A Letter from the White Sea

I have not had the “pleasure” of rowing a boat for a few decades. It used to be one of my favorite pastimes in the “old country” to row a leaky old boat to a thin slice of empty dirty sand on a Ukrainian riverbank, which would become a luxurious tropical beach in my vivid imagination.

Now, however, after a short rowing session, I had fully realized that the oars were too heavy, the lake was too vast, and the light headwind was a formidable obstacle in my humble attempt to cross the lake. I rented a boat to find and pass through the canals excavated during the last two centuries by the Orthodox monks and their serfs in order to create a network of navigable waterways on the remote Solovetsky Islands. Yes, the Solovetsky Islands, a.k.a. “Solovki”, a few specs of land lost in the Russian White Sea, just one degree (165 km) south of the Arctic Circle.

Prior to this trip many people asked me where I was headed and stared blankly after hearing the names of such distant northern lands as Arkhangelsk, Murmansk, Solovki… Inevitably, they would ask the next most logical question: “Why?” as in “Why would you even consider going there?”

I understand their bewilderment – not many Westerners have even heard of such places, much less considered spending their summer holidays there. Nevertheless, these names are very familiar to every person born and raised in the former Soviet Union as well as the heroic British, American and Canadian sailors who had transported astronomical amount of strategic supplies to the USSR between 1941 – 1945 via the so-called Arctic or Northern Convoys.

I knew of Murmansk and Arkhangelsk as the legendary Northern Navy ports, the jumping off points for famous Arctic expeditions and the cities, which were off limits to most people, due to their highly secretive role. The surest and the least enviable way to visit Murmansk was to get drafted onto a nuclear submarine for a 3-year tour of duty and not too many young people had jumped at that opportunity.

In the meantime, Solovki were known for the entirely different reason. This informal nickname of the northern islands had entered the Russian vernacular as a powerful synonym for such words as “political prison”, “hard labor”, “torture” and so on. Indeed, the Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp (S.L.O.N. in Russian) had become the first, the largest and one of the deadliest labor camps in the world. It was opened in 1923, a few years after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, and had mushroomed in size spilling over to the vast mainland and exceeding the territory of France. Approximately 80,000 people had died on the Solovetsky Islands between 1923 and 1936 when the camp was officially closed. Many more had perished in the camp’s mainland branches, their exact number remains unknown.

Despite the common knowledge of these atrocities, the tragic history of the islands was not made public in the Soviet Union. The only information about Solovki was available in the underground copies of “The GULAG Archipelago” published by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 1973 in the West. This was the very first book I checked out from the Russian library in Rome in 1977, as my family was awaiting immigration documents from the United States. The mere thought of visiting the Solovetsky Islands had seemed an impossible fantasy, until recently, when so much has changed in the world.

And here I was, in the middle of the Big Solovetsky island, burning up in the June sun on a large lake, while the heavy oars were slicing the skin off my hands. Finally, I managed to find the entrance into a canal overgrown with tall leafy trees on both banks. None of these trees were here back in 1936 – all of them had already been harvested by then. Even the Solovetsky brick-making factory had exhausted its supply of the local clay and the camp relocation must have been necessitated by the purely economic reasons.

The raped islands laid bare, covered only by a spiderweb of the narrow-gauge railroad tracks and the unmarked common graves used as the last refuge for the tortured, undernourished and overworked bodies. They were stripped of their clothes (given to those who were still alive and could still benefit from it) and all identification elements. The modern archeologists, who have the unenviable task of uncovering the burial sites, can not identify the individual corpses.

A small wooden barrack stands behind the grand monastery and the ancient kremlin (fortress) wall surrounding it. Inside its cramped rooms one can find the photographs, charts and a few artifacts dating to the GULAG era. All of the signs are in Russian and the exhibition clearly makes no apologies for the terrible events, which were taking place here. Neither does the Russian government in Moscow, nor its Federal Security Service (F.S.B.), the direct descendant of the V.Ch.K., G.P.U. and N.K.V.D., i.e. the services who had sent the countless people here. If anything, a special K.G.B. team was dispatched to the islands during the 1970’s in order to sweep clean the former camp sites, just in case an inmate or two had managed to hide a message addressed to the future generations. They’ve done a good job – virtually nothing remains here to tell the pilgrims and careless tourists about the terrible events that had taken place right under their feet.

Should the young people know? Should they care? It seems that there are many powerful forces who don’t believe so…

More than 40,000 people visit the islands every year. A great majority of them are Russian tourists who come to Solovki to visit the 500 year old monastery, the lakes, the canals, and the mysterious stone labyrinths built about 7,000 years ago. The Orthodox Church, the Federal Government in Moscow and the local authorities prefer to keep things this way and not to air the extremely dirty GULAG laundry in public.

I emerged from one canal, rowed the boat across another lake, went through the second canal and decided that I’ve had enough. The lakes were too clear, the sky was too blue, and the serene scenery was too perfect for the former “Ground Zero” of human suffering and death. It was time to follow the old Russian tradition to empty a glass of vodka in memory of those poor souls who were also taken to these islands on a ship. but were not lucky enough to return.

Photo albums: Solovetsky Islands, Murmansk

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