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Friday, Oct. 20, 2000
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Off the Beaten Track
Islands on the Edge of the World
The desolate and economically troubled Solovki archipelago still attracts modern-day Russian pilgrims
By PAUL QUINN-JUDGE Solovetski
 Medieval chroniclers called the Solovki archipelago "the islands on the edge of the world." Centuries later, its grim past provided Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn with the title for a book that was to undermine the Soviet state: The Gulag Archipelago.
The monastery on the main island of Solovetski, with its fortress-like boulder ramparts, is a place of saints and miracles, one of the holiest sites of Russian Orthodoxy. For more than 500 years people have journeyed there in search of spiritual transformation or personal freedom. Monks were drawn by its remoteness. Peasants, dissidents and disillusioned intellectuals went to escape the suffocating grip of the state, or test themselves in an environment 160 km from the Arctic Circle, where the brutal climate dominates daily life.
For almost as long as there has been a settlement on Solovki, though, Russia's rulers have found another use for the islands — a place to consign and forget unruly courtiers, religious heretics or political opponents. And it was there, in 1923, that the Soviet labor camp system, the Gulag, was born and took shape before metastasizing, as Solzhenitsyn put it, into the monstrous network that swallowed up millions of lives.
In the last few years the great monastery has come back to life, but the small settlement that surrounds it is withering, the victim of the economic changes that have devastated most of the Russian hinterland. For many islanders, Solovki these days is a different sort of prison: a place with no work, no future and no way out.
For a few mavericks — people who by their own admission do not want to play by the mainland's rules of materialism and cynicism — Solovki is a refuge from Vladimir Putin's Russia. "People who come here are either completely crazy, like me, or not equipped for life elsewhere," says Sergey Morozov, a former university researcher specializing in Japanese and Chinese who has spent the past 15 years immersed in the islands' history.
People like Morozov, who have left prestigious and hectic lives in Moscow or St. Petersburg, seem to know precisely what they are looking for — something the first monks on Solovki called the "wordless life." There are few distractions: there is little TV or radio, and the island's one traffic policeman is seriously underemployed — there are no paved roads and few vehicles. The settlers are reticent about their motivations. One, a former executive at one of Moscow's most famous and fashionable theaters, wished neither to be named or even quoted anonymously. Others include the one-time spokesman for the Polish trade union Solidarity and a young graduate of the Moscow Conservatory.
Morozov was one of the most talkative. Like many other historians, Morozov sees in Solovki, with its centuries-long struggle between individual freedom and all-embracing state power, a microcosm of Russian history. The state has always been viewed as more likely to harm its citizens than help them. This perception continues to mark Russian life, albeit in more benign ways — from the deeply cynical assumption of most Russians that their leaders have one aim in life, grand larceny, to the quiet pride with which 99% of Russians (according to the Russian tax service) either lie about their taxes or do not pay them at all.
Founded in the 15th century by two ascetic monks who similarly sought to escape the bustle of the mainland, Solovki's monastery had by the end of the 16th century become one of the richest and most powerful of northern Russia. But by then Czar Ivan the Terrible had found another use for the monastery: a prison for special enemies. In the 350 years or so leading up to the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, there were 300 prisoners. Many were held in solitary confinement in chill cells; others enjoyed relative freedom within the monastery walls.
With the victory of the revolution the monastery was closed and its treasures dispersed. The prison, however, boomed. The monastery was turned into the Gulag headquarters, its cathedrals became prison cells and its retreat houses and chapels served as punishment blocks and execution chambers. Between 1923 and 1939, when the camps were transferred deeper into Russia with the approach of war, tens of thousands passed through Solovki's camps. Up to half are thought to have perished.
Solovki's victims included some of the country's finest minds, such as Pavel Florensky, a theologian and polymath whose interests ranged from mathematics to folklore, and such fantastical figures as Innokenty Kozhevnikov, a disgraced Red Army commander who went insane and declared himself emperor Innokenty I, for which he was tortured and shot. One prisoner, an Odessa black marketeer named Naftali Frenkel, developed such a genius for organizing Gulag labor that he eventually became a general in state security. Other figures issue straight from the world of nightmares, like Dmitry Uspensky, the camp's head of Culture and Education who doubled as chief executioner.
The most beautiful places on the archipelago harbor the most horrific memories. Sekira Hill rises 70 m above the main island, offering dramatic views in all directions. In the church atop the hill, prisoners were systematically tortured and killed. From Golgotha, the peak that dominates Anzer, two hours from the main island, inmates could look across magnificent views of lakes, forests and sea as they were led to their execution.
Today, the monastery has been restored and is modestly flourishing as a religious house under the leadership of its superior, the Archimandrite Iosif, who according to local people is destined for great things in the Orthodox Church hierarchy. Life on the island is difficult. Though the sun scarcely sets during a short, hot summer, winters are long and brutal: two months of permanent twilight, snow seven months of the year and winds whipping off the White Sea that are so vicious that it is painful to go out into the street. During those months, they say, they read, hibernate or drink.
That hard life may become even harder. Money is running out even for basic services and the few small factories on the island are mostly idle. The chances of developing tourism are slim: hotels are few and basic transportation is unreliable. That leaves monks and modern-day seekers of silence as the only people fit for life in Solovki.
Check out timeeurope.com for more Fast Forward Europe stories in the days and weeks to come. Our Fast Forward coverage culminates in a year-end special issue and website to be published on December 14
PHOTO: CHRISTOPHER MORRIS-BLACK STAR for TIME
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