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underground, from my student years, and from the many different towns and cities where we had lived during our wanderings.” The prisoners were allowed free run of the prison. They organized morning gymnastic sessions, founded an orchestra and a chorus, created a “club” supplied with foreign journals and a good library. According to tradition— dating back to pre-revolutionary days—every prisoner left behind his books after he was freed. A prisoners’ council assigned everyone cells, some of which were beautifully supplied with carpets, on the floors and the walls. Another prisoner remembered that “we strolled along the corridors as if they were boulevards.”54 To Babina, prison life seemed unreal: “Can’t they even lock us up seriously?” 55

The Cheka leadership wondered the same. In a report to Dzerzhinsky dated January 1921, a prison inspector complained angrily that in Butyrka prison “men and women walk about together, anarchist and counter-revolutionary slogans hang from the walls of cells.”56 Dzerzhinsky recommended a stricter regime—but when a stricter regime was brought in, the prisoners protested again.

The Butyrka idyll ended soon after. In April 1921, according to a letter which a group of Social Revolutionaries wrote to the authorities, “between 3 and 4 a.m., an armed group of men entered the cells and began to attack . . . women were dragged out of their cells by their arms and legs and hair, others were beaten up.” In their own later reports, the Cheka described this “incident” as a rebellion which had got out of hand—and resolved never again to allow so many political prisoners to accumulate in Moscow.57 By February 1922, the “socialist wing” of the Butyrka prison had been dissolved.

Repression had not worked. Concessions had not worked. Even in its special camps, the Cheka could not control its special prisoners. Nor could it prevent news about them from reaching the outside world. Clearly, another solution was needed, both for them and for all the other unruly counter-revolutionaries gathered in the special prison system. By the spring of 1923, a solution had been found: Solovetsky.

Chapter 2

“THE FIRST CAMP OF THE GULAG”

There are monks and priests, Prostitutes and thieves. There are princes here, and barons— But their crowns have been taken away . . . On this island, the rich have no home No castles, no palaces . . .

—Anonymous prisoner’s poem written on the Solovetsky Islands, 19261

LOOKING DOWN from the top of the bell tower in the far corner of the old Solovetsky monastery, the outlines of the Solovetsky concentration camp are still visible today. A thick stone wall still surrounds the Solovetsky kremlin, the central collection of monastery buildings and churches, originally built in the fifteenth century, which later housed the main administration of the camp and its central barracks. Just to the west lie the docks, now home to a few fishing boats, once crowded with the prisoners who arrived weekly and sometimes daily here during the short navigation season of the far north. Beyond them stretch the flat expanses of the White Sea. From here, the boat to Kem, the mainland transit camp from which prisoners once embarked for their journey, takes several hours. The ride to Arkhangelsk, the largest White Sea port and the regional capital, requires an overnight journey.

The Solovetsky archipelago, in the White Sea

Looking north, it is just possible to see the faintest outlines of Sekirka, the hilltop church whose cellars once contained Solovetsky’s notorious punishment cells. To the east stands the power station built by the prisoners, still very much in use today. Just behind it lies the stretch of land where the botanical garden used to be. There, in the early days of the camp, some of the prisoners grew experimental plants, trying to determine what, if anything, might usefully be harvested in the far north.

Finally, beyond the botanical garden, lie the other islands in the Solovetsky chain. Scattered across the White Sea are Bolshaya Muksalma, where prisoners once bred silver-black foxes