Each year, thousands of Russian Orthodox pilgrims trek to these windswept islands near the Arctic Circle to pray at the onion-domed churches of a gloomy monastery that dates from the 15th century. The pristine lakes and forests also lure adventure travellers who fish and hike and sail their yachts in the choppy White Sea waters.
Less than 70 years ago, however, the Solovetsky Islands – known locally as Solovki – were the grim endpoint for the first political prisoners of the Soviet Union. Some of the country's top scientists, artists, clergymen and scholars – all branded enemies of the people by the zealous Bolshevik state – were dispatched here in overcrowded boats and thousands were worked to death.
The prison served as a blueprint for the vast network of slave-labour camps – “the gulag archipelago,” as the late Nobel-winning writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn named it – that spread across the Soviet Union and killed millions. The word gulag (an acronym from the Russian for “main camp administration”) became synonymous around the world with forced labour and state repression in general.
Today at Solovki, the barbed wire and metal bars are gone and towering crucifixes again sit atop the church and cathedral steeples. Orthodox services are held twice a day and millions of dollars of state funds have poured into restoring the 600-year-old fortress, which gleams like a white beacon against the grey sky.
But still there is no peace.
An unholy feud has erupted between the monastery, which is home to about 40 Russian Orthodox monks, and a small museum that runs tours and mounts exhibits about the area's storied past. The church wants to evict the museum not just from the walled monastery complex but off the islands altogether. It argues that the land was stolen by the Soviets in 1920 and should be returned to the church. The museum replies that the gulag is a vital part of Russian history and its victims must be commemorated.
So far, the church appears to be winning this rancorous dispute. A group of well-connected Russian politicians and academics has taken the church's side and appealed to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to support the monastery's bid to control the islands and halt all tourism development, which underscores this country's current reluctance to confront the full horrors of the Soviet regime.
In the days after perestroika and the fall of the Soviet Union, the story of the imprisonment of millions of dissidents, peasants and members of ethnic minorities was at the top of the national discussion. In today's resurgent Russia, the image of the labour camps has undergone a gradual but unmistakable makeover.
School textbooks now describe Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin's terror of the 1930s to the 1950s as a regrettable but necessary “instrument of development” that helped the young communist state industrialize quickly and assume its status as a world superpower.
While Mr. Putin has never gone so far as to praise the prison camps, the fiery former president and still-dominant force in Russian politics has played down Stalin's crimes by suggesting, for example, that the history of the United States includes just as many dark moments, including the Second World War bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
“We should never allow others to make us feel guilty,” he has said.
Many human-rights activists fear that Russia – with the tacit blessing of its political and religious leaders – is erasing one of the darkest periods of its past.
Death by work or hunger
According to Solovki tour guide and resident Anna Yakovleva, this is what awaited political prisoners who arrived on the island in the early 1930s: After a choppy three-hour boat trip, they were herded inside the cavernous Trinity Cathedral, which was transformed into a sinister triage station, where the fates of inmates were decided by a stroke of the pen.
