We arrive at the Solovetsky Islands at 8:00am. Northern Russia is not exactly a hotbed of tourist activity, and there aren’t all that many places to visit, so I guess Oceania Cruises decided on this place for lack of other options.
This is our first tender port, so we will be transported to the island on the ship’s lifeboats. This is a pretty long tender – about 25 minutes. We have the morning to catch up on blogging and reading as our excursion, Solovestsky’s Botanical Gardens, isn’t starting until 3pm. We both agreed on this tour for a couple of reasons. First, we were curious to answer the question: What will grow this far north? And second, the tour of the other two notable landmarks, Solovetsky Monastery and the Soviet Gulag didn’t sound all that interesting.
Gulag you say? Yes, this is the location of the very first of many, many of the infamous Soviet Gulags. For those of you young enough to not be familiar with this term, here is Wikipedia’s definition: “an acronym of Main Administration of Camps, the word was the government agency in charge of the Soviet forced-labour camp-system that was set up under Vladimir Lenin and reached its peak during Joseph Stalin’srule from the 1930s to the early 1950s.”
Here is a little more information about this prison in particular, again from Wikipedia:“The Solovki special camp (later the Solovki special prison), was set up in 1923 on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea as a remote and inaccessible place of detention, primarily intended for socialist opponents of Soviet Russia’s new Bolshevik regime. At first, the Anarchists, Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries enjoyed a special status there and were not made to work. Gradually, prisoners from the old regime (priests, gentry, and White Army officers) joined them and the guards and the ordinary criminals worked together to keep the “politicals” in order.
“This was the nucleus from which the entire Gulag grew, thanks to its proximity to the first great construction project of the Five-Year Plans, the White Sea – Baltic Canal. Indeed, the phrase used to describe the group of islands, “Solovetsky Archipelago”, seems to have suggested to Solzhenitsyn the title of his classic work, Gulag Archipelago.”
The Solovetsky Monastery, the other tour option, was taken over and converted to be part of this prison. By the time it was closed, it has been estimated that overone millionprisoners died.
The Botanical Garden tour is set to last about an hour. We hop into an old Russian bus for a very bumpy 4-kilometer ride over dirt roads to the gardens, which were once part of the monastery and then the gulag. We enter the gardens and first see a very well-drawn map of the area where we will be walking. We start with a short stroll along a path lined with Siberian Pines planted by prisoners during the period when the Soviet government operated the gulag. At that point, we were being eaten alive by mosquitos and pesky gnats. Fortunately our guide, Maxim, has brought along some bug spray, which was passed around. It helped a bit.
I’m walking along wondering what it must have been like for those prisoners, wondering what they might have thought if they knew that someday American tourists would be on a guided tour of the place where they worked as virtual slaves. They would have thought that they had lost their minds. I can’t get out of my mind how this place, once one of Russia’s most famous and holy places was turned into a virtual death camp. Desecration on an industrial scale. Hard to believe.
The gardens are tended today by five employees, with some volunteer help from some of the residents of the island, of which there are fewer than a thousand. The gardens were founded in 1822, and contain trees and plants normally found in much more southern climates. There are two reasons for this anomaly: 1) the gardens are located in a “heat-trapping” valley, and 2) an intricate system of underwater hot-water pipes was installed to keep the soil warm, even during the winter.
This is Maxim’s first day as a tour guide, and he is both nervous and not terribly full of botanical information. He is a university student studying foreign relations, so this topic is a little far afield for him. Very nice guy, though, and we are impressed with his knowledge of the history of the place.
One of the places we visit was a dacha, which is a Russian seasonal home. In this case, it was a summer home for the head of the monastery, and then for the head of the prison camp. It’s on the top of a hill overlooking the gardens and the monastery. It’s in pretty rough shape now, but the window boxes and plants around the windows are quite lovely. We are there at the same time as a church school group from southern Russia led by an enormous monk. His presence alone added something special to being there.
Cathy was absolutely delighted with the gardens. Here are her comments: The enormous monk looked just like Rasputin. The gardens were wonderful. Lots of spring flowers that bloom at home in May and June. Huge columbine in very different colors, roses, pansies, and lots of other stuff I didn’t recognize. It was really nice. The guide was way ahead and I just meandered through the flower beds. The whole place was really beautiful but SUCH bad juju! One million people died. That’s why we didn’t go to the monastery or gulag tour…too depressing.
We hop back on the old bus and it’s back to the dock. We have a chance to meet two new people, Jay and Diane from Ashland, Kentucky. We chat it up with them, hoping to see them on some other tours later on. Nice people.
Before we leave for the ship, we take one more photo of the monastery, which heads up this post. Before we end, by the way, let me insert some Wikipedia information because our mention of this important place has not done it justice: “The Solovetsky Monastery was founded in 1436 by the monk Zosima. … Zosima later became the first hegumen of the monastery. After Marfa Boretskaya, wife of the posadnik of Novgorod, donated her lands at Kem and Summa to the monastery in 1450, the monastery quickly enlarged its holdings, which was situated strategically on the shores of the White Sea.
“In the 15th and 16th centuries, the monastery extended its commercial activities, becoming an economic and political center of the White Sea region. This included saltworks (in the 1660s, it owned 54 of them), trapping, fishing, mica works, ironworks, pearl works, among others. Archmandrites of the monastery were appointed by the tsar himself and the patriarch.
“By the 17th century, the Solovetsky Monastery had about 350 monks, 600-700 servants, artisans and peasants. In the 1650s and 1660s, the monastery was one of the strongholds of the Old Believers of the Raskol (schism) in the Russian Orthodox Church.”
The article goes on to say: “A small brotherhood of monks has re-established activities in the monastery after the collapse of communism, and it currently houses about ten monks. The monastery has also recently been extensively repaired, but remains under reconstruction. The Solovetsky Monastery is also an historical and architectural museum. It was one of the first Russian sites to have been inscribed in the UNESCO World Heritage List.”
Very shortly after we arrive back on the ship, the fog rolls in. By the time we depart at 7pm, we can see nothing, and for hours we hear the ship’s foghorn sounding every two minutes as a warning. A fitting ending to a very interesting day where we were at the site of two notable aspects of Russian history, one sublime and exalted, the other depraved and evil. Thank God the former is being resurrected and the latter is in history’s rear view mirror.
