Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Solovki prison camp
Summary
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. The first book on the Gulag, namely, In the Claws of the GPU (1934) by Francišak Aljachnovič, described the Solovki prison camp.
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.
In one way, Solovki and the White Sea Canal broke a basic rule of the Gulag: they were both far too close to the border. This facilitated a number of daring escapes in the 1920s; as war loomed in the late 1930s it led to the closure of the Solovki special prison. Its several thousand inmates were transferred elsewhere, or shot on the mainland and on Solovki.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn called Solovki the "mother of the GULAG".
Historically, the Solovetsky Islands were the location of the famous Russian Orthodox Solovetsky Monastery complex. It was a centre of economic activity with over three hundred monks, and also a forepost of Russian naval power in the North, repelling foreign attacks during the Time of Troubles, the Crimean War, and the Russian Civil War. In the autumn of 1922 the process of transitioning from a monastery to concentration camp began.
All wooden buildings were burned, and many of the monks were murdered, including the Igumen. The remaining monks were sent to forced labour camps in central Russia.
The unpublished decree of 3 November 1923 led to the conversion of the monastery buildings into the Solovki "special" camp: the Solovetsky Lager Osobogo Naznachenia or SLON in Russian (the acronym is a play on the Russian word for elephant).
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.