“Strange things always happen with Solovki,” wrote Dmitry Lebedev in response to my letter, “one needs to be careful.”
I emailed Lebedev when I decided I absolutely had to visit the Solovetsky Islands in 2008. Lebedev is the unofficial coordinator of the Northern Seafaring Fellowship, a group of enthusiasts involved with several volunteer projects on Solovki. They run a free Seafaring Museum and are constructing a wooden replica of the 18th century ship that Peter the Great used to sail the White Sea.
“I’d like to come and work on the islands,” I wrote, “what can I do to help out?”
Two days later, I received a call from the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW). “Do you want to come to Solovki the day after tomorrow?” asked Maria Vorontsova, the fund’s director in Russia. “Someone from the Natural Resources and Environment Ministry was supposed to go, but cancelled at the last moment. We already have a ticket.”
I was already on a plane bound for Arkhangelsk when Lebedev’s email hit my inbox. Nevertheless, he was right: you must be careful of what you wish for.
There are two ways to reach the islands. One involves a long train ride to Kem, a gloomy seaside town in Karelia where some of Pavel Lungin’s recent movie, The Island (Остров) was filmed. From there, travelers endure a bumpy, three-hour boat journey to the Solovetsky port. Inexplicably, the trip didn’t take as long in the 19th century. According to some monastery accounts, Solovetsky monks who went to the mainland to buy food and sell salt made the crossing in just over two hours.
In order to save time, our group is taking the second, “bourgeois” way: the connecting flight through Arkhangelsk. From Arkhangelsk, we board a tiny, lightweight Antonov jet, where passengers have to be distributed equally on both sides of the plane to prevent tipping. The vibration makes speaking feel like you are sitting inside a drum.
IFAW has a number of projects around Russia, one of which is sponsoring studies of beluga whales off the coast of Bolshoy Solovetsky Island. Over time, the whales have become yet another natural attraction on the islands. Over 30,000 visitors come to the archipelago every year to admire its heritage of austere northern Orthodoxy, to learn about the horrific Soviet prison, and to breathe the salty air of the White Sea that surrounds this unique ecosystem.
We wait by the plane’s cargo opening, from which a young man is handing out suitcases like he’s selling potatoes from a truck. “Zhenya, if you damage my luggage, you’re in big trouble,” one female passenger says half seriously before accepting her bag and disappearing into the morning mist.
Several hundred locals live on the islands. For the most part, they live in the village of Solovetsky, the settlement that surrounds the Solovetsky Kremlin. Some inhabit simple, century-old wooden houses, others live in apartment blocks left behind from various Solovetsky eras: the prison, the military settlement, the seaweed harvest, the museum. The tourist mecca period came last.
As it became possible to purchase housing here in the 1990s, the boundary between “local” and “tourist” was blurred. Many families live in their island flats in summer and return to live in a big city during winter. Former Moscow classmates have bumped into each other here after losing touch for decades.
Many of the buildings on Solovki are testaments to the faith and endurance of the monks that first inhabited this remote archipelago in the 15th century, seeking spiritual and physical isolation from the world. For at least the first 100 years, it was a desolate outpost with only wooden structures.
In the 16th century, the monastery also became a northern point of defense against enemy ships, and eventually its importance, both spiritual and military, was recognized by Russia’s rulers, who gave it considerable support. Although the monks bravely fought foreign intruders, they also proved feisty to Moscow on several occasions, the most tragic of which was the “Solovetsky sitting” in the 1670s. Rebelling against Patriarch Nikon’s reforms, the monastery refused to submit to tsarist diplomats. When troops stormed the monastery walls after a blockade lasting eight years, few monks were spared.
Armed with not much more than time, their health, and what the island provided naturally, the monks completed a number of amazing infrastructural projects. One is a 1220-meter-long dry-stone dyke. The dyke snakes across the water, connecting Bolshoy Solovetsky with Bolshaya Muksolma Island, where the monks had cows and farmland. According to monastery accounts, Zosima, one of the three original monks on the islands (the other two were Savvaty and Guerman), forbade the keeping of animals on the main island. The dyke/causeway was engineered by a monk and former peasant, Feoktist.
We spot a boat with two men in it as soon as our captain, Vladimir Danilovich, drops us off at the dyke. “I wonder what they are doing,” says biologist Nadezhda Cherenkova, our guide. “If they are harvesting seaweed, we need to report them to the station – they are poachers in a protected area.”
Bolshaya and Malaya Muksolma are renowned for the abundant seaweed near their shores. Malaya Muksolma is one of three official harvesting areas for the Arkhangelsk Seaweed Factory, an enterprise that receives in its raw material from Solovki. Seaweed harvesting was a main source of income for locals in the 1970s. Now, most harvesters are from other parts of the country; some come from as far away as Moldova. Locals are unimpressed with the 45 cents they can get per harvested kilo; it’s much easier to earn a living renting out a room to tourists during the summer.
The two lost souls in the boat are seasonal workers from Arkhangelsk. Apparently, they caught the wrong current off of Malaya Muksolma. Small wonder, as they are hopelessly drunk. One introduces himself as Vanya Fortochkin, and presents us with a starfish hanging onto life in a crummy plastic bag. If they are poachers, they are unsuccessful ones. Nadezhda rolls her eyes and goes back to describing for us island wildlife and history.
During our time on the islands, we occasionally saw points where the islands’ various interest groups collide. Nadezhda and her husband Alexander, an ornithologist, are both from Moscow, but have lived on the islands for over a decade. Like IFAW, they want the archipelago to be recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site of mixed status, which would protect all of the islands’ ecosystems, not just cultural landmarks such as the Kremlin on Bolshoy Solovetsky Island.
But if this happens, the Arkhangelsk Seaweed Factory will likely close. Most of the pharmaceutical and cosmetic products made at the factory are produced from Solovetsky seaweed.
When I meet the factory’s director, Yelena Bokova, in Solovetsky village, she complains that locals have gotten used to easy money from tourism, that they have forgotten how to work. To her, the monastery is but a prop – a remnant of the past that gives Moscow historians access to an easy life on museum salaries. “They come here and spend their entire lives guarding a rock,” she says sarcastically.
Just a few locals are “unspoiled” by tourism mania, preferring the grueling labor of seaweed harvesting. As Bokova and I talk, boats pull into Solovetsky port and music is playing. It is a prelude to the Solovetsky Regatta, an event that brings tourists to Solovki from all across the country. Bokova sighs. Many years ago, there was a harvesting site right next to the port, she says, but it was closed after workers started to use harvesting boats to take tourists for rides.
In the summer, the port is alive late into the evening. Days are so long during the summer, in fact, that they never really become nights. The sun dips toward the horizon, giving the islands a pink-orange glow, then rises again. During our three-day stay on Solovki, the wee hours of morning were only delineated by the silence that filled the village around midnight, and the local cows that floated eerily past our hotel at 1 am, clanging their cow bells.
The next day we take the boat to Beluzhy Cape, named after the white beluga whale that has congregated there for decades. Scientists from Moscow’s Shirshov Oceanographic Institute study the animal from a watchtower. Belugas come here to have offspring in June, after the ice melts. In July, brown baby belugas swim alongside their white mothers. In a month, the colony will migrate away from Solovetsky shores.
“Nobody knows why they come here,” says Vladimir Baranov, one of the scientists on the tower. “There is a small spot [of sand] that is just four square meters, and all of the whales try to rub their bellies on it,” Baranov says, “it’s a ritual they repeat over and over again.”
Baranov looks like a pirate but talks like a philosopher. While his colleagues peer toward the horizon with binoculars, he stands behind them, listening to whale chatter through headphones. The animals make clicking sounds to “see” the surroundings with their built-in sonar. To communicate with one another, Baranov says, they whistle. “We have their alphabet already, now we are trying to put together a dictionary of what all of the signals mean,” Baranov says matter-of-factly, but I am rather sure he is making a joke.
Scientists from the Shirshov hope to one day mount a camera over the spot where the Belugas congregate. Simultaneously monitoring their behavior and language would bring greater understanding. Observation through diving was fruitless, as the Belugas are easily spooked. And the last thing the scientists want to do is scare the whales into leaving these feeding grounds altogether, endangering their survival.
This Beluga tribe is one of only five or seven such pods in the White and Bering Seas, researchers say, and is the only one in the world that comes so close to the shore. Monastery accounts don’t mention Belugas on the Solovetsky coast, but the animal was widely hunted in tsarist times for its prized skin – a carriage on display in St. Petersburg’s Hermitage museum has a roof made of beluga leather.
Attached to one of the poles of the watchtower is a faded, plastic toy horsehead. Baranov tied it there to recall the legend that Savvaty and Guerman came to the islands on “a white horse,” a beluga. The horsehead is also the mascot for this team of Moscow scientists, who live in a secluded campground all summer. The campground is their skete (“monastery”), where they mark time by the tides and celebrate birthdays by presenting each other with stones from the nearby beach.
The “birthday garden” in front of their wooden kitchen building looks a lot like a graveyard.
Stones are everywhere on Solovki – witnesses to an era of repression and monuments to lives that ended in the Solovetsky prison camp. Gulag memorials in several Russian cities, including Moscow, are boulders from these islands, site of the first Soviet camp for political prisoners.
Yury Brodsky is Russia’s most dedicated chronicler and historian of the Solovetsky Prison. He started collecting evidence and archival information in the 1960s, and published a book on the subject in 2003, full of former inmate accounts, correspondence, photography, and the chilling story of the country’s exemplar prison. His archive holds over five thousand images, and he has travelled around the country extensively to interview former zeks (prisoners).
Brodsky likes to speak broadly about historic trends, noting that a prison was projected as part of the monastery as early as the 16th century. Even in their planning stages, the Kremlin walls had cells, and inmates were held in the basements of the Uspensky and Spaso-Preobrazhensky cathedrals. The first inmates were the non-possessors (nestyazhateli) – Orthodox believers who were against ecclesiastical land ownership.
“There was a prison in the genes of Solovki,” Brodsky says. The genetic inheritance was establishment of Solovetsky Prison in 1923. Over the next ten years, a million people went through its system, including some of the dedicated Bolsheviks who worked to establish the prison in the first place. Most of those sent here were politicals being isolated from the body politic. Most did not receive any trial; their fates were decided at various semi-official committees.
Brodsky explains all of this as we stand atop of Sekirnaya Mountain. Like any other Solovetsky site, this mountain has at least a dual significance. The view from here is beautiful, and the elegant white church doubles as a lighthouse – a small glass cabin on top of the belltower houses a powerful projector that guides passing ships. But in the prison camp period, this church served as a lock-up, a punishment cell where prisoners often died after enduring cruel torture. On the second floor, inmates stripped to their underwear awaited execution.
The Solovetsky Prison Camp laid the groundwork for the Gulag system. Here, the system of labor, punishment, and identity erasure was perfected through trial and error. Looking at the archipelago through the lens of this era is difficult and wearying. It seems so much easier to forget, to stop questioning why history unfolded along a path that was so bloody, uncompromising, and illogical. Brodsky has dedicated half of his life to this study and it has clearly worn him down. He is concerned that prison history will be swept under the carpet.
Nearby are several neat stacks of logs. “The monks have chopped down a building where female inmates were held before their execution,” Brodsky says. He is opposed to how the monastery is commemorating prison victims selectively, putting Orthodox crosses over mass graves where Jews and Catholics are also interred, for example. The museum, a secular organization, is also not representing the atrocities adequately, he says, “their position is to collect the material without judging it, to find something positive in the prison camp period.”
This period ended in 1933, when prisoners were sent to other labor camp projects, such as the Norilsk Nickel mine and factory beyond the Arctic Circle (see Russian Life, March/April 2007).
It is Saturday, the Orthodox holiday of Sts. Peter and Paul. I want to get the monastery’s perspective, but Father German, who has the authority for such discussions, is ill. Instead, I meet with Pyotr Boyarsky, a well-known Arctic explorer and one of the people who signed a public letter this summer in favor of handing over the entire archipelago to the Orthodox Church. The letter has much of the community, especially the museum staff, up in arms.
As we stand next to the monastery gates after the holiday service, Boyarsky is listing the things he is not happy about on Solovki. To him and many Orthodox believers, Solovki should be first and foremost a spiritual pilgrimage center. Instead, irresponsible development is turning it into a commercial and recreational spot.
This year, there is yet another unwelcome guest on Solovki: Ministry for Emergency Situations troops are camping out in green tents on a site where mass graves used to be, preparing for exercises on Sekirnaya mountain. Their heavy trucks are tearing up what remains of Solovetsky roads.
“Tourism is out of control, there are helicopters flying, women are bathing in the Holy Lake in bikinis, there is advertising everywhere, there are unnecessary regattas, there are so many people – everywhere!”
Boyarsky points to a crowd of people headed in our direction, but then we both realize that these are not drunken tourists but the Procession of the Cross, making its turn around the Kremlin in celebration. We both laugh at his mistake as he accepts greetings and congratulations from passersby. The priest showers us with holy water, and, for a moment, the joyous singing and smiles on everyone’s faces ease the complexities of Solovki.
Later in the day, our group is standing, waiting for the tiny Antonov plane to take us back to Arkhangelsk. The airport may be the only place on Solovki where all the different classifications of archipelago visitors come together: pilgrims who bunked in monastery dormitories, backpackers who have just broken camp, moneyed Muscovites who have stayed in a new hotel, monks on monastery business to the regional capital, journalists leaving more confused than when they arrived. We have all come to Solovki with our own motivations, and are leaving with very different experiences.
These islands will ever be a mystery beckoning all comers, not unlike that patch of sand where Belugas rub their bellies without knowing why.
I know I will be back for more. RL
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