Gulag

Solovetsky journals also contained more learned articles, ranging from Likhachev’s analysis of criminal gambling etiquette, to works on the art and architecture of Solovetsky’s ruined churches. Between 1926 and 1929, the SLON printing house even managed to put out twenty-nine editions of the work of the Solovetsky Society for Local Lore. The society conducted studies of island flora and fauna, focusing on particular species—the northern deer, the local plants—and published articles on brick production, wind currents, useful minerals, and fur farming. So interested did some prisoners become in the latter subject that in 1927, when the economic activity of the island was at its height, a group of them imported some silver-black “breeder” foxes from Finland to improve the quality of the local herds. Among other things, the Society for Local Lore carried out a geological survey, which the director of the island’s local history museum still uses today.³²

These more privileged prisoners also participated in the new Soviet rites and celebrations, occasions from which a later generation of camp inmates would be deliberately excluded. An article in the September 1925 edition of Solovetskie Ostrova describes the First of May celebration on the island. Alas, the weather was poor:

On the First of May, flowers are blooming all over the Soviet Union, but in Solovetsky, the sea is still filled with ice, and there is plenty of snow. Nevertheless, we prepare to celebrate the proletarian holiday. From early morning, there is agitation in the barracks. Some are washing. Some are shaving. Someone is repairing his clothes, someone is shining his boots ...³³

Even more surprising—from the perspective of later years—was the long persistence of religious ceremonies on the islands. One former prisoner, V. A. Kazachkov, remembered the “grandiose” Easter of 1926:

Not long before the holiday, the new boss of the division demanded that all who wanted to go to church should present him with a declaration. Almost no one did so at first—people were afraid of the consequences. But just before Easter, a huge number made their declarations . . . Along the road to Onufrievskaya church, the cemetery chapel, marched a great procession, people walked in several rows. Of course we didn’t all fit into the chapel. People stood outside, and those who came late couldn’t even hear the service. ³⁴

Even the May 1924 edition of Solovetskoi Lageram, another prison journal, editorialized cautiously but positively on the subject of Easter, “an ancient holiday celebrating the coming of spring,” which “under a Red banner, can still be observed.”³⁵

Along with religious holidays, a small handful of the original monks also continued to survive, to the amazement of many prisoners, well into the latter half of the decade. They functioned as “monk-instructors,” supposedly transmitting to the prisoners the skills needed to run their formerly successful farming and fishing enterprises—Solovetsky herring had once been a feature of the Czar’s table—as well as the secrets of the complex canal system which they had used to link the island churches for centuries. The monks were joined, over the years, by dozens more Soviet priests and members of the Church hierarchy, both Orthodox and Catholic, who had opposed the confiscation of Church wealth, or who had violated the “decree on separation of Church and state.” The clergy, somewhat like the socialist politicals, were allowed to live separately, in one particular barrack of the kremlin, and were also allowed to hold services in the small chapel of the former cemetery right up until 1930–31—a luxury forbidden to other prisoners except on special occasions.