The Gulag Archipelago Vol. 2 An Experiment in Literary Investigation - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The Archipelago Rises from the Sea I 29
~h was already a very old man, was imprisoned here, and he was
over a hundred years old when he was released after serving a
long term.'
Incidentally, the ancient history of the Solovetsky monastery
prison was the victim of a fashionable myth, disseminated only
in Soviet times, during the period of the Soviet prison camp on
Solovki, which deceived the writers of guidebooks and historical
descriptions--and nowadays one can read in several books that
the Solovetsky prison was a torture prison, that it had hooks for
the rack, and lasl)es, and torture with fire. But all these'were the
appurtenances of interrogation prisons in the era before Empress
Elitabeth, or of the Western Inquisition, and were not at all
typical of Russian monastery dungeons in general, and were
dreamed up here by an unscrupulous and also ignorant in~
vestigator.
The old Solovetsky Island people remember him very well.
It was the joker Ivanov, who bore the camp nickname of the
"antireligious germ." Formerly he had been a lay brother attached
to the Novgorod Archbishopric, arrested for selling church
valuables to the Swedes. He got to Solovki in 1925 and hustled
about to escape general work and death. He had made antireligious
propaganda among the prisoners his specialty, and of
course became a collaborator of. the ISCh (the Information and
Investigation Section-which was named very candidly!). But
in addition he excited the heads of the camp with his suggestions
that many treasures had been buried here by the monks-and
so they created a Commission for Excavations under his leadership.
This commission kept on digging many months. But, alas,
the monks had cheated the pliychological calculations of the
"4ntireligious germ": they had buried no treasures on Solovki.
At this point, to get out of the situation with honor, Ivanov went
around explaining the underground workshops, storehouse, and
defense installations as prison and torture facilities. The torture
instruments naturally could not be preserved so many centuries,
5. The state prison in Solovki existed from 1718 on. Visiting Solovki in the
eighties of the nineteenth century. the Commander of the Armies of the St.
Petersburg Military District. Grand Duke Vladimir Aleksandrovich, found the
military garrison there superfluous and he removed all the soldiers from Solovki.
In 1903 the Solovetsky prison ceased to exist. (A. S. Prugavin. Mo1UlStyrskiye
Tyurmy [Monastery Prisons). Posrednik Publishers, pp. 78. 81.)
30 I THE GULAG ARCHIPBLAGO
but the hooks of course (for hanging up carcllsses) were evidence
that there had been a rack here. It was more difficult to provide
a basis for the finding that no trace of nineteenth-century torture
had survived-so the conclusion was reached that "during the
past century the regime in the Solovetsky prison had been significantly
relaxed." The "discoveries" of the "antireligious germ"
had come right at the most appropriate time, had in some degree
reassured the disappointed administration .. and were published
in The Solovetsky Islands and subsequently as a monograph in
the Solovetsky printing shop-and by this means successfully
muddied the waters of historical truth. (This whole intrigue was
judged all'the more appropriate .because the flourishing Solovetsky
Monastery had been very famous and respected in all Russia up
to the time of the Revolution.) .
But when power passed into the hanps of the workers, what
was to be done' with these malevolent parasitical monks? They
sent Commissars, socially tried-and-true leaders, and they proclaimed
the monastery a state farm, and ordered the monks to
. pray less and to work harder for the~nefit of the workers and
peasants. The monks worked, and their herring, which was
astonishing in its flavor, and which they had been able to catch
because of their special knowledge of where and when to cast
nets, was shipped off to Moscow to be used for the Kremlin tables.
However, the abundance of valuables concentrated in the
monastery, especialiy in the sacristy, troubled some of the leaders
and overseers who had arrived there: instead of passing into the
workers' hands (i.e., their own), these valuables lay there as a
dead religious burden. And at that point, contradicting to it
certain degree the Criminal Code but corresponding in a very
genuine way.with the general spirit of expropriation of the
property of nonworkers, the monastery was set on fire· (on May
25, 1923); the buildings were damaged, and many valuables
disappeared from the sacristy; and, the principal thing, all the
inventory records burned up, and it was quite impossible to determine
how much and exactly what had disappeared.o
But without even conducting an investigation, what is our
revolutionary sense. of justice (sense of smell) going to hint to
6.- And the antireligiolls "germ" also referred to this fire, explaining the difficulty
in finding nowadays material proofs of the former prison .cells and torture
apparatus.