Strangely enough, for a city so far-flung and beset with inclement weather, Arkhangelsk has managed to develop a modest tourist industry by touting its polar nights (and aurora borealis) in winter and its white nights in summer, and its rich historical heritage. At the time of our visit, we found a shaggy, pensive two-humped Bactrian camel welcoming tourists to an exhibition of ice sculptures celebrating the town’s five-hundred-year history on Lenin Square. (Only in ever-paradoxical, geographically distended Russia would one discover a Central Asian ungulate overseeing parka-clad visitors to the extreme north.) Moreover, right across the street sits the regional government headquarters, where a billboard recounts the establishment, in the 1920s, of the first labor camps in the Gulag.
The first and most infamous of these camps—the “Mother of the Gulag,” as Solzhenitsyn put it—was located on the Solovetsky Islands, colloquially called Solovki, a short forty-minute flight northeast of Arkhangelsk. Solovki soon became a byword for incarceration in brutal conditions—“go to Solovki!” meant “go to hell!” But there is much more to Solovki’s history than hell. Indeed, as with so much in Russia, the tale of Solovki’s existence consists of a paradox blending wrenching tragedy with almost otherworldly holiness.
In the fifteenth century, an Orthodox Christian monk, and now saint, named Zosima arrived on Solovki seeking refuge from persecution in Moscow, then ruled by the tyrannical Ivan the Terrible. He and two other monks settled down for good and founded a monastery—Solovetsky Monastery—that soon morphed into an influential center of Orthodox Christianity. With its large landholdings—the islands cover 134 square miles—and its varied sources of income, from fishing to algae extraction to salt gathering, Solovetsky Monastery flourished.
The harsh subarctic winter climate—windy and humid, with temperatures below zero—and trying summers during which thirty types of ferocious mosquitos emerge from bogs to torment man and beast, plus three hundred species of fauna, many of which do not fear people even today, all serve to augment the islands’ legendary aura of mysticism, of being outside this world. A curious fox entered the house where we stayed to spy on us; a deer calmly paused to let our snowmobile past, which brought to mind notions of paradise before the fall of man. These, of course, quickly fade when you recall how many humans killed one another here. Local lore has it that only the devout could survive Solovki’s arduous conditions; hence, before the fifteenth century, the islands had no permanent inhabitants. Settlers proved able to defend their autonomy for several hundred years and even welcomed exiled opponents of autocracy but eventually found they had to surrender to pressures from the state, with monks eventually almost officially serving as jail guards of political opponents deemed guilty in the eyes of the czars. They began turning their monastery’s cellars into prison dungeons, some of which were so small that one could barely sit. Under Peter the Great, Russia further encroached on Solovki’s monastic vocation, conscripting monks to serve as the jail guards of political criminals. The twenty-foot-thick walls of the monastery and the surrounding sea began to entrap rather than protect, and the island transmogrified into a Hades—utopia turned dystopia.
Following the October Revolution in 1917, the monks served the new regime as vigorously as they did the old. They eagerly accepted political prisoners sent to them by the new communist state, only to soon become prisoners themselves. The Soviet atheists had little use for Christian guards, and the priests were declared “enemies of the people.” The Bolsheviks closed the monastery as a religious institution, enhanced its prisons, and established the Specialized Solovetsky Camp, or SLON. The acronym, which means “elephant” in Russian, was the topic of many grim jokes about the incongruities of Soviet life, which situated an elephant in Russia’s far north. But after seeing a camel on the shores of the White Sea we hardly found the idea of an African beast here absurd. Many viewed the monks’ fall from the Lord’s favor as divine punishment. After all, they had betrayed their heavenly master to help found a version of human hell.
Yury Brodsky, a photographer and Solovki historian who took an iconic picture of one of the cathedrals—the photo, shot through one of the monastery’s barbwire windows, showed the darkened cupola topped with a red star in place of a gilt cross—suggested to us that the island’s saga is nothing less than a microcosm of Russia’s broader history. The monastery ultimately devolved into an unholy trinity consisting of the state, its religious faith, and its karatelnye organy (punitive organs).[23] Post-Soviet Russia has sanctioned this sacrilege by adorning the current five-hundred-ruble banknote with a depiction of long-suffering Solovetsky Monastery on its obverse. What sort of holy man would come up with such an idea?
Large gray and black stones—those from which the monastery was built—cover the shores of the White Sea here. A black boulder now commemorates all the political prisoners who perished on the island. The spot on which it stands, appropriately, turned out to be an old unmarked mass grave, and the adjacent street now carries the name of a Solovetsky detainee, Pavel Florensky, an inventor and religious philosopher who lost his life here in 1937, at the height of the Terror. Since then, members of many religious denominations and nationalities (including Muslims, Catholics, and Poles) who suffered in the purges have had their own stone monuments erected on Florensky Street. In the 1990s one such rock, dubbed the Solovetsky Stone, was transported to Moscow and placed in front of Lubyanka, the FSB headquarters, to honor the Gulag’s victims. (A Soviet bust commemorating Stalin continues to stand half a mile away, by the Kremlin’s wall.) In the summer months these days, however, as state-fanned xenophobia rises, tourists often deface the memorials with nationalist graffiti.
The islands have turned into a quasiofficial sanctuary for the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian state. People we met jokingly called it the funktuary, a mashup of “sanctuary” and “functionary,” and laugh about the visits of supposedly repentant Kremlin apparatchiks. Many locals would enjoy running them up and down the steps leading up the 250-foot-high Sekirnaya (Flagellation) Hill—a trial said to absolve sins. (Flagellation Hill is where the angels supposedly killed the fisherman’s wife in the 1400s.) “Look at all those sins those Muscovites are guilty of!” they exclaim.
Four hundred miles southwest of the Solovetsky Islands lies Saint Petersburg, which long rivaled Moscow for domination of Russia. Saint Petersburg, founded in 1703, is the creation of Peter the Great, who enacted westernizing reforms on the thitherto Byzantine country that effectively brought about its split personality syndrome. Yet, better than any other Russian ruler, he managed to foment Russian nationalism and instill a desire to modernize. Putin, a native of Saint Petersburg (once Soviet Leningrad), has seen himself following in Peter the Great’s footsteps—to merge the old and the new across all of Russia.
As part of his westernization program, the first Russian emperor moved the capital from tradition-bound Moscow to Saint Petersburg, Russia’s “window to Europe.” Saint Petersburg would become the only Western-style metropolis in Orthodox Russia. Not all were pleased with Czar Peter’s efforts to bring Russia into the modern world. Russophile writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky acknowledged this when he reportedly said, “We may be backwards, but we have soul.”
Tens of thousands of serfs died of disease and hunger draining the gloomy swamps along the Gulf of Finland, on the Baltic Sea, to build Saint Petersburg and fulfill the dream of Peter the Great, a task they accomplished in fewer than ten years. The emperor was determined to convert mostly landlocked Russia into a naval empire on a par with Holland, which he had visited on his embassy to Europe. Saint Petersburg boasts marble embankments along the Neva River, imitating the “first” Rome, and other top-tier European cities—Amsterdam, Venice, and Paris. The Russian tricolor is even modeled after the Dutch. Luxurious palaces, designed by Italian and French architects, dot the downtown area and the suburbs. Celebrating Western-style modernity with its factories, military academies, shipyards, and plenty of German tradesmen hard at work, the city represented everything that the rest of backward, sleepy Russia was not.
1
Yury Brodsky,