The Solovki Camp

The Solovetsky Camp of Special Purpose (SLON), established in 1923 in the confiscated monastery on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea — the first and most symbolic of the Soviet concentration camps, the prototype of the whole Gulag, through which a great number of bishops and clergy passed. This file treats Solovki as the emblematic camp of the persecuted Church, and above all the two documents its imprisoned hierarchs produced: the Solovki Memorandum of 1926, addressed to the Soviet government, and the episcopal response of 1927 to Metropolitan Sergius’s Declaration — the courageous witness of the “Solovki bishops.”

Tradition: Russian Orthodox

The Monastery Turned Camp

The Solovetsky Islands, in the White Sea near the Arctic Circle, had for centuries been the site of one of the greatest and most austere monasteries of the Russian North, the Solovetsky (Solovki) Monastery. In 1920 the monastery was suppressed, and in 1923 the Soviet state established on the islands the Solovetsky Camp of Special Purpose — known by its Russian acronym SLON (Solovetskii Lager’ Osobogo Naznacheniia). Solovki was the first large camp of the emerging Soviet penal system and became the laboratory and prototype of the entire Gulag: the place where the methods of forced labour, the regime of the camps, and the economics of slave labour were first developed on a large scale (Applebaum, Gulag: A History, Doubleday, 2003, on Solovki as the seed and model of the Gulag; Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, on Solovki as the “mother” of the camp system). It was, with a bitter fittingness, a monastery of the North turned into the first island of the “archipelago” of the camps.

The Solovki Bishops

Among the many thousands imprisoned on Solovki in the 1920s was a remarkable concentration of the Russian episcopate. Bishops and clergy were sent there in such numbers that at times some two dozen or more hierarchs were imprisoned on the islands simultaneously, forming an informal council of confessor-bishops — the “Solovki bishops” (solovetskie episkopy) — who continued, even in captivity, to deliberate on the grave questions facing the Church (the presence of a large body of imprisoned bishops on Solovki in the mid-1920s is documented in the scholarship of the camp and of the Church; by 1926 the number of imprisoned hierarchs on Solovki is given as around two dozen). That the Church’s bishops should hold council in a concentration camp is one of the starkest images of the persecution, and it produced two documents of lasting importance.

The Solovki Memorandum of 1926

The first was the Memorandum (or Appeal) of the Solovki Bishops, addressed to the Soviet government and dated 9 June 1926. In it the imprisoned hierarchs set out, with dignity and without either servility or futile defiance, the Church’s position on its relation to the atheist state. They accepted the political fact of the Soviet order and disclaimed any political struggle against it; but they insisted, on principle, on the Church’s freedom in matters of faith and conscience, denounced the ongoing persecution as a violation of the state’s own declared principle of the separation of Church and state, and rejected the Renovationist schism the state was sponsoring — asking, in effect, not for privilege but for the honest application of the state’s own law on religious freedom (the Solovki Memorandum of 9 June 1926, its authorship by the imprisoned bishops and its content, is documented in the histories of the period; the text calls for the consistent implementation of the separation of Church and state and denounces the persecution as its violation). The Memorandum is remembered as a model of confessing witness: a statement of the limits of the Church’s submission to the civil power, made by men wholly in that power’s hands.

The Response to Sergius’s Declaration, 1927

The second document came the following year and belongs to the heart of the Sergianism controversy. In July 1927, Metropolitan Sergius (Stragorodsky), the deputy locum tenens then governing the Church in the imprisoned Metropolitan Peter’s place, issued his Declaration of 20/29 July 1927, pledging the Church’s loyalty to the Soviet government and expressing the wish that its joys and sorrows be the Church’s own — a document that many clergy and faithful regarded as a capitulation to the persecutors and that split the Church (on the Declaration and the origins of “Sergianism,” see St. Tikhon and the Patriarchal Church and The Glorifications: Methodology). The imprisoned Solovki bishops responded. In an appeal to Metropolitan Sergius dated to September 1927, a group of the Solovki hierarchs — some seventeen bishops, by the common account — set out their criticism of the Declaration: while affirming, as they had in 1926, their acceptance of the civil authority in political matters and their readiness for loyalty within the bounds of conscience, they judged that Sergius’s Declaration went too far, that its expressions of gratitude and identification with the state’s aims exceeded what the Church could honestly say to a government persecuting it, and that it compromised the Church’s inner freedom (the Solovki bishops’ response to Sergius’s Declaration, dated September 1927 and subscribed by a group of the imprisoned hierarchs, criticizing the Declaration while maintaining civil loyalty; documented in the histories of the Sergianism dispute). The Solovki bishops thus staked out a middle position that has been much cited since: neither the schism of those who broke communion with Sergius outright, nor the acceptance of the Declaration as it stood, but a principled objection from within — loyalty to the state in the civil sphere, but a refusal to let the Church be made to bless its own persecutors.

Solovki and the Reckoning of the Martyrs

The witness of the Solovki bishops matters to the whole question of the New Martyrs for a specific reason: it shows that the confessing Church itself, from within the camps, drew the very distinction the later canonization commissions would have to draw. The Solovki hierarchs distinguished between the political submission a Christian may render to any government and the spiritual freedom the Church may never surrender; and it is along that line that the Sergianism dispute, and the judgement of who among the persecuted died a faithful confessor, would afterward run (see The Criteria and the Contested Cases). Many of the Solovki bishops themselves went on to die in the Terror of 1937–38; the islands that had been a monastery and became the first Gulag camp thus also became, for the Church, a place where its confessors both suffered and thought — where the theology of resistance to the atheist state was worked out by men in chains. Solovki is, with Butovo, one of the two physical poles of the New Martyrs’ geography: Butovo the killing ground where the martyrs’ blood was shed, Solovki the camp where the confessors endured and bore witness (see The Butovo Firing Range). Since the fall of the Soviet Union the monastery has been restored to monastic life, and the Church commemorates a Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Solovki, keeping the memory of the bishops and clergy who suffered there.

See Also

References

  • Applebaum, Anne. Gulag: A History. New York: Doubleday, 2003. (Solovki/SLON as the prototype and seed of the Gulag system.)
  • Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I. The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956. Trans. Thomas P. Whitney. New York: Harper & Row, 1974. (Solovki as the “mother” of the camp system.)
  • The Solovki Memorandum of 9 June 1926 and the Solovki bishops’ response of September 1927 to Metropolitan Sergius’s Declaration — documented in the histories of the period; texts and analysis in Pospielovsky, The Russian Church Under the Soviet Regime, 1917–1982, SVS Press, 1984, vol. 1, and in the ROCOR Studies timeline of the Church 1917–1927 (rocorstudies.org). Used to locate the documents and their content.
  • Pospielovsky, Dimitry. The Russian Church Under the Soviet Regime, 1917–1982. 2 vols. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984. (The Solovki bishops; Sergius’s 1927 Declaration and the reactions to it.)