March 5 is the anniversary of Stalin's death. About the times of great repressions, great construction projects and great war a lot has been written. Here we have collected quotes from the book of memoirs by Nikolai Kiselev-Gromov “S.L.O.N. Solovetsky forest for special purposes”, published in Arkhangelsk.
The author was not a prisoner of the camp, he was a guard, served in the headquarters of the paramilitary guard of the famous Solovetsky special purpose camp - S.L.O.N. This camp, as you know, was the first and was a model not only for the Gulag, but also for camps Hitler's Germany. In 1930, Kiselev fled from the USSR to Finland and wrote these memoirs there.
In winter, it is incredibly cold in a boxcar, since it does not have a stove; It is completely dark - there are no lamps or candles. It is very dirty, and most importantly, incredibly cramped - there are no facilities for lying or sitting, and the prisoners have to stand the whole way; they cannot sit down because of the cramped conditions: in boxcar At least sixty people are imprisoned without bunks. Before the train departs, the security officers throw an old, often leaky bucket into the carriage and order them to climb into it; Along the way, the security officers do not release prisoners from the carriages to perform their natural needs.
For the journey from Petrograd, that is, for at least three days, the prisoner is given about one kilogram of black half-raw and stale bread and three roach. Those imprisoned on the road are not supplied with water at all. When they start asking the security officers for a drink along the way, they answer them: “I didn’t get drunk at home! Wait, I’ll get you drunk in Solovki!” If a prisoner, driven to despair by thirst, begins to persistently demand water and threatens to complain to higher authorities, then the guards begin to beat such a prisoner (“ban”). After this, others endure in silence.
And from cities like Baku or Vladivostok, from where prisoners are also sent to SLON, the journey continues for weeks.
In the 7th company, in which prisoners are also concentrated before being sent on business trips, I had to observe the following: the company barracks stand in a square fenced off with barbed wire; in the frosty season, dozens of prisoners walk around it non-stop all night long, because it is not safe for them there was enough space in the barracks: it was so packed with people that you couldn’t stick a finger through; those who remained in the yard had to walk all the time so as not to freeze. Exhausted from walking and the cold and unable to resist sleep, they approach their things, piled right there in the square, put their heads against them and fall asleep for a few minutes; the cold quickly forces them to get up and rush around the square again.
The party walks through the dense Karelian forest, in the summer eaten by billions of mosquitoes and clouds of midges, among countless swamps, and in the winter, that is, for most of the year, waist-deep in snow. Turning their bast-shod feet out of the snow, they walk five, ten, twenty and even up to thirty kilometers. The night is coming.
Party, hundred-oh-oh! - the senior officer in the convoy shouts from a small sleigh, on which he and alternately all the escorting security officers are carried by prisoners. The party stopped.
Make fires, shovel snow, settle down for the night.
For the Chekists, the prisoners pitch a camp tent, which they, like the Chekists themselves, carried on sleighs, put an iron stove in it, and prepare food for the Chekists. Those who have kettles heat it for themselves and drink 200 grams of boiling water. black bread (if they have any left). Then, bent over and putting a dirty fist under their heads, the prisoners somehow spend the night near the fires, all the time extracting dry wood from under the snow, using it to keep the fires burning both in their own fires and in the Chekists’ stove.
Many prisoners, seeing that self-cutting cannot save them, and in the future - inevitable death with preliminary long suffering, act more decisively: they hang themselves on icy trees or lie down under a chopped pine tree at the moment when it falls - then their suffering will surely end .
ELEPHANT never issues any mosquito nets, which are absolutely necessary in that climate, to prisoners. While working, the prisoner continually drives away or wipes off the insects that mercilessly bite him with the sleeve of either his right or his left hand from his face, neck and head. By the end of the work, his face becomes scary: it is all swollen, covered with wounds and the blood of mosquitoes crushed on it.
“Mosquito stand” here is the favorite method of punishment for the security officers. “Philo” strips naked, is tied to a tree and left there for several hours. Mosquitoes stick to it in a thick layer. The “malingerer” screams until he faints. Then some guards order other prisoners to pour water on the fainting person, while others simply do not pay attention to him until the end of his sentence...
The second scourge with which the nature of the North hits prisoners is night blindness and scurvy.
Night blindness often leads to the murder of a prisoner when he takes a few steps in the evening from a business trip into the forest to recover and gets lost. The Chekist warden knows very well that the prisoner has lost his way due to illness, but he wants to curry favor, receive a promotion, receive gratitude in the order and a monetary reward, and most importantly, he is possessed by a special Chekist sadism. He is therefore glad to take such a prisoner at gunpoint and kill him on the spot with a rifle shot.
Only an insignificant part of the sick and self-destructive people are saved from death, the rest die on business trips like flies in the fall. On the orders of the security officers, their comrades take off their clothes and underwear and throw them naked into large pit graves.
“Krikushnik” is a small shed made of thin and damp boards. The boards are nailed so that you can stick two fingers between them. The floor is earthen. No equipment for sitting or lying down. There is no stove either...
IN Lately In order to save timber, the heads of business trips began to build “screamers” in the ground. A deep hole, about three meters deep, is dug, a small frame is made over it, a piece of straw is thrown into the bottom of the hole, and the “screamer” is ready.
From such a “screamer” you can’t hear the “jackal” yelling, say the security officers. "Jump!" - the person being put in such a “screamer” is told. And when they let him out, they give him a pole, along which he climbs out, if he can, to the top.
Why is a prisoner put in a “screamer”? For all. If, while talking with the security officer-overseer, he did not, as expected, go to the front, he is in the “screamer”. If during the morning or evening verification he did not stand rooted to the spot (for “formation - Holy place“, say the security officers), but behaved at ease - also a “screamer”. If the security officer-supervisor thought that the prisoner was talking to him impolitely, he is again in the “screamer”.
Women in SLON are mainly engaged in work on fishing trips. The intelligent ones, like the majority there, and especially those who are prettier and younger, serve under the Chekist overseers, washing their clothes, preparing dinner for them...
The guards (and not only the guards) force them to cohabit with themselves. Some, of course, at first “fashion”, as the security officers put it, but then, when the “fashion” is used to send them to the hardest physical work - to the forest or swamps to extract peat - in order not to die from backbreaking work and starvation rations, humble themselves and make concessions. For this they get a feasible job.
Chekist supervisors have a long-established rule of exchanging their “marukhs,” which they previously agree upon among themselves. “I am sending you my marukha and ask, as we agreed, to send me yours,” one security officer writes to another when his “beloved” gets tired of him.
ELEPHANT does not issue official clothing to female prisoners. They wear their own all the time; after two or three years they find themselves completely naked and then make themselves clothes from bags. While the prisoner lives with the security officer, he dresses her in a poor cotton dress and boots made of rough leather. And when he sends her to his comrade, he takes off “his” clothes from her, and she again dresses in bags and official bast shoes. The new partner, in turn, dresses her, and sending her to the third, undresses her again...
I didn’t know a single woman in SLON, unless she was an old woman, who would not ultimately give her “love” to the security officers. Otherwise, she will inevitably and soon die. It often happens that women have children from cohabitation. During my more than three-year stay in SLON, not a single security officer recognized a single child born from him as his own, and women in labor (the security officers call them “mothers”) are sent to Anzer Island.
They are sent according to a general template. They stand in ranks, dressed in clothes made from sacks, and hold their babies wrapped in rags in their arms. Gusts of wind pierce both themselves and the unfortunate children. And the security officers-supervisors scream, intertwining their teams with inevitable obscene language.
It's easy to imagine how many of these babies could survive...
In winter, they walk along a snowy road in all weathers - in bitter cold and in snow blizzards - several kilometers to the coastal business trip of Rebeld, carrying children in their arms.
In desperation, many women kill their children and throw them into the forest or into latrines, subsequently committing suicide themselves. “Mothers” who kill their children are sent by the ISO to a women’s punishment cell on the Hare Islands, five kilometers from Bolshoi Solovetsky Island.
The thirteenth company is located in the former Assumption Cathedral (I think I’m not mistaken in the name of the cathedral). A huge building made of stone and cement, now damp and cold, since there are no stoves in it, drops formed from human breath and fumes continuously fall from its high arches. It can accommodate up to five thousand people and is always packed with prisoners. Throughout the room there are three-tiered bunks made of round damp poles.
The prisoner had worked twelve hours the day before; Having returned from work to the company, he spent at least two hours standing in line to receive bread and lunch and for lunch itself; then he dried his clothes and shoes, or onuchi; An hour and a half after lunch, the evening verification begins, and he also stands there for about two hours. Only after it can he go to bed. But the noise and commotion all around does not stop: someone is being “punched in the face”, the guards are loudly calling for people to dress up for night work, prisoners are walking around to recover and talking. A few hours later he is picked up for the morning roll call...
At the entrance to the 13th company, on the right and left there are huge wooden tubs, one and a half meters high, replacing a latrine. A prisoner who wants to recover must tell the orderly about this, he will report to the company duty officer, and the company duty officer will allow him to go to the “restroom” when there is a whole group of people willing to do so. The orderly leads them to the tubs and puts them in line. To recover, the prisoner must climb onto a high tub with a board placed across it, where he will relieve himself in front of everyone standing below, listening to: “Come on, you rotten professor! Defender of the Tsar-Father! Get off the barrel like a bullet! Enough! Stayed too long! etc.
To remove such tubs filled with sewage, two people thread a stick through its ears and carry it on their shoulders to the “central cesspool.” The bearers must descend about a hundred meters along the steps of the cathedral. Chernyavsky forced (necessarily priests, monks, priests and the most cleanly dressed or intellectuals distinguished by their manners) to carry them out several times a day. At the same time, in order to mock the “bars” and “long-manes,” he forced criminals to push a tub filled to the brim so that the contents spilled and fell on the one in front, or he taught them to knock down the one in front or behind them, so that he could then force the intellectuals and priests wipe up spills with rags.
In 1929, all priests of the 14th company, through the company commander Sakharov, were asked to cut their hair and take off their robes. Many refused to do this, and they were sent on penal trips. There, the security officers, with beatings and blasphemous abuse, forcibly shaved their heads, took off their cassocks, dressed them in the dirtiest and torn clothes, and sent them to forest work. Polish priests were also dressed in such clothes and sent into the forest. In general, it must be said that Polish citizens get more in SLON than people of other nationalities. At the slightest political complication with Poland, they immediately begin to be put under pressure in every possible way: they go to punishment cells or on punishment trips, where the guards quickly bring them to the point of “bending.”
The clay mill is like a department of the punishment cell. She is completely dark and damp basement, dug under the southern wall of the Kremlin. At the bottom there is a half-meter layer of clay, which the prisoners knead with their feet to construction work. In winter the clay freezes; then they put small iron stoves on it, thaw them out and force the prisoners to knead... Literally everything is removed from those who end up in the clay mill, and completely naked - in winter and summer - they stand for several hours in wet clay up to their knees...
Photo from an album donated by the Office of the Solovetsky Special Purpose Camps
S. M. Kirov, first secretary of the Leningrad Regional Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks.
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Solovetsky Monastery- Solovetsky Monastery. SOLOVETSKY MONASTERY (Preobrazhensky), male, on the Big Solovetsky Island in the White Sea, founded in the 30s. 15th century Played a significant role in the economic development of Pomerania. In the 60s and 70s. 17th century one of the centers of schism. From 16... Illustrated Encyclopedic Dictionary
Male, on Solovetsky Island. in Beloye metro station. Founded in the 30s. 15th century Played a significant role in the economic development of Pomerania. In the 60s and 70s. 17th century one of the centers of schism. At 16.00 20th centuries place of reference. After the October Revolution it was abolished. In 1923 39... ... Big Encyclopedic Dictionary
SOLOVETSKY MONASTERY, male, on Solovetsky Lake in the White Sea. Founded in the 30s. 15th century Large religious and cultural center; played a significant role in the economic development of Pomerania. In the 60s and 70s. 17th century one of the centers of schism. In the 16th beginning... ...Russian history
Monastery Solovetsky Monastery ... Wikipedia
Male, on Solovetsky Island in the White Sea. Founded in the 30s. XV century Large religious and cultural center. Played a significant role in the economic development of Pomerania. In the 60s and 70s. XVII century one of the centers of schism. IN XVI early XX centuries place… … encyclopedic Dictionary
Monument Solovetsky Stone ... Wikipedia
Village rural type Solovetsky Country RussiaRussia ... Wikipedia
Solovetsky: Settlements Solovetsky village in the Arkhangelsk region on Solovetsky Island, the administrative center of the Solovetskoye municipality; Solovetsky village, Oryol district, Oryol region; Other... ... Wikipedia
Solovetsky Monastery- (Spaso Preobrazhensky Solovetsky stauropegial monastery) The Solovetsky archipelago consists of six large ones (Big Solovetsky Island, Anzer Island, Bolshaya and Malaya Muksalma islands, Bolshoy and Maly Zayatsky Islands) and several... ... Orthodoxy. Dictionary-reference book
Vishera pulp and paper mill today Vishera forced labor camp, Vishera ITL, Vishlag, Visherlag forced labor camp, organized in 1928-1929. on the basis of the Vishera branch of the Solovetsky ITL OGPU... ... Wikipedia
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| Solovetsky power. USSR-GULAG-Solovki. |
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Certificates and documents. Mosfilm, 1988. |
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In May 1923, Deputy Chairman of the GPU I. S. Unshlikht turned to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee with a project to organize the Solovetsky forced labor camp, and already in July the first prisoners were transported from Arkhangelsk to Solovetsky Island.
On July 6, 1923, six months after the formation of the USSR, the GPU of the union republics were removed from the control of the republican NKVD and merged into the United State Political Administration (OGPU), subordinate directly to the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR. The places of detention of the GPU of the RSFSR were transferred to the jurisdiction of the OGPU.
On Revolution Island (formerly Popov Island) in the Kem Bay, where the sawmill was located, it was decided to create a transit point between the Kem railway station and the new camp on the Solovetsky Islands. The government of the Autonomous Karelian SSR opposed the actions of the OGPU, but the transit point was still open.
According to the decree of the OGPU, presented to the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR on August 18, 1923, the new camp was to contain “political and criminal prisoners sentenced by additional judicial bodies of the GPU, the former Cheka, the “Special Meeting of the Collegium of the GPU” and ordinary courts, if the GPU quickly gave permission.
Soon, on the basis of the resolution of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR dated October 13, 1923 (protocol 15), the Northern camps of the GPU were liquidated and on their basis the Office of the Solovetsky Camp of Forced Labor for Special Purposes (USLON or SLON) of the OGPU was organized. All the property of the Solovetsky Monastery, closed since 1920, was transferred to the camp for use.
Initially, the scope of USLON's activities was limited to the Solovetsky Islands; in Kemi, on the territory of Autonomous Karelia, there was only a transit and distribution point. However, in very short time its branches appeared on the mainland - first in the coastal regions of Karelia, in 1926 in the Northern Urals (Vishera branch), and two or three years later on the Kola Peninsula. Territorial expansion was accompanied by a rapid increase in the number of prisoners in the OGPU system. As of October 1, 1927, 12,896 people were kept in USLON alone.
During the existence of the camp, about 7.5 thousand people died in it, of which 3.5 thousand died in the famine year of 1933. At the same time, according to the historian, former SLON prisoner, and later collaborator Semyon Pidgainy, only during the construction of the railway to the Filimonovsky peat mines in 1928, ten thousand Ukrainians and Don Cossacks died on eight kilometers of the road [ ] .
The official number of prisoners in 1923-1933 is shown in the table below (figures as of the end of the year).
In December 1933, the camp was disbanded, and its property was transferred to the White Sea-Baltic camp.
Later, one of the camp departments of BelBaltLag was located on Solovki, and in 1937-1939. - Solovetsky Special Purpose Prison (STON) of the Main Directorate of State Security (GUGB) of the NKVD of the USSR.
Thanks to archival research conducted in 1995 by the director of the St. Petersburg Research Center "Memorial" Veniamin Ioffe, it was established that on October 27, 1937, by the verdict of the Special Troika of the UNKVD, Leningrad region Some of the prisoners of the Solovetsky special prison were loaded onto barges and, having taken them to the village of Povenets, they were shot in the Sandormokh tract (1,111 people, including all those who were disabled and “not equipped” - a camp term denoting a prisoner who did not have a specialty).
“Politicians” (members of socialist parties: Socialist Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, Bundists and anarchists), who made up a small part of the total number of prisoners (about 400 people), nevertheless occupied a privileged position in the camp and, as a rule, were exempt from physical labor (except emergency work), communicated freely with each other, had their own governing body (elder), could see relatives, and received help from the Red Cross. They were kept separately from other prisoners in the Savvateevsky monastery. From the end of 1923, the OGPU began a policy of tightening the regime for holding political prisoners.
Oleg Volkov in his work “Plunging into Darkness” cites memories of Gorky’s visit to Solovki:
I was in Solovki when Gorky was brought there. Swollen with arrogance (of course! They brought a ship under him alone, led him by the arms, surrounded him with an honorary retinue), he walked along the path near the Office. He only looked in the direction that was pointed to him, talked with security officers dressed in brand new prison clothes, went into the barracks of the Vokhrovites, from where they had just managed to remove the racks of rifles and remove the Red Army soldiers... And he praised!
A mile from the place where Gorky enthusiastically played the role of a noble tourist and shed a tear, moved by the people who devoted themselves to the humane mission of re-education through the labor of lost victims of the remnants of capitalism - a mile from there, in a straight line, brutal overseers beat with sticks backhanded eight and ten into the long-laden sleighs of tormented, exhausted penal prisoners - the Polish military. They used them to transport firewood along the black trail. The Poles were kept especially inhumanely.
According to Yuri Brodsky, a researcher of the history of the Solovetsky camps, various tortures and humiliations were used against prisoners at Solovki. Thus, prisoners were forced to:
From 1922 to 1926, newspapers were published in the camp, and a prisoner theater operated (this period is described in the memoirs of Boris Shiryaev, “The Unquenchable Lamp”). The campers composed a number of songs about the camp, in particular, “The White Sea is an expanse of water...” (attributed to Boris Emelyanov).
Many organizers involved in the creation of the Solovetsky camp were shot:
At the same time, for example, SLON prisoner Naftaliy Aronovich Frenkel, who proposed innovative ideas for the development of the camp and was one of the “godfathers” of the Gulag, moved up the career ladder and retired in 1947 from the post of head of the Main Directorate of Railway Construction Camps with the rank Lieutenant General of the NKVD.
There is a museum-reserve SLON on Solovetsky Island
Solovetsky memorial stones were installed in St. Petersburg, Arkhangelsk, in the village of Solovetsky on Bolshoi Solovetsky Island and in the Museum of the Holy Trinity Monastery in the city of Jordanville (USA) in memory of the new martyrs who died in the Solovetsky special purpose camp.
With the increase 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 entire country. In the 1920s a system of scattered throughout the state and placed in the close service of socialist construction Gulag Few people have planned it yet. The communists then found it useful to concentrate the most “dangerous” opponents of their regime in one isolated place, almost completely inaccessible, from which it would not be easy to escape. This place was chosen Solovetsky Islands.
Solovetsky Monastery. Photo from 1915
The assertion that the prison on Solovki was a torture facility back in tsarist times is an invention of communist hacks. But in general, before the revolution, there was a prison here - for a few few prisoners, who over the course of three or four centuries can be counted almost on one hand (the famous figure of the Time of Troubles Avraamy Palitsyn, who died here, the last Zaporozhye Koshevoy Kalnishevsky, Pushkin’s uncle P. Hannibal, who was imprisoned for sympathy for the Decembrists). During the years of Nikonian reforms, the island monastery became famous for the eight-year (1668-1676) Solovetsky uprising for the old faith.
In the first time after the revolution of 1917, the Solovetsky Monastery was declared a state farm. The monks “were ordered 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 visiting leaders and commissars. And then, in some contradiction with the criminal code, but in true accordance with the general spirit of expropriation of “unearned property,” the monastery was set on fire (May 25, 1923). At the same time, all the accounting books burned, and it was impossible to determine how much and what exactly was missing. The Bolsheviks accused the “black monastic pack” of forgery. It was decided to throw it onto the mainland, and to concentrate the Northern Special Purpose Camp on the Solovetsky Islands. Only the monastery team of fishermen, livestock specialists and sauerkraut specialists remained here.
In June 1923 security officers came to Solovki to create “an exemplary strict camp, the pride of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Republic.” Northern Special Purpose Camps were actually founded already in 1921 - in Pertominsk, Kholmogory and near Arkhangelsk itself. But these places were apparently considered difficult to guard and unpromising for condensing large masses of prisoners. And the eyes of the authorities, naturally, 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 six months without communication with the mainland - a tougher nut to crack, than the former royal convict Sakhalin. The first head of the Solovetsky camp was the famous security officer Eichmans.
The rules established in the Solovetsky camp were very cruel. They didn’t give me any clothes: they caught me in a summer dress and so go through the Arctic winter. People carried carts and sleighs instead of horses. As in the Gulag later, in the mornings the company officers kicked their workers out to work. In the Sekirke punishment cell, guilty Solovetsky prisoners were forced to sit all day on arm-thick poles, reinforced so that their feet did not reach the ground (the guards beat those who fell down). Those especially guilty were pushed tied to a log down the right hand in 365 steep steps, and in the summer they stood naked under clouds of northern mosquitoes. Public executions were also practiced in the Solovetsky camp for minor violations of the regime (for example, for visiting a church, reserved for the remaining monastic artels, without permission from the authorities). And yet the “Solovetsky” 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, everyone’s ears were buzzing about them, and they were constantly mentioned in pop couplets. The magazine “SLON” (Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp) published here was distributed in large quantities throughout the country.
Solovetsky Power - Evidence and documents
The camp grew quickly. Already in the first six months, more than 2,000 prisoners were sent here, and by 1928 there were already about sixty thousand (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” also appeared on other islands of the Solovetsky archipelago. The terms have so far been short - rarely 10 and 5 years, mostly 3 years. There were many old intelligentsia in the camp; philosophers, historians, literary scholars, financiers, lawyers; Refined intellectual treatment of each other was common among them. Despite the shortness of their sentences, few were released: when the sentences ended, Stalin’s Gulag camps had already begun to open - and the Solovetsky prisoners were re-convicted.
The internal management of the Solovetsky camp was characterized by a struggle between the KGB “information and investigative unit” (ISCh, seksot) and the “administrative unit”, which was in charge of current security and was recruited mainly from former White Guards. The White Guards caught the informers, sent them to the usual stages, in 1927 they broke into the ISCH, broke into the fireproof cabinet, removed them from there and announced the full lists of informers. But over the years, there were fewer and fewer former white officers in the Administrative Unit of the Solovetsky camp. The number of criminals among its personnel grew, and clashes within the prison administration ceased.
In the first year or two of the camp's existence, the security officers completely destroyed the once flourishing monastic 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 bunks in order to get extra rations for them. Epidemics of typhus and smallpox broke out (typhoid in the neighboring mainland Kem killed 60% of prisoners), and scurvy became widespread.
The system of labor - the main task of the subsequent Stalinist Gulag - in the Solovetsky special purpose camp was still poorly developed. The prisoners here mainly carried out tasks according to their own contents and (as punishment) various meaningless orders, such as pouring water from an ice hole to an ice hole or dragging logs from one place to another and back. According to state statistics, until 1929 in the RSFSR, only 35-40% of prisoners were subject to forced labor - without camp maintenance - and it could not have been otherwise given the unemployment in the country.
But since the first five-year plan the situation has changed dramatically. The camps began to be put into service industrialization. If in 1926 SLON harvested forests - not for itself, but for “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 Karelo-Murmansk Territory for 105 thousand rubles, in 1930 - for 6000 thousand rubles. The mainland city of Kem previously served as a transit point for the Solovetsky camp, through which prisoners entered the archipelago. But now, through him, the SLON camp began to spread to the mainland. To the west of Kem, through the swamps, prisoners taken from Solovki began to lay the unpaved Kem-Ukhtinsky tract, which was once considered almost impossible. Then they led the Parandovsky tract from Medvezhyegorsk. We spent with great difficulties on the Kola Peninsula dirt road 27 km. to Apatity, covering the swamps with logs and sand embankments, leveling the capricious reliefs of the crumbling slopes of rocky mountains. Then SLON built a railway there - 11 kilometers in one winter month. (The task seemed impossible - 300 thousand cubic meters earthworks! 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. It became a thing of the past due to the “interests of communist construction.” The camps began to spread throughout the country - and in accordance with the new conditions, the task was set to “wage a fight against free people hobnobbing with prisoners, hiding fugitives, purchasing stolen and government-owned items from prisoners, all sorts of malicious rumors spread about SLON 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, true news about the order in Europe began to spread. Soviet camps. The All-Russian Central Executive Committee sent a verification commission to the north of the “conscience of the party - Aron Solts”, which traveled along the Murmansk railway, without managing anything special. Then the great proletarian writer Maxim Gorky was sent to Solovki” (June 1929), who behaved unusually vilely in the camp (for details, see A.I. Solzhenitsyn’s book “The Gulag Archipelago”). After his visit, the Solovetsky prisoners were subjected to extreme terror. One failed escape was inflated into a huge White Guard conspiracy - the Whites were supposedly going to seize the ship and sail away - and 300 people were shot on the night of October 15, 1929 (then additional parties brought from the mainland).
Gorky on Solovki surrounded by security officers (to the left of Gorky is the famous Gleb Bokiy). 1929
Since the late 1920s, prostitutes, household workers, and punks have poured into Solovki in a wide stream. The social composition of the camp prisoners was changing rapidly. With the expansion of the scale of forced labor, the authorities, as elsewhere in these years, began to encourage “socialist competition among prisoners.” In the fall of 1930, the Solovetsky headquarters for competition and shock work was created. The role of shock workers was mainly played by thieves, who took away work from other camp inmates and claimed that they had fulfilled several standards. In official Soviet literature, without the slightest irony, it was narrated how notorious repeat offenders, murderers and raiders suddenly “acted in the role of 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 dormitories, began to feed and clothe them better than other prisoners. The percentage of compliance with the norms among the members of the “commune” inexplicably doubled. The conference of the “Solovetsky 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 Novaya Zemlya islands. 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 materials from the book by A. I. Solzhenitsyn “The Gulag Archipelago”
was closed, and soon two organizations were created on Solovki: a forced labor camp for imprisoning prisoners of war Civil War and persons sentenced to forced labor, and the Solovki state farm. At the time of the closure 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 on the state farm.
After 1917, the new authorities began to consider the rich Solovetsky Monastery as a source of material assets, numerous commissions mercilessly ruined it. The famine relief commission alone in 1922 exported more than 84 pounds of silver, almost 10 pounds of gold, and 1,988 precious stones. At the same time, icon frames were barbarously torn off, mitres and vestments were picked out gems. Fortunately, thanks to the employees of the People's Commissariat for Education N.N. Pomerantsev, P.D. Baranovsky, B.N. Molas, A.V. Lyadov, it was possible to take many priceless monuments from the monastery sacristy to central museums.
At the end of May 1923, a very serious incident occurred on the territory of the monastery. strong fire, 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 grounds 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 acute housing situation on the island.”
On June 7, 1923, the first batch of prisoners arrived in Solovki. At first, all the male prisoners were kept on the territory of the monastery, and the women in the wooden Arkhangelsk hotel, but very soon all the monastery hermitages, hermitages and tonis were occupied by the camp. And just two years later, the camp “spread out” onto the mainland and by the end of the 20s occupied vast areas of the Kola Peninsula and Karelia, and Solovki itself became only one of 12 departments of this camp, which played a prominent role in the Gulag system.
During its existence, the camp has undergone several reorganizations. Since 1934, Solovki became the VIII department of the White Sea-Baltic Canal, and in 1937 it was reorganized into the Solovetsky prison of the GUGB NKVD, 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 personnel, peasants, writers, artists, and poets. Solovki became a place 
exiles of many hierarchs, clergy, monastics of the Russian Orthodox Church and the laity who suffered for the faith of Christ. In the camp they were an example of true Christian charity, non-covetousness, kindness and peace of mind. Even in the most difficult conditions, the priests tried to fulfill their pastoral duty to the end, 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 hunger 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 in the ranks of the holy new martyrs and confessors of Russia. Among them are such outstanding hierarchs and figures of the Russian Orthodox Church as Hieromartyrs Evgeniy (Zernov), Metropolitan of Gorky († 1937), Hilarion (Troitsky), Archbishop of Vereisky († 1929), Peter (Zverev), Archbishop of Voronezh († 1929), Procopius (Titov), Archbishop of Odessa and Kherson († 1937), Arkady (Ostalsky), Bishop of Bezhetsk († 1937), Hierarch Afanasy (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 evidence from prisoners about the conditions of the Soviet re-education through labor system:
Prisoners worked no more than 8 hours a day;
Increased rations were given for harder work “on peat”;
Elderly prisoners were not subject to assignment to heavy labor;
All prisoners were taught to read and write.
Gorky describes their barracks as very spacious and bright.
However, according to researcher of the history of the Solovetsky camps, photographer Yu. A. Brodsky, various tortures and humiliations were used against prisoners in Solovki. Thus, prisoners were forced to:
Drag stones or logs from place to place;
Count seagulls;
Shout International loudly for many hours in a row. If the prisoner stopped, then two or three were killed, after which the people stood screaming until they began to fall from exhaustion. This could be done at night, in the cold.
Newspapers were published in the camp, and a prisoner theater operated. The campers composed a number of songs about the camp, in particular, “The White Sea is an expanse of water...” (attributed to Boris Emelyanov).
The fate of the camp founders
Many of the organizers involved in the creation of the Solovetsky camp were shot:
The man who proposed gathering camps on Solovki, Arkhangelsk activist 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 Eichmans camp was shot as an English spy.
The head of the Solovetsky special prison, Apeter, was shot.
At the same time, for example, SLON prisoner Naftaliy Aronovich Frenkel, who proposed innovative ideas for the development of the camp and was one of the “godfathers” of the Gulag, moved up the career ladder 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.
