What was President Vladimir Putin trying to tell his people a few weeks ago when he journeyed to an extraordinary archipelago in the Russian Arctic that has by turns been a mighty monastic fortress, a dreadful Bolshevik prison camp and now, since the fall of communism, the home of a revived community of monks? A former Kremlin adviser, Georgy Sata-rov, says there was a "coded message" in the president's decision to mark the tenth anniversary of the Soviet Union's collapse by visiting the Solovetsky Islands, often known simply as Solovki. Coded or not, what was the message?
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