that intangible quality of melodrama that throngs the air, and lingers in the air, persistently haunts the spirit, and is as consciously perceptible as the dirty villages, the white church, and the grief-laden skies.’
The archipelago had functioned as a dumping ground for undesirables for centuries: after Ivan, Peter the Great despatched enemies to cells within the monastic walls. With its island isolation and ready-made infrastructure, Solovki was just the spot to get rid of someone you didn’t like, and the leaders of the newly-minted Soviet Union were inevitably to take up the baton. First they had to lock the churches, pack off the monks and crate up the valuables. In the Solovki archives, a suite of rooms off a roofed walkway within the kremlin, the first Anna showed me footage of the requisition teams from Moscow, flickering black-and-white images of men in suits stuffing medieval icons into cardboard boxes. ‘It all went off uncatalogued, without notes,’ said Anna. It was still agony to a curator. ‘The requisition teams were sent by Lenin at the time of the famine, and they said the icons and jewels were going to be sold abroad to buy bread.’ And the pigs of the island flew.2
In 1923, revolutionary authorities sent the first 150 Soviet prisoners to Solovki. Under Lenin’s portrait in the cathedral, guards hung the inscription, ‘We are showing mankind a new road. Labour will be the master of the world.’ That year the administration for the entire system of northern camps also moved to Solovki. It was called Severnye Lagerya Osobogo Naznacheniya, which means Northern Special Purposes Camps, and its acronym was SLON, the Russian word for elephant. It was the seed which grew into the Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei, or Main Camp Administration, the acronym of which was GULAG. In the last week of the year, the camp chief, called, believe it or not, Eichmanns, ordered the first massacre. In those early days, funerals were held; the surviving prisoners, according to Solzhenitsyn, ‘sang in chorus across the Solovetsky wilderness’ and pushed a boulder over the common grave carved with the names of the dead. Meanwhile Lenin had had his third stroke, and in January 1924 he died. Stalin was the Party General Secretary.
In the archives Anna pulled out cardboard boxes and the two of us sat on the flagged floor sifting through tattered black-and-white photographs labelled with name, profession and date of death. Galina Maximovna Yudova, teacher, 23.9.23; Ivan Sergeyevich Tsekovski, engineer, 14.2.24; Mikhail Nikolayevich Bezborodov, priest, 20.3.24. Many priests and bishops died on Solovki. ‘Their silver locks gleamed’, according to Solzhenitsyn, ‘in every cell and in every prisoner transport en route to the Solovetsky islands,’ actual martyrs sustaining the spirit of self-martyrdom pursued by Savvatii and German and the other founding fathers.3 By 1925, the prison population on the islands had reached 6,000, a quarter of whom died of typhus that winter. Anxiety that the prison project was not self-supporting put a stop to talk about re-education and punishment. Stalin wanted labour camps at the heart of the economy, and as a result decreed that production was the primary purpose of the new prisons. In other words, Solovki and the other camps were not set up as death factories, though death was often the result.
Anna disappeared into a storeroom, returning with a sheaf of grainy photographs of the cathedral-barracks. Eight hundred and fifty zeki, or prisoners, some of them children, slept stacked on top of one another. During the day they worked in the forests and peat bogs, permitted to take the lunch ration only if they completed unrealistic quotas. The logging camps burgeoned after the camp won a contract to sell timber to foreign lands. Few prisoner-loggers recorded their memories. But one who did, a Latvian called E.I. Solovieff, had arrived in 1925. Years later his daughter found his neatly typed story at the bottom of a suitcase. Having arisen at four, wrote Solovieff, ‘if one couldn’t complete the urok [quota of prescribed work] by night, then one had to work through the night and continue back in the woods after check-in and have very little food. In such cases the prisoner frequently collapsed from exhaustion and crawled into bushes to sleep, only to be found asleep for ever. Almost every day some were missing from the groups, having fallen asleep in tents under a spruce and then frozen to death.’ Frozen limbs were ignored, and many died of untreated gangrene. One particular guard, Vanka Potapov, enjoyed lighting a fire at night and shooting any prisoner who crept within the ambit of its heat. Many asked guards to beat them to death. Others mutilated themselves by chopping off their hands or feet in order to obtain a hospital transfer, but when this turned into an epidemic, all samorubi (‘self-inflictionists’) were left in the forest to die. Prisoners had to jump off bridges into rivers when a particular guard shouted, ‘Dolphin!’ And every morning, wrote prisoner Y. Danzas, ‘people armed with long sea hooks, through slightly opened gates, hook the dead bodies in order to take out the corpses. At the same time live prisoners attempt to hold on to the dead bodies, to serve them instead of mattresses.’ Camp administrators kept groups of women in separate accommodation for use as a personal harem. In the thirties, many Ukrainian women arrived, having escaped from the artificially-induced famine in the south during which their relations had eaten one another.
In 1929 the random terror of the early Soviet years yielded to a more systematic persecution of the regime’s perceived opponents. Stalin’s ‘great turning point’ signalled the onset of collectivisation, which, according to gulag historian Anne Applebaum, ‘destroyed – for ever – rural Russia’s sense of continuity with the past’. As a result of the doomed collectivisation policies, kulaks swamped the gulag. Anna recounted the story of an old Ukrainian on one of her monastery tours. ‘At the end of the tour, he explained that he came from a family of kulaks, or rich peasants. When he was five, he was in a neighbour’s house and saw through the window his parents and four siblings being taken away. He never saw them again. His hands were shaking when he told me all this. He was going round the camps, trying to find a trace in the records, so he would know.’ `Solovki records cover a small percentage of inmates. Nonetheless, Anna said she would ask the colleague responsible to look through the lists in the morning. ‘When I got to my office the next day, the Ukrainian was waiting,’ Anna continued. ‘My colleague arrived. They looked at the lists. But the name wasn’t there. The man started crying. He said he was so old, he couldn’t carry on looking much longer.’ By 1930, the prison population at Solovki had swollen to 28,000, and 44 per cent of them had typhus. (From 1929 to 1934, the overall Soviet prison population multiplied by twenty-three.) As waves of political terror washed over Russia in the thirties, party members arrived at Solovki as prisoners, transported in rail boxcars in which they lay on shelved slats, unable to sit, stand or protect themselves from the vomit, urine and excrement of those on the slats above. Most prisoners lasted a year, perhaps two. The guards were corrupt and inefficient, and every so often a commission arrived from Moscow and shot half of them.
Something indefinably resilient rose out of the glass cabinets displaying newspapers produced by zeki on the monks’ lithography press. At Solovki these publications reached a level of sophistication unmatched in any other camp. One could subscribe to the weekly Novye Solovky (New Solovki) anywhere in the Soviet Union. In the twenties, Anna said, the island was the intellectual centre of Russia, as half the intellectuals lived there. Copies of Solovetskie ostrova (Solovki Islands) faintly typed on an old Underwood, ran to 250 pages, with illustrations, poems and articles.
Bizarrely, at some camps ‘Culture and Education Departments’ showed films to entertain the zeki. When there was a large criminal population, which was often, prisoners took advantage of the darkened rooms to kill one of their colleagues, and during the credits a corpse would be carried out. It was a crazy para-world. The same departments organised singing and dancing ensembles featuring songs such as ‘The Ballad of Stalin’, ‘The Cossack Meditation on Stalin’ and ‘Let’s Smoke’. They appointed in-house camp artists and set up theatre troupes; in 1924 prisoners staged Uncle Vanya in the Solovki mess hall. Camp ‘educators’ also encouraged prisoners to design inventions which would increase productivity. Cunning zeki used the scheme to engineer a less horrible life. When a former chauffeur said he could make a car that could run on oxygen, he was given a lab in which to toil in peace. It was not funny, but also, it is funny.
Clandestine religious life persisted. In the twenties a priest-prisoner known as Father Nikodim kept a small cup on a string round his neck with which to celebrate the Eucharist. A prisoner who gave birth in the camp remembered, ‘We walked together into the forest, to where there was a small wooden chapel, some benches, and a spring. There the priest, who had a cross and was wearing a cassock, baptised my son.’ Could one imagine how much that meant to her? Or what happened to the boy?
The salted herring we ate at lunch seemed miraculous in its ordinariness. When we had finished, the first Anna asked if I would care to accompany her to collect a box of archive material from Sekirka, a hill church eleven kilometres away on the east of the island. We were to travel in the old museum Land Rover, virtually an exhibit itself. The mud road was exceptionally bumpy, and we hit our heads numerous times on the (fortunately canvas) roof of the vehicle. Loons were feeding on the lakes in the softwood forest. We could see the Sekirka belfry above the treetops long before we arrived at the foot of the hill. The church there was the only one in the world with a lighthouse on top. Three monks lived in the cloisters. One of them came out to greet Anna when we walked up. I asked him if the lighthouse still functioned. ‘Oh yes!’ translated Anna. ‘It’s used ten months a year – August to May.’ The forest there was fragrant with bilberries, and winds had bent the ashes and birches into shapes Anna called ‘dancing trees’. As we went into the church, she said, ‘Solovki used to be the most revered name in all Russia. Then it became the most feared. But when you actually got to the island, there was a name that was more feared. It was Sekirka. Nobody came back from this place.’ A spyhole had been clumsily drilled in the door so guards could observe their prisoners. It would have been an obscene image anywhere; but it was in a church. After a guard spotted him secretly celebrating the Eucharist, Father Nikodim arrived at Sekirka. He slept at the bottom of three layers of other men, piled in the church like firewood, and it was there that he died of asphyxiation. At the same time, naked men were made to sit on a pole for hours high in the unheated nave. When they fell, they were beaten. Prisoners went to desperate lengths to avoid this torture. Solovieff again. ‘I saw how people deliberately burned their mouths or sex organs to simulate syphilis . . . people swallowed pieces of glass or nails to get into the hospital . . . the number of deaths was enormous here.’ On a small patch of a corner wall, faces on a fresco had been violently scratched out. ‘One generation destroys what the previous ones have created,’ I said as we walked out into the sunlight of a vegetable garden. ‘But they didn’t destroy it,’ said Anna fiercely. ‘The spirit lives.’
Outside the church, the early monks built 365 steps as part of their podvig, or ongoing spiritual struggle. But the steps were made for going up. During the gulag, guards tied prisoners to logs and rolled them down, their bodies bouncing on the frosted wooden treads. Anna and I descended in silence and continued along a narrow path cut through the birch forest. ‘In the mosquito season,’ she said, ‘they tied men tightly to trees, naked, and left them there all day.’ The mosquitoes, according to Anna, who had seen photographs of one of these events, were ‘like a moving carpet’. The crunch of my boots on iced mud released the resinous scent of bog rosemary. But I knew I was walking on bones.
Countrywide, 1937 was the worst year. It was the start of The Great Terror. That was a time, wrote Anna Akhmatova in an unforgettable poem, when only the dead / Could smile, delivered from their struggles. In Solovki some zeki escaped into the forest and took their chances. According to one source, ‘The killing and eating of human beings was not considered something extraordinary above the 65th parallel, as it was a matter of survival and was considered a more or less original way to procure food.’ Many of the other prisoners were deliberately worked to death or murdered; at Solovki, in August, the administration announced a death quota: 1,200 prisoners had to be executed. A witness remembered, ‘Unexpectedly they forced everyone from the open cells to a general count. At the count they read out an enormous list of names to be taken on transport. They were given two hours to prepare . . . a terrible confusion ensued . . . columns of prisoners marched out with suitcases and knapsacks.’ They died near the village of Sandormokh and the killers threw their bodies into a pit. I should like to call you all by name, Akhmatova ends the poem, But they have lost the lists.
Anna had shown me photographs of a figure in a flat cap standing in front of the cathedral accompanied by a delegation of gormlessly grinning men. The cap-wearer was Maxim Gorky, then, in June 1929, the Soviet Union’s most important writer. Initially an urgent socialist (he had assisted in the ‘nationalisation’ of church artefacts), Gorky had had a difficult relationship with Lenin, and when he visited Solovki he had just returned from self-imposed exile in Sorrento. He toured a Potemkin row of cells, visited an apparently well-stocked hospital and saw contented prisoners reading newspapers in comfortable chairs. But Gorky talked to a fourteen-year-old inmate in private for forty minutes and got the true picture. He wrote approvingly nonetheless of the Solovki set-up once he had left, describing ‘healthy lads’, flowers on windowsills and ‘no resemblance to a prison’ – though he said later that the censor had been responsible for much of his essay. Solzhenitsyn accused Gorky of an evil conscience after he failed to speak out. Anne Applebaum, less subjective than Solzhenitsyn, says we do not know what Gorky’s motivation was, but we do know that he ‘made the institutionalised violence of the Solovki camps seem a logical and natural part of the new order, and helped to reconcile the public to the growing, totalitarian power of the state’. Furthermore, writes Applebaum, ‘Gorky’s 1929 essay on Solovki was to become an important foundation stone in the forming of both public and official attitudes to the new and far more extensive system of camps which were conceived in that same year.’ Guards shot the fourteen-year-old as soon as Gorky boarded his steamship.
On my last day I walked from lake to lake, following whortleberry outcrops and the flight paths of the loons. Close to a dammed reservoir marked on my rudimentary map as St Fillip’s Pool, knotweed was making progress over a grid of concrete struts, remnants of an abandoned plan to throw a ring road round the forest. When the economy collapsed, the infrastructure went with it, and Solovki was not immune to the problems experienced across the disintegrating Soviet Union. Public money simply stopped, like the water behind the dam; the hospital was heated just enough to stop the drips freezing, and as in the end it was the only building that was heated at all, the administration moved onto the wards. Polish journalist Mariusz Wilk went to live in Solovki at that time. He wrote that when he arrived in 1990 you could buy sixty loaves for the price of a bottle of vodka. When he left in 1996, it had gone down to three loaves per bottle.
As the afternoon ended I hurried to the public sauna for a final roasting. I had been attending women’s sessions at the banya behind the monastery, a decrepit brick building with an exterior colonised by milky fungus. In the cold far north, people still regard the ritualised sauna of the public banya with particular affection. Having paid the modest entrance fee, I derobed in the small outer predbannik and collected a bunch of birch twigs for thrashing purposes, together with a woollen cloche hat to insulate my skull against excessive heat, and a sheet in which to enrobe while cooling off. After a brisk bout of self-flagellation, followed by sweating to the locomotive hiss of liquid on hot stone, and excruciating plunges in a trough of iced water, I swaddled up and took my place among the women in the rest room. At first, nobody spoke. By the end of the week, they wouldn’t stop talking. When I could edge in a word, I reflected that with its Bronze Age relics, monastic sanctity and gulag ghosts, Solovki opened a window onto the sweep of Russian history. ‘Yes,’ said my neighbour, heat radiating from her crêpey skin. ‘On Solovki you see Russia in miniature, like the tiniest matreyoshka doll.’ The island even reflected the shrinking awareness in Russia of the need to condemn the crimes of the gulag (‘Say what you like about Stalin, he revived the economy . . .’). Above the quiet chants in the churches and the muttered prayers in the hermitages there was no tone of sober repentance – the Never Again of Dachau or Auschwitz. But the spirit lived in the quiet chants and the muttered prayers; they plucked new life out of death, as they always had. It was easier to believe in when you weren’t tied to a tree or starving in an igloo, but it was a kind of humanity that eluded articulation, and I had sensed it everywhere in the muddled and loveable Arctic.
A Solzhenitsyn story came to mind on the trawler back to Kem. In the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, the author describes being transferred under armed guard from one prison camp to another. On the journey, made on public transport, Solzhenitsyn overhears the chattering complaints of free men and women. How can it be of any interest, the fettered prisoner wonders, in the face of the barbarity to which he has been condemned, that a woman squabbles with her daughter-in-law? ‘Do not pursue what is illusory’, he begs the reader, ‘– property and position: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade, and is confiscated on one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life – don’t be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn after happiness; it is, after all, all the same: the bitter doesn’t last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing. It is enough if you don’t freeze in the cold and if thirst and hunger don’t claw at your insides. If your back isn’t broken, if your feet can walk, if both arms can bend, if both eyes see, and if both ears hear, then whom should you envy? And why? Our envy of others devours us most of all. Rub your eyes and purify your heart – and prize above all else in the world those who love you and who wish you well.’
The White Sea wind picked up speed, and out on deck salty spray sent the others hurrying into the cabin. A mist had fallen over the distant domes. What had the first fishermen made of it as they piloted their flimsy craft across this water centuries before Solzhenitsyn? Did they lay out the stones for their labyrinth spirals as a way of reaching towards some unobtainable transcendental truth? Or did the stones mark the edges of a Bronze Age rubbish dump? The trawler chugged to the coast, over wells of oil speculators had not yet sunk. Either way, the mossy whorls revealed the human spirit at work, stretching back across oceans of time. They were manifestations of the human need to make order. It was better not to know.
1 Other camps existed by 1923, but Solovki is considered the first because of the structured role it acquired as a model for what followed.
2 The Bolsheviks requisitioned more in their first eighteen months in power than the Nazis sent to Switzerland during the entire Second World War.
3 In 1927 interned bishops issued a statement known thereafter as The Solovki Declaration emphasising the basic inconsistency between communist ideology and Christian faith.
