Gulag

It was also a project of extreme, even foolhardy ambition, which is perhaps why no one had tried it before. The canal required 141 miles to be dug, five dams, and nineteen locks. Soviet planners intended to build it using the lowest possible technology, in a pre-industrial, far northern region which had never been properly surveyed and was, in Maxim Gorky’s words, “hydrologically terra incognita.”¹⁶ All of this, however, may have been part of the project’s appeal to Stalin. He wanted a technological triumph—one the Old Regime had never managed—and he wanted it as fast as possible. He demanded not only that the canal be built, but also that it be built within twenty months. When completed, it would bear his name.

Stalin was the chief promoter of the White Sea Canal—and Stalin specifically wanted the canal to be built with prison labor. Before its construction, he furiously condemned those who questioned whether, given the relatively light volume of traffic in the White Sea, such an expensive project was really necessary. “I’m told,” he wrote to Molotov, “that Rykov and Kviring want to squelch the matter of the Northern Canal, contrary to the Politburo’s decisions. They should be taken down a peg and given a slap on the wrists.” During a Politburo meeting at which the canal was discussed, Stalin also wrote an angry, hastily scribbled note, which speaks of his belief in inmate labor: “As for the northern section of the canal, I have in mind relying on the GPU [prison labor]. At the same time we must assign someone to calculate yet again the expenses in building this first section . . . Too much.”¹⁷

Nor were Stalin’s preferences kept secret. After the canal’s completion, its top administrator credited Stalin both for his “bravery” in undertaking to build this “hydrotechnical giant,” and for the “wonderful fact that this work was not completed by an ordinary workforce.”¹⁸ Stalin’s influence can also be seen in the speed with which the construction began. The decision to begin building was made in February 1931, and, after a mere seven months of engineering work and advance surveying, the work began in September.

Administratively, physically, even psychologically, the first prison camps associated with the White Sea Canal were an outgrowth of SLON. The canal’s camps were organized on the SLON model, used SLON’s equipment, and were manned by SLON’s cadres. As soon as it began, the canal’s bosses immediately transferred many inmates from SLON’s mainland camps and from the Solovetsky Islands to work on the new project. For a time, the old SLON and the new White Sea Canal bureaucracies may even have competed to control the project—but the canal won. Eventually, SLON ceased to be an independent entity. The Solovetsky kremlin was re-designated a high-security prison, and the Solovetsky archipelago simply became another division of the Belomor–Baltiiskii [White Sea–Baltic] Corrective-Labor Camp, known as “Belbaltlag.” A number of guards and leading OGPU administrators also moved from SLON to the canal. Among them, as noted, was Naftaly Frenkel, who managed the daily work of the canal from November 1931 until its completion.¹⁹

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.²⁰

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.