Gulag

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.” ²¹ 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.”²²

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.²³

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. ²⁴ 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.²⁵

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 . . .”²⁶