What was the role of force?

Ann Yip 12U4S

The White Sea

Canal

What is the White Sea Canal?

• Aka. Baltic Canal or Belomor Canal (Belomorkanal)

• opened 2 Aug 1933– 227 km long

• Constructed 1931-3 by forced labour of Kulaks– Farmers, political

prisoners, criminals

Showcase success of Five-Year Plan

• use ‘collective labor’ to ‘reforge’ ‘class enemies’

• Completed 4 months ahead of schedule

But its economic utilization limited by depth of 4m, inadequate for most vessels.

Stalin’s Aims

• Possibly 180,000 labourers• many were arrested Kulaks

in Collectivisation • Worked up to 14 hours a day

• poor conditions, risky labour– Digging frozen ground with

pickaxes– Cutting trees with

handsaws/axes– Make-shift wheelbarrows– Dug 37km altogether

Forced Labour

• approx 100,000 died– Solzhenitsyn

estimated 10,000

• Mortality rate 8.7%• more sick and

disabled• about 100,000

labour corpses missing from graves

• Prisoners could be easily replaced by system

• Kolyma River – Gold mining destination• Reputed to be winter

all year round• Survival was scarce

• Mining coal/copper caused lung disease from inhalation or ore dustPrisoners mine gold at Kolyma,

the most notorious Gulag camp in extreme northeastern Siberia

Drawing and memoir excerpt by Jacques RossiCourtesy of Regina Gorzkowski-Rossi.

“After eleven and a half hours of labor (not including time needed to assign a task, receive tools and give them back), Professor Kozyrev commented: ‘How far Man is still from perfection. Just to think how many people and what minds are needed to do a job of one horse.’”

• 1934, memorial book “Kanal imeni Stalina (The Canal Named Stalin)” published

• 120 writers and artists produced book– under editorship of the

GPU (Maksim Gorki)– articles by Aleksei

Tolstoy, Boris Pilniak, Ilf and Petrov, Viktor Shklovsky and Mikhail Zoshchenko

Kanal imeni Stalina

“Labor re-educates them”

• Portrayed redemptive, liberating effect of labour– Stalin described writers as

"engineers of the soul“

• Pictures heavily retouched: dynamic compositions and flowery captions– photographs by Aleksandr

Rodchenko

• Some writers not aware of moral destruction of labour

• Victor Shklovsky probably co-operated to free brother from camps. After brother arrested again in 1937, he disappeared

'We study nature and obtain freedom'.

• Cultural-Educative Division (KVO) glorified labour– Also with exhibitions

and theatres

• Camp newspaper: “Perekovka”– Meant ‘re-casting’ or

‘remoulding’– Mottos, slogans– Devoted to camp life– Praises authority– Socialistic

achievements

Propaganda Within Camps

Agitprop poster: 'Canal Army soldier! The heat of your work will melt your prison term!'

• Newspapers (Pravda and Izvestija) glorified construction work– articles, cartoons,

images showed 'reforged' workers

Newspaper Coverage

'The captain of the land of the Soviets leads us from victory to victory'Artist: Boris EfimovFrom: Izvestija, 5-8-1933

• B.V. Ginzburg: 'Reforged' • From: Pravda, 5-8-1933

Summary of article:In a Belomorstroi newspaper a good example of 're-forging' is found. Ginzburg was a person who would be lost in a bourgeois society, the term 'recidivist' glued on his forehead. He stubbornly refused to work, but the building leaders faced him with the same stubbornness. In solitary detention he repented and became a good ground worker, an 'udarnik' (shock worker) and educator of other workers. His collectives always more than fulfilled the plan. Ginzburg, once a recidivist from the gutter, now shines as an example of the system of re-education. In this system there is no place for plaintive sentimentality or hypocritical talking on the human 'soul'.

• majority of prisoners resisted labour

• But there were reforged prisoners– organized system for

spying– guarded against own

escape

• One of the editors of perekovka was Sergei Alymov, a prisoner– assisted with Kanal imeni

Stalina – the only one in the

author's collective who knew situation from inside

Did the Prisoners “Reforge”?

They do not hold the rifle like this to frighten, but because it is more comfortable

– From the memorial book

• BBC New – Giant Cross to Mark Stalin Terror

• International Institute of Social History – Belomorkanal

• Wikipedia – White Sea Baltic Canal

• Gulag History.org• Vladimir V.

Tchernavin, I Speak for the Silent - Prisoners of the Soviets

Bibliography