White Sea-Baltic Canal
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The White Sea-Baltic Sea Canal (Russian: Belomorsko-Baltiyskiy Kanal (BBK)), opened on August 2, 1933, is a ship canal that joins the White Sea and the Baltic Sea near St. Petersburg. Its original name was Belomorsko-Baltiyskiy Kanal imeni Stalina (The Stalin White Sea-Baltic Sea Canal), and it is known under the abbreviation Belomorkanal. During its construction, an estimated 100,000 Gulag prisoners died (although various estimates have placed the figure at both significantly higher and lower casualties).
The canal runs partially along several rivers and two lakes, Lake Onega and Lake Vygozero. The total length of the route is 227 km (141 mi). Its economic advantages at present are limited by its depth, between ten and twelve feet deep, making it useless to most vessels. Today it only gets light traffic, between 10 and 40 boats a day.
The Soviets presented the canal as an example of the success of the First Five Year Plan. Its construction was completed four months ahead of schedule. The entire Canal was built over the course of twenty months, between 1931 and 1933, almost entirely by manual labor.
In fact, the canal was the first major project constructed using forced labour, i.e., Gulag inmates. BBLAG, the Directorate of the BBK Camp, serviced the construction, supplying a workforce of an estimated 150,000 convicts. The Soviets portrayed the project as evidence of the efficiency of the Gulag. Supposedly "reforging" criminals through "corrective labor," the working conditions at the BBK Camp were brutal. A carefully prepared visit to Belomorkanal hid the worst of the brutality from a group of Russian writers and artists, including Maxim Gorky, Aleksey Tolstoy, Victor Shklovsky, Mikhail Zoshchenko, who compiled a work in praise of the project. However, it should be noted that Victor Shklovsky visited Belomorkanal on his own and did not travel there with the Writers Brigade organized by Maxim Gorky. Likewise, Gorky himself did not travel with the Brigade but instead organized the trip. Gorky had previously visited the Solovki Islands labor camp in 1929 and wrote about it in the Soviet journal Our Accomplishments.* Additionally, it is doubtful that all of the writers involved in the project were unaware of the brutality or actual living conditions present in the camp. In fact, one of the contributors, Sergei Alymov, was a prisoner at the Belomor camp and was the editor for the camp newspaper Perekovka, or re-forging in English. Similarly, Aleksandr Avdeenko's account of the trip to Belomor includes conversations between OGPU Chief Semyon Firin and Prince Mirsky that reveal at least some of the writers were aware of the true nature of Belomor.
The Canal was commemorated by the Russian cigarette brand Belomorkanal. There is a monument for the prisoners killed during the construction at Povenets, and a small memorial in Belomorsk near the entrance of the canal into the White Sea. There was even a play, a comedy, written about the canal by Nikolay Pogodin.
[edit] References
- Maxim Gorky, L. Auerbach, S. G. Firin (editors), The White Sea canal; being an account of the construction of the new canal between the White Sea and the Baltic Sea, London: John Lane, 1935
- Paul R. Gregory, Valery Lazarev and V. V. Lazarev, Economics of Forced Labor: The Soviet Gulag, Hoover Institute Press, October, 2003, trade paperback, 356 pages, ISBN 0-8179-3942-3
- Cynthia A. Ruder, Making History for Stalin: The Story of the Belomor Canal, University Press of Florida, 1998, 284 pages, ISBN 0-8130-1567-7
