#belomor

Gorky’s special relationship to the Belomor project allows for an understanding of his career as a symbolic representation of the ideals promoted at the camp. Gorky was a staunch enthusiast of prisoner labor and even predicted the possibility of a waterway similar to Belomor in his early works; in the April 1917 issue of his journal New Life (Novaia zhizn’) he writes

Imagine, for example, that in the interest of the development of industry, we build the Riga-Kherson canal to connect the Baltic Sea with the Black Sea […] and so instead of sending a million people to their deaths, we send a part of them to work on what is necessary for the country and its people.

Gorky’s condoning of Gulag camps such as Solovki and Belomor seems paradoxical to many scholars in light of his humanitarian endeavors, and some speculate either that Gorky was ignorant of the full extent of Stalin’s butchery or that he was aware, but was in a position that necessitated acquiescence to safeguard his well-being. When viewed in the context of his philosophical outlook on literature and labor, however, his support of prison camps seems not like an aberration but rather a natural extension of his belief in violent re-birth, a belief related to Marxist-Leninist ideology and the concept of god-building. Gorky sees people and language alike in the framework of craftsmanship. Perhaps his mistake was not so much his general support of Gulag projects, but his belief that human flesh can be formed like words on a page or cement in a factory. Gorky, after all, cared more about the craft than people themselves; in his 1928 essay “On How I Learned to Write” (O tom, kak ia uchilsia pisat’), he claimed that “the history of human labor and creation is far more interesting and meaningful than the history of mankind.” Gorky was key to the canal project because his philosophical interests exemplify the very core of Belomor: the violent transformation of people through creative acts.

Technology’s magic demonstrated humans’ usurpation of God in a tangible way, with the ever-widening capacity to harness and transform the natural environment showcasing the potential of man-made machines. Soviet pilots were imagined as literal incarnations of the New Man, and the massive expansion of the Soviet aviation industry in the mid 1920s provided some of the most concrete evidence of human superiority over the divine. Short voyages known as “air baptisms” (vozdushnye kreshcheniia) supposedly eradicated peasants’ belief in God while highlighting the majesty of Red aviation. In such “agit-flights,” pilots would take Orthodox believers into the skies and show them that they held no celestial beings. Those who participated in the flights would narrate their experiences to neighboring villagers, describing “what lies beyond the darkened clouds.” This phrase served as the title of a 1925 essay by Viktor Shklovskii in which a village elder embarks upon a conversional agit-flight that he later recounts to his fellow peasants. Six years later, Shklovskii participated in the writers’ collective that coauthored the now infamous monograph History of the Construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal, in which a different, often deadly, type of technological program offered the promise of conversion. In both instances, darkness will be overcome by the enlightening potential of socialist rationalism: aviation will liberate the peasants from their ignorant beliefs, just as labor will supposedly bring the Belomor prisoners to the light of Soviet ideology. Such endeavors occurred before the backdrop of a larger civilizing project, since both the rural reaches of peasant villages and the wild expanses of untouched Karelia necessitated modernization.

Yet could such projects ever be completed? Did the New Man really exist, and could his creation ever be achieved? The messianic vision of Soviet socialism necessitated that paradise lie always just out of reach.

Similarly, Nietzsche posits the development into the Übermensch as a perennially elusive goal; like the Faustian concept of striving, the individual is forever trying to perfect oneself without necessarily ever achieving perfection. This constant yearning renders the present as the future, as the purpose of today is necessarily the reward of tomorrow. In the Soviet Union, the regime assured people that the difficulties they endured were required in order to reach the svetloe budushchee (radiant future), a utopia found at the end of an interminable road. In the absence of an end result or final destination, the voyage itself becomes the site of cultural exploration."

The welding of a hitherto unchecked and shapeless populace into a firm form was not only instituted by an act of violence but also carried to its conclusion by nothing but acts of violence—that the oldest “state” thus appeared as a fearful tyranny, as an oppressive and remorseless machine, and went on working until this raw material of people and semi-animals was at last not only thoroughly kneaded and pliant but also formed.

Coupled with physical force (thousands of prisoners died in building a waterway that came to be known as the “road of bones”) was ideological force. As prisoners toiled at Belomor, the regime transmogrified their minds as well as their bodies. Imbedded in the ideals of the Russian Revolution was a sense of aggressive transformation, and the Bolsheviks sought to re-mold forcefully those not willing to submit to their worldview. According to Lenin, Marxism had “assimilated and refashioned everything of value in the more than two thousand years of the development of human thought and culture.” The Communist Party, in turn, served as the vanguard of the proletariat. Their task was to actively lead the workers and peasants to consciousness, to help them make the pilgrimage from darkness to light. Not only Belomor but the entire Soviet project is modeled off of the assumption that perekovka—the potential for human self-transformation—is possible. Marxism-Leninism particularly embraced this possibility, since peasants and workers had to become enlightened, class-conscious citizens in the absence of the full development of capitalism."

The inherent industrial connotation of re-forging played a significant role in the creation of selfhood at the White Sea-Baltic Canal, and the close connection between industry and culture was ubiquitous in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s. “Forge” serves as both a noun and a verb: it is both the fire in which metal is melted and the process of melting itself. The term perekovka, therefore, succinctly captures the perpetuum mobile of transformation at Belomor: the prisoners themselves produce the furnace in which they are to be smelted. The fiery heat of industrialization renders self-molding permanent, physical, and transformative. This identity conversion, like a metallurgical process, would be violent, and the Soviet labor camp was an ideal site for building the New Man.

The recasting of industrial processes as cultural constructs began long before the construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal; it was a favorite rhetorical device of the Bolsheviks. In a 1924 speech by Leon Trotsky, workers’ clubs are cited as a “smithy” where proletarian culture is “forged.” In the violent and heady years following the Russian Revolution, a massive restructuring of culture and society occurred, one that was very often portrayed in metallurgical terms. The concept of smelting is apparent in other utopian visions as well. In Book Three of Plato’s Republic, the “myth of the metals,” a fiction assuring citizens that they all have a bit of metal from the earth in their souls—gold, silver, or iron/bronze, depending on their level in society’s hierarchy—is discussed in detail. This “noble lie” is intended to foster patriotism, as one who believes they literally come from the land will most likely be loyal to it. The prisoners at Belomor were encouraged to take pride in the canal project in a similar, fabricated fashion; since they are part and parcel of the industrialization plan—both metaphorically and literally—they must swear allegiance to the Soviet project. Many prisoner narratives, in turn, imagine the project as a homeland, as more dear to them than their families, or even as a romantic lover.

The violence inherent in the molding of prisoners’ consciousnesses— as well as the ferocity that characterized the Gulag more generally—cannot be underestimated. This was a characteristic feature of Soviet ideology."

When you consider [it], our jailers did some strange things. Having arrested us for meeting at the most once a week to spend a few hours in discussion of philosophical, artistic, and religious questions that aroused our interests, first of all they put us together in a prison cell, and then in camps, and swelled our numbers with others from our city interested in the resolution of the same philosophical questions; while in the camps we were mixed with a wide and generous range of such people from Moscow, Rostov, the Caucasus, the Crimea, and Siberia. We passed through a gigantic school of mutual education before vanishing once more in[to] the limitless expanses of the Motherland.

Likhachev’s recollection gets to the heart of just one of the many inconsistencies structuring the Soviet prison system: in separating unwanted elements from socialist society, the regime facilitated their communication. Likhachev’s depiction addresses this irrationality while also highlighting the pedagogical function of prison, which he calls “a gigantic school of mutual education.” Likhachev here reverses the standard relationship between homeland and prison camp. Rather than vanishing within the limitless expanse of the Gulag, prisoners are first educated in the Gulag and disappear only after their release from the camps. Here the camps are not unlike a hardscrabble type of higher education, similar in some ways to Maxim Gorky’s education on the streets through low-skill professions in My Universities (1923) and mirrored in criminal slang terms for prison, such as “academy,” “big school,” and “college.”

Yet to imply that a Gulag camp could be more educational, more self-imprinting, than society itself seems controversial, almost repugnant. How do you make sense of a didactic death camp? ... On the one hand, prisoners at the camp were remarkably creative. They worked as journalists, composed academic research papers, debated philosophical issues, and staged costumed operas. On the other hand, they lived in a landscape of destruction. The prisoners broke apart solid rock in twelve-hour shifts, dug a 227-kilometer canal with no modern equipment, and died by the thousands. How could one make sense of this seemingly irresolvable contradiction? That is the question this book tries to answer by asserting that such a paradox is in fact not a contradiction at all: the prison camp embraces the life-affirming thrust within violence itself, the possibility of creation within destruction.

... camp enthusiasts were not necessarily official political representatives or devout Communist Party members—many were authors and artists, some of whom I counted among my favorites: Mikhail Zoshchenko, Viktor Shklovskii, and Maxim Gorky. These well-known Soviet writers, along with many others, depicted Belomor as a “school” of socialist education as well as a prison camp. While scholars and historians often explain away such statements by claiming that these artists had no choice, that they were intimidated by the State to make them, this did not seem like a satisfactory or sufficient explanation to me. In addition to winning the support of artistic luminaries, the Belomor project spurred a play, a film, and innumerable other cultural products. ... how was it possible to evince so much creativity in the face of death?

...

While published sources regarding the White Sea-Baltic Canal had long been available—a “history” of its construction was published in Russian as well as English in 1934—I was more curious about the prisoners who built the canal than about the outsiders who wrote about it. And here again Belomor represented a fortuitous opportunity: precisely because of the unique cultural dynamics of the project, the State preserved scores of documents regarding its history. The administration collected autobiographies of “shock-workers,” the most productive laborers, and the camp newspaper held literary competitions that selected the best of the short stories, poetry, and plays of the prisoners. Russian archives still house these documents.

... why [had] so few people had looked at these texts, let alone analyzed them? ...part of the reason is that it is assumed that the Belomor documents were mere propaganda items, not worthy of further study. This seems to be true even in relation to the collectively written “history” of Belomor written by the well-known Soviet authors I mentioned. Even with these famous contributors, it took some time and a few insightful scholars, such as Cynthia Ruder, to demonstrate that this was a complex text worth studying. Perhaps the same is also true of these prisoner texts, with the added difficulty that they were stored in Moscow archives and not on a library shelf. And while it is important to study propaganda, no matter how consistent it might be, ... these texts were not necessarily homogeneous, which deepened their mystery and complexity. The more I worked with Belomor narratives of all types, the more I found a multiplicity of approaches. Rather than actors in masks, brainwashed automatons, or self-serving careerists, the prisoners at Belomor were a mix of all three and more. While some worked to gain special privileges or because of psychological shame and peer pressure, others worked because they believed in the socialist system of education through labor, re-forging.

While it may be controversial to claim that prisoners in a labor camp believed in the very system incarcerating them, the idea seems less absurd when one considers Belomor within the broader context of the Gulag, and even the Soviet Union. Not only did the camps house, clothe, and feed the prisoners—however terribly—during the massively traumatic periods of famine and collectivization, the inmates served as a surrogate family for many criminals orphaned by the violence of the Civil War. In addition, the notion of dedication in the face of oppression is not unusual in Russian history; many victims of Stalin’s purges fervently believed in the Soviet project, even when faced with execution.

...to make such claims during the Cold War would not have been possible. To even hint that the camps were anything other than death machines, or that prisoners could have been proud of their labor performed at Gulag sites, would have made one an apologist for one of the darkest legacies of the twentieth century. Yet to acknowledge the creative fecundity at Belomor is not to ignore or belittle the many lives that were destroyed there. Just the opposite: acknowledging the creativity at the camps in the face of annihilation, and asserting that some prisoners might have bought into the project, is precisely what will help us to understand the mechanisms of Stalinism. It is much more frightening to realize that some prisoners could have “believed” in the camps than to assume they were all dissidents, since this fact demonstrates just how powerful and pervasive Soviet propaganda truly was. Casting the Soviet Union as entirely evil, and all prisoner responses as monologic in their contestation of the regime is just as misguided as proclaiming that the Soviet Union was the fairest and best country in the world. Both viewpoints are equally one-dimensional.

... Belomor narratives gave ... a far more nuanced point of view, showing me that prisoners understood their time in the camp in varied ways. With this backdrop in mind, we can more fully understand the complexity of Stalinism. And the more I studied Belomor, the more I came to see the prison camp as a microcosm of Stalinism, a distillation of the many paradoxes that framed the Soviet experience. The camp was a synecdoche for the Soviet Union, the representation of a whole with a part. It contained all the necessary elements: oppression, ideological indoctrination, utopianism, the New Man, the Cultural Revolution, achievement through labor, cultural richness, whisperers and liars, fudged work reports, and the desperation to “catch up” with the West technologically. If the “whole notion of transformation […] was at the heart of the Soviet project,” Belomor mirrored this desire for conversion with its penal philosophy of re-forging (perekovka). At Belomor, common criminals would be re-born as socialist subjects. The key motifs around which this book is organized all reverberate with features of the larger Soviet experience."