Gulag

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.³⁵

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.” ³⁶

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 . . .³⁷

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: