Solovki prison camp

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A 1570 map by Abraham Ortelius shows the location of "Salofki".

The Solovki prison camp and later Solovki prison (located on the Solovetsky Islands, White Sea) was part of the Soviet penal system. Historically Solovetsky Islands have been the location of the famous Russian Orthodox Solovetsky Monastery complex, which repelled foreign attacks during the Time of Troubles, the Crimean War, and the Russian Civil War.

By Lenin's decree, the monastery buildings were turned into Solovetsky Lager' Osobogo Naznachenia (SLON), that is, the "Solovki Special Purpose Camp". The acronym of the camp name is a sullen word play for those who speak Russian: slon means "elephant". It was one of the first "corrective labor camps", a prototype of the Gulag system.^[1]

In 1926 the Solovki camp was turned into a prison, partly because of the conditions which made escape near impossible and partly because the monastery had been used as a political prison by the Russian imperial administration. The treatment of the prisoners attracted much criticism in Western Europe and the USA. After a thorough cleanup, the Soviet government sent the proletarian writer Maksim Gorky to the camp in an attempt to counter this criticism. Indeed, Gorky wrote a very favourable essay, which praised the beautiful nature of the islands. How much Gorky knew about the real conditions, remains a mystery.

The prison was closed in 1939 because the Second World War was imminent, while the camp was situated close to the border with Finland. The buildings were then transformed into a naval base. The Orthodox Church reestablished the monastery in 1992, the year when the ensemble was included into UNESCO's World Heritage List.

[edit] Solovki camp in art and literature

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn spends a great deal of Part III of The Gulag Archipelago discussing the development of Solovki and the conditions there during the early Soviet regime.
The fictional town of Solovets in Monday Begins on Saturday is a hint at Solovetsky Monastery.
In The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, Ivan Ponyrov (the poet also known as Ivan Homeless) suggests to Woland (a German name for Satan) that Immanuel Kant should be sent to Solovki as punishment for his attempts to prove the existence of God. Woland replies "Thats just the place for him! I told him so that day at breakfast...[However] It is impossible to send him to Solovki for the simple reason that he has resided for the past hundred-odd years in places considerably more remote than Solovki, and, I assure you, it is quite impossible to get him out of there."