A letter home from the Arctic Circle

From August, 2001

Many of you will remember that when I was in Russia a year ago, I inundated you with posts about my various experience and activities. I’m determined not to do that again, but I recently went on a pilgrimage that is worth an email. As many of you know, I recently returned from Solovki, a men’s monastery founded in the 1400's that was turned into a ruthless labor camp during the early days of the Soviet Union. I should warn you that this letter probably gets an R-rating for violence, but the ending is a happy one.

We left Moscow on August 3 at 1:20 AM on the train to Murmansk, one of the northern-most cities in the world. Our actual destination by train was Kem, almost exactly a 24-hour train ride from Moscow. For those of you who have been on Russian trains, you can imagine how we spent the time: eating & drinking (which started about five minutes after departure), talking,singing, sleeping, and reading (the latter two only occasionally). We were in a large open car (platzkart) with lots of other people, who I'm sure were intrigued (to say the least) when most of our group stood up to say morning prayers together. Upon arriving in Kem, all 22 of us ― as well as our belongings ― packed into the back of a large, square, army green truck. As an American, my first thought was of the old TV show, Hogan’s Heroes, but the Russians joked about escaping the Leningrad blockade from WWII. (Oh well, same war, at least.)

About 15 minutes later, we arrived at the dock on the shores of the White Sea, where we were met by the crew of the Onega, a boat which would take us on to our final destinations. At 2:30 AM, the White Sea was anything but white: more like a grey mass that turned silver as the first rays of sunlight hit it. (August mornings come early just south of the Arctic Circle.) We had a rather choppy ride ahead of us, but we consoled ourselves partly by singing a simple little song appealing to the Savior and each of our patron saints to be with us. After a three hour boat ride, we docked at Solovki to refuel, and then headed out for another three hour trip to Anzer, an island that I had heard much about. The vegetation there was astounding. Flowers of almost all colors greeted us near the place where we came ashore. The landscape changed from forest to meadow to swamp and back again as we made a 30 minute trek to the place where we would have lunch. (At one point, I thought I saw a large pink building through the trees and was sure we had reached the chapel where we were headed; it turned out to be a huge field of flowers!) There were so many different berries growing, we could have lived on them alone during our stay.

Our final destination that day was Holy Trinity Skete, where we stayed for two days. The skete is no longer functioning and is in pretty bad shape; in fact, I was a little worried when we had to walk under a huge sign that said Danger Zone to enter! Fortunately, there was an operational banya there (kind of like a sauna), so we all got a good, hot bath. The church itself ― an octagonal brick structure ― is all but devastated. There was no iconostas (the stand with icons on near the front of an Orthodox church), a stack of bricks served as an altar, a tree stump was the main stand where we placed a few little icons and candles, and the “floor” was a series of boards suspended a yard or so above the foundation. Most of these were 2-x-4's placed on their 2" side, so you had to be really careful where and how you walked! For those of you who have attended Orthodox services, you can only imagine how difficult it must have been for Fr. Anatoly to walk around and cense the church.

At Holy Trinity, we served a short prayer service and Divine Liturgy (communion service). Of course, after the relative splendor of most Orthodox churches, this church seemed rather spare (understatement), but the sparseness itself was an icon of what had happened over the course of the last century on that island. Knowing of the suffering that had taken place there, combined with the beautifully simple chanting of our choir and the chance to take communion made this service one of the most inspiring in which I have participated. That was repeated yet again the following day, a Sunday, when we packed up our things and headed back to the chapel where we ate lunch the first day. The chapel sits at the bottom of a steep hill, and at the top of that hill is the Golgotha-Crucifixion Skete. The church there is a square, brick affair, and as was the case at Holy Trinity, there is basically nothing inside the church at this point. (Instead of boards suspended over a cavern, however, there was a dirt floor in this church.) Some of the pre-revolutionary frescos were still visible beneath the white-wash.

Golgotha-Crucifixion Skete was founded by St. Job of Anzer, himself exiled to Solovki in the early 1700's by one of his spiritual children, Tsar Peter the Great. According to tradition, the Mother of God visited St. Job and told him to build a skete here in honor of Christ's Crucifixion on Golgotha. Today they consider that this was a prophecy, for this place would become the Golgotha of the Russian Church about 300 years later. For all its beauty, Anzer Island was a place of terror during the 1920s-30s. Just as those on the USSR mainland knew about and feared the labor camp located on Solovki, so did the inmates at Solovki fear Anzer. The grey wooden building next to the Golgotha-Crucifixion church, which housed prayerful monks before the revolution, was used later to stack dead bodies, sometimes to house barely- clothed prisoners at any time of year. (It was “wearing-my-Chicago-winter-coat” cold and windy when we celebrated Divine Liturgy in early August; you can perhaps imagine how hellish it would be in January.) Between the church and this building was a large wooden cross erected by some of the spiritual children of Archbishop Peter of Voronezh, one of the members of the hierarchy who died in this very place. At the other end of the structure was nature’s own cross: a birch tree that had sprouted two very thick, low branches that grew out perpendicular from the trunk, exactly opposite each other. If you are familiar with birch trees and their thin branches that tend to grow upward, you know how unusual this is.

After Divine Liturgy at Golgotha-Crucifixion Skete, we headed back to the shore where our boat would meet us to take us back to Solovki. The boat ride back was incredible. There were just a few clouds in the sky and the White Sea was a gorgeous pale blue; it stood so still, it was almost like glass. The islands in the area were nothing but dark blue silhouettes, and as the sun changed positions and began to set, various shades of pastel red and orange played on the water, clouds, and islands. Truly one of the most beautiful things I have seen. Golgotha-Crucifixion Skete, being so high up, was visible for the first hour or so after our departure. As we watched it disappear, some sang hymns to various Holy New Martyrs of Russia. Things eventually “lightened up” some, as we told jokes, drank coffee, and chatted. We arrived at the main monastery at Solovki just in time to get our sleeping bags set up in the hostel before it got totally dark (no electricity, but a real bathroom!).

The next day we attended Divine Liturgy at the monastery and spent several hours fulfilling our obedience as pilgrims: in this case, helping to stack wood. We formed a long chain and passed logs from the stacks outside into the basement where they would be stored for the winter. Most of the time, part of our group sang Russian folk songs. That evening, we rested, because the next morning at 6 AM, we headed out for a 12-kilometer trek (mostly uphill, it seemed) to Ascension Church on Sekirnaja Mountain. The dome of the church there is actually a lighthouse. During the days of the labor camp, Sekirnaja was about on the same level as Anzer: a place of no return. There we saw a steep wooden staircase (over 300 steps, if I recall) down which camp guards used to throw bound prisoners. The church there was in about the same shape as the others. In addition to Divine Liturgy, we served an extraordinarily poignant memorial service for those who had suffered at that place.

We headed back to the monastery from Sekirnaja by rowboat. Rain started just as we reached the dock to board, so we had a wet 2-hour trip home. Not exactly the most comfortable experience in the world, but we agreed that a trip to a place like Sekirnaja should involve a little suffering; after all, two hours in the rain is nothing compared to what prisoners went through there 75 years ago. Upon arriving back at the main monastery, Fr. Anatoly insisted that in order to ward off any illness that might develop from sitting in the rain for 2 hours, I should take either cold medicine or a large shot of vodka. I chose the latter.

The next day was our last one at Solovki. We attended Divine Liturgy in the morning, had a tour of the monastery in the afternoon, and attended part of the evening service before boarding the St. Nicholas to head back to Kem, where we caught our train to Moscow (repeating 24 hours of eating, singing, talking, eating, reading, eating, etc.). Before leaving, I was able to stop in at the museum in the monastery, where they have a large hall dedicated to the history of the labor camp.

I expected this trip to be intense, and it was. We in the west are used to looking on the deeds of Hitler as the embodiment of evil, and indeed they were. But for some reason, we never think of Russia. The Russian people, and in particular the Russian Church, experienced something just as bad, if not worse (if indeed we can compare such outrageously terrible things): over the course of 75 years, tens of millions of people killed, millions of others imprisoned, churches ravished. The clergy ― in particular the bishops ― were lightening rods for Bolshevik aggression. A list of just a few of their names and causes of death is sobering: Peter (imprisoned in Siberia for years, finally executed), Vladimir (tortured and shot), Benjamin, Thaddeus, and Pimen (all shot), Tikhon (hung from the iconostas in the church), Ioakim (also hung), Isidor (impaled on a stake), Amvrosii (tied to a horse's tail and dragged until dead), and so on, and so on, and so on. But thankfully (as Steve wrote me recently), God always wins in the end. Solovki is now a thriving monastery. There are even a few monks living on Anzer. And we have a host of new saints in heaven interceding for us before the Most Holy Trinity.

As I send this out, the Russian Church is beginning a general council of bishops that is expected to ratify an earlier decision to canonize all who suffered for Christ - both known and unknown - at the hands of the communists. (Many individuals have been glorified already.) If I'm not mistaken, the general glorification will take place this coming weekend. As we look forward to this, let us keep in our hearts the Eternal Truth of our Faith: Christ is Risen! And let us entreat our glorified fathers, brothers, and sisters: Holy New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, pray to God for us!