The days were getting shorter and we turned in at dusk, Sami scrambling into the upper bunk. ‘I talk too much,’ he said without removing his headphones. ‘When I play back what I’ve said during the day, I ask myself, “Did I say that? Was that really necessary?” I tell myself, “Don’t talk so much.” But come the morning I’m jabber jabbering again.’
I couldn’t sleep so gazed out of the window at the mantle of forest, at nameless swamps turning to ice, at streams tinted yellow by the tundra. I caught sight of a station from time to time until the blackening sky inked away the horizon. In the rocking carriage, without lights or reference points to link me to the ground, I felt myself to be cut adrift, perched between departure and destination, yesterday and today.
I must have slept for – in that dark place – I saw the young woman from the aeroplane, the last rays of sunlight forming her halo. But instead of a sandwich I saw that she was now eating moss. Her leather bracelet had become a manacle. Her purple nail varnish had been chipped away by axe work. In the timber camp her life had been ground to the bone. In a canvas tent she built a windbreak out of corpses. Almost no one had ever escaped from Solovki, the island gulag, and no one had ever stood tall. All were bent like a million birch saplings weighed down by snow.
At dawn our train stopped at Kem. In the breaking light a geriatric bus wheezed us to the pier where a ferry waited among rusted fishing boats. We squeezed into its glass-cracked cabin with dozens of pilgrims, all women, who stared wide-eyed at Sami, a young man blacker than any they had ever seen. Only as we pulled away from the harbour for the three-hour crossing, did the women drop their eyes, don headscarves and start to pray.
Solovki is Russia’s Stonehenge, Lourdes and Auschwitz. Ancient people were drawn to the White Sea archipelago as if by a magnet, winding mysterious stone labyrinths across its sacred earth, imagining it as the portal between this world and the next. Since time immemorial it has been a place of both light and darkness. Two thousand years ago, shamans chose it as a gateway to the Saivo, the land of the dead in Sámi mythology. Its monastery was founded in the fifteenth century for prayer, refuge and incarceration. Disciples and heretics were interned within its sacred walls, the devout and the damned living side by side for almost 400 years.
On the backs of the tsar’s prisoners, and the salt and timber trades, the monastery became rich, the second wealthiest in the land. Two to three hundred inmates were said to have dragged each of its vast glacial foundation stones into place, building upon them the twenty-foot-thick walls. In the name of God, jailer-monks worked the condemned to death in the forests or left them to rot in coffin-like cells. At the same time pilgrims – for whom Solovki was the spiritual heart of Russia – arrived by summer steamships to kneel in its holy chapels and to light candles at the tombs of its saints.
In 1903 Nicholas II closed the prison, so horrified was he by its abuses, only for it to be reopened after his execution. In the 1920s the Bolsheviks banished the monks, stripped the monastery of its gold and made it the headquarters of the Northern Special Purposes Camps. Solovki became the first cancer cell of the tumour that would spread across Russia, wrote Solzhenitsyn. In its ‘killing forests’ royalists in rags, poets stripped of their pens, academics, clerks and angels felled timber by hand, dragged the wet logs to the shore, died by the thousand. In winter it was impossible to conceal the killings, wrote one survivor, for ‘the naked, dead, frozen people were everywhere… their elbows, hands, legs, heads, backs sticking out of the snow’. Another recalled that every morning guards ‘armed with long sea hooks, through slightly open gates, tried to drag the dead bodies out of the cells’. At the same time the living attempted to hold on to the dead ‘to serve them as mattresses’.
Inmates were lice-ridden, surviving on breadcrumbs and gruel. Those who missed their work target were punished with ‘slaughter by sticks and swimming in ice holes’. Priests were stripped naked, dunked in water then staked in winter courtyards until they became living ice statues. Others were tortured until they were no longer recognisable – not as class enemies, not even as human. The luckiest prisoners were those who were shot on arrival.
The pilgrims crossed themselves with renewed fervour as Solovki’s gilded domes rose on the horizon like a line of musical notes. A breeze blew up from the west, flicking frothy tufts off the wave tops. Overhead blue holes pierced the clouds and I felt the wind brush against my cheek.
Together we stepped ashore as had the prisoners, as had a Nazi delegation who came in the 1930s to glean tips on the camp’s ‘correctional’ regime, as had Putin himself. He had come to the citadel-cemetery to mark its re-establishment as a monastery, declaring without irony that all peoples were equal before God, and that Russia had always guaranteed that equality.
Like him, Sami and I now walked on the bones of its less-than-equal citizens, drawn forward by the toll of a giant bell. We followed worshippers and bearded monks in black frocks through the massive stone walls and across a cobbled courtyard to morning liturgy. In the chapel – once a twenty-eight-cell barracks – faithful voices lifted towards the heavens. We climbed the stairs above the granary to stare into vaulted brick chambers, on the walls of which prisoners had once scratched their names. Around the perimeter, among grazing goats, we stepped over unnumbered mass graves. Sami didn’t ‘jabber’ at all that morning, and not only because of the cold. Again and again he tightened his coat against it and the ghosts.
Then I spotted the hangar.
Inside the drafty, barn-like building there had once existed an extraordinary, ephemeral modern art gallery. Over three fleeting Arctic summers, contemporary work – remarkable in its incongruity – had tumbled into and out of it: architectural fantasies had spread across its pinewood walls, fanciful scrap-metal sculptures had marched towards its Tamarin pier, a lattice of large white crosses had reached out into the sea. Then its doors were locked and its organisers condemned as rastliteli russkoi dushi, molesters of the Russian soul.
‘Those years were a real adventure,’ said Luba Kuzovnikova, one of the so-called ‘molesters’. We had arranged to meet outside her unlikely Arctic gallery, on her first return to the island in almost two decades. ‘We had no website, no social networks. There was only one telephone line for the whole island.’ She pushed back her mane of curly, shoulder-length hair and added, ‘Yet it was a springboard for everything that happened afterwards.’
Everything.
And nothing.
Luba had grown up in Severodvinsk, the Soviet Union’s great northern shipyard. Within sight of her family’s apartment, the huge SEVMASH Machine-Building facility had produced as many as five new boats every year, including the world’s largest nuclear submarine. Her father had been an electrical engineer, her mother a teacher and Luba’s childhood one of privilege.
‘In the shops we had boys’ clothes and girls’ clothes. We had bananas in September. Sometimes we could even buy little chocolate cheese treats. Severodvinsk was a closed town because of its military importance and I never went hungry. I didn’t realise my luck.’
But then came the 1990s and ‘everything disappeared’. Jobs and money vanished and Luba’s father came to be paid in kind, not cash: vodka, ‘Bush legs’ and a thousand rolls of toilet paper for rewiring a factory. Her mother’s salary went unpaid for months. As so many others, the family survived on vegetables grown at their dacha, and forest mushrooms, until Luba won a scholarship to study abroad.