Gulag

Mass executions seemed to take place almost at random, and many prisoners recall feeling terrified by the prospect of arbitrary death. Likhachev claims to have narrowly escaped execution in one mass murder in late October 1929. Archival documents do indeed indicate that about fifty people (not 300, as he wrote) were executed at that time, having been accused of trying to organize a rebellion.²³

Nearly as bad as direct execution was a sentence to Sekirka, the church whose cellars had become the Solovetsky punishment cells. Indeed, although many stories were told about what went on in the church’s cellars, so few men returned from Sekirka that it is difficult to be certain of what conditions there were really like. One witness did see one of the brigades being marched to work: “a line of terrified people, with an inhuman look, some dressed in sacks, all barefoot, surrounded by heavy guard . . .”²⁴

As Solovetsky legend would have it, the long flight of 365 wooden steps which lead down the steep hill from the Sekirka church also played a role in group killings. When, at one point, camp authorities forbade guards from shooting the Sekirka prisoners, they began to arrange “accidents”—and threw them down the steps.²⁵ In recent years, the descendants of Solovetsky prisoners have erected a wooden cross at the bottom of the steps, to mark the spot where these prisoners allegedly died. It is now a peaceful and rather beautiful place—so beautiful that in the late 1990s, the Solovetsky local history museum printed a Christmas card showing Sekirka, the steps, and the cross.

While the reigning spirit of irrationality and unpredictability meant that thousands died in the SLON camps in the early 1920s, the same irrationality and unpredictability also helped others not just to live but—quite literally—to sing and dance. By 1923, a handful of prisoners had already begun organizing the camp’s first theater. At first the “actors,” many of whom spent ten hours a day cutting wood in the forests before coming to rehearsal, did not have scripts, so they played classics from memory. The theater improved greatly in 1924, when a whole group of former professional actors arrived (all sentenced as members of the same “counter-revolutionary” movement). That year, they put on productions of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya and Gorky’s Children of the Sun.²⁶

Later, operas and operettas were performed in Solovetsky’s theater, which also hosted acrobatic performances and films. One musical evening included an orchestral piece, a quintet performance, a chorus, and arias from a Russian opera.²⁷ The repertoire for March 1924 included a play by the writer Leonid Andreev (whose son Danil, another writer, would later be a Gulag prisoner), a play by Gogol, and an evening dedicated to the memory of Sarah Bernhardt.²⁸

Nor was theater the only form of culture available. Solovetsky also had a library, which eventually numbered 30,000 books, as well as the botanical garden, in which prisoners experimented with Arctic plants. Solovetsky captives, many former St. Petersburg scientists among them, also organized a museum of local flora, fauna, art, and history.²⁹ Some of the more elite prisoners had use of a “club” which—at least in photographs—appears positively bourgeois. The pictures show a piano, parquet floors, and portraits of Marx, Lenin, and Lunacharsky, the first Soviet Culture Minister, all very cozy-looking.³⁰

Using the monks’ old lithography equipment, the Solovetsky prisoners also produced monthly magazines and newspapers featuring satirical cartoons, extremely homesick poetry, and surprisingly frank fiction. In the December 1925 edition of Solovetskie Ostrova (the name means “Solovetsky Islands”) one short story described a former actress who had arrived on Solovetsky, was forced to work as a washerwoman, and was unable to accustom herself to her new life. The story ends with the sentence “Solovetsky is cursed.”

In another short story, a former aristocrat who had once known “intimate evenings at the Winter Palace” finds comfort in his new situation only by visiting another aristocrat and talking of old times.³¹ Clearly, the clichés of social realism were not yet mandatory. Not all of the stories have the happy ending which later became obligatory, and not all of the fictional prisoners joyfully adapted to Soviet reality.