IN 2010, I flew to the Solovetsky Islands (or Solovki), within the Arctic Circle in the White Sea, ice-bound for eight months of the year, but in summer often bathed in sunlight, even at midnight. To me, Solovki had a luminous natural beauty that was enchanting, but, at the same time, I had a sense of darkness as I thought of what had gone on there during the Communist period.
A monastery was founded on the largest of the Solovetsky Islands in the 15th century, and developed dramatically in the next century. By the 17th century, the monastery had a library of 1500 books and 1000 icons. In the 20th century, Solovki became a place of appalling human suffering: from 1923 to 1939, it was a labour camp, and, by 1930, it held more than 53,000 prisoners. About 40,000 of them are buried on the islands. A torture chamber (the Sekirka) was housed in the Church of the Beheading of St John the Baptist, on Sekirka Hill, from which 365 steps led down a steep incline to a lake below. Here, prisoners had to sit all day on poles (their feet were not allowed to touch the ground), which were fixed between the walls. If they fell off, they were beaten or were attached to a log and thrown down the steps to the lake below.
Boris Shiryaev, the son of a Russian landowner, was imprisoned in Solovki from 1922 to 1929. He wrote a memoir in which he describes a Russian Orthodox priest called Fr Nikodim — known as the “consoling priest” — who was a gifted storyteller and kept his fellow prisoners spellbound every evening with his stories. One Christmastide, he was caught celebrating the liturgy, and was imprisoned in the Sekirka, where, to keep warm at night, the prisoners would form what was called “a stack”: four lay on their side, with another four on top crosswise and another four on top of them, like a stack of logs; their breath kept them warm.
To help the prisoners get to sleep, Fr Nikodim would tell stories “and a weight would be lifted from our hearts”, as a fellow prisoner told Boris Shiryaev. When would Fr Nikodim’s sentence come to an end, Boris asked, to which came the reply: “He’s already come to the end — on Easter Day. He led Easter matins in a corner, after which we greeted each other with ‘Christ is risen!’. We then all lay down in stack formation, and as we drifted off to sleep he told us a ‘story’ about Christ’s resurrection. In the morning, we emerged from the stack, but our ‘consoling priest’ did not get up. We tried to wake him, but he was already cold.”
DURING my visit in 2010, I explored the monastery buildings, the Transfiguration Cathedral, where Fr Nikodim had told his stories, and the great refectory, which had been whitewashed to obliterate the prisoners’ messages carved into the walls. I began to feel very cold. Two monks crossed this great space, disappeared into a small side chapel, and started to sing vespers: the sound lightened the weight of the place.
When I talked to the Abbot, I asked him whether he saw the monastery’s prayer as a way to help to redeem the past. He replied simply: “This is a special place; we feel that here Christ is close.” For me, Fr Nikodim and other martyrs like him are part of that “presence”; they help to turn the past terrible darkness into light.
Xenia Dennen chairs the Keston Institute. keston.org.uk