Thursday, January 16, 2020

Monastery turned prison camp in James L. May's debut THE BODY OUTSIDE THE KREMLIN


HALLIE EPHRON: James L. May's THE BODY OUTSIDE THE KREMLIN debut novel is a historical mystery set in the same era (1920s) as Jess Montgomery's THE HOLLOWS but in a very different place--a notorious Russian prison camp based in a gloomy monastery that housed priceless icons. Amazing setting, right? James is here to talk about why he set his novel there.

JAMES L. MAY: The Solovetsky Archipelago was a strange place for the Bolsheviks to set up the first camp in what would become the Gulag, the secret-police-run prison system in which millions of citizens of the Soviet Union were imprisoned and worked to death. Strange, but maybe inevitable too.

Before Solovetsky was a prison, you see, it was the site of one of the most important monasteries in the Russian north. Located in the White Sea, almost on the Arctic Circle, by the time the camp was established in the 1920s, the place had been occupied by monks for almost 500 years.

When the Communist and anti-religious Bolsheviks seized power, they took the monastery over as part of the general expropriation of the property of the Orthodox Church. With repression being a major part of their political program from the beginning, they needed somewhere to send dissidents: members of competing socialist parties, untrusted intellectuals, Ukrainian nationalists, remaining White Army officers, and whoever else got on the wrong side of the regime. You could be imprisoned for any reason, or no reason at all.

What always surprises me about this is just how easily the monastery’s piety and serenity were translated into the prison camp’s starvation and suffering. Partly this was a matter of its filling practical needs: Solovetsky was remote, it was isolated, and the monks had already built much of the infrastructure that would be needed for a self-sufficient labor camp of the kind the Party had in mind. The Bolsheviks were never hesitant about exploiting this kind of efficiency.
But the two institutions also had more in common symbolically than you might think. Russian monasticism, like most Christian monasticism, has always had strong threads of withdrawal from the world and self-abnegation running through it. The Kievan Crypt Monastery, probably the most famous monastery in Russian Orthodoxy, was founded when Saint Antonius couldn’t find a place that would suit his worship in the city; instead he went into the wilderness and dug himself a hole to live in. (In time it was expanded into an elaborate system of crypts by his followers, then a huge cathedral and monastery complex.) Here’s the description of his daily life given in the medieval Russian Primary Chronicle: “Thus he took up his abode there, praying to God, eating dry bread all the day long, drinking little water, and digging the crypt. He gave himself rest neither day nor night, but endured in his labors, in vigil, and in prayer.” Minus the prayer, it sounds like a prisoner’s routine, doesn’t it? Bread, water, and hard work. The monks on Solovetsky didn’t dig crypts, but many of the most devout did go out to live in the islands’ forests as hermits, with little food and no comforts.

The Solovetsky camp’s treatment of its prisoners was like a dark mirror held up to these monks’ self-imposed strictures. Where the monks had fasted, prisoners starved. Where the monks’ days had been ordered by the liturgy, prisoners’ were ordered by the steam-whistle
sending them to work or calling them back for curfew. Solzhenitsyn, who devotes a chapter to Solovetsky in his classic Gulag Archipelago, was struck by the fact that supply issues at the camp were so bad that some prisoners were issued sacks as clothing. How can that not bring to mind the sack-cloth shirt a monk might have worn a hundred years earlier to mortify his flesh and demonstrate his repentance?

There’s no evidence that the people who organized the Solovetsky camp had these parallels in mind explicitly. But I do think they show that Russian Communism inherited more from Russian Orthodoxy than its adherents would have been comfortable admitting. The common idea is that human beings, by being removed from the world and denied normal human needs, can be transformed into something beyond human.

For the monks, that something was a more spiritual, more Christlike being. For the Bolsheviks, it was a creature that could be completely dominated and used up by the State. There’s certainly no moral equivalence between those two things! And I don’t want to suggest that Orthodox monasticism was to blame for Soviet repression. But viewed from a certain angle, the resemblance is there.

(I should note that it was never just Russians that had the idea that prisons effectively remove prisoners from the human world. The word “penitentiary” came into use in the US in the 19th century, as people began to think of prisoners as “penitents” – in other words, as people who withdrew to repent their sins and improve their souls, just like monks. And that way of thinking has had some bad results here too. Maybe it’s no wonder that the US incarceration rate is sometimes compared to that of the Gulag in its worst years – though our prisons are nowhere near as deadly.)

Of course monks rarely ever succeed at being as pure and unworldly as they are supposed to be. Monastery-set mysteries, like Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose or Ellis Peters’s Brother Cadfael novels, have always been favorites of mine in part for the ways that they show people in cloistered life to be as human as the rest of us, just as capable as we are of greed, or pride, or love. (Mysteries are especially good at showing this, since the detective is always trying to discover the motives that people would rather keep hidden.)

One of the reasons I wrote The Body Outside the Kremlin was to do the same thing for the prisoners of Solovetsky. Subject to a regime that aimed to dehumanize, they deserved to have the human details of their lives in the camp imagined and investigated as fully as I could manage in fiction.
I’m curious to know whether this way of thinking resonates with Jungle Reds readers. Do you have favorite mysteries that bring people who have been placed “outside the bounds” of humanity back inside? Any good ones to recommend, whether set in monasteries, prisons, or elsewhere?

HALLIE: Hmmm, mysteries set in monasteries or prisons, places that sequester their inhabitants. Of course, Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile come immediately to mind. Kiss of the Spiderwoman. Surely there are great mysteries set in convents. And maybe we can count the many crime novels in the rarified atmosphere of Oxford or Cambridge. Maybe even Hogwarts.

What else comes to mind?

And I'd certainly like to hear about the research James did in order to write his novel. What is the Solevetsky camp now?

54 comments:

  1. Congratulations on your book, James . . . it sounds quite intriguing. This background information is fascinating . . . .

    Isn’t Louise Penny’s “The Beautiful Mystery” set in a monastery? And didn’t the Solovetsky Monastery eventually became a UNESCO World Heritage site?

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    1. I wonder if anyone reading this has been there...

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    2. Yes, it is a UNESCO World Heritage site now! Hallie asked about my research above -- one of the early things I read was actually the UNESCO application. Along with the monastery and the camp, the application lists a group of Stone Age labyrinths on the island as important heritage pieces. I didn't get to mention them in the post, but they're pretty interesting as well. They do make a brief appearance in my book. One of the prisoners at the camp actually wrote about them, and his paper is still cited.

      I haven't read that Louise Penny, but it sounds great. I'll add it to the stack. And thanks for the congrats!

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    3. Stone age labyrinths?!? Wow. Rich with possibilities.

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  2. All the best with the new release, James.

    Halley definitely the Shawshank Redemption. There's a John Grisham book, too, the title escapes me, that gave me nightmares although as with most Grisham books, it was about the lawyer character, not the prison.

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    1. Ah, The Shawshank Redemption is a classic. I think the depiction of the kind of psychological warfare prisons wage on their inmates is spot on. It can be a kind of resistance just to remember that there's a world outside. Very relevant for Gulag literature!

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  3. Welcome James, and what an intriguing book you have written. As for book set in prisons, of course THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION and THE GREEN MILE come to mind, also DEAD MAN WALKINg and THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO. But the one that I keep going back to, not set in prison but in a witness protection program, the protagonist certainly having a criminal bent, is CITIZEN VINCE. It certainly begs for another reading.

    And a story waiting to be fictionalized and written properly in the Dannemora prison break of a few years ago, 2015 I think. There's definitely a book in there, and not just a made for TV series, but something really fleshed out.

    January is half over. I saw buds showing vermillion on a fruit tree this week. Don't tell me that climate change is a hoax.

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    1. I don't think anyone here is going to claim it's a hoax. It was 75 in Boston two days ago. Fortunately now back in the 30s. STILL warm for this time of year.

      Dannemora prison break... I thought someone had or was going to develop it. Lots of interesting parts... the way they did it, the cooperation of the female prison guard.

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    2. Yes, there was a TV movie..with--ah. Someone unexpected. It was SO depressing and sad.

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    3. The Gulag Archipelago was certainly one of the sources I looked at when researching the book. I haven't been able to determine it with absolute certainty, but I always think he must have had Solovetsky in mind when he chose the archipelago metaphor for the Gulag. Relatively few of its camps were on islands, really. And Solovetsky was the first, after all.

      Haven't read Citizen Vince, but the Goodreads page makes it sound great. I am interested in its focus on felon voting. I'll put it on my list.

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  4. Like Joan, my first thought was Louise Penny's "The Beautiful Mystery," set in a deliberately remote monastery in the Canadian wilderness. It was a beautiful book.

    And Ann is right about climate change. It was nearly 80 degrees in north Texas yesterday--a day when we have frequently had ice storms in past years. I'm sorry for her fruit trees, however, because ice and freezing temperatures do happen in places where spring strikes too early.

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    1. Yeah, the weather in New York has been nuts this week too. Almost 70 the other day. I thought about the fruit too. In 2012 I was living upstate, and I remember an early thaw and freeze really devastated the apples, which are a fairly big business up there.

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  5. James, your book sounds absolutely fascinating. I can't wait to read it!

    Like others, Louise Penny's "The Beautiful Mystery" came to mind for me, too. In addition, I thought of "The Fifth Gospel" by Ian Caldwell, which is set inside the Vatican, and "Bel Canto" by Ann Patchett, which is set in an embassy but during a protracted hostage situation.

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    1. Clearly I'm behind the curve on The Beautiful Mystery! Everyone's read it but me. I'll move it up the triage rankings in my reading list.

      Bel Canto's a great example of plotting in an enclosed space. I love seeing what writers come up with for people to do when they can't get away from each other. I think they're much more tightly hemmed in there than even my prisoners, who are actually able to move around a good bit on the island. Another piece of sort of bottled up plotting I really like is Martin Cruz Smith's Polar Star, which is set on a factory-fishing ship. (And of course I'm especially interested in it for being about the Soviet Union.)

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    2. Loved POLAR STAR. And reminds me: Smilla's Sense of Snow for a story set (wasn't it?) in a submarine.

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  6. Congratulations! What a fascinating premise.

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    1. Thanks! I certainly still think it's fascinating, even after all this time writing about it. I talk about some of my less selfish motivations in the post, but a big one was also that I just really wanted to read a mystery story set there.

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  7. Louise Penny, PD James (Death in Holy Orders), Brother Cadfael, though he's out and about in the Shrewsbury area.
    Did you visit Solovetsky?

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    1. I didn't! It's sort of embarrassing to admit. Of course I hadn't been there when I started writing, so I spent a lot of time looking at maps and photographs to get a feel for the layout and the atmosphere. (There's a Russian site that hosts historical photos organized by site that was really useful. I'll post a link at the bottom of this comment if anyone's interested. It's in Russian, but it should be easy to navigate.) At a certain point in the process I realized that if I replaced the sort of model of the place I'd built in my mind with the real place, it would really throw me off.

      I don't have that excuse anymore, of course. I'd still like to go, but a convenient time hasn't presented itself. But people definitely do visit -- though not around this time of year, mostly. It's a little hard to reach in the winter, and very cold.

      Link to Russian photo site. Should open up right on the Solovetsky monastery:

      pastvu.com?g=65.023529,35.70636&z=15&s=osm&t=osmosnimki&type=1

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  8. Another fascinating blog post, thank you.

    Part of the Outlander series, I think in the second book, takes place in a monastery. And part of another one takes place in a convent.

    Monastic life has its short-term appeal, but I can't say it would be a lifestyle choice for me. Deprivation vs. hygge: I know which would win in my life!

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    1. Mmmm, hygge. Wondering what monasteries are like in Scandinavia.

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    2. Hallie, I wonder if there was an Ingmar Bergman film that thad a monastery?

      Diana

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    3. Ah, hygge/deprivation is a good binary! For all that I talk about the deprivation involved in the concept of monasticism, as a matter of fact I think there was a good bit of hygge involved too. The Solovetsky monastery was quite wealthy; like many Christian monasteries around the world it was supported by extensive land grants. So when they weren't fasting the monks often ate better than the people around them, especially during times of scarcity. In fact, I think I remember reading about some of the early abbots remonstrating with the monks for eating too much and too well!

      This is making me think of what was probably my earliest exposure to monasticism in literature, the Redwall Series by Brian Jacques. They're children's books, about a group of mice and forest animals that live in an abbey and have adventures; I think I must have read the first one when I was 8 or 9. They're certainly hygge. I still remember the descriptions of the meals -- acorn bread and beer brewed by mice sounded delicious!

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  9. This sounds like a great book, and thanks for the background. The similarities between the prisons and monasteries are interesting.

    Kelly Armstrong’s Rockton series is about people, mainly criminals, sent to an isolated town in the wilderness which effectively serves as a prison. A key part of the plots and the tensions between characters is that they are all stuck together since no one is allowed in or out without permission.

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    1. Thanks, I'm going to look into Rockton. Another one I haven't read and am rapidly absorbing the Goodreads summary of. It sounds like a good comparison. One of the things you could say about both prisons and monasteries is that they're "intentional communities," meaning that they are brought together for a purpose instead of just organically arising. Sounds like Rockton would fit that category too? But what's the purpose of such a place existing? Or maybe you can't tell me without giving away too much -- the summary is a little coy, so I probably need to read to find out.

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    2. You remind me of Colleen McCullough's Morgan's Run in witch she describes the life of Richard Morgan who was condemned and sent to Botany Bay with the first batch of prisoners that England sent there. Remote place all right : nothing there but aborigens at the time. It became Australia after many more prisoner contingents and many years.

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    3. Rockton’s purpose, and who gets sent there, is revealed over the course of the story so I don’t want to get too spoilery! But it is definitely intentional, although not everyone has the same intention.

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  10. Congratulations! I loved NAME OF THE ROSE and Brother Cadfael.

    Has anybody seen the trailers for the new Michael B. Jordan movie - the one where he is trying to get a man off death row? I want to say the title is "True Mercy," but I think I'm wrong.

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    1. Just Mercy, by Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative. It is a true story about a man who is wrongly convicted of a murder and the efforts to get him released.

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    2. Yeah, looks good. I'll watch almost anything with Michael B. Jordan in it, but that one's especially compelling.

      Thanks for the congratulations!

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  11. Congratulations on your new novel, James. And welcome to Jungle Reds. The comparison of prisons to monasteries is interesting. It did not occur to me until I read this post. I had another thought. Was it the Kremlin under the Romanov dynasty? St. Petersburg had a different name under the Soviet Union, right?

    Yes, I thought of Ellis Peters' Cadafel mysteries when reading about monasteries in this post.

    Diana

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    1. Oh, yes. St. Petersburg was called Petrograd briefly, then Leningrad. I don't believe it became St. Petersburg again until the fall of the Soviet Union.

      The Kremlin was certainly there and used under the Romanov's, but it would probably have been called "the Moscow Kremlin." It was the Tsar's Moscow palace, although they lived in St. Petersburg most of the time.

      I'm glad you brought it up, because it gives me the chance to explain something about the title of the book. Most of us in the US only know the word "kremlin" from its being the seat of the Russian government in Moscow, but actually it's a general word meaning something like "a fortified citadel in a city or settlement." So the Kremlin is actually only *a* kremlin, the same way that the White House is only a white house. The "kremlin" in my title refers to the walled enclosure where the main buildings of the monastery were located.

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    2. James, thank you. I learned something new today.

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  12. Wow. Yes, yes, talk about the research--and how you felt writing this!
    ( And yes, Just Mercy is Bryan Stephenson. He's amazing--Iv'e heard him speak and it's incredible.)

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    1. Well, I wasn't much of a scholar of Russian history when I started writing the book. (I'm still not, but I certainly know more than I did then.) So I had to do quite a bit of general reading in Russian history in order to understand the time and place. I can recommend A People's Tragedy by Orlando Figes as a history of the October Revolution and the Russian Civil War. Some of his later scholarship has been called into question, but I believe that book is still well regarded, and he tells a compelling story. Everyday Stalinism, by Sheila Fitzpatrick, is another great book about the period. Instead of focusing on affairs of state or the enormities of the Gulag, she's answering questions about what it was like to live in the new Soviet state. What was it like to eat at the new state-run cafeterias? What was it like to go to a soccer game? Those are great questions for anyone writing about the period to get answers to.

      I also read a good bit of period literature as a way of getting the texture of life. I'd recommend The Galosh And Other Stories by Mikhail Zoshchenko to anyone. Zoshchenko was extremely popular in Russia in the 20s, and he's really funny. Most of his stories are about daily life under the new regime. The title story, for instance, is about the bureaucratic hoops the narrator has to jump through to reclaim a lost boot cover.

      I also had a lot to learn about Solovetsky specifically. The most useful sources for that were memoirs. There were a number of English-language memoirs published in the 20s by prisoners who had been released or escaped from the camp. Mostly they were trying to raise the alarm about Soviet repression. But the one I found most interesting was written in the 1990s by an eminent Russian scholar named Dmitry Likhachev. He had been imprisoned on Solovetsky in his 20s, so the memoir was written at the end of his life. What struck me most about it was the degree to which his time in the camp was a kind of scholarly education in addition to being a period of suffering. Since the new regime was broadly suspicious of the intelligentsia, an awful lot of scholars and intellectuals ended up on Solovetsky. There's almost a kind of symposium atmosphere to what Likhachev describes, at least when people aren't starving or struggling for their lives.

      As for how I felt writing -- well, Gulag history can be a downer (to utter the understatement of the new year). My wife jokes that she's glad we've finally escaped from Solovetsky, now that the book is out. But I certainly always felt I was learning fascinating new stuff in the research. And I was able to give a couple of the characters endings that, if not quite happy, at least aren't totally tragic. It's sentimental, but I do feel pretty good about that. I must be attached to them.

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    2. Sounds like this book was a long time in the works... will your next one (you're working on one?) take advantage of it?

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    3. Well, at the moment I need a bit of a palate cleanser. I've been working on a ghost story set in suburban New Jersey, where I grew up. Much less historical research, and a very different sort of plot -- though like mystery, ghost stories are usually concerned with the return of past secrets.

      After that we'll see. It would feel like a shame to give up on all my research, and I'm still quite interested in the place and time, but I'd need to discover a new story. The one I had to tell on Solovetsky is pretty well finished.

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  13. Very interesting! I’m trying to think of some other examples not yet mentioned. Stalag 17 came to mind. I’ll have to mull this over and get back to you.
    I’m afraid if a modern-day Antonius tried living in a hole he’d be hauled in for mental evaluation.

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    1. Oh yeah, Stalag 17's a good one. There's a lot of potential for humor in some of these situations, horrible as they can be. In the extreme cases, like the German death camps or the Kolyma camps in the Gulag, that disappears; human extermination isn't funny, and the people interned in those places were subject to such horrible conditions that they kind of lost the human elements of themselves capable of humor. (I take that to have been one of the goals of the camps' creators.) But where resistance is still possible, it's often fun and funny to see how people got around the rules, or to see what kind of weird behavior they adopt as a way of coping with confinement. I do think it's possible to laugh in response to these things, without making light of them or laughing at the prisoners. A lot of Russian humor is like that, actually.

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  14. James, THE BODY OUTSIDE THE KREMLIN sounds fascinating. I love historical fiction and historical mysteries, and it's always so exciting to see a novel set in a place and time that hasn't been explored. And of course, a murder mystery set in a brutal prison camp switches things up for the author and the reader - does killing really matter when death is all around you? What value is there in solving the crime? Can there be justice in a place or situation that is, by design, unjust?

    I'll suggest a book that has some of these themes that's NOT set in a monastery: THE LAST, by Hanna Jameson. In some ways it's a traditional mystery - a group of guests and staff are trapped in a remote Swiss hotel, and they discover a murder victim. What really sets it spinning off the traditional axis: they're trapped because the world is ending. There have been nuclear strikes in the UK, Europe and the US, and the residents of the hotel have nothing to go back to and nothing to look forward to. It's a fascinating, genre-blending book that I highly recommend.

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    1. Yes, exactly! Those were some of the questions that made me interested in setting a mystery in a camp, and which I hope readers will contemplate. Without giving too much away, I will say that some of those apparently philosophical questions about the value of solving the crime end up having practical, political answers for my protagonist, Tolya. But that shouldn't settle them for the reader!

      The Last sounds great, and is a perfect example of the kind of thing I'm talking about in the post. What's further outside the bounds of humanity than surviving when everyone else has died? Another addition to my reading list.

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  16. Something was niggling at the back of my mind and it finally crept out. The Dirty Dozen. In the first hour, which is as far as I got last month, a group of army prisoners are told they can earn their reprieves by training and embarking on a dangerous mission. The condition is all or none. One infraction by one man and they’re all held to account.

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    1. Another good example. One of the things that interests me about that movie is seeing the ways that what would be considered antisocial behavior in peacetime becomes useful in war. That plays out in some pretty interesting ways on the Russian front in WWII. The Russian war effort needed soldiers capable of independent thinking and operating on their own, but the Soviet political apparatus was very suspicious of that kind of independence. Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate has a great storyline about this.

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  17. Wow, James, what an interesting post! It's fascinating, in a horrible sort of way, that the Russians would take the structure of a peaceful, spiritual place and use that structure for brutal imprisonment. I don't want to say that it's ingenious, but it shows that evil too often has a unexpected cunning in its madness. Again, I'm not praising it, just acknowledging that taking advantage of a system in place and turning it into their own means to and end was rather smart on their part. Of course, as you point out, James, the fasting of the monks became the starvation of the prisoners, and there certainly isn't anything to admire about that.

    In thinking about how bad or nefarious intentions seep into an otherwise peaceful, normal, or innocuous setting, one book that made an impression on me is Joseph Kanon's The Good German. This story takes place after WWII in Berlin, and it examines and makes the reader examine how seemingly good people can become a part of an evil mission. Not only valued scientists but ordinary people who once had only good intentions in life and, yet, they become entrenched in an unimaginable horror. Of course, I agree with others here who have mentioned Louise Penny's The Beautiful Mystery in which greed and deceit infect the normally peaceful atmosphere of the monastery. The corruption of a system created for good, to help people is unfortunately all too common, and one book I always remember is our own Hank's The Wrong Girl, in which the foster care and adoption agency systems are corrupted in a murder mystery that eventually exposes the wrong doing. People who, again, at one time are individuals looking to do the right thing and who end up on the wrong side of that.

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    1. Oh, I'm going to have to pick up The Wrong Girl! I wrote above about intentional communities. Adoption systems and orphanages are in the business of creating intentional families, aren't they? But, as with prisons, things get vexed when you start asking whose intentions are being carried out.

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    2. That's so on target, "whose intentions are being carried out." I've really enjoyed your post and your comments here today, James. And, I can't believe I failed to tell you that The Body Outside the Kremlin is now on my TBR list and my Amazon wish list. Looking forward to reading it!

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    3. I'm delighted to hear it, Kathy. Hope you enjoy!

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  18. I wonder why he chose to put the gulag inside the monastery. There's no evidence that ever happened! They are in the same islands, but I can't find that they were ever in the same building. This seems a very strange fiction to adopt. (If that happened, I'd like to see some evidence somewhere. This was so bizarre, I had to research a bit and don't find that it's true.)

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    1. That part sounds like fiction, doesn't it? But it really is a truth-is-stranger-than situation. If you're interested in reading about it, I recommend the first chapter of Anne Applebaum's Gulag: A History, or the chapter on Solovetsky in the second volume of The Gulag Archipelago. For a slightly more readily available verification, you might look at this article that ran in the New York Times a few years ago, about the present-day conflict between the monks who have reoccupied the place and the people interested in memorializing the camp: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/31/world/europe/russians-clash-over-commemorating-monasterys-grim-past.html . The Wikipedia article on the Solovetsky camp discusses the occupation of the monastery buildings too. Of course you have to take Wikipedia with a grain of salt, but the Solovetsky articles are pretty well sourced.

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    2. I see why the monks are upset. Makes perfect sense. It's rare that nothing pops up anywhere online about a subject, so it didn't seem right, which is why I posted. If I were one of the monks, I wouldn't want this memory preserved either. The monastery has been there much, much longer.

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