employed on the canal, as were many of the prisoners, who were transferred from the Solovetsky camp to the canal. To save time and money, the depth of the canal was soon reduced from 22 feet to just 12, rendering it virtually useless for all but shallow barges and passenger vessels (in some of the southern sections, built in a rush at the end of the project in 1932–3, the canal was only 6 feet deep). Prisoners were given primitive hand tools – crudely fashioned axes, saws and hammers – instead of dynamite and machinery. Everything was done by hand – the digging of the earth, the dragging of the heavy stones, the carting of the earth in wheelbarrows, the construction of the wooden cranes and scaffolding, not to mention the camp sites, which were built by the prisoners themselves along the route of the canal. Worked to exhaustion in the freezing cold, an unknown number of prisoners, but somewhere in the region of 25,000, died in the first winter of 1931–2 alone, although among the survivors the number of dead was rumoured to be much higher. Dmitry Vitkovsky, a former prisoner of the Solovetsky labour camp who worked as a supervisor on the White Sea Canal, recalls the scene:
At the end of the workday there were corpses left on the work site. The snow powdered their faces. One of them was hunched over beneath an overturned wheelbarrow, he had hidden his hands in his sleeves and frozen to death in that position. Someone had frozen with his head bent down between his knees. Two were frozen back to back leaning against each other. They were peasant lads and the best workers one could possibly imagine. They were sent to the canal in tens of thousands at a time, and the authorities tried to work things out so no one got to the same sub-camp as his father; they tried to break up families. And right off they gave them norms of shingle and boulders that you’d be unable to fulfil even in summer. No one was able to teach them anything, to warn them; and in their village simplicity they gave all their strength to their work and weakened very swiftly and then froze to death, embracing in pairs. At night the sledges went out and collected them. The drivers threw the corpses onto the sledges with a dull clonk. And in the summer bones remained from the corpses which had not been removed in time, and together with the shingle they got into the concrete mixer. And in this way they got into the concrete of the last lock at the city of Belomorsk and will be preserved there for ever.54
Apart from the physical destruction of human life, the White Sea Canal brought untold suffering to many families.
Ignatii and Maria Maksimov were childhood sweethearts from the village of Dubrovo in the Valdai region of Novgorod province. They were married in 1924, when Maria turned sixteen, and worked on Ignatii’s family farm until 1927, when they moved to Leningrad, where Ignatii found work as a carpenter. In October 1929, five months after the birth of their daughter Nadezhda, Ignatii was arrested (he had taken part in a peasant uprising against the Bolsheviks in 1919) and was sent first to the Solovetsky camp, and then to the northern sector of the White Sea Canal. Meanwhile, Maria was evicted from their room in Leningrad. She returned with Nadezhda to Dubrovo, only to discover that her parents’ house, like the Maksimovs’, had been destroyed, and both families sent into exile. No one from her family was left in Dubrovo. Maria was advised by an old neighbour to flee the village to avoid arrest herself. Carrying her baby, she walked across the border into the neighbouring province of Tver (hoping this would put her beyond the reach of the Novgorod police) and knocked on the door of the first house of the first village she came across. The door was opened by an old couple. Maria went down on her knees and begged them to take in her daughter, so that she could run away: nobody would give work to a woman with a child. The couple were kind people. They nursed Nadezhda for two years, while Maria got a job as a cook on the Leningrad to Murmansk railway. The railway ran along the northern sector of the White Sea Canal, where Ignatii was working, although Maria did not know that at the time. She knew nothing about her husband until 1932, when she heard from an acquaintance that he was at a labour camp somewhere in the region of Belomorsk, where the canal ran into the White Sea. Maria tried to make contact with her husband by writing notes on little scraps of paper and throwing them from the kitchen-carriage window as the train passed the building works at Belomorsk. Finally, a miracle occurred: she received a letter from Ignatii, who was actually in a camp near Kem, 55 kilometres further north on the railway line towards Murmansk. At the end of 1932, Ignatii was released and sent into exile in Arkhangelsk, where he was reunited with Maria and Nadezhda.55
Maria, Nadezhda and Ignatii Maksimov with Ignatii’s brother Anton (standing), Arkhangelsk, 1934
The Gulag was more than a source of labour for building projects like the White Sea Canal. It was itself a form of industrialization. The first industrial complex of the Gulag system was the integrated pulp-and-paper mill at Vishlag, an OGPU complex of labour camps on the Vishera River in the Urals. The complex began life in 1926 as a vast network of logging camps administered by SLON, but it was not until the summer of 1929, when Eduard Berzin, the Latvian Bolshevik, was placed in charge of building works, that the camp developed its industrial activities. The purity of the Vishera’s waters led the Politburo to choose it as the site for producing the high-quality paper that began to appear in the early 1930s, when prestigious publications like the
Vishlag was typical of the Gulag system in its early years, when the idea of using prison labour to ‘reforge’ human beings in a Soviet mould was not just propaganda but an article of faith for many Bolsheviks. For all that, the Vishlag camp with its paper-mill was primarily an economic venture. Berzin’s operating principles were based entirely on the projected returns from his investments, which included moral and material incentives to stimulate the prisoners to meet production plans. In November 1931, Berzin moved on to become the first boss of Dalstroi (Far Northern Construction Trust), a vast conglomerate of labour camps (including the infamous Kolyma camps) in the north-east corner of Siberia – an area the size of Western Europe between the Pacific and the Arctic oceans – where the world’s biggest gold reserve lay beneath the frozen ground. Berzin ran the Dalstroi camps on the same economic principles as he had run Vishlag: his job was to get his prisoners to dig as much gold as possible (by the mid-1930s the gold production of the Dalstroi camps exceeded the total gold production of the Soviet Union in 1928).58 During Berzin’s reign (1931–7) conditions in the Dalstroi camps were much better than they would become in later years, when many prisoners would look back with nostalgia to the Berzin period, as Shalamov did in his
Berzin attempted – not without success – to solve the problem of colonizing this severe and isolated region and the allied problem of reforging the souls of the convicts. A man with a ten-year sentence could accumulate enough work credits to be released in two or three years. Under Berzin there was excellent food, a workday of four to six hours in the winter and ten in the summer, and colossal salaries for convicts, which permitted them to help their families and return to the mainland as well-to-do men when their sentences were up… The cemeteries dating back to those days are so few in number that the early residents of Kolyma seemed immortal to those who came later.59
Vishlag itself was dismantled in 1934, but by then the pulp-and-paper mill at Krasnovishersk had become an industrial centre, a major economic power in the northern Urals, drawing many peasants into industry.
The rise of industry required engineers and other technical specialists. Ivan Uglitskikh was born in 1920 to a peasant family in Fyodortsovo, in the Cherdyn region of the Urals. Banned as a ‘kulak’ from the kolkhoz in Fyodortsovo, Ivan’s father fled to Cherdyn and worked on the river barges transporting timber down to the pulp- and-paper mill at Krasnovishersk, where his brother and uncle were both in the labour camp. Ivan grew up with a strong desire to get on in life. His father was always telling him to learn a profession. ‘There was nothing where we lived, no industry at all,’ recalls Ivan. ‘My dream was to go to Perm, but that was far away, and I could not afford the fare… The main thing was to have a profession. Without that there was no future.’ The only place where he
