Viktor Listov

"Solovky Power" is a documentary about the first Soviet labor camp created by Lenin in 1923. Solovky was established in a complex of ancient monasteries on a cluster of islands off the remote White Sea coast. Though its name derives from the Russian word for nightingale, the title of the film echoes the term 'Soviet power', stressing the fact that from the very beginning the Soviet penal colonies were a world unto themselves.

The film is about why Fedor Chalyapin was actually expelled from his native country and left Russia forever.

Russian life in 1917 was not limited to civil confrontations, shootouts, demonstrations and rallies. Many people lived, or at least tried to live peacefully and constructively. The great Fyodor Shalyapin sang and staged opera performances in Moscow and Petrograd; director Vsevolod Meyerhold played the Lermontov Masquerade on the stage of the Alexandrinsky Theater, and Anna Akhmatova and Sergey Eisenstein applauded him. The future writer Konstantin Paustovsky eagerly absorbed impressions about the life of summer and autumn Moscow. And in the Moscow region estate Lopasnya-Zachatievskoe a happy accident led to the discovery of the longest manuscript by A.S. Pushkin, who was considered lost. The film is built on cinema and photo chronicles of a century ago.