Gulag

Walking along the banks of the White Sea Canal today, it is hard to conjure up that near-hysterical atmosphere. I visited the site on a lazy day in August 1999, in the company of several local historians. We stopped, briefly, to look at the small monument to the victims of the canal in Povenets, which bears a brief inscription: “To the innocents, who died while building the White Sea Canal, 1931–1933.” While we stood there, one of my companions insisted on ceremonially smoking a “Belomor” cigarette. He explained that the “Belomor” cigarette brand, once one of the Soviet Union’s most popular, was for decades the only other monument to the canal’s builders.

Nearby stood an old trudposelok, or “exile settlement,” now virtually empty. The large, once-solid houses, made of wood in the Karelian style, were boarded up. Several had begun to sag. A local man, who came originally from Belorussia—he even spoke a little Polish—told us that he had tried to buy one of the houses a few years ago, but the local government would not sell it to him. “Now it’s all falling apart,” he said. In a little garden behind the house he grew squash and cucumbers and berries. He offered us homemade liquor. With his garden and his 550-ruble pension—at the time, about $22 per month—he had enough, he said, to live on. Of course there was no work to be had on the canal.

And no wonder: along the canal itself, boys were swimming, throwing stones. Cows waded in the murky, shallow water, and weeds grew through the cracks of the concrete. Alongside one of the locks, in a small booth with pink curtains and the original Stalinist columns on the outside, the lone woman controlling the rise and fall of water told us that there were perhaps seven passing ships a day at the most, and often only three or four. That was more than Solzhenitsyn saw in 1966, when he spent a whole day beside the canal and saw two barges, both carrying firewood. Most goods by then, as nowadays, travel by rail—and, as a canal worker told him, the waterway is so shallow that “not even submarines can pass through it under their own power; they have to be loaded on barges.” ⁴²

The shipping route from the Baltic to the White Sea had not, it seemed, proved so urgently necessary after all.

Chapter 5

THE CAMPS EXPAND

We go forward, and behind us

The whole brigade walks merrily along.

In front of us, the victory of the Stakhanovites

Opens a new path . . .

For the old path is no longer known to us,

From our dungeons we have risen to the call

Along the path of Stakhanovite triumph

Believing, we walk towards a life of freedom . . .

—From the journal Kuznitsa printed in Sazlag, 1936 ¹

POLITICALLY, THE WHITE SEA CANAL was the most important Gulag project of its era. Thanks to Stalin’s personal involvement, no existing resources were spared on its construction. Lavish propaganda also ensured that its successful completion was trumpeted far and wide. Yet the canal was not typical of the Gulag’s new projects, of which it was neither the first nor the largest.

In fact, even before construction of the canal had begun, the OGPU had already started quietly deploying prison labor all over the country, with far less fuss and propaganda. By the middle of 1930, the Gulag system already had 300,000 inmates at its disposal, dispersed among a dozen or so camp complexes and a few smaller sites. It had put 15,000 people to work in Dallag, a new camp in the far east. More than 20,000 were building and operating chemical plants in Vishlag, a camp organized on the base of the Vishersky division of SLON, on the western side of the Ural Mountains. In Siblag, in western Siberia, prisoners were building the northern railways, making bricks, and cutting trees, while the 40,000 prisoners of SLON were at work building roads, cutting wood for export, and packaging 40 percent of the fish harvested in the White Sea.²

Unlike the White Sea Canal, these new camps were not for show. Although they were certainly of greater economic significance to the Soviet Union, no teams of writers set out to describe them. Their existence was not completely secret—not yet—but no one publicized them either: the “real” achievements of the Gulag were not for foreign or even domestic consumption.