Solovki prison camp

Gradually, prisoners from the old regime (priests, gentry, and White Army officers) joined them and the guards and the ordinary criminals worked together to keep the "politicals" in order.

[1] This was the nucleus from which the entire Gulag grew, thanks to its proximity to the first great construction project of the Five-Year Plans, the White Sea–Baltic Canal.

[2] This facilitated a number of daring escapes in the 1920s;[3] as war loomed in the late 1930s it led to the closure of the Solovki special prison.

[6] Its remote situation made escape almost impossible and in Tsarist times the monastery had been used, on occasion, as a political prison by the Russian imperial administration.

The treatment of the prisoners in the Soviet-era camp attracted much criticism in Western Europe and the United States after a book came out in England, An Island Hell, by S. A.

[3] After a thorough clean-up and careful staging, the Soviet government sent the proletarian writer Maxim Gorky there in an attempt to counter this negative publicity.

He wrote a very favourable essay, which praised the beauty of nature on the islands, but some authors believe he understood the real conditions he was witnessing.

[11] In the early 1930s, many of the prisoners from the camp were transferred to the newly established Belbaltlag to man the construction of the White Sea – Baltic Canal.

[14] All but five of the 1,116 prisoners sent from Solovki across the White Sea on 27 October 1937 were executed by NKVD Captain and senior executioner Mikhail Matveyev at Sandarmokh between that date and 10 November 1937, when he reported his task complete.

[19] In January 2016 the Gulag section in the Solovki Museum was closed by its new director, Vladimir Shutov who, as Archimandrite Porfiry, was head of the monastery.

[22] The author of several books about Solovki, Yury Brodsky, was accused by an Orthodox website of displaying "religious hatred" in his latest publication.