In 1920 Solovetsky Monastery was closed. May 20, 1920 on Solovki a labor camp was organized "For prisoners of war of the civil war and persons sentenced to forced labor" and a state farm " Solovki».
By autumn, according to the census, the population Solovkov was 320 men and 5 women. In 1920–23 Soviet organizations appeared in the village: the authority is the Administration of the Islands, headed by the Plenipotentiary of the Archgubernia Executive Committee for Solovki, police, medical center, club them. Karl Marx, two schools - for the children of state farm employees and for former homeless children held in the Solovetsky children's colony.
The first stage of the existence of the Soviet settlement on Solovki ended in May 1923 with the fire of the Kremlin (as the new owners began to call the monastery) and the economic collapse of the Solovki state farm.
On October 13, 1923, USLON - the Administration of the Solovetsky Special Purpose Camps (1923-1939) became the new sole owner of the archipelago. During this tragic period of life Solovkov up to 4-5 thousand (in some years - up to 20 thousand) prisoners were at the same time on the archipelago. In addition, camp guards and civilians lived in the military camp.
This period is characterized by the tightening of the regime of detention of prisoners. The punitive machine was launched, and flowed on Solovki thousands of "enemies". The lists of the repressed (dispossessed kulaks, "spies" and "terrorists", ordinary party members and senior officials, Chekists) were continuously updated with new victims. Solovki turned into a testing ground, where norms and methods were developed, later widely applied in Gulag. The organization of the work and life of prisoners, types of punishment, sophisticated methods of interrogation and psychological suppression, security regimes, methods of execution and mass burial of corpses - all this was invented there. From 1920 to 1939, until it was disbanded by order of Beria, through Solovetsky camp special purpose and the Karelian camps connected with it nearly a million people passed. Only a select few were lucky enough to return ... "(Alexander Rapoport. Secrets of the harem and a rail on the shoulder. Chronicle of the Solovetsky training ground. Nezavisimaya gazeta. 27.02.2003). The camp guards were no exception. They were recruited from imprisoned Red Army soldiers and Chekists. With each new stage new candidates for the guards were arriving, so the old ones had to be disposed of.Almost all the camp commanders were shot.
Demonstrative mass executions and torture were practiced more and more often. People were driven up to their necks into the lakeside swamp and kept in it. The prisoner was undressed and left to die in the forest in the summer to be eaten by mosquitoes, in the winter in the cold. They froze people and massively 150 people each. They tied a man to a log and lowered him down the steps of a steep staircase. Sekirnaya mountain(300 steps). All that was left of the man was a bloody bag of bones. A punishment cell (SHIZO) was set up in the temple on Sekirnaya Gora. The guards there were criminals who were forbidden to go outside the ShIZO. They harnessed the horse to empty shafts, and tied the legs of the guilty person to the shafts, a guard sat on the horse and drove it through the forest clearing until the unfortunate man uttered his last breath. Gang rape of prisoners was practiced.
There were many children among the prisoners, mostly from homeless children. One of the barracks housed the "Children's Department ELEPHANT».
From the Solovki fugitives, who fled from the camps on the mainland and on foot to Finland, and on ships carrying timber, rumors spread in the West about the extreme cruelty in our logging. In the spring of 1929, on Solovki I arrived Maksim Gorky.
Bitter was supposed to calm world public opinion. He interacted a lot with the prisoners. For forty minutes one boy told him about what was going on in the camp. The Petrel of the Revolution could not hold back her tears. In 3 days Bitter left. The boy was never seen afterwards.
After visiting Solovkov in 1930 in the magazine "Our Achievements" (!) Bitter published an enthusiastic essay on the Solovki Chekists ...
After the visit Gorky a special commission was sent to the camp under the leadership of the secretary of the Collegium of the OGPU A.M. Shanin. Information about torture was confirmed. A number of assistants to the camp administration from among the former Chekists were shot, some representatives of the authorities received terms. Later, when the noise subsided, the lawlessness continued.
Execution sentences were carried out by a brigade led by an executioner who had twenty years of work experience. In the fall of 1937, he personally killed from 180 to 265 Solovki prisoners daily. His name is known - the captain of the NKVD Mikhail Matveev - "lower education, participant in the storming of the Winter Palace." For the performance of the Solovetsky special operation M.R. Matveev was awarded a valuable gift and a silver badge "Honorary Worker of the Cheka-OGPU".
“The award “Honorary Worker of the Cheka-OGPU” is a sign of mutual responsibility of all who wear it,” the head of the Chekist department, Genrikh Yagoda, proclaimed even before the maelstrom of the Great Terror dragged Yagoda himself, and the Leningrad brigade of executioners, and the local security officers who helped them.
At the foot Sekirnaya mountain- the most terrible punishment cell of the concentration camp, a cross was erected in memory of the victims of repressions.
In connection with the change in the camp regime and the transformation of the SLON into Solovetsky prison The Main Directorate of State Security of the NKVD in the area of ​​the former monastery brick factory, a three-story prison was built in record time (1938–39). This building has never been used for its intended purpose. After the emergency evacuation of the camp in November-December 1939 to the mainland (in connection with the Soviet-Finnish war), it housed the services of the Training Detachment of the Northern Fleet. Later, the building was converted into warehouses for the military unit. It is currently empty.

ELEPHANT and people. 70 years ago, the Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp (SLON), the first concentration camp in the world, was closed.
Author - Yuri Brodsky, researcher of the history of Solovki.

The selection of books about history in the shop of the Solovetsky Monastery speaks for itself - pilgrims and tourists are offered books praising Stalin. At the same time, about a million people left their lives or part of their lives on the islands and in their branches.

The transfer of all prisoners, the movement of prison personnel and the export of material assets to be completed on December 15, 1939 - read the order of the People's Commissar Lavrenty Beria "ON CLOSURE OF THE PRISON ON SOLOVKI ISLAND". The convicts were shock-evacuated to polar camps, created at the suggestion of G. Ordzhonikidze for the development of the Norilsk copper-nickel deposit.

In late autumn, the prisoners, isolated even from each other on an island in the White Sea, were all simultaneously expelled from their cells. The prisoners were waiting for a "dry bath", that is, a search with undressing, and a general formation. Pale faces, identical dark blue jackets and trousers with a yellow stripe and yellow cuffs. Fates are also the same. Basically - the intelligentsia. Doctors of the highest qualification; internationalists who fought against fascism in Spain; engineers trained abroad; scientists-economists, former front-line officers, future academician-microbiologist.

It is very reminiscent of the sign on the gates of Auschwitz: "Work sets you free" (Arbeit macht frei).

was closed, and soon two organizations were created on Solovki: a forced labor camp for the conclusion of prisoners of war of the Civil War and persons sentenced to forced labor, and the Solovki state farm. At the time of the closing of the monastery, 571 people lived in it (246 monks, 154 novices and 171 laborers). Some of them left the island, but almost half remained, and they began to work as civilians at the state farm.
After 1917, the new authorities began to consider the rich Solovetsky Monastery as a source of wealth, numerous commissions ruthlessly ruined it. The Famine Relief Commission alone in 1922 took out more than 84 poods of silver, almost 10 pounds of gold, and 1988 precious stones. At the same time, salaries from icons were barbarously stripped, precious stones were picked out from mitres and vestments. Fortunately, thanks to the employees of the People's Commissariat of Education N. N. Pomerantsev, P. D. Baranovsky, B. N. Molas, A. V. Lyadov, many priceless monuments from the monastery sacristy were taken to the central museums.
At the end of May 1923, a very strong fire broke out on the territory of the monastery, which lasted three days and caused irreparable damage to many ancient structures.
At the beginning of the summer of 1923, the Solovetsky Islands were transferred to the OGPU, and the Solovetsky Special Purpose Forced Labor Camp (SLON) was organized here. Almost all the buildings and lands of the monastery were transferred to the camp, it was decided "to recognize the need to liquidate all the churches located in the Solovetsky Monastery, to consider it possible to use church buildings for housing, taking into account the acuteness of the housing situation on the island."
On June 7, 1923, the first batch of prisoners arrived at Solovki. At first, all male prisoners were kept on the territory of the monastery, and women - in the wooden Arkhangelsk hotel, but very soon all the monastery sketes, deserts and toni were occupied by the camp. And two years later, the camp "splashed" onto the mainland and by the end of the 1920s occupied the vast expanses of the Kola Peninsula and Karelia, and the Solovki themselves became just one of the 12 departments of this camp, which played a significant role in the Gulag system.

During its existence, the camp has undergone several reorganizations. Since 1934, Solovki became the VIII branch of the White Sea-Baltic Canal, and in 1937 it was reorganized into the Solovetsky prison of the NKVD GUGB, which was closed at the very end of 1939.
During the 16 years of the existence of the camp and prison on Solovki, tens of thousands of prisoners passed through the islands, including representatives of famous noble families and intellectuals, prominent scientists in various fields of knowledge, military men, peasants, writers, artists, poets. Solovki became a place exile of many hierarchs, clergymen, monastics of the Russian Orthodox Church and laity who suffered for the faith of Christ. In the camp, they were an example of true Christian mercy, non-covetousness, kindness and peace of mind. Even in the most difficult conditions, the priests tried to the end to fulfill their pastoral duty, providing spiritual and material assistance to those who were nearby.
Today we know the names of more than 80 metropolitans, archbishops and bishops, more than 400 hieromonks and parish priests - prisoners of Solovki. Many of them died on the islands from disease and starvation or were shot in the Solovetsky prison, others died later. At the Jubilee Council of 2000 and later, about 60 of them were glorified for church-wide veneration as the Holy New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia. Among them are such prominent hierarchs and figures of the Russian Orthodox Church as Hieromartyrs Eugene (Zernov), Metropolitan of Gorky († 1937), Hilarion (Troitsky), Archbishop of Vereya († 1929), Peter (Zverev), Archbishop of Voronezh († 1929), Procopius (Titov), ​​Archbishop of Odessa and Kherson († 1937), Arkady (Ostalsky), Bishop of Bezhetsky († 1937), clergyman Athanasius (Sakharov), Bishop of Kovrov († 1962), Martyr John ( Popov) († 1938), professor at the Moscow Theological Academy and many others.

Living conditions in the camp
Maxim Gorky, who visited the camp in 1929, cited the testimonies of prisoners about the conditions of the Soviet system of labor re-education:
The prisoners worked no more than 8 hours a day;
For harder work "on peat" an increased ration was issued;
Elderly prisoners were not subject to assignment to heavy work;
All prisoners were taught to read and write.
Gorky describes their barracks as very spacious and bright.
However, according to the researcher of the history of the Solovetsky camps, photographer Yu. A. Brodsky, various tortures and humiliations were used in relation to the prisoners in Solovki. So, the prisoners were forced to:
Drag stones or logs from place to place;
Count seagulls;
Shout the Internationale loudly for hours on end. If the prisoner stopped, then two or three were killed, after which people screamed while standing until they began to fall from exhaustion. This could be done at night, in the cold.
Newspapers were published in the camp, and a prison theater was operating. The villagers composed a number of songs about the camp, in particular, “The white sea is the expanse of water ...” (attributed to Boris Yemelyanov).

The fate of the founders of the camp
Many of the organizers who were involved in the creation of the Solovetsky camp were shot:
The man who proposed to assemble the camps on Solovki, the Arkhangelsk leader Ivan Vasilyevich Bogovoy, was shot.
The man who raised the red flag over Solovki ended up in the Solovetsky camp as a prisoner.
The first head of the camp, Nogtev, received 15 years, was released under an amnesty, did not have time to register in Moscow, and died.
The second head of the camp, Eichmans, was shot as an English spy.
The head of the Solovetsky prison for special purposes, Apeter, was shot.
At the same time, for example, SLON prisoner Naftaly Aronovich Frenkel, who proposed innovative ideas for the development of the camp and was one of the "godfathers" of the Gulag, advanced through the ranks and retired in 1947 from the post of head of the main department of railway construction camps with the rank lieutenant general of the NKVD.

With the growth in the number of political prisons in the USSR, the Bolshevik government had an idea to create a large Special Purpose Camp not near densely populated areas, but in an inaccessible distance from the whole country. In the 1920s system scattered throughout the state and placed in close service to socialist construction Gulag few have planned yet. The Communists then found it useful to concentrate the most "dangerous" opponents of their regime in one place, cut off almost to the point of complete inaccessibility, from which it would not be easy to escape. The Solovetsky Islands were chosen as this place.

Solovetsky Monastery. Photo from 1915

The assertion that the prison on Solovki was a torture prison back in tsarist times is an invention of communist hacks. But in general, before the revolution, there was a prison here - for a few individual prisoners, who for three or four centuries can be counted almost on the fingers (the famous figure of the Time of Troubles Avraamiy Palitsyn, here to the deceased, the last Zaporizhzhya kosh Kalnishevsky, Pushkin's uncle P. Hannibal, who was sitting for sympathy for the Decembrists). During the years of the Nikonian reforms, the island monastery became famous for the Solovetsky uprising for the old faith that lasted eight years (1668-1676).

In the first period after the revolution of 1917, the Solovetsky Monastery was declared a state farm. The monks “were told to pray less and work more for the benefit of the workers and peasants” (the herring they caught in the White Sea went to the Kremlin table). But the abundance of valuables concentrated in the monastery confused some of the arriving leaders and commissars. And then, in some contradiction with the criminal code, but in true accordance with the general spirit of the expropriation of "unearned property", the monastery was set on fire (May 25, 1923). At the same time, all accounting books burned down, and it was impossible to determine how much and what exactly was missing. The Bolsheviks accused the “black monastic gang” of forgery. It was decided to throw it on the mainland, and to concentrate the Northern Special Purpose Camp on the Solovetsky Islands. Only the monastic artel of fishermen, specialists in livestock and sauerkraut was left here.

In June 1923 Chekists came to Solovki to create "an exemplary strict camp, the pride of the Workers' and Peasants' Republic". The Northern Special Purpose Camps were actually founded already in 1921 - in Pertominsk, Kholmogory and near Arkhangelsk itself. But these places were apparently recognized as difficult to guard, unpromising for crowding large masses of prisoners. And the eyes of the authorities, of course, were transferred next door to the Solovetsky Islands - with an already established economy, with stone buildings, 20-40 kilometers from the mainland, close enough for jailers, remote enough for fugitives and half a year without communication with the mainland - tougher nut to crack, than the former tsarist convict Sakhalin. The famous Chekist Eichmans became the first head of the Solovetsky camp.

The orders established in the Solovetsky camp were very cruel. They didn’t give out clothes there: they grabbed them in a summer dress - and go through the polar winter. People carried carts and sledges instead of horses. As in the GULAG later, in the mornings, company officers drove their workers to work in droves. In the punishment cell Sekirka, the guilty Solovki prisoners were forced to sit all day on hand-thick poles, reinforced so that their feet did not reach the ground (the guards who fell down were beaten). Particularly guilty were pushed tied to a log down the right hand in 365 steep steps, and in summer they were put naked under clouds of northern mosquitoes. Practiced in the Solovetsky camp and public executions for minor violations of the regime (for example, for visiting without the permission of the authorities of the church, preserved for the remaining monastic artels). And yet, the “Solovki” era of camp life was very different from the subsequent, Stalinist one. The Solovki were not hidden from the country, they were even openly proud of them, they buzzed all ears, constantly commemorated them in pop couplets. The magazine SLON (Solovki Special Purpose Camp) published here was distributed in large numbers throughout the country.

Power Solovetskaya - Certificates and documents

The camp grew rapidly. Already in the first six months, more than 2,000 prisoners were sent here, and by 1928 there were already about sixty thousand of them (since 1926, in addition to political prisoners, seasoned criminals began to be sent to Solovki). In addition to the main prison - the local Kremlin - "business trips" appeared on other islands of the Solovetsky archipelago. So far, the terms have been short - rarely 10 and 5 years, mostly - 3 years. There were many old intellectuals in the camp; philosophers, historians, literary critics, financiers, lawyers; among them, a refined-intellectual treatment of each other was widespread. Despite the short terms, few were released: when the terms ended, the camps of the Stalinist Gulag had already begun to open - and the Solovki prisoners were condemned again.

The internal management of the Solovetsky camp was characterized by a struggle between the Chekist “information and investigation unit” (ISCh, secret police) and the “administrative unit”, which was in charge of the current guards and was recruited mainly from former White Guards. The White Guards caught informers, sent them to the usual stages, in 1927 broke into the ICH, broke into a fireproof cabinet, seized it from there and announced the full lists of informers. But over the years, there were fewer and fewer former white officers in the Administrative Department of the Solovetsky camp. The number of criminals grew in its personnel, and clashes within the prison administration ceased.

During the first year or two of the existence of the camp, the Chekists completely destroyed the once flourishing monastery economy (the monks grew high-quality vegetables here - even melons, caught the best fish - and bred it, kept greenhouses, had their own mills, sawmills, foundry, forge, bookbinding and pottery workshops, even their own power plant, they themselves produced complex shaped bricks and sea boats). There was nothing to feed the prisoners of the Solovetsky camp: the dead were hidden under bunk beds in order to get extra rations for them. Epidemics of typhus and smallpox broke out (60% of prisoners died from typhus in the neighboring mainland Kem), scurvy spread widely.

The labor system - the main task of the subsequent Stalinist Gulag - in the Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp was still poorly developed. Prisoners here mostly performed tasks for their own maintenance and (as punishment) various meaningless orders, such as pouring water from an ice hole into an ice hole or dragging logs from one place to another and back. According to state statistics, until 1929 in the RSFSR forced labor - without servicing the camps - covered only 35-40% of prisoners - and it could not have been otherwise with unemployment in the country.

But since the first five-year plan, the situation has changed dramatically. The camps began to serve industrialization. If in 1926 SLON harvested forests - not for himself, but according to "external" orders - for 63 thousand rubles, then in 1929 - for 2355 thousand rubles, and in 1930 - three times more. In 1926, road construction was completed in the Karelian-Murmansk Territory for 105 thousand rubles, in 1930 - for 6,000 thousand rubles. The mainland city of Kem previously served as a transfer for the Solovetsky camp, through it the prisoners got to the archipelago. But now, through it, the SLON camp began to spread to the mainland. To the west of Kem, through the swamps, the prisoners taken out from Solovki began to lay the Kem-Ukhta tract, which was once considered almost impossible. Then they led the Parandovsky tract from Medvezhyegorsk. With great difficulty, they built a 27 km dirt road on the Kola Peninsula. to Apatity, covering the swamps with logs and sandy mounds, leveling the capricious reliefs of the crumbling slopes of rocky mountains. Then the SLON built a railway there - 11 kilometers in one winter month. (The task seemed impossible - 300 thousand cubic meters of earthwork! in winter! beyond the Arctic Circle, when the earth is worse than any granite!).

To the Solovetsky camp from the Kemsky transit point

Thus, the previous plan of a Special Purpose camp closed on the islands fell apart. He receded into the past due to the "interests of communist construction." The camps began to spread to the territory of the country - and in accordance with the new conditions, the task was set "to lead the fight against the intercourse of freemen with prisoners, harboring fugitives, buying stolen and state-owned things from prisoners, all kinds of malicious rumors spread about the ELEPHANT by class enemies." It was necessary to isolate the prisoners from the civilian population. After several successful sea escapes from the Solovetsky camp in Europe, the fugitives began to spread truthful news about the order in the Soviet camps. The All-Russian Central Executive Committee sent to the north an inspection commission "of the conscience of the party - Aron Solts", which drove along the Murmansk railway, without managing anything special. Then the great proletarian writer was sent to Solovki Maxim Gorky "(June 1929), who behaved unusually vilely in the camp (for details, see A. I. Solzhenitsyn's book " The Gulag Archipelago"). After his visit, the Solovki prisoners were subjected to extreme terror. One failed escape was inflated into a huge White Guard conspiracy - the whites allegedly were going to seize the ship and sail away - and on the night of October 15, 1929, 300 people were shot (then additional batches brought from the mainland).

Gorky on Solovki surrounded by Chekists (to the left of Gorky is the famous Gleb Boky). 1929

From the end of the 1920s, prostitutes, home workers, and punks poured into Solovki in a wide stream. The social composition of the camp prisoners changed rapidly. With the expansion of the scale of forced labor, the authorities, as everywhere in these years, began to encourage the "socialist competition of prisoners." In the autumn of 1930, the Solovetsky headquarters for competition and shock work was created. The role of shock workers was played mainly by thieves, who took away the workings of other camp inmates and claimed that they had fulfilled several norms. In the official Soviet literature, without the slightest irony, it was narrated how notorious recidivists, murderers and raiders suddenly "acted as thrifty business executives, skilled technologists, capable cultural workers." Thieves and bandits created a “commune” in the Solovetsky camp, proclaimed their reforging and re-education, and the authorities moved the “communards” to separate hostels, they began to feed and clothe them better than other prisoners. The percentage of compliance with the norms of the members of the "commune" inexplicably doubled. The conference of the “Solovki shock brigades” decided to “respond with a broad wave of socialist competition to the new slander of the capitalists about forced labor in the USSR. However, already in the spring of 1931, a general purge of the so advertised "successful brigades" and "communes" was suddenly required - all their "labor achievements" turned out to be fake.

From Solovki, the system of camps was transferred to the islands of Novaya Zemlya. There were, most likely, the most terrible special purpose camps - not a single prisoner returned from here, there is no information about their history.

Based on the book by A. I. Solzhenitsyn "The Gulag Archipelago"

The selection of history books in the shop of the Solovetsky Monastery speaks for itself - pilgrims and tourists are offered books praising Stalin. At the same time, about a million people left their lives or part of their lives on the islands and in their branches.

The transfer of all prisoners, the transfer of prison personnel and the export of material assets to be completed on December 15, 1939 - read the order of People's Commissar Lavrenty Beria "ON CLOSURE OF THE PRISON ON SOLOVKI ISLAND". The convicts were shock-evacuated to polar camps, created at the suggestion of G. Ordzhonikidze for the development of the Norilsk copper-nickel deposit.

In late autumn, the prisoners, isolated even from each other on an island in the White Sea, were all simultaneously expelled from their cells. The prisoners were waiting for a "dry bath", that is, a search with undressing, and a general formation. Pale faces, identical dark blue jackets and trousers with a yellow stripe and yellow cuffs. Fates are also the same. Basically the intelligentsia. Doctors of the highest qualification; internationalists who fought against fascism in Spain; engineers trained abroad; scientists-economists, former front-line officers, future academician-microbiologist.

The prisoners who survived the thirty-seventh had the worst assumptions, but they were all given three kilograms of crackers, warning that this was a ration for ten days. Under the shouts of the guards and the barking of dogs, a herd of people was driven at a run through the Holy Gates to the pier, to the gangways, to the open hatches into the belly of the dirty timber truck "Semyon Budyonny". The hold seemed bottomless. Nara - in six tiers, in the middle is a 40-bucket barrel, it is also a slop bucket. Vohrovtsy battened down the hatches. Places on the bunks were occupied by the light of matches. Horn. Farewell, Solovki!

The prison, arranged in the monastery by the evil will of Ivan the Terrible, did not lose its significance under Joseph Stalin. “Forcing mankind to happiness with an iron hand,” the Red Russians, having ousted the White Russians from Arkhangelsk in February 1920, continued the story of imprisonment in Solovki. The tragedy of Solovetsky monasticism turned into a tragedy for Russia. Navigation had barely opened when, through the efforts of Lenin's associate Mikhail Kedrov, a concentration camp for prisoners of war of the Civil War was set up in the Solovetsky Monastery. This camp, reflecting the intensification of state repressions against its citizens, developed into the SLON - the Solovetsky Special Purpose Camps of the OGPU. On June 7, 1923, the Pechora steamer delivered new prisoners to Solovki - activists of political parties, recent allies of the Bolsheviks in the struggle for power.

The term "special purpose camps" implied that Solovki was a priori not intended for people who committed crimes. The Bolsheviks usually destroyed obvious enemies immediately. The Solovetsky camps were predetermined primarily for dubious people, who posed a potential threat to the Soviet government by the very fact of their existence, socially alien to the proletarians by origin and upbringing.

The victims of the extrajudicial class struggle were lawyers who knew the basics of classical Roman law with its presumption of innocence. Lawyers were driven to Solovki so as not to interfere with the work of the Soviet "courts of revolutionary expediency." Historians, connoisseurs of classical history, which the Bolsheviks redrawn to please the political situation, ended up in the camps. Philologists were sent behind barbed wire - critics of the new Soviet spelling rules; officers capable of participating in uprisings; clergymen of all confessions - carriers of ideologies alien to the Bolsheviks.

Socially alien "penalty category", declared dangerous for their people, were the elite of the country. In Solovki, the elite fell into the power of socially close scoundrels exiled to camps for service and criminal offenses. By the will of the OGPU, "the best part of the prisoners from the party members and Chekists" gave written obligations "not to mix with the rest of the mass of prisoners and to keep the secret of the circumstances of camp life until their death." Adopted in the "self-guard" received caps with cockades "ELEPHANT". They were supposed to have firearms, military uniforms and Red Army food rations. Privileged penitentiaries lodged in the Ninth Company, which in Solovki was contemptuously called the “Lyagavaya Company”. The OGPU considered such camp selection to be economically expedient (the prisoners guarded the prisoners) and ideologically correct (the socially close dominated the socially alien). The class approach in dividing the prisoners into categories stimulated the overseers to a special zeal. They seemed to be given a chance to prove their loyalty to the proletariat and get early release.

On the Solovetsky archipelago, the Soviet concentration camp system was looking for its face. There, as at an experimental training ground, not only the organization of security was worked out, but the order of camp life was also formed. On the islands, according to V. Shalamov, "a national standard has gained the right to life - barracks for two hundred and fifty places of the two-tier Solovetsky system with latrines for eight points in a row." Empirically in Solovki, dietary standards, methods of using forced labor, the technique of executions and the technology of burying bodies were determined.

At the same time, a new Soviet worldview was being formed in the camp "factory of people", which included erasing the old collective memory and replacing it with new myths. Internally, the camp press, the camp theaters, and the museum were seen as vehicles of communist ideology. The process of destruction of the old world included the hammering of new moral guidelines, the change of geographical names, as well as the replacement of established traditions, holidays and rituals. The Soviet government formed a new pantheon of heroes, including the deification of political leaders. An important ideological task of propaganda was the ability to create an image of the enemy and mobilize the efforts of society to fight new and new enemies.

Prison Solovki was a "forge of personnel" and a "school of excellence" for future concentration camps of the twentieth century. The slogan "Through labor - to liberation" first appeared not in Auschwitz, but on the Nikolsky Gates of the Solovetsky Kremlin. The priority in creating gas chambers for killing people could well belong to the Soviet country. Stocks of the poisonous substance chloropicrin had already been created on Solovki, but Dr. Nikolai Zhilov, from the camp medical unit, at his own peril and risk, destroyed this gas, he allegedly used it to disinfect the clothes of convicts in wool swatters during a typhus epidemic in 1929.

The Bolsheviks did everything to turn the concept of "Solovki" into a scarecrow word, into a symbol of state lawlessness. When GPU officers shot people extrajudicially somewhere in Siberia, the relatives of the dead were verbally informed: "Sent to Solovki."

The history of the camps once again confirmed the monastic adage "Today in Solovki, tomorrow in Russia." It is no coincidence that one of the demoted true-believing Leninists, before his death, comprehended the anticipatory meaning of the phenomena taking place in the Solovetsky archipelago. Hiding under the bunks, he scribbled a warning to his former colleagues almost at floor level: “Comrades! ... Solovki is a school leading us on the path to recidivism and banditry!” This inscription in the altar of the Church of the Ascension on Sekirnaya Hill, of course, was covered over, but years later the paint crumbled, the text appeared, and the prediction came true across the country.

Solovki, having quickly depleted the natural resources of the archipelago - its ancient forests - moved to the continent, reproducing itself with a network of branches on the mainland. The Solovetsky Kremlin, as in the days of the formation of serfdom, again turned into the capital of a state within a state. This state had its own army and navy, its own court, its own banknotes, its own postal service, its own press and censorship. The products of the camp enterprises sent to the mainland were called "Solovki exports".

Under Stalin, the contingent of prisoners expanded significantly, including new social strata of the population. The prisoners were transferred to self-sufficiency and introduced a "nutrition scale". "Drummers" who overfulfilled the norms were presented with a diploma and premium potato pies. Portraits of the heroes of forced labor were hung on the Board of Honor. At a meeting of the Politburo, Stalin even suggested awarding prisoners orders, but not letting them out of the camp, “so that they don’t deteriorate again when they are free.”

The prisoners, not capable of hard physical labor, were doomed to death from exhaustion. Camp libraries and theaters, "chamber orchestras" and "chess" (so!) tournaments disappeared quickly enough. The struggle for physical survival has consumed the fig leaves of the culture. Correctional institutions in fact turned out to be extermination. People's Commissar Yezhov's answer to the question of the head of the Orenburg NKVD Uspensky, what to do with elderly prisoners, is known: "Shoot."

Agents of the GPU searched towns and villages for masters of their craft, arrested them on provoked charges, and forced them to work for nothing at the camp enterprises. The technology of Chekist recruitment for the needs of the OGPU was described by V.V. Chernavin in the book "Notes of a Pest". When the administration was dissatisfied with the work of special convicts, they were demonstratively destroyed "for sabotage", and new victims were caught in the wild, as always, from among the best specialists. Professor Ivan Ozerov, a leading economist, counted stool legs in the warehouse. The director of the Russian Museum, Nikolai Sychev, organized the camp museum. Professors of genetics - took care of the animals in the camp rabbitry. Engineers worked in the Solovetsky design and estimate bureau - the prototype of future "sharashkas".

The talented geologist Nikolai Koltsov, who was arrested in 1931, allegedly for anti-Soviet agitation, ended up in the camps according to the KGB recruitment. In the zone, he supervised surveys during the construction of Molotovsk (Severodvinsk). In 1936, Koltsov, while searching for salt springs, analyzed volcanic rocks from deep pits and suggested the presence of diamonds in the southeast of the White Sea. Nikolai Fedorovich, who was forty years ahead of his colleagues, died in 1939. Even earlier, the executioners shot another Solovki citizen, the brilliant engineer Leonid Kurchevsky, the author of the idea of ​​using tidal currents to generate electricity.

The most massive trade in the camps of the OGPU was the sale of timber abroad. The slogan of those years was “Pine smells like currency!” Using the forced labor of Solovki prisoners, the Soviet Union sought to oust Norway, Sweden and other countries from the world lumber market due to extremely low dumping prices for their products. The exploitation of the labor force in logging was unprecedented.

References from the elephant folder of 1928 in the archive of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Karelia:

- “128 prisoners were left on Krasnaya Gorka for the night in the forest due to the failure to complete the lesson,” junior warden S.P. informs the authorities. cooks;

- “In the party of 46 people who arrived from the Paranovo business trip, 75% ended up with frostbite limbs,” reports doctor L.N. Volskaya;

“More than half of them are bare-footed and undressed at logging sites,” complains the head of the district of Raznavolok;

“The prisoners get sick, as they are forced to work in the snow in bast shoes,” Idel justifies the business trip;

- "Death came from progressive anemia in cold conditions" - there are hundreds of such short typical acts.

For the first time Sozerko Malsagov, an unsentimental hero of the First and Second World Wars, called Solovki "Hell Islands" in 1925. He, already after escaping from the Solovetsky hell, fought with the Nazis on the territory of Poland in 1939, was captured, fled from the Nazi camp. Both the NKVD and the Gestapo hunted for Malsagov, and he already fought in the French Resistance. Malsagov was the first to draw the attention of the world to the terrible plight of women who ended up in the Solovetsky camps.

"Do not divide work into male and female - we have a common cause - the construction of socialism!" - was written on the gate of the women's barracks. But the fate of women behind barbed wire was many times harder than that of men - primarily because of the humiliation associated with the unlimited power of lousy bosses.

An even more defenseless part of the population of the camps were teenagers. In 1929, some of the children scattered around the archipelago were driven to the children's section of the camp, to the so-called Labor Colony, arranged to be shown to Maxim Gorky on the eve of his voyage to the island. The writer liked the colony, he did not notice that the fir trees surrounding the barracks were hastily dug up without roots, for blazir.

“3357 minor teenagers, mostly street children, who are on the territory of the SLON, without receiving proper qualifications, decompose morally and physically by the adult part of the prisoners - their use as passive pederasts flourishes,” is recorded in the act drawn up by the commission under the leadership of the Secretary of the Collegium OGPU A.M. Shanin immediately after Gorky's visit.

The writer Oleg Volkov called Solovki a landmark of Russia's martyrdom. Under him, the Chekists laid a flower bed of whitewashed stones in the form of a five-pointed star inscribed in a circle in front of the altar of the church on Sekirnaya Gora. The executioners led the prisoners doomed to death from the cells and placed five people at the circle line. Shoulder masters shot through the pentagram from the wall of the altar of the temple of the Ascension. All employees of the camp apparatus were supposed to participate in the executions (although not always at the same time), who had learned the order, which, according to the camp head Igor Kurilka, said: "Whoever does not kill, they kill him himself."

The bodies of the dead were buried along the southwestern slope of Sekirnaya Mountain, where tree roots did not interfere with digging holes, in an abandoned monastery berry garden. In accordance with the order of the People's Commissariat of Justice "On the order of executions", the bodies were interred "without any ritual, so that no traces of the grave remain."

Another well-known summit of Solovki, which was named Golgotha ​​by the monks according to a prophetic vision, fully justified its name. Prisoners were not shot there, where the prisoners themselves left the world “from difficult living conditions,” as the cause of death was often indicated in “personal records”. Things and gold dental crowns of the dead became the prey of the guards. “The act of checking the activities of the administration of the Golgotha ​​camp trip in 1929,” compiled by the OGPU commission, reads: “Large graves, in which up to 800 corpses were placed, were filled to the top with those and remained open. The above graves are located in a conspicuous place, on the opposite mountain, across the ravine from the main buildings for the placement of prisoners.

In 1937-1938, 1,800 prisoners were shot by order from Moscow. The executioners brought the prisoners into the room, stunned them with a blow to the head with a birch club, undressed them and tied them with wire. Then people were taken to the pits, laid out five bodies in a row, killed with shots in the head, and the assistants at that time dragged the next ones to the pits.

So the philosopher and scientist P.A. Florensky, restorer A.I. Anisimov, inventor L.V. Kurchevsky, lawyer A.V. Bobrischev-Pushkin, Udmurt educator K.P. Gerd, the ideologist of pan-Islamism I.A. Firdeks, Gypsy King G.P. Stanesko, sister of mercy L.A. Sokolova-Miller, Academician S.L. Rudnitsky, "clergymen" Sh.G. Batmanishvili, P.I. Weigel, D.G. Voskresensky, S.I. Eroyan, Professor P.P. Kazarinov, P.I. Kikobidze, Kh.I. Garber, S.F. Vasiliev, R.N. Litvinov, researcher V.M. Chekhovsky, pediatrician G.A. Turk, law student G.D. Marchenko. Hundreds of names. The mind, honor and conscience of Russia, and not only Russia.

Execution sentences were carried out by a brigade headed by an executioner who had twenty years of work experience. In the fall of 1937, he personally killed from 180 to 265 Solovki prisoners daily. His name is known - the captain of the NKVD Mikhail Matveev - "lower education, participant in the storming of the Winter Palace." For the performance of the Solovetsky special operation M.R. Matveev was awarded a valuable gift and a silver badge "Honorary Worker of the Cheka-OGPU".

“The award “Honorary Worker of the Cheka-OGPU” is a sign of mutual responsibility of all who wear it,” declared the head of the Chekist department, Genrikh Yagoda, even before the maelstrom of the Great Terror dragged Yagoda himself, and the Leningrad brigade of executioners, and the local security officers who helped them.

In 1937, a series of transformations ended with the reorganization of the Solovetsky camps into an exemplary Solovetsky prison with branches in the Kremlin, Savvatiyevo and Muksalma. The corridor system of the monastic buildings of the 19th century contributed greatly to this transformation - significant alterations were not required. The prison was not part of the Gulag system and did not officially bear the sonorous abbreviation STON, that is, the Solovetsky Special Purpose Prison, although it echoed with a groan in the memory of the prisoners who managed to survive it. The prison was distinguished by an extremely merciless internal order, the hardest for the prisoners and for the guards.

Academician Alexander Baev recalled that the Solovetsky prison was superior in its senseless Asian cruelty to everything that he had seen in eighteen years of wandering around the camps and prisons. Absolute secrecy. Instead of names, the prisoners have numbers. Control is on a daily basis. Light is constant. Hands and face must be visible to the warden even at night, even in the toilet. Move silently around the camera. Do not approach the window. During a walk, look at the heels of the person in front, you can’t cough, it’s forbidden to raise your head! Letters and photographs are not allowed in the cell. Prisoners were allowed to write letters or statements according to a special schedule; instead of a pen, only a pencil lead was given, the frame for which the prisoners learned to sculpt from bread crumbs. Any violation of the daily routine was followed by the placement of a prisoner in a cold punishment cell. Two punishment cells usually ended in death.

The Solovetsky prison was considered the pinnacle of the Soviet penitentiary system, but turned out to be its dead end, an unviable mutant. The history of the prison ended overnight. The new three-storey building, the only capital structure built during the time of special use, remained uninhabited. In the camps arranged on the initiative of G. Ordzhonikidze for the development of the wealth of the Norilsk copper-nickel deposit, free laborers were required. “Given the colossal experience of the OGPU in carrying out construction in extremely difficult conditions beyond the Arctic Circle,” the Solovetsky prisoners were urgently taken to Siberia. The campaign of the caravan with convicts lasted two weeks. The bodies of people who could not endure the hardships of the road were thrown by the guards over the sides onto the ice.

Seven decades ago, Solovki ceased to be called a prison. There is almost no material evidence of the middle ages of the twentieth century on the islands. The buildings that kept hundreds of inscriptions left by the prisoners were dismantled by the Red Navy for firewood. The prison archive is hidden somewhere. Restorers, restoring architectural monuments, destroyed the camp deposits, alien to ancient architecture. The monastery in the post-Soviet period rebuilt the buildings for itself, not thinking about preserving the history alien to it.

The country did not repent of the crimes committed on its land by its sons. The primordial meaning of repentance is not in tears, not in the construction of a hundred-meter statue of Christ on Sekirnaya Hill, not in breaking foreheads, not in the number of crosses. In the New Testament Greek language used in church life, repentance is denoted by the concept of metanoia, which in literal translation corresponds to the word “change of mind”, that is, a change of views, a rethinking of the path traveled.

In a country where a moral assessment of Stalin's crimes is not given, where pride in the great Soviet past is cultivated, alas, it is not customary to recall the great tragedy of the 20th century. In Arkhangelsk in the autumn of 2009, the heirs of the Chekist department seized the manuscript of his book on the Solovetsky camps during a search from Professor Mikhail Suprun. The deputy director of the Solovetsky State Museum-Reserve, who is responsible for the exposition dedicated to the history of special purpose camps, is convinced that the Solovetsky camps were an ingenious form of protecting the state from all sorts of dissidents. The position of this admirer of General Makashov is apparently shared by the owners of the monastery shop in Solovki. The selection of history books in the shop of the Solovetsky Monastery speaks for itself - pilgrims and tourists are offered books praising Stalin.

Solovki - from the word "salt". Solon Russia from the tears shed by the victims of Solovki. About a million people left their lives or part of their lives on the islands and in their branches.