Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [28]
The monastery complex had served as a prison before. Solovetsky monks, faithful servants of the Czar, had helped incarcerate his political opponents— wayward priests and the odd rebel aristocrat among them—from the sixteenth century.3 The loneliness, high walls, cold winds, and seagulls that had once attracted a particular breed of solitary monk also appealed to the Bolshevik imagination. As early as May 1920, an article in the Arkhangelsk edition of the government newspaper Izvestiya described the islands as an ideal site for a work camp: “the harsh environment, the work regime, the fight against the forces of nature will be a good school for all criminal elements.” The first handful of prisoners began arriving that summer.4
Others, higher up the chain of command, were interested in the islands as well. Dzerzhinsky himself appears to have persuaded the Soviet government to hand the confiscated monastery property, along with the property of Petrominsk and Kholmogory monasteries, over to the Cheka—by then renamed the GPU, then the OGPU, or Unified State Political Administration—on October 13, 1923. Together they were christened the “camps of special significance.” 5 Later, they would be known as “northern camps of special significance”: Severnye Lagery Osobogo Naznacheniya, or SLON. In Russian, slon means “elephant.” The name was to become a source of humor, of irony, and of menace.
In the survivors’ folklore, Solovetsky was forever after remembered as the “first camp of the Gulag.”6 Although scholars have more recently pointed out that a wide range of other camps and prisons also existed at this time, Solovetsky clearly played a special role not only in survivors’ memories, but also in the memory of the Soviet secret police. 7 Solovetsky may have not been the only prison in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, but it was their prison, the OGPU’s prison, where the OGPU first learned how to use slave labor for profit. In a 1945 lecture on the history of the camp system, Comrade Nasedkin, then the system’s chief administrator, claimed not only that the camp system originated in Solovetsky in 1920, but also that the entire Soviet system of “forced labor as a method of re-education” began there in 1926.8 This statement at first appears odd, considering that forced labor had been a recognized form of punishment in the Soviet Union since 1918. It appears less odd, however, if we look at how the concept of forced labor evolved on Solovetsky itself. For although everyone worked on the island, prisoners were not, in the early days, organized into anything remotely resembling a “system.” Nor is there evidence that their labor was in any way profitable.
To begin with, one of the two main categories of prisoner on Solovetsky did not, at first, work at all. These were the approximately 300 socialist “politicals,” who had actually begun to arrive on the island in June 1923. Sent from the Petrominsk camp, as well as from Butyrka and the other Moscow and Petrograd prisons, they were taken upon arrival immediately to the smaller Savvatyevo monastery, several kilometers north of the main monastery complex. There, the Solovetsky guards could ensure that they were isolated from other prisoners, and could not infect them with their enthusiasm for hunger strikes and protests.
Initially, the socialists were granted the “privileges” of political prisoners that they had so long demanded: newspapers, books, and, within a barbed-wire enclosure, freedom of movement and freedom from work. Each of the major political parties—the Left