Gulag (13 page)

In survivors’ memoirs, the chaos that accompanied the building of the canal takes on an almost mythological quality. The need to save money meant that prisoners used wood, sand, and rocks instead of metal and cement. Corners were cut wherever they could be. After much discussion, the canal was dug to a depth of only twelve feet, barely enough for naval vessels. Since modern technology was either too expensive or unavailable, the canal’s planners deployed vast quantities of unskilled labor. The approximately 170,000 prisoners and “special exiles” who worked on the project over the twenty-one-month construction period used wooden spades, crude handsaws, pickaxes, and wheelbarrows to dig the canal and to build its great dams and locks.
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From photographs taken at the time, these tools certainly seem primitive, but only a closer look reveals exactly how primitive. Some of them are still on display in the town of Medvezhegorsk, once the gateway to the canal and the “capital” of Belbaltlag. Now a forgotten Karelian village, Medvezhegorsk is notable only for its enormous, empty, roach-infested hotel, and for its small local history museum. The pickaxes on display there are actually slices of barely sharpened metal, tied to wooden staves with leather or string. The saws consist of flat metal sheets, with teeth crudely cut into them. Instead of dynamite, prisoners broke up large rocks using “hammers”—hunks of metal screwed on to wooden handles—to pound iron bars into the stone.

Everything, from the wheelbarrows to the scaffolding, was handmade. One inmate remembered that “there was no technology whatsoever. Even ordinary automobiles were a rarity. Everything was done by hand, sometimes with the help of horses. We dug earth by hand, and carried it out in wheelbarrows, we dug through the hills by hand as well, and carried away the stones.”
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Even Soviet propaganda bragged that stones were dragged away from the canal on “
Belomor
Fords . . . a heavy truck on four small, solid wooden wheels made out of tree stumps.”
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Living conditions were no less makeshift, despite the efforts of Genrikh Yagoda, the OGPU chief who bore political responsibility for the project. He appeared genuinely to believe that prisoners would have to be given decent living conditions if they were to finish the canal on time, and frequently harangued camp commanders to treat prisoners better, to “take maximum care to see that prisoners are correctly fed, clothed and shod.” Commanders followed suit, as did the chief of the Solovetsky division of the canal project in 1933. Among other things, he instructed his inferiors to liquidate queues for food in the evenings, to eliminate theft from the kitchens, and to restrict the evening head count to an hour. In general, official food norms were higher than they would be a few years later, with sausage and tea among the recommended products. Theoretically, prisoners received a new set of work clothes every year.
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Nevertheless, the extreme haste and lack of planning inevitably created much suffering. As work progressed, new camp sites had to be built along the course of the canal. At every one of these new sites, the prisoners and exiles arrived—and found nothing. Before starting work they had to build their own wooden barracks and organize their food supply. In the meantime, it sometimes happened that the freezing cold of the Karelian winter killed them before they completed their tasks. According to some calculations, more than 25,000 prisoners died, although this number does not include those who were released due to illness or accident, and who died soon afterward.
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One prisoner, A. F. Losev, wrote to his wife that he actually longed to be back in the depths of Butyrka prison, since here he had to lay on bunks so crowded that “if during the night you roll from one side to another, at least another four or five people have to roll over too.” Even more desperate is the later testimony of a young boy, the son of exiled kulaks, who was deported with his entire family to one of the settlements that had just been built along the canal:

We ended up living in a barrack with two layers of bunks. Since there were small children, our family was given a lower bunk. The barracks were long and cold. The stoves were lit twenty-four hours a day, thanks to the fact that firewood was plentiful in Karelia . . . our father, and main source of food, received on behalf of all of us, one third of a bucket of greenish soup, in whose dark water swam two or three green tomatoes or a cucumber, a few pieces of frozen potato, shaken together with 100–200 grams of barley or chick-peas.

In addition, the boy remembered that his father, who worked building new houses for the settlers, received 600 grams of bread. His sister received 400 grams. That had to suffice for all nine members of the family.
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Then, as later, some of the problems were reflected in official reports. At a meeting of the Communist Party cell of Belbaltlag in August 1932, there were complaints about the poor organization of food distribution, dirty kitchens, and increasing incidents of scurvy. Pessimistically, the secretary of the cell wrote that “I have no doubt that the canal will not be built on time . . .”
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But for most, there was not the option of doubt. Indeed, the letters and reports written by the canal’s administrators over the period of its construction carry overtones of overwhelming panic. Stalin had decreed that the canal would be built in twenty months, and its builders well understood that their livelihoods, and possibly their lives, depended upon it being completed in twenty months. To speed up work, camp commanders began to adopt practices already being used in the “free” working world, including “socialist competitions” between work teams—races to fulfill the norm or move the stones or dig the hole first—as well as all-night “storms,” in which prisoners “voluntarily” worked twenty-four or forty-eight hours in a row. One prisoner remembered when electric lights were strung up around the work site so that work could continue for twenty-four hours a day.
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Another prisoner received 10 kilos of white flour and 5 kilos of sugar as a prize for good performance. He gave the flour to the camp bakers. They made him several loaves of white bread, which he ate all at once, alone.
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Along with the competitions, the authorities also adhered to the cult of the
udarnik
or “shock-worker.” Later, shock-workers were renamed “Stakhanovites,” in honor of Aleksei Stakhanov, a ludicrously overproductive miner. The
udarniki
and Stakhanovites were prisoners who had overfulfilled the norm and therefore received extra food and special privileges, including the right (unthinkable in later years) to a new suit every year, in addition to a new set of work clothes every six months.
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Top performers also received significantly better food. In the dining halls they ate at separate tables, beneath posters reading “For the best workers, the best food.” Their inferiors sat beneath posters reading “Here they get worse food: refusers, loafers, lazy-bones.”
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Eventually, top performers were also released early: for every three days of work at 100 percent norm-fulfillment, each prisoner received a day off his sentence. When the canal was finally completed, on time, in August 1933, 12,484 prisoners were freed. Numerous others received medals and awards.
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One prisoner celebrated his early release at a ceremony complete with the traditional Russian presentation of bread and salt, as onlookers shouted, “Hooray for the Builders of the Canal!” In the heat of the moment, he began kissing an unknown woman. Together, they wound up spending the night on the banks of the canal.
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The White Sea Canal construction was remarkable in many ways: for its overwhelming chaos, for its extreme haste, and for its significance to Stalin. But the rhetoric used to describe the project was truly unique: the White Sea Canal was the first, last, and only Gulag project ever exposed to the full light of Soviet propaganda, both at home and abroad. And the man chosen to explain, promote, and justify the canal to the Soviet Union and the rest of the world was none other than Maxim Gorky.

He was not a surprising choice. By this time, Gorky was well and truly a part of the Stalinist hierarchy. After Stalin’s triumphant steamer trip down the completed canal in August 1933, Gorky led 120 Soviet writers on a similar expedition. The writers were (or so they claimed) so excited by this journey that they could hardly hold their notebooks: their fingers were “shaking from astonishment.”
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Those who then decided to write a book about the building of the canal received plenty of material encouragement as well, including a “splendid buffet lunch at the Astoria,” a grand, Czarist-era Leningrad hotel, to celebrate their participation in the project.
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Even by the low standards of social realism, the book that emerged from their efforts—Kanal imeni Stalina (The Canal Named for Stalin)—is an extraordinary testament to the corruption of writers and intellectuals in totalitarian societies. Like Gorky’s foray into Solovetsky,
Kanal imeni Stalina
justifies the unjustifiable, purporting not only to document the spiritual transformation of prisoners into shining examples of
Homo sovieticus
, but also to create a new type of literature. Although introduced and concluded by Gorky, the responsibility for the bulk of the book was ascribed not to one individual but to a thirty-six-writer collective. Using lavish language, hyperbole, and the gentle massaging of facts, they strove together to capture the spirit of the new age. One of the book’s photographs encapsulates its theme: it depicts a woman, dressed in prison garb, wielding a drill with great determination. Beneath her is the caption “In changing nature, man changes himself.” The contrast with the cold-blooded language used by the Yanson commission, and the economic agenda of the OGPU, could not be more stark.

For those unfamiliar with the genre, some aspects of the social realist
Kanal
might seem somewhat surprising. For one, the book does not attempt to disguise the truth altogether, as it describes the problems created by the lack of technology and trained specialists. At one point, the book quotes Matvei Berman, at the time the commander of the Gulag: “You will be given one thousand healthy men,” Berman tells an OGPU subordinate:

“They have been condemned by the Soviet government for various terms. With these people you are to accomplish the work.”

“But permit me to ask, where are the warders?” the OGPU man responds.

“The warders you will organize on the spot. You will select them yourselves.”

“Very well; but I know nothing about oil.”

“Get the imprisoned Engineer Dukhanovich to be your assistant.”

“What good is he? His specialty is the cold drawing of metals.”

“What do you want? Are we to condemn the professors you require to concentration camps? There is no such clause in the Penal Code. And we are not the Oil syndicate.”

With those words, Berman then sent the OGPU agent off to do his job. “A crazy affair,” notes
Kanal
’s authors. Within “a month or two,” however, the OGPU man and his colleagues are bragging to one another about the successes they have achieved with their ragtag group of prisoners. “I’ve got a colonel who’s the best lumberjack in the entire camp,” crows one; “I have a field engineer on excavation work—an ex-cashier embezzler,” says another.
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The message is clear: material conditions were difficult, the human material was rough—but the all-knowing, never-failing Soviet political police succeeded, against all the odds, in transforming them into good Soviet citizens. Thus actual facts—the primitive technology, the lack of competent specialists—were deployed to give verisimilitude to an otherwise fanciful portrait of life in the camps.

Much of the book, in fact, is taken up with heartwarming, semireligious stories of prisoners “reforging” themselves through their work on the canal. Many of the prisoners thus reborn are criminals, but not all. Unlike Gorky’s Solovetsky essay, which dismissed or minimized the presence of political prisoners,
Kanal
features some star political converts. Fettered by “caste prejudice, Engineer Maslov, a former ‘wrecker,’” tries to “veil with iron those dark and deep processes of reconstruction of his conscience which were continually surging within him.” Engineer Zubrik, a working-class ex-saboteur, “honestly earned the right to return again to the bosom of the class in which he was born.”
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But
Kanal imeni Stalina
was by no means the only literary work of the time to praise the transforming powers of the camps. Nikolai Pogodin’s play,
Aristokraty—
a comedy about the White Sea Canal—is another notable example, not least because it picks up on an earlier Bolshevik theme: the “lovability” of thieves. First performed in December 1934, Pogodin’s play (eventually made into a film called
Prisoners
) ignores the kulaks and politicals who constituted the bulk of the canal’s inmates, instead depicting the jolly japes of the camp bandits (the “aristocrats” of the title) using a very mild form of criminal slang. True, there are one or two sinister notes in the play. At one point, a criminal “wins” a girl in a card game, meaning his opponent must capture her and force her to submit to him. In the play, the girl escapes; in real life, she would probably not have been so lucky.

In the end, though, everyone confesses to their previous crimes, sees the light, and begins to work enthusiastically. A song is sung:

I was a cruel bandit, yes,
I stole from the people, hated to work,
My life was black like the night.
But then they took me to the canal,
Everything past now seems a bad dream.
It is as if I were reborn.
I want to work, and live and sing . . .
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At the time, this sort of thing was hailed as a new and radical form of theater. Jerzy Gliksman, a Polish socialist who saw
Aristokraty
performed in Moscow in 1935, described the experience:

Instead of being in the usual place, the stage was built in the centre of the edifice, the audience sitting in a circle around it. The director’s aim was to draw the audience closer to the action of the play, to bridge the gap between actor and spectator. There was no curtain, and the stage settings were exceedingly simple, almost as in the Elizabethan theatre . . . the topic—life in a labour camp—was thrilling in itself.
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