Searching for History on the Solovetsky Islands

There is darkness in the shadows. The rain, which had been falling steadily as we crossed the White Sea in the steel hold of our boat, the Vasiliy Kosyakov, lightened as we pulled even with the Solovetsky Transfiguration Monastery on Bolshoi Solovetsky, the largest of the Solovetsky Islands. The boat listed to the side, weighed down with picture takers crowding the rail. It felt unstable, but nobody said anything; and in any case, we pulled into port safely. A crowd waited at the pier with piles of suitcases, tourists at the end of their tour and ready to head for home. The island, lying before us, seemed to be sleeping; it seemed peaceful and tranquil.

The Vasiliy Kasyakov, our transportation across the White Sea

View of Solovetsky Monastery pulling into port, in the rain

Who would have thought this place had been the site of the first Soviet gulag? But it had been, and something about the history of the place had drawn me here. A dark past lay hidden beneath the pleasant modern veneer. The monastery, dating back to the Middle Ages, was now covered with scaffolding; the past would be rebuilt. But only a certain past, we would see; to find the story of what happened here from 1921 to 1939, when Solovetsky became the testing grounds for what would become the GULAG, the widespread system of Soviet labor camps under Stalin, required deeper searching. There remained few markers of that dark and sordid past. 

We left the pier and turned down a dirt path to the right, toward the monastery about a half mile distant to the south. We could see the walls from where we stood; they dominated the landscape, thick walls of stone with narrow slats, designed for defense against heavy cannon. There was an agenda to our visit, at least for me: I wanted to see the monastery and the Gulag Museum, what was supposed to be a room with some exhibits in the monastery’s walls; and then rent a bike to get out to Sekirnaya Gora, where a church had been used as a punishment camp on the island; and lastly, past Sekirnaya to Savvatyevsky, an older secluded church to the north of the island where the political prisoners, socialists and anarchists who disagreed with the communists, were kept separate from the other prisoners.

A corner tower dating to the 1400s

Solovetsky Monastery and reflection

The first problem we encountered was finding where to purchase tickets. The monastery was largely free to enter, but for certain rooms, tickets were required. The Gulag Museum was one of these places. We wandered the monastery, but many of the walls and internal buildings were closed due to renovations. The area where the museum was supposed to be, according to my guidebook, was closed; I read later that the museum had been moved to Solovetsky Village, but we were, unfortunately, unable to find any signs of it during our visit. We were able to visit a newer chapel in the rear of the monastery, though, where an Orthodox service was underway, as well as explore a section of the walls that was open for tours. We put thoughts of the gulag behind us and enjoyed the setting, the wind-swept coast and the sea breeze. We had lunch at a small restaurant near the monastery, shi soup (with a meat broth and cabbage) and for dessert, blini, Russian pancakes with a jam filling.

And from there we continued our explorations. We got lost wandering around the village. We found a small square with memorials for different national groups who had been imprisoned on the island. This would prove to be the biggest acknowledgement we found of the atrocities committed on Solovetsky over those years. It was well-maintained and swept. Somebody took care to keep it that way.

We circled the walls of the monastery back around to the road, past some wandering cows, bells ringing as they ate their fill of coarse marsh grass. We rented bikes and set off to the other end of the island, along a sandy dirt road pitted with puddles, absorbing the bumps and racing in sections, reconnecting with our lost childhoods. The beauty of the island was impossible to ignore, as we felt the cool forest breeze, and saw alongside as we flew past sun-dappled trees. Before long we were alone on the road, except for occasional passing trucks with passengers. At a fork in the road, we turned right toward the botanical gardens.

The botanical gardens on Bolshoi Solovetsky Island have an interesting history. They were started, naturally enough, by the monks who inhabited the island for much of its history. Prisoners, however, made great contributions to the gardens in the early years of the gulag, before the camps were turned over solely toward labor and economic productivity. Many prisoners, especially politicals, were highly educated—many were scientists, some even botanists—and the gardens were expanded during the 1920s to include a wide variety of plants from the surrounding arctic region. I expected to find some recognition of their contributions. But aside from the signs on a few building showing they were built between the 1920s and ‘30s, there was no mention in the gardens of the prisoners. The buildings, I noted, were almost surely built by prisoners, based on the dates of construction; but here, also, there was no mention that prisoners had ever been present in the gardens. We did, however, find some of the most amazing, colorful mushrooms as we walked the trails, complete with bright red caps (most assuredly highly poisonous).

Mushroom, most assuredly highly poisonous

Many of the buildings dated to the 1930s, when Solovetsky was used as a prison camp.

We remounted our bikes and set back out along the dirt track toward Sekirnaya. From here, the road quickly became worse, with deep puddles and mud, and the going slower. We kept a close watch on the time; we needed to be back in time to catch our boat. Reaching Sekirnaya Hill, we found a steep dirt track and turned up, needing to get off and walk the bikes; we passed a banya—in use at the time—and, taking a right at a fork, up one last steep section to discover the church alone on a rise with a commanding view of the rest of the island. Church steeples were visible in the remote distance, rising above the tree line, somewhere among them Savvatyevsky. But we would not be getting that far out on the island today. Our time was short, and we needed to head back to town to catch our ferry.

On the way to Sekirnaya

Sekirnaya Chapel, where prisoners were punished in the basement

On the way down the hill, we discovered an information board concerning the use of Sekirnaya during the labor camp years. There was a small cemetery further along, down a narrow trail where prisoners had been buried; according to the information, another cemetery was located closer by the chapel. After biking down the hill, we found the large wooden cross erected at the bottom of the wooden staircase leading down the hill, where the dead bodies had been thrown down when Sekirnaya had been used as a torture site. The hill was overgrown now, but had been clearer in those days. Today it was quiet; there was an eerie stillness. One could almost hear the shadows whispering. The place seemed forgotten.

The cross at the bottom of the stairs, Sekirnaya Gora

Entrance sign to the cemetery, Sekirnaya Gora

We left that behind us: the haunted chapel, the remote nature, the mud puddles on the road. Biking back toward Solovetsky village and the pier, our legs were heavy and spent. We breathed the fresh air and stopped to take some last pictures of the sun-dappled trees, the remote, tragic beauty of this island in the White Sea.

A small chapel near Solovetsky Monastery and reflection

Solovetsky Monastery from the boat upon departure

The moon rises above the White Sea, taken aboard the Vasiliy Kosyakov

Iron Roads of Russia

We fought through a crowd on the platform, the people pressing forward, loitering, sitting on over-stuffed suitcases; some smoked on the far-side of the platform, furthest from the train, where the people were less and thinned out. We pressed through on this side, coughing from the unwanted smoke, glancing to our left to read the numbers on the first window of each wagon: five, six, looking for number fifteen. Even knowing it was the last car, having barely managed to book our space in one of the train’s last kupe carriages, still we glanced at the train regularly as we passed by, squeezing through the crowd, anxious to find our wagon; excited, also, to find our friends, who had arrived earlier and waited for us on the platform.

Meeting our friends on the platform, late at night Moscow

What better way to see the vast Russian countryside than by train? The Russian railway network includes over 50,000 miles of track. The network, known as Rossiskye Zheleznye Dorogi, or the Russian Iron Roads, is one of the largest networks in the world, with routes not only traversing the famous east/west trans-Siberian corridor, but also north to south, and about every other direction imaginable. With Moscow as the center, the tracks spread out like a giant spider web, providing important transportation and freight links to remote regions and bringing the country closer together in its iron embrace.

Our chosen track for this trip led to the White Sea and the region of Karelia in the northwest of Russia. Karelia borders Finland and, at different times throughout history, was part of that country, a fact that has greatly influenced the character of the region, leaving behind place names and architectural styles that differ from the rest of Russia. The region is also conveniently accessible by overnight train from Moscow.

We boarded the Moscow to Murmansk train at Leningradskaya Station, intending to disembark at Kem, from there a short taxi ride to Rabocheostrovsk, a small town on the White Sea. From there we would, all things working properly, the stars aligned, and fingers firmly crossed, catch a two-hour ferry ride to the Solovetsky Islands. It all worked on paper: twenty-four hours and five minutes on a train, a short taxi ride, a late hotel check-in and early ferry departure. In the end, an arrival at a distant port, a monastery on the White Sea that was bombarded by the British during the Crimean War and later used by the Soviets as the first gulag prison camp, then and still surrounded by the majestic, otherworldly countryside of the far north: remote, rugged, beautiful. This was travelling, I thought. This would be a real Russian Railways adventure.

We boarded the train and passed down a narrow corridor to our kupe, which consisted of a small table with bunked sleeping berths, an upper and a lower on each side, the lower acting as a seat for two when not in use for sleeping. Our train wagon smelled like old clothes—we later determined this came from the bedding. From the corridor came the excited sounds of passengers getting ready for a long journey: the thud of suitcases being put away, people greeting one another and getting settled in their cabins, and moving out of the way for newly-boarded passengers who moved down the aisle pushing their bags in front of them, glancing at the numbers on the doors

Relaxing in our kupe, on the way back to Moscow

But what does a person do for twenty-four hours on a train? Surely this is a slow way to travel, uneconomical in regards to time. To get to the Solovetsky Islands, we could have flown to Arkhangelsk, and then on to the islands; but, according to our guidebook, flights can often be cancelled due to the weather, and the ferries are more reliable. Somehow, defying logic, the train, with its connection to the ferry, would get us there sooner than flying. So trains continue to be an important mode of transportation in Russia.

We slept fitfully on the train. The swaying of a train is not gentle, but more of a jerking motion, with fits and starts that are impossible to ignore. There are the occasional screeches as the metal wheels rub on the track around a sharp curve, and the squealing, and halting motion of the breaks as we slow for a stop. Yet somehow we awoke fresh in the morning, excited about the day ahead—a full day on the train, all the pressures and anxieties, the schedules and deadlines of real life cast off. There is nothing to do in the cabin but relax. Here we are cut off from the rest of that stuff. Even our cell phone reception is ever only intermittent, enough to check where we are on the map when we stop in a good-sized town, and that is all. No email or Facebook, just us and our books and games, whatever we brought with us; we are today passengers captive in our carriage, with no other cares for the world.

Time on the train, we found, passed quickly. We had breakfast in the dining car, which was mostly empty: omelets and coffee (bitter, but strong) with toast and fried potatoes. Back in our cabin, we read quietly in our bunks and watched the countryside pass by outside the window. We passed by the city of Petrozavodsk, which we would visit later on the return journey, and into the lake country with Lake Onega on our right; here beautiful views of a wide expanse of water, the starchy white trunks of birch trees, majestic green pines. Timeless Russia painting her picture for us.

Lake Onega outside our train window

The train stopped frequently along the route, and we pulled into a small town called Medvezhy Gory (Bear Mountain) where a crowd gathered awaiting the train, vendors laden with buckets of berries: small, juicy mountain blueberries; currants; and brusnika, or lingonberries, a kind of mountain cranberry that grows on a short bush. Old babushkas in headscarves with trays of pirozhnoe (pastries) and cracked, smiling faces greeted us. In our cabin, an aura of barely contained excitement; we spoke rapidly, eyeing the splendor arrayed before us on the track, the waiting feast. We sampled eagerly and returned with more than we could eat: blueberries that stained our fingers and teeth; and sweet, tangy, delicious black currents, pirozhnoe in every local flavor—blueberry, lingonberry, and tvorog, similar to cream cheese but more sour.

The train stopped at Medvezhy Gory

Buying pirozhnoe

Buckets of berries

Black and red currents

The journey continued with satisfied passengers filing back to their cabins. The train moved on: 24 hours, and that only to Kem; some passengers would continue all the way to Murmansk, in the Arctic Circle. At one stop the conductor asked us where we were from, in Russian: Kto vy? Americans. Oh. Outside the cabin we can hear: They’re Americans. So somebody asked. But everybody is nice; there is a camaraderie among the long distance travelers. One woman in a neighboring cabin tells us about the dining car, just to be sure we know. We run into another passenger from our train on the boat to Solovetsky, and she offers her seat so we can all sit together; we are fellow travelers all going to the same place, a status somehow a notch above that of total strangers. We share something.

The sun sets behind a field of young saplings. The train stops and people get off and the train starts again. I wonder: What is their story? Where are they headed? After more than twenty hours of travel, the jerks of the train seem to have mellowed to a steady rocking. Outside the window, a pale yellow moon rises above a copse of trees, birches, beautiful gleaming spires of spectral white in the gathering darkness, as I recline on my lower berth, sticky in the close cabin air. The train glides to another stop, and so we slowly make our way to Northern Russia and the White Sea.