Solovki prison camp

A 1570 map by Abraham Ortelius shows the location of "Salofki".
Solovetsky Islands at the map of the White Sea.

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 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.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn called Solovki the "mother of the GULAG". It was openly termed a concentration camp until the late 1920s when the euphemism "corrective labour camp" was applied throughout the system, now organised as the GULag or main directorate for corrective-labour camps. The Solovki "special" camp served as a testing ground where security measures were developed and tried out, as were innovations in "living conditions", work production norms, and other forms of repression.

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.[1] In 1923, Solzhenitsyn thought, Soloviki contained "no more than 3,000" prisoners; by 1930 the number had jumped to "about 50,000", with another 30,000 held at the nearby railroad transit point of Kem.[2]

From monastery to labour camp, and back again

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.

Lenin's unpublished decree of 3 November 1923 led to the conversion of the monastery buildings into the Solovki "special" camp or Solovetsky Lager' Osobogo Naznachenia (SLON).[3] (The acronym is a play on the Russian word "slon" meaning elephant.) One of the first "forced labor camps", Solovki served as a prototype for the Gulag as a whole.[4] In early 1924 it was sometimes given a double name, Severnye (Solovetskiye) Lagerya OGPU (Northern (Solvki) camps of OGPU).[5]

Solovetsky Monastery in 2013

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 previously been used, on occasion, 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 clean-up, the Soviet government sent the proletarian writer Maxim Gorky to the camp in an attempt to counter this criticism. 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.[6][7]

The Baltic-White Sea Canal

In the early 1930s many of the prisoners from the camp worked on the notorious White Sea – Baltic Canal,[6] one of a succession of grandiose schemes devised by Stalin.

During the Great Purges over 9,500 victims of Soviet political repressions were executed by shooting from 11 August 1937 to 24 December 1938 and buried on the mainland at Sandarmokh, near the first two locks of the canal. More than a thousand of those shot were transported to the mainland from Solovki and were long thought to have died from drowning after the barge on which they were travelling was deliberately sunk in the White Sea.[8] The 1,111 prisoners from Solovki were executed by NKVD Capt. Mikhail Matveyev over a four-day period in November 1937.[9]

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 being the future author Valentin Pikul.

A World Heritage site

The Orthodox Church reestablished the monastery in 1992, the year when the ensemble was included into UNESCO's World Heritage List. In 2015 human rights activists accused the authorities of "gradually removing all traces of the labor camp".[10]

Notable prisoners

Memorial to the victims of the Gulag, in Lubyanka Square, Moscow, made from a boulder from the Solovetsky Islands
Memorial to the victims of the Gulag, in St. Petersburg, made from a boulder from the Solovetsky Islands

Many prisoners were members of the intelligentsia, and represent the cream of Tsarist and revolutionary-period Russia. These include:[11]

Naftaly Frenkel was at first a prisoner, but later became commander of the camp.

Solovki camp in art and literature

Maksim Gorki visiting the prison camp, to his right stands NKVD officer Gleb Boky

Emigré and samizdat literature, 1926-1974

Perestroika and Glasnost, 1985-1991

Footnotes

  1. ↑ "Forced Labor Camps", on-line exhibition at the Open Society Archives.
  2. ↑ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1975). The Gulag Archipelago. Collins & Harvill Press. p. 72.
  3. ↑ Соловецкий Лагерь Особого Назначения (СЛОН). (in Russian)
  4. ↑ Gulag by Anne Applebaum. New York: Anchor Book, 2003. p.20.
  5. ↑ СОЛОВЕЦКИЙ ИТЛ ОГПУ (Соловецкие лагеря особого назначения, Соловецкий лагерь принудительных работ особого назначения ОГПУ, СЛОН, СЛАГ, Соловецкие и Карело-Мурманские лагеря, СКМИТЛ) Memorial (in Russian)
  6. 1 2 Robson, Roy R. (2004). Solovki: The Story of Russia Told Through Its Most Remarkable Islands. Yale University Press. p. 320. ISBN 9780300102703. See pp. 242–243.
  7. ↑ Yedlin, Tova (1999). Maxim Gorky: A Political Biography. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 260. ISBN 9780275966058. See p.188.
  8. ↑ "Sandarmokh"
  9. ↑ Fishman, Mikhail (9 June 2017). "Stalin's Shadow: How a Gulag Historian Fell Victim to Russia's Dark Past". The Moscow Times. Retrieved 2017-06-12.
  10. ↑ Macfarquhar, Neil (2015-08-30). "A Tug of War Over Gulag History in Russia’s North". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2015-08-31.
  11. ↑ Application for UNESCO World Heritage Site, 1991, p. 11.
  12. ↑ I speak for the silent prisoners of the Soviets (1934).
  13. ↑ 7,000 days in Siberia (1989).

Further reading

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Solovki prison camp.

Coordinates: 65°1′28″N 35°42′38″E / 65.02444°N 35.71056°E / 65.02444; 35.71056

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.