Devil's Islands

National Review, November 11, 1996

Solovetsky Islands, August 1996 © Andrew Stuttaford

It may have voted for Yeltsin, but Archangel is still a very Soviet sort of place. There's a Lenin in the main square and another on the way out of town, just to make sure. Seven hundred miles north of Moscow, this once rich port city of 400,000 seems, at a glance, trapped in Brezhnev's dereliction — though there are hints of a commercial revival. There is plenty in the shops, and someone is buying all those Western cars.

History too is making a comeback. Gingerly at first, like the small boys passing their arms through the eternal flame at its World War II Memorial, Archangel is beginning to confront its Soviet past. A local cemetery finally acknowledges, and honors, the soldiers who died in Afghanistan. The regional museum displays not only stuffed and snarling wildlife, but also an impressive exhibit dedicated to the long Communist repression. This is only fitting. The Archangel oblast was one of the earliest Soviet killing fields. A remote land of forest and swamp, frozen for much of the year, it was an ideal place of exile and execution. By the late 1930s the region was dotted with prison camps and kulak settlements. But even in the first days of revolution, long before Stalin can be blamed, political prisoners were being gathered here. Many were sent just offshore, to the Solovetsky Islands, the "mother tumor," as Alexandr Solzhenitsyn put it, that metastasized into the Gulag.

Solovetsky Kremlin, August 1996 © Andrew Stuttaford

In August, the islands are an easy journey, an hour's flight from Archangel. Blessed by a mild micro-climate, this archipelago of lakes and forests dozes in the warmth of a late northern summer. Dominated by a massive sixteenth-century monastery, the islands' main settlement is a trash-strewn, shabby home to a thousand people. Tumbledown wooden houses overlook a tranquil White Sea. Livestock wander down the main street.

Solovetsky Islands, August 1996 © Andrew Stuttaford

Thirty thousand died here, perhaps more. The precise numbers are lost in the night and fog of a terror that spanned decades. What is certain is that when the Soviets came they found a place of pilgrimage, a once rich monastery supported by a neat little town. This would not do. The crosses went down and the prisoners came in. The cathedral made a good holding pen; its altar, naturally, was replaced by a latrine.

Strangely enough, in the early days there were still relics of Russia's more civilized past: scientific research, theater, even a newspaper. But these were diversions from the camp's principal, dirtier business. For, as Solzhenitsyn has noted, Solovetsky was the prototype for a new age. Could the socially hostile elements be forced to work? Absolutely. Could they be brutalized, starved, and shot? Why yes, that too. The prisoners arrived, in the hundreds, in the thousands, perhaps a hundred thousand in all.

Solovetsky Islands, August 96 © Andrew Stuttaford

On Sekirnaya Hill, the lighthouse-chapel became a punishment barracks of Gothic cruelty, a beacon for future totalitarians. Suitably distorted, it was a light, Moscow discovered, that could also be shone in the eyes of its clever friends. Maxim Gorky showed up to investigate reports of savagery. He found, he said, nothing amiss. So that was all right then. Later, the camp was closed, its lessons learned, its job done. The islands sank safely back into obscurity — in the USSR a half-memory, in the West not even that. The Solovetskys became a vacation spot, the monastery a picturesque backdrop for Komsomol backpackers. Houses were built over one mass grave, and of the other dead, the tens of thousands, nothing could be said.

At least, not until Gorbachev's later years. Then the monks began to return and so did the truth, slowly. Today, a boulder stands at one killing place. Unmarked and anonymous, it is unremarkable on a rocky island. It should not be so much a memorial as a work in progress, like a wooden cross on a recent grave. But for the Solovetsky dead there can be no more. A headstone needs names, and most of those are missing.

Memorial boulder, Solovetsky Islands, August 1996, © Andrew Stuttaford

Solovetsky Monastery, August 96 © Andrew Stuttaford

At the monastery the domes and crosses are back but the spirit is not. The monks seem downcast as they lead a drab procession out of their chapel. The wild Orthodox exuberance of the cathedral is lost. And the dead? They get a small museum at the back, an afterthought on an architectural tour. But it is a start. There are details, even, at last, some names, the names of prisoners, and the names of their tormentors: Ekmans, Kedrov, and the others.

"Kedrov?" Vladimir Mityn smiles, and the past again clouds over. "He was in Archangel. He only visited the islands two or three times." Mr. Mityn, the Director of Archangel's regional archives, is no revisionist. He just wants, he says, to be objective. His interest is in the kulaks, "richer" peasants like his grandparents, torn by the hundreds of thousands from southern villages and dumped in the forests, to log and to die. He leads expeditions into the hinterland searching for a trace of their settlements. There is not much to find: a ruined hut or a marked grave, if he is lucky.

For Russia's is the holocaust that worked, that devastated a continent, and then disappeared into a new ruling class. The society it leaves behind is hopelessly compromised, still tempted by a past that it has never been allowed to understand. While the survivors of the Gulag generations still live, there needs to be a reckoning, a Soviet Nuremberg which might influence the attitudes of the new Russia before it is too late.

But it will never happen. No one wants it. Not even Vladimir Mityn, a man who wanders through forests in search of history. "You see," he explains, "I was a Communist myself."

Solovetsky Islands, August 1996 © Andrew Stuttaford