Many of them were sentenced to forced labor camps. In 1952 the International League for the Rights of Man was able to document the existence of more than 400 forced labor camps in Central and Eastern Europe . Here you can find highlihts of the Open Society Archives hodings related to the Gulag and other forced labor camps. The work is still in progress. The exact number of prisoners who went through the camp during 1923-1939 is still unknown.
Estimates range between tens and hundreds of thousands.
Solovki is a symbol of the new system's attitude to religion and tradition. A wave of repression of a scale never seen before brought hundreds of thousands arrested people to camps, where their destination is to become a work-force performing economic tasks. At the end of 1936 the Solovetsk camp was reorganized into a prison and then shut down in 1939 to make way for a naval base. The devastation of church buildings continued well into the 1960s, when restoration work was initiated. The influx of military families and conservators brought new life to the islands.