Gulag

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.²⁷ 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.²⁸

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.²⁹ 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.” ³⁰

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. ³¹ 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.³²

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.”³³ 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.³⁴

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.