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Solovki, the Island of Tears
SYNOPSIS This is where the gulag system was organized on a “scientific” basis before being extended to the whole of the Soviet Union: this is where the most suitable techniques to exploit prisoners were studied, together with the techniques of psychological annihilation and of death by a firing-squad. The prisoners condemned for “religious” reasons were the ones who suffered the most: Christian-Orthodox mainly, but also Catholics and Jewish people, who were deported by the thousands in the Solovki gulag from all over the Soviet Union. In only 15 years, more than 1 million prisoners have died there. At present, the Solovki are considered the symbol of the martyrdom undergone by the USSR Christian Community during the communist period. “THE ISLES OF MARTYRDOM” traces the story of this first Soviet gulag through the testimony of the last survivors still alive, as well as of the Russian historians from the “Memorial” Association, who had the possibility to access the KGB archives only in the last few years and unveil all the horrors of this death camp. The extraordinary images shot on these islands – which are beautifully unique from a landscape point of view – make the collected testimonies even more suggestive, turning the narration into an “impressionistic painting”, explaining better than many books what daily life was like in the gulag world. « back |
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