Solovetsky Islands, Russia - Maria Smirnova barreled past the heavy granite walls of the 16th-century Solovetsky Monastery, blaring French hip-hop in her oversized truck to the consternation of the nearby monks whose long, black cloaks billowed in the northerly breeze.
Ms. Smirnova, 23, runs an adventure tour company on the Solovetsky Islands, an archipelago in the White Sea of northwestern Russia, about 100 miles from the Arctic Circle.
Though growing in popularity, her business has roiled the monks and some residents, who accuse her of sullying the island’s religious traditions and ignoring its bloody past.
The islands, also known as Solovki, are one of the holiest sites in Russian Orthodox Christianity, and the 40 or so monks who reside here consider the land their own. Their predecessors settled here in the 15th century, creating a monastic dynasty that lasted nearly 500 years. They built the white-walled Transfiguration Cathedral, capped with silver cupolas, and enclosed it in fortress-thick walls of granite. An intricate canal system linking dozens of lakes still supplies fresh water to the islands’ 1,000 inhabitants.
Fiercely opposed to religion, the Soviets imprisoned or killed most of the clergy members and lopped off the cupolas. Having only recently returned after a banishment of nearly 70 years, many of the monks are now alarmed by the efforts of entrepreneurs like Ms. Smirnova to open the islands to tourists.
Similar conflicts have arisen throughout Russia as the Orthodox Church clambers to regain land and property lost to the Soviet government before they can be grabbed by adherents of the new capitalist ethos.
“This land, is it a means for earning money or is it a holy place?” asked Archimandrite Mifodi, the acting head of the monastery. “The two cannot exist together.”
With the backing of the Russian Orthodox Church, he is pressing the government, which administers the islands, for control of the monastery and other religious sites, though a decision has not been made.
The issue, however, runs deeper than just a dispute over land use and property rights.
Buried beneath the wild blueberry fields and gangly forests of knotted dancing birches are the bones of thousands of inmates who perished at one of the first and most notorious Soviet prison camps: the Solovetsky Camp of Special Purpose, described by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as the harbinger of the gulag.
Through the camp’s 20-year history, hundreds of thousands of prisoners — aristocrats, clergymen, intelligentsia, common criminals — toiled through brutal winters and mosquito-plagued summers, succumbing to disease, starvation and execution. Prison officials experimented with methods of torture that were later refined at prison camps throughout the Soviet Union. The horrors that occurred here remained an official secret even after the camp closed in 1939.
Today people can freely discuss the atrocities, and a museum tucked inside the monastery walls has a small exhibition devoted to the camp. Yet people seem ambivalent about the subject here, as in much of Russia, where a varnished rendering of Soviet history’s bloodiest episodes has begun taking hold.
“There are some groups who don’t want to hear about the prison history at all,” said Aleksandr Martinov, an archaeologist and longtime resident who spends part of the islands’ short summer giving tours. “They’ve read about it, they know and don’t want to endure it any more.”
On a recent tour of Sekirnaya Gora, a scenic hill topped with a red-domed church that served as a punishment ward during the 1920s and 1930s, Russian tourists gasped, cupping hands to their contorted faces, when Mr. Martinov described how prisoners were stripped naked and tied to trees, to freeze to death in winter or to be eaten alive by swarms of mosquitoes in summer.
Tall crosses made in the monastery’s workshop mark the islands’ many mass graves. One stands in the main population center, not far from a former barracks where hundreds of prisoners’ names are carved into the outer walls.
Archimandrite Mifodi is somewhat undecided about Solovki’s prison legacy. He said that wars, persecution and the harsh environment had for centuries made life on the islands a struggle.
On the subject of tourism, however, he was unequivocal.
“Solovki should be a place of pilgrimage,” he said. “The tourists do not understand this.”
Indeed, the remains of campsites, littered with food containers, cigarette packs and vodka bottles, pockmark the forests and beaches.
For many of Solovki’s residents, however, tourism offers a chance to emerge from the poverty endemic to many remote Russian regions. Among the dilapidated shacks and crumbling apartment blocs — some of which are former prison barracks — quaint wooden cottages and hotels with relatively expensive restaurants have appeared.
Tourism advocates like Ms. Smirnova say the islands have a history going back thousands of years, and extraordinary natural beauty.
She uses her all-terrain vehicle to take visitors to some of Solovki’s most inaccessible regions to see Neolithic stone labyrinths and white beluga whales that gather close to shore in summer’s midnight sun. She has used her earnings to study English to help her cultivate business with European and American tourists.
“Solovki is more than a monastery,” she said.