Prisons at Orthodox monasteries are a very unusual (and probably even unique) phenomenon in the history of the Russian Empire. At various times, large monasteries such as Nikol-Karelsky, Troitsky (in Siberia), Kirillo-Belozersky (on the Northern Dvina River), Novodevichy (in Moscow), and many others were used as places of detention. The most prominent example of such a prison is the Solovetsky monastery.

A political and ecclesiastical prison existed in the Solovetsky Monastery from the 16th to the early 20th century. Spiritual and secular authorities considered it a reliable place of detention due to the remoteness of the Solovetsky Islands archipelago from the mainland and very unfavorable climate, which made it extremely difficult for prisoners to escape.

The Solovetsky Monastery itself was a unique military-engineering structure. The harsh northern climate (the archipelago consists of six large and several dozen rocky small islands near the Arctic Circle) opposed the plans of the builders.

The work was carried out only in the summer - in winter, the soil froze so deeply that it was impossible to dig a grave. By the way, graves were prepared from the summer, approximately calculating how many prisoners would not survive the next winter. The monastery was made of huge stones, the gaps between which were filled with brickwork.

It was practically impossible to escape from the Solovetsky Monastery. Even if a prisoner succeeded, they would hardly be able to cross the cold strait alone. In winter, the White Sea froze, but it was also difficult to walk a few kilometers on the cracking ice due to underwater currents. The coast for 1000 km from the monastery was sparsely populated.

The first prisoner on the Solovetsky Islands was the abbot of the Trinity Monastery, Artemiy, a supporter of extensive Orthodox reform, who denied the essence of Jesus Christ, advocated abandoning the veneration of icons, and sought Protestant books. He was not kept under strict confinement, for example, Artemiy could freely move around the monastery. The abbot took advantage of the absence of rules for holding prisoners and escaped. It is likely that someone helped him. The fugitive crossed the White Sea on a ship, successfully reached Lithuania, and later wrote several theological books.

The first real criminal (murderer) appeared on the Solovetsky Islands during the Time of Troubles. He was the infamous church robber Petr Otyaev, known throughout the Moscow Tsardom. He died in the monastery, and the location of his burial is unknown.

By the 17th century, the Solovetsky Monastery began systematically receiving lawbreakers. People were exiled to Solovki for rather atypical crimes. In 1623, a boyar's son was sent here for forcibly tonsuring his wife into monasticism, in 1628, deacon Vasily Markov for corrupting his daughter, and in 1648, priest Nektary for urinating in the church while drunk. The latter spent almost a year in the Solovetsky Monastery.

From Ivan the Terrible's time until 1883, there were between 500 and 550 prisoners in the Solovetsky prison. The prison officially existed until 1883 when the last inmates were removed. The guards remained there until 1886. Afterwards, the Solovetsky Monastery continued to serve as a place of exile for church officials who had transgressed in some way.

The first camp on the Solovki Islands was established on February 3, 1919 by the government of Miller-Chaikovsky. Its decree stated that citizens "whose presence is harmful... may be arrested and exiled extrajudicially to the places specified in paragraph 4 of this decree." The specified paragraph stated: "The place of exile shall be the Solovetsky Monastery or one of the islands in the Solovetsky group, where the exiles can be settled."

Even earlier, the Provisional Government of the Northern Region began deporting political opponents to the islands of Mudyug and Yokanga. "People called prisoners of war were pushed to the extreme limits of hunger: like hungry dogs they pounced on the bones gnawed by the prison administration, knowing in advance that this would cost them beatings with batons, solitary confinement, etc. The bodies of the prisoners were reduced to such a state of starvation that a slight gust of wind knocked them off their feet, which was considered simulation, and so the unfortunate ones were beaten again... More than 50 percent of those imprisoned on Mudyug perished, and many went insane..." described the situation after the liberation of Mudyug by the Archangel Council of Trade Unions in August 1919.

In the forced-labor prison on Yokanga, prisoners were beaten, tortured, starved, and slowly killed by hunger and cold. Of the 1200 detainees who passed through Yokanga, only 20 were Bolsheviks, the rest were non-party members. By the time the prison was liberated from the White Guards, just over a third of the prisoners were still alive, of whom 205 could no longer move.

In 1919, the Cheka established a series of forced labor camps in the Arkhangelsk Governorate: in Pertominsk, Kholmogory, and near Arkhangelsk. The camps were supposed to operate on a self-sufficient basis without central support. On May 20, 1920, a labor camp subordinate to the sub-department of forced labor of the Arkhangelsk Provincial Executive Committee was organized to imprison prisoners of the civil war who were sentenced to forced labor. Abakumov was appointed as the commander of the camp and the Solovetsky Islands, a position he held from 1920 to May 1921.

In 1921, these camps were renamed the Northern Special Purpose Camps (SLON). In a report to the Islands Administration of the Arkhangelsk Provincial Executive Committee in 1921, the idea of using the labor of convicts for food was first proposed. In early 1923, the GPU of the RSFSR, which had replaced the Cheka, proposed to increase the number of northern camps by building a new camp on the Solovetsky Archipelago.

In May 1923, the Deputy Chairman of the GPU, Unshlicht, addressed the All-Russian Central Executive Committee with a project to organize the Solovetsky forced labor camp. On June 6, 1923 (before the decision to create the Solovetsky camp was made), the steamship "Pechora" delivered the first group of prisoners from Arkhangelsk and Pertominsk to the Solovetsky Islands.

On the Island of Revolution (formerly Popov Island) in the Kem Bay, where a 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 opened anyway.

According to the decree of the OGPU presented to the Sovnarkom of the RSFSR on August 18, 1923, the new camp was to hold "political and criminal prisoners sentenced by the additional judicial bodies of the GPU, the former Cheka, the 'Special Meeting of the GPU Collegium,' and ordinary courts, if the GPU gave permission quickly."

Soon, based on the Decree of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR of October 13, 1923, the Northern camps of the GPU were liquidated and the Solovetsky Camp for Forced Labor of Special Purpose (USLON or SLON) of the OGPU was organized on their basis. The camp was given all the property of the Solovetsky Monastery, which had been closed since 1920. It was planned to accommodate 8,000 people in the camp.

Prisoners who worked at individual enterprises were divided into artels, and these into dozens, which were led by tenors responsible for work productivity.

The Regulations on the Solovetsky Camps of Special Purpose of the OGPU (October 2, 1924) provided that "the work of the convicts has an educational and labor value, aiming to accustom and teach those serving punishment to work, giving them the opportunity to live an honest working life and be useful citizens of the USSR after leaving the camps." This document outlined various measures of disciplinary punishment for refusal to work, failure to complete the assignment, damage to equipment, disobedience, but economic methods of stimulating labor were practically not mentioned. During this period, not everyone was able to find work, so in the second half of 1924, the OGPU was forced to allocate an additional 600 thousand rubles for the maintenance of the camp.

"Politicians" (members of socialist parties: Social 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 exempted from physical labor (except for emergency work), freely communicated with each other, had their own governing body (starosta), could see relatives, received assistance from the Political Red Cross, and packages.

In early December 1923, the head of USLON, Eichmann, announced to the starostas that new instructions had been received regarding the regime for political prisoners in Solovki, which, among other things, prohibited walks from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. Without discussing with other prisoners, the starostas decided not to comply with the innovation. The Social Revolutionaries, Left Socialist Revolutionaries, and anarchists decided not to stop walking and organized walks in groups, taking turns. The Social Democrats abstained from demonstrations. On December 19, 1923, at 5 p.m., the starosta of the Social Revolutionaries, Ivanitsky, went to negotiate with the head of the Savvatiyevsky Skit, Nogtev, but he did not receive him. At 6:00 pm, soldiers came out into the courtyard and demanded that the people who were walking around return to their dormitory. In response to their disobedience, the guards used their weapons, killing five members of the Socialist Revolutionary Party and anarchist groups and seriously injuring three (one fatally). A commission led by Smirnov from the All-Russian Central Executive Committee investigated the incident and found that the actions of the guards were unlawful.

In the fall of 1924, the Prosecutor of the Supreme Court of the USSR, Krasikov, reported in the "SLOAN" journal on the results of an inspection of the Solovetsky camp and the Kemskaia transit point, noting that the political prisoners eat much better than the criminals and even better than the Red Army soldiers. Some of them have a special diet with white bread and butter. They can also receive packages with chocolates, cocoa, butter, and other items, totaling 500-600 poods (1 pood is approximately 16.38 kilograms) per year, at their own discretion. The rooms allocated to them in the monastic sketes are the best on the islands: they are well heated, have spacious bright rooms with views of the sea and forest, and there are no bars or guards inside the houses. The political prisoners are not engaged in any work, seeing it as a violation of their freedom. They only have to prepare their own food from the provided products and maintain order in the rooms, which they do not do very well. The administration cannot even organize the collection of firewood for them. As of the end of 1924, there were 320-330 political prisoners, including women and children born on the Solovki Islands or brought there by their parents, according to the prosecutor. The criminal convicts view them negatively, considering that they lead a parasitic way of life and make excessive demands on the administration, such as demanding electric lighting around the clock, accommodating visiting guests not in the hotel, but in the isolation ward with them, and walks not until 6:00 p.m., but at any time of day. The political prisoners depict their imprisonment as a struggle against Soviet power, appealing to the foreign press. When discussing the possibility of the budget meeting the growing demands of the political prisoners, their elders said: "What do we care about your budgets? Our only desire is for your budget to burst, and we are happy to contribute to that as much as we can. Your duty is to provide us with everything we need."

The protest against the privileges of political prisoners was expressed in the "Slon" magazine, issue No. 9-10 for 1924, by the imprisoned Suhov. "They will soon demand for themselves peasants and horses for rides," as they demanded before the provision of firewood and fuel prepared by others for the laundry. The author protested against the politically insulting behavior of the prisoners towards the Red Army, calling them "sheep" and calling for opposition to the Soviet government.

As of October 1, 1924, the number of political prisoners in the camp was 429 out of a total of about 3,000, including 176 Mensheviks, 130 right-wing Social Revolutionaries, 67 anarchists, 26 left-wing Social Revolutionaries, and 30 socialists from other organizations. On June 10, 1925, a resolution was adopted to cease the detention of political prisoners in "Slon." In the summer of 1925, political prisoners were transported to the mainland.

The majority of the prisoners were sent to "Slon" without a trial. Their sentences ranged from 3 to a maximum of 10 years in the 1920s.

The first group of prisoners consisted of those who the authorities officially recognized as political prisoners - Social Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, and anarchists. They were not subjected to forced labor, received a special ("enhanced") ration, and had elected elders. Until 1925, they were held in complete isolation from other prisoners in the Savvateevsky monastery, and then in the Anzersky and Muksolomsky sketes. In 1925, they were all transferred to political isolation cells of the OGPU on the mainland.

The second group of prisoners consisted of other political prisoners. They were called "kaery" ("counter-revolutionaries"). They were people of various intellectual professions, former students, former officers, priests of various denominations (according to various estimates, the number of imprisoned clergy in 1925 ranged from 120 to 500 people[19], by 1926, there were 29 Orthodox archbishops among the prisoners[20]), workers and peasants who participated in mass anti-Bolshevik movements. They were widely used for heavy labor.

The third category of prisoners included criminals and "everyday" offenders who were sent to the camp by court order (at first they made up no more than 20% of all prisoners), as well as professional beggars, prostitutes, homeless children, and juvenile delinquents who were sent to the camp without trial from major cities. As of April 1, 1930, the camp held 3,357 minors.

Due to a shortage of hired staff, prisoners (including those convicted on "political" charges) occupied most of the management positions in workshops and enterprises of the Solovki camp system since 1923: out of 659 managers and specialists, 559 were prisoners. The internal security of the camps was maintained by an armed "supervisory" force, mainly made up of prisoners, including former communists, red army officers, Chekists, those convicted of official crimes, as well as criminals. In April 1931, "everyday" offenders and former Soviet and party workers were also recruited to the lower administrative positions and as marksmen in the militarized guard.

Initially, the scale of the Solovki camp system was limited to the Solovetsky Islands; only a transit and distribution point was located in Kemi, on the territory of the Autonomous Republic of Karelia. During an inspection of the Solovki camp system in the fall of 1924, the prosecutor of the Supreme Court of the USSR, Krasikov, noted that the Kemi transit point had been built by the English for their landing and had been completely renovated in 1924, equipped with stoves, kitchens, a hospital with a pharmacy and medical personnel. Communication with Solovki was provided by two steamships during the navigation season, and the journey from Kemi to Solovki took two hours, while the trip to Moscow took 36-38 hours.

In 1924, a former Odessa businessman named Naftaly Aronovich Frenkel was sent to Solovki. During this time, the administration of the SLON Management structure was formed in the camp, with the Production and Technical Department responsible for the development of production activities (including management of enterprises, factories, and workshops; technical, construction and repair work, and forestry; labor force and its rational use; organization of processing and extractive industries), and the Economic Department responsible for controlling fishing and hunting, operating maintenance workshops, procurement and supply of materials, raw materials and household inventory for all production and technical enterprises, factories and industries, and sales.

In 1926, all of these functions were merged into the Exploitation and Production Department of the Economic Department (EPO EKC), which was headed by Frenkel, who was a prisoner at the time. His innovation was to replace the standard rationing system with a precise differentiated method of distributing food based on the work output and labor capacity of the prisoners, which sharply increased labor productivity.

One of Frenkel's main tasks was the "development of methods and means of work productivity when organized on rational principles." If in 1925 the head of the SLON, Eichmann, acknowledged in a report on the economic condition of the camps that "there was nowhere to use the labor force on Solovki despite the presence of our enterprises," then by 1928 he noted that the situation had changed dramatically: the number of prisoners had increased from 5,872 to 21,900, of whom about 10,000 were employed in construction and logging on the mainland. The camp had turned into a multi-industry industrial zone. According to reports for 1927, logging alone gave the camp economy a net profit of 5 million gold rubles.

In 1926, by decision of the OGPU Collegium, Frenkel's sentence was reduced to 5 years, and on June 23, 1927, he was released early. Naftali Aronovich was far from the only prisoner who made a career in the camp during this time: out of 659 employees in his department in Solovki and on the mainland, 559 were convicted of counterrevolutionary activities. This did not please the party cell, which wanted to lead the camp's production and economic life itself, not to be subordinate to Frenkel. However, they acknowledged that Frenkel "...had established the Solovki economy. Of course, his approach was that of a commercial owner and by no means that of a Soviet public figure. But as a worker, he was valuable...". "We cannot expel Frenkel now - we need to prepare for a replacement," believed the party members, creating the Organizational Bureau to control and audit all of the camp's production, duplicating the EPO ECH.

The claims of the Solovki party cell against Frenkel with a desire to gradually replace counterrevolutionary prisoners in leadership positions with "unemployed comrades" from the party led to a special meeting of members of the CPSU(b) SLO of the OGPU on April 5, 1929, with the participation of the head of the OGPU special department, Bokiy, representatives of the prosecutor's office of the city of Kem, the Solovki party organization, and the party organization of the camp. At the meeting, Bokiy supported the strategy for the development of the camps proposed by Frenkel, declaring that Frenkel was not a counterrevolutionary but a secret OGPU employee. As a result, he prohibited party organizations from interfering in the operational work of production, "because the economic affairs of the camps are also often secret."

The camp's complex economy included the construction and operation of railways, logging, peat extraction, iodine and agar-agar production from seaweed, sea animal hunting, fishing, agricultural production, saltworks, fur farming (including breeding valuable breeds of rabbits, whose skins were exported to Great Britain), craft workshops, brick, tannery, lime, mechanical, pottery, resin, and saltpeter plants. Some of them (brick plant, iodine production, sea animal hunting and fishing, fur farming, logging) worked not for self-sufficiency, but for export.

In 1930, there were 63,000 prisoners in the Solovetsky camps, of whom 24,534 were involved in contract work and 11,029 were involved in the camp's own enterprises. The average daily income per person at the Solovetsky labor camp increased to 4 rubles. At the same time, the leadership of Arkhangelsk and KASSR had the desire to take control of the Solovetsky Islands. The decisive word was spoken by the OGPU, which in 1929 had petitioned the Secretariat of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee to keep the Solovetsky Islands as part of the Northern Krai.

The leadership of the Solovetsky labor camp tried to defend their own concept of development, presenting in April 1930 "Materials on the Reorganization of the Solovetsky Labor Camp," which pointed out such shortcomings as interdepartmental rivalry and weak technical and operational management of all of the camp's business activities, which was an overwhelming task for one person or one department. It was proposed to reorganize the leadership of all of the camp's enterprises, creating specialized departments: forestry, road and construction, trade, fishing, agriculture, and others, with independent balance sheets, in order to open up "new paths for the rational use of the arriving slave labor."

However, the proposed project was not implemented: the OGPU began to create a network of corrective labor camps based on mainland units of the Solovetsky labor camp. The Solovetsky labor camp, officially known as the SLON until 1930, included six divisions located on the territory of the Solovetsky Archipelago. During the existence of the camp, about 7,500 people died, including 3,583 in the last quarter of 1929 and the first quarter of 1930 as a result of a typhus epidemic. The investigation into the epidemic lasted until the deep autumn of 1930, after which several guilty parties were convicted, including three who were sentenced to the highest punishment for failure to provide assistance to the sick and for mistreatment of sick prisoners. The leadership of the Solovetsky labor camp was replaced.

According to the recollections of former prisoners, Sekirnaya Mountain, where the disciplinary isolation unit of the camp was located, was a place of individual and mass shootings. The well-known shooting of 1929 (the so-called "shooting of three hundred") described in memoirs actually included the shooting of participants in an alleged conspiracy aimed at a mass escape. The executed were buried at the former monastery cemetery near the Kremlin and on Sekirnaya Mountain.

In 1937, before the formation of the Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp, 2,000 prisoners were shot. On February 14, 1938, 198 prisoners were shot in the forest on the road to Sekirnaya Mountain.

In December 1933, the camp was disbanded and its property was transferred to the White Sea-Baltic camp. Subsequently, one of the camp divisions of BelBaltLag was located on the Solovki Islands, and in 1937-1939, the Solovetsky Special Purpose Prison (STON) of the Main Directorate of State Security (GUGB) of the NKVD of the USSR was located there.

During 1939, the remaining prisoners of the Solovetsky Special Purpose Prison were transferred to Norilsk, Vladimir and Oryol prisons.

Maxim Gorky, who visited the camp in 1929, cited in his essay "Solovki" the testimony of prisoners about the conditions of the Soviet system of labor re-education. Oleg Volkov in his work "Diving into Darkness" cites recollections of Gorky's arrival at Solovki:

"I was at Solovki when they brought Gorky there. Swollen with pride (no wonder! a ship was sent for him alone, he was led by the hand, surrounded by an honor guard), he walked along the path near the Administration. He only looked in the direction they pointed him to, talked to the Chekists dressed in brand new prisoner's clothes, went into the barracks of the guards, from which they had just managed to remove the stands with rifles and remove the Red Army soldiers... And he praised it!"

From the location where Gorky played the role of a noble tourist with enthusiasm and shed tears, delighting the people who had dedicated themselves to the humane mission of re-educating the laboring victims of capitalist vestiges, about a verst away from there, in a straight line, the enraged overseers were mercilessly beating the exhausted, punished Polish military convicts who were harnessed to sledges laden with logs, along the dark path. The Poles were treated in an especially inhumane manner.

According to Yuri Brodsky, a researcher of the history of the Solovetsky camps, various tortures and humiliations were inflicted on the prisoners in Solovki. For example, prisoners were:

Forced to move stones or logs from one place to another;

Forced to count seagulls;

Forced to shout the Internationale loudly for hours on end. If a prisoner stopped, two or three were killed, and the remaining people continued to shout until they fell from exhaustion. This could be done at night, in the cold;

Stripped naked and tied to a tree to be eaten by mosquitoes. This torture was called "mosquitoes" in the camps.

Interrogations of a number of people from the oversight and the prisoners revealed a system of arbitrariness and complete decay that had established itself in the USLON. Extortion and bribery of prisoners were widespread, as well as the misappropriation of clothing and food rations intended for prisoners. The trend of personal enrichment at the expense of prisoners developed on the basis of legalized abuse and terrorization of prisoners in the USLON. The oversight was formed from the most declassed and sometimes criminal elements, who were given complete freedom of action. The following methods of terrorizing prisoners were used:

Many organizers who were involved in creating the Solovetsky camp were executed.

The person who proposed to establish the camps on the Solovetsky Islands, the Archangel activist Ivan Vasilievich Bogovoy, was shot.

The first head of the camp, Nogtev, received 15 years of imprisonment, was released by amnesty, but died before being able to register in Moscow.

The second head of the camp, Eichmann, was shot as an English spy.

The head of the Solovetsky prison of special purpose, Apeter, was shot.

At the same time, for example, the prisoner of the Solovetsky camp Naftali Aronovich Frenkel, who proposed innovative ideas for the development of the camp and was one of the "godfathers" of the Gulag, advanced in his career and retired in 1947 as the head of the Main Administration of Camps for Railway Construction in the rank of Lieutenant General of the NKVD.

The Day of the Political Prisoner in the USSR was announced on October 30, 1990. On this day, the Solovetsky Memorial Stone was installed on Lubyanka Square in Moscow in memory of those who perished during the years of political repression. The stone itself was brought from the Solovetsky Islands.

Sources: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Соловецкий_лагерь_особого_назначения