Solovetsky prison camp

The Solovki special camp (later the Solovki special prison), was set up in 1923 on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea as a remote and inaccessible place of detention, primarily intended for socialist opponents of Soviet Russia's new Bolshevik regime. At first, the Anarchists, Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries enjoyed a special status there and were not made to work. Gradually, prisoners from the old regime (priests, gentry, and White Army officers) joined them and the guards and the ordinary criminals worked together to keep the "politicals" in order.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn called Solovki the "mother of the GULAG". It was openly termed a concentration camp until the late 1920s when the euphemism "corrective labour camp" was applied throughout the system, now organised under the main directorate for corrective-labour camps or GULag (Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei). The Solovki "special" camp served as a testing ground where security measures were developed and tried out, as were innovations in "living conditions", work production norms, and other forms of repression.

Historically, the Solovetsky Islands were the location of the famous Russian Orthodox Solovetsky Monastery complex. It was a centre of economic activity with over three hundred monks, and also a forepost of Russian naval power in the North, repelling foreign attacks during the Time of Troubles, the Crimean War, and the Russian Civil War.

The unpublished decree of 3 November 1923 led to the conversion of the monastery buildings into the Solovki "special" camp: the Solovetsky Lager Osobogo Naznachenia or SLON in Russian (the acronym is a play on the Russian word for elephant). One of the first "forced labor camps", Solovki served as a prototype for the Gulag as a whole. In early 1924 it was sometimes given a double name, Severnye (Solovetskiye) Lagerya OGPU (Northern (Solovki) camps of OGPU).

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