A pilgrimage to Sandarmokh and the Solovets Islands

The Solovets Islands - a group of islands in the White Sea that are part of the Arkhangelsk oblast in northwestern Russia - consist of three large islands: Solovets, Bolshoi Muksalma, and Anzersky, as well as several smaller ones.

The archipelago, defined by an inordinate beauty and variety of landscapes has, unfortunately, another association, albeit one not widely known - as a former penal colony dating back to tsarist times and, more recently, as "one of the cruelest concentration camps of the era of Communist rule."_1_

Subsequent to the breakdown of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the emergence of the new independent states, a degree of access to original documents of the Soviet secret police and to previously restricted materials became possible, providing new revelations about Stalin's crimes and the political terror of the early 1930s.

Accordingly, the circumstances behind the mass killings of 1,111 Solovets internees - including some 300 members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, who were transported under prison convoy from the main island in 1937 - was finally ascertained, six decades later, in 1997.

A three-volume scholarly documentary publication titled "Ostannia adresa. Do 60-richchia solovetskoi trahedii" (The Last Address. Toward the 60th Anniversary of the Tragedy on the Solovets Islands), that came out in Kyiv in 1997-1999, contains details of the executions of the prisoners at the Sandarmokh woods, some 19 kilometers outside of Medvezhiegorsk in Karelia.

Sandarmokh, referred to in NKVD files as "the habitual site for executions," was first opened for visitation in 1997. The first "Days of Remembrance" were held that year at Sandarmokh and the Solovets Islands at the initiative of the St. Petersburg Memorial Society.

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Nadia Svitlychna is a philologist, former political prisoner and human-rights activist and member of the External Representation of the Helsinki Group. Upon renouncing her Soviet citizenship, she was finally granted permission to emigrate to the United States in 1978. Ms. Svitlychna undertook a trip or, more properly, a pilgrimage this past summer to Sandarmokh and the Solovets Islands as part of a group that set out from Kyiv to take part in the Days of Remembrance for the victims of political terror and repression of the Stalin era.

Since coming to the United States in 1978, Ms. Svitlychna has worked for the Ukrainian service of Radio Liberty until her retirement and also as editor-in-chief of Vira (Faith), a quarterly publication of the United Ukrainian Orthodox Sisterhoods based in New Jersey.

Ms. Svitlychna gave an illustrated presentation about her journey at the New York-based Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the U.S. on November 2; an account of her journey appeared in Vira (No. 4, 2003).

Ms. Svitlychna's account for The Weekly follows, in translation by Ika Casanova.

by Nadia Svitlychna

A 10-day bus trip to the far north, organized by the Our Ukraine political bloc was undertaken on the morning of August 2 from the Podil district in Kyiv's city center by a diverse group of people who came together, setting out on a journey to commemorate the victims of Communist terror and political repression. Among those assembled were the Rev. Valerii Kopiika of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church and the Rev. Volodymyr Cherpak of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church - Kyiv Patriarchate, who concelebrated a moleben service at the Church of St. Mary the Protectress, asking for God's blessing on the participants of the journey.

The group comprised members of the Vasyl Stus Ukrainian Memorial Society, several journalists, six people whose forebears perished in the Gulag (the Russian acronym for Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei, or main camp administration), an Orthodox priest, a film director, as well as several students - in all, not more than 50 people. I was the only Ukrainian on the trip from abroad; last year, Beniamin Trokhymenko, who resides in the United States, undertook the trip upon learning in 1998 that his father, the noted philologist Mykola Trokhymenko, was executed at Sandarmokh.

It fell to Vasyl Ovsienko, former political prisoner and recipient of the Vasyl Stus Award, as a veteran of Solovets trips, to organize as well as bring some kind of order to the disparate group, which varied in age as well as interests, and needless to say, in terms of personalities.

Heeding Mr. Ovsienko's instructions and advice, we took with us, apart from personal belongings and necessities, the following: a national flag of Ukraine, a flag of the Our Ukraine party, as well as smaller flags, icons, candles, bread, boughs of guelder rose, or "kalyna" (used in parts of Ukraine as a national symbol) and earth from the gravesites of the more recent victims of political repression who have been laid to rest in Kyiv's Baikove Cemetery. We also took with us publications pertaining to this particular stage of Ukrainian history, as well as the latest publication of Memorial to present to the Ukrainian community of Karelia and for the museums of the region.

The aim of our journey was to take part in the Days of Remembrance for the victims of Stalin's terror and political repression. The Days of Remembrance came into being on the initiative of the St. Petersburg Memorial Society. They are held annually on August 5 at Sandarmokh and on August 7 on Solovets.

The very name "Solovets" (or "Solovky" as the archipelago is commonly referred to in Ukrainian) has been indelibly ingrained in the general consciousness, not only of Ukrainians but of all the peoples of the former Soviet republics, as being synonymous with imprisonment and the ruthlessness of the Stalinist system.

It was only six years ago - thanks to the efforts of the late Benyamin Yofe, head of the St. Petersburg Memorial (after whom the chapter is now named) and Yuri Dmytriev, president of the Socio-Juridical Academy for the Defense of the Republic of Karelia - that light was shed on what happened at the Sandarmokh woods near Medvezhiegorsk in Karelia. Their investigations have served to fill in one of the blackest of the so-called "blank pages" of recent history - the uncovering of over 9,000 victims of mass executions whose remains were found in 150 mass graves. Among the victims were 1,111 Solovets internees who were transported from the island in 1937 whose fate had remained unkown for decades.

Having access to documents of the St. Petersburg KGB archives, the St. Petersburg Memorial was able to procure lists of the Solovets internees who were executed at Sandarmokh. Among the executed were some 300 Ukrainians.

With access to original documents and previously restricted materials, a three-volume scholarly documentary publication titled "Ostannia Adresa. Do 60-Richchia Solovetskoyi Trahedii" (The Last Address: On the 60th Anniversary of the Tragedy on the Solovets Islands), came out in Kyiv in 1997-1999.

Subsequently, a series of documentary films was produced, but these films are relatively seldom screened in Ukraine due to generally unsupportive government policies.

Then again, it is difficult to account for the apparent indifference on the part of the Ukrainian diaspora to the appearance of these documents.

Among other publications that have come out since "The Last Address" are such works as "Ukrainski Solovky," an overview co-authored by Dmytro Viedienev and Serhii Shevchenko, which was published in Kyiv in 2001, and "Rubaly Lis" (They Were Cutting Down the Forest) a memoir by Larysa Krushelnytska, which came out in Lviv in 2001; the title is a reference to a novel by the author's grandfather titled "Rubayut Lis" (They are Cutting Down the Forest).

In continuing with my account of this year's expedition to Sandarmokh and the Solovets Islands, I will limit myself to the Days of Remembrance, and any relevant background information. I will not dwell on the first three days of our trip, apart from noting that this part of the journey entailed stops in St. Petersburg and Petrozavodsk, as well as meetings at the Consulate General of Ukraine and with the Ukrainian community in Karelia, the latter as represented by the Kalyna Ukrainian Association.

We started our trip on the morning of August 5. Upon arriving in Medvezhiegorsk, we were struck by the beauty of the Karelian landscape - the majesty of Lake Onezk, the Kivach Waterfall on the Suna River, the richness of vegetation, the rugged rock formations.

At 11 a.m., we set out for the Sandarmokh woods, traveling along a 19-kilometer stretch of road, heading in the direction of Povenets. The buses dropped us off at the entrance to the woods-cemetery.

Upon approaching the site, the first thing one sees is a boulder with a bas-relief and the inscription - "Do Not Kill One Another." A little further, there is a rock from Solovets, with an affixed plate which states that 1,111 people who were held as prisoners in Solovets were executed at this site in 1937 on October 27 and November 1, 2, 3 and 4.

The reason that August 5 has been designated as a Day of Remembrance at Sandarmokh has the following explanation. On July 2, 1937, the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (of bolsheviks) (CC AUCP[b]) passed a resolution concerning "anti-Soviet elements" which, in effect, served as the doctrinal basis for the Great Terror.

The resolution required all CP secretaries on the oblast, regional [krai] and republic levels, as well state security agents at the NKVD to organize, within five days, special troikas that were to come up with quotas designating the number of people who were to be executed or sent into exile.

This nefarious resolution was enacted on August 5, 1937, in accordance with Order No. 00447. The operation was to be in effect for four months. In actual fact, the operation continued through November 15, 1937, in accordance with a decision taken by the CC AUCP(b). The implementation of said resolution constituted the most massive purge carried out by the Kremlin leadership in the history of the Soviet Union.

The work of the troikas encompassed all sectors of the population: the kurkuls, or rich peasants, so-called "criminals," "counter-revolutionaries" of various hues, "guerrilla/resistance fighters," "tserkovnyky" (religious believers), "spies," "Trotskyites," "dyversanty" (subverters), "shkidnyky" (those who disturb public order from the system's point of view) and "bourgeois nationalists" - among the latter, the Ukrainian intelligentsia which, according to Stalin, "did not deserve to be trusted."

The quotas were set according to two categories: Category I - execution; Category II - imprisonment; the ratio of executions to imprisonment was 3 to 1.

Reports of over-fulfilling the quotas started coming in from the "lower echelons," fostering, in turn, a sense of competition endemic to the socialist order, soon to be followed by requests to increase the quotas, especially with regard to Category I.

Thus, Israel Leplevsky, a People's Commissar at the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, called for an increase in quotas on three occasions, and the newly appointed People's Commissar Aleksandr Uspensky, submitted two such requests. Moscow did not disappoint them.

In the course of 15 months of this campaign - with no due process (i.e., without legal investigation, defense or trial), and, for the most part, in the absence of the accused - 681,692 death sentences were issued on the basis of the lists drawn up.

The sentences were carried out immediately - in the spirit of Lenin's exhortation to be exemplary in one's ruthlessness, to shoot without any idiotic muddling or lack of resolve.

With the passage of the aforementioned resolution, purges were also conducted in the concentration camps. Thus, the head of the special-regimen camp in Solovets (Russian acronym, SLON, subsequently, STON), a man by the name of Eichman, received an order to draw up a list for executing 1,850 prisoners. Included in the lists were the 1,111 Solovets internees whose names have become known today.

An NKVD captain by the name of Mykhail Matveyev almost single-handedly shot the prisoners using a pistol at the Sandarmokh woods during a span of five days. After the first day of this slaughter, which took place on October 27, 1973, the executions had to be postponed until November 1 due to an ambush on the convoy by the sentenced prisoners in an attempt to escape.

The transport of subsequent groups of prisoners from the transit prison to the final destination, the so-called "final address," i.e., place of execution in southern Karelia, was perfected soon enough: henceforth, the prisoners were stripped to their underwear and bound in pairs.

Capt. Matveyev (born in 1892) lived to a ripe old age. Initially, he was given official recognition for his part in the executions during the 20th anniversary celebrations of the October Revolution; later, he was sentenced on criminal charges, without possibility of rehabilitation. He lived until the age of 81 and died a natural death.

For the Solovets contingent of internees, the previously mentioned Eichman selected members of the intelligentsia of practically all the nationalities that comprised the USSR. Among the imprisoned were some 300 Ukrainians. Their numbers included such prominent figures as the neoclassicist poet and critic Mykola Zerov; the founder and director of the famed Berezil Theater Les Kurbas; playwright Mykola Kulish; the historians Matvii Yavorsky and Serhii Hrushevsky (the latter, the brother of Mykhailo Hrushevsky), Minister of Education of the Ukrainian National Republic Anton Krushelnytsky and his sons, Ostap and Bohdan (other members of the family perished in other camps); writer and critic Hryhorii Epik; the writers Oleksa Blyzko, Valerian Pidmohylnyi, Valerian Polischuk, Mykhailo Semenko, Oleksa Slisarenko, Marko Voronyi, Mykhailo Yalovyi; (the writer Yevhen Pluzhnyk, one of the finest Ukrainian poets of the 1920s, did not live to be executed; he died of tuberculosis in a prison hospital); and Catholic priests, among them, the Rev. P. Weigel, who was sent by the Vatican to assess the persecution of believers in the USSR.

* * *

For this year's observances of the Days of Remembrance, which are held under the aegis of the St. Petersburg Memorial, people arrived from a variety of places, among them, Finland, Poland, Russia, Belarus and Great Britain as well as from various parts of Karelia. The Ukrainian contingent was the most numerous, but, unfortunately, without any official representation. Even those Ukrainian national deputies to the Verkhovna Rada who had signed up for the trip, did not show up. So, our group was a bit discomfited when listening to such representatives as the general consul of Poland, a deputy of the Russian Duma, and government representatives of Finland.

Serving as spokesmen for our group were Mr. Ovsienko, Valentyna Bovsunivska and Stanislav Volkov - the latter two, descendants of the victims of the Great Terror who perished in Solovets. As part of the commemoration, Antonina Lystopad from Krasnodon read her poem, titled "Solovetskyi Rekviem" (The Solovets Requiem). The Rev. Volodymyr Cherpak of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Kyiv Patriarchate said a panakhyda (memorial service) at the site of the wooden cross, the work of Mykola Malyshko, which was brought to Sandarmokh in 1997 by the Ukrainian literary critic and former Soviet political prisoner Yevhen Sverstiuk. Subsequently, two additional panakhyda services were said on the main island of Solovets.

The pilgrimage to the at once hallowed and damned Solovets archipelago deserves a separate retelling. I will limit myself to relating what created the strongest impression. Foremost was an unfathomably overwhelming sense of contrast - a most jarring dissonance occasioned by, on the one hand, the visible traces of the former "vale of suffering and despair," and, on the other, the richness and beauty of the natural landscape - reinforced, in turn, by the inordinate beauty of such architectural landmarks as the 16th century monastery of the Stavropigian Order and its monumental towers, which during the 1930s had served as a camp for political prisoners; and the Church of the Ascension on Siekirnaya Hill, illuminated by the Solovets lighthouse, which formerly served as a place for solitary confinement.

The iconostases, where the "parashas," or toilet buckets, were customarily placed, have already been restored. The writings and markings on the church walls have been, for the most part, removed and painted over, although occasionally one can still discern the names of prisoners on some of the walls. And, there is still a peephole in the dilapidated doors of a now once-again active church.

Another very strong impression was made during a visit to the prison cell of the last kish (central administrative body of the Zaporozhian Sich) otaman of the Zaporozhian Sitch, Petro Kalnyshevsky (1765-1775) - the first "Ukrainianizer" of Solovets. Russian Empress Catherine II, having ordered the abolition of the Zaporozhian Host (1775), had Kalnyshevsky imprisoned in a cell beneath the tower of the Solovets kremlin, or fortress, from which he was freed 25 years later by decree of Tsar Alexander I. After his release, Kalnyshevsky became a monk at the age of 110; he died two years later, on October 30, 1803, on the island of Solovets.

Although access to Kalnyshevsky's cell is off limits to laymen, a number of people from our group were able to gain access to this sacred site for Ukrainians. We adorned the cell with branches of guelder rose, lit the candles we had brought, set out the bread and said a prayer to the singing of the Kyiv kobzar (bard) Taras Kompanychenko and, among others, Iryna Atamaniuk, Ivan Kushnir and Oles Obertas.

It is worth noting that among this year's group of travelers to Solovets was a substantial number of young people, including some 10 journalists. Again, this is a topic for a separate account.

Upon our return to Ukraine, small conifers from the Solovets Island were transplanted in Kyiv's Baikove Cemetery at the gravesites of the most recent Ukrainian political dissidents and prisoners (associated with the human-rights movement in the mid-1960s through the 1980s): Yurii Lytvyn (1934-1984), participant in the Ukrainian nationalist movement and active in the production of samvydav literature and poetry; teacher and founding member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group Oleksa Tykhyi (1927- 1984); a leading poet of the '60s generation and literary critic Vasyl Stus (1938-1985); and noted literary critic Ivan Svitlychny (1929-1992). Also placed at the cemetery was earth from the symbolic resting places of Kish Otaman Petro Kalnyshevsky (1690-1803) and the writer Yevhen Pluzhnyk (1898-1936), and stones from the sites of execution in Solovets and Sandarmokh.

Recently, an unofficial association called Ukrainski Solovky (Ukrainian Solovets) was founded in Ukraine, with Mr. Ovsienko as general coordinator for organized expeditions-pilgrimages to Sandarmokh and the Solovets Islands.

Interested individuals, including any Ukrainians from the diaspora, may contact the association at the following address, c/o Vasyl Ovsienko, vul. Kikvidze 30, kv. 60, Kyiv, 01103, Ukraine; telephone, 011-380-44-295-12-11.

One can only hope that by August 5 of next year, there will already be a Ukrainian chapel standing in Sandarmokh, as designed by the young Ukrainian architect Ivan Kushnir of Kyiv. (Financial support for the project has been pledged by Our Ukraine; the Kalyna Cultural Association of Karelia, which is headed by Laryssa Skrypnykova, has taken upon itself to overseeing the upkeep of the grounds.)

The black-and-white granite rock which was brought back from Solovets as a memento for Viktor Yushchenko, the head of the Our Ukraine political bloc, will serve as a reminder of this commitment - especially, the three symbolic natural red spots that the stone bears.

1. Dr. Yuri Shapoval, leading authority on the history of Communist rule in Ukraine and head of the Center for Historical and Political Studies at the Institute of Political and Ethnonational Studies at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Kyiv, in a lecture delivered in July 2001 on the invitation of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. [Back to Text]

Dr. Shapoval is the author and co-author of many publications based on archival documents of the Soviet secret police known successively as the Cheka, GPU, NKVD and KGB, as well as other Communist Party organs. He is co-author, with V. Prystaiko and V. Zolotariov, of the book "ChK-GPU-NKVD v Ukraine: Osoby, Fakty, Dokumenty" (The Cheka-GPU-NKVD in Ukraine: Personalities, Facts, Documents), which came out in 1997.

Solovets Islands: pertinent data

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, December 14, 2003, No. 50, Vol. LXXI

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