Russia is again becoming dark. In a double-edged move for imprisonment studies, Gullotta has turned a patient scholarly eye on one pocket of the gulag that briefly experienced more light than most. Geographically his focus is tiny, but its history stretches over half a millennium. In 1429, three monks founded a retreat on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea, the Russian Far North. Consecrated as a frontier monastery/fortress in the sixteenth century, this thriving community, rich in timber and fish, played a dramatic role at key moments in Russia's history: from Ivan the Terrible (when the monastery was first used as a prison) to the seventeenth-century Schism in the Orthodox Church (when Old Believers held out during an eight-year siege), to bombardment by the British navy in the Crimean War (1853–56) and then Allied intervention against the Bolsheviks near Arkhangelsk during the Russian Civil War. A Red victory sealed...
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