Belomor: An Account of the Construction of the New Canal Between the White Sea & the Baltic Sea

by Maksim Gorky (Editor)

344 pages. Illustrated.

Genres: Russia

344 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

Also known as Alexei Maximovich (Aleksei Maksimovich) Peshkov.
Alternate spelling for Maxim Gorky.

Reviews

[Ian · Rating 1 out of 5]

The White Sea Canal was a prestige-project designed to showcase the great advances made under Stalin the 1930s. It was built using slave labor and thousands died during its construction. Conditions were horrendous and the NKVD guards were brutal psychopaths. People were deliberately worked to death in a calculated way of getting rid of "class enemies" who posed a threat to the new Soviet regime. This project formed the model for the use of prisoner labor that developed into the Gulag system that the USSR depended upon until its collapse in 1989. And after all the needless deaths, the canal ended up not being deep enough to take large ships that it was designed for.

Not that you'll find any of these details in this book.

This is a blatant propaganda piece designed to dupe gullible foreigners and whitewash the horrific brutality that occurred during the canal's construction. Written by a collective authorship (socialist-realist literature at its best) the book is a series of simple stories about prisoners finding redemption through hard labor. The guards are shown as kindly father-figures who truly have the prisoners welfare at heart. Once prisoners understand the error of their ways then they are ready to become happy and productive Soviet citizens under Stalin. All is forgiven.

A fascinating and horrifying read.

[Mél ☽ · Rating 1 out of 5]

2 + 2 = 5

Why read Dystopia when works like this one have all the crazy ingredients of terror?

Context:
Under the Stalinist regime, the White Sea Canal was the prototypical construction project that was designed to make the Baltic Sea directly, and consequently more easily accessible. The construction was carried out by over 100,000 prisoners. It was brutal, to say the least.
Under the supervision of the OGPU Police, precursors to the KGB, many lives were sacrificed in an attempt to build a canal which at long last turned out to be futile.

Published in 1935 in England and written by a committee of writers supervised by Gorki, this book demonstrates the way reality could be viciously twisted and reshaped into a gigantic lie by a regime that worked thousands of people to death only to construct a narrative confirming its agenda.

Throughout the book, we are introduced to few inmates who either fall into the category of murderers or individuals who opposed Stalin's rise to power.
As readers, we are supposed to accept how men (over)work their way up towards redemption after understanding and acknowledging their past errors.

[ In case anybody did not buy into this propaganda, the book includes a generous number of 25 photographs: portraits of important individuals believed to have found salvation through labour.

*Also, interestingly, Yagoda, former head of the OGPU and one of the said-influential photographed men, ended up imprisoned and executed following Stalin's orders. This incident soon made the possession of the Russian book in itself a crime that sent people to the Gulag]

Additionally, readers ought to rejoice at the final scene where Stalin himself visits the construction site and notices the happiness these dying men exude while building his useless canal.

Slave laborers built the canal almost entirely by hand over a mere 20 months, completing it in August 1933. At first glance, the final outcome was impressive: at 227 kilometers, the Soviet waterway was longer than both the Suez or Panama Canals. On the other hand, it was only about five meters deep and 30 meters wide. After touring the site, Stalin reportedly called it “a senseless undertaking, of no use to anyone.” The decades that followed proved him right. Cheaply built, shallow and narrow, and largely destroyed by the Finns and Germans during World War II, the canal is today more of a historical curiosity than a functional waterway. It is also a testament to the wastefulness of Stalin’s Gulag-based economy, which, as Khlevniuk notes, owed its few successes to “massive, uncontrolled exploitation of forced labor.”

[George Gruenthal]

Try reading the book before you listen to all the anti-communist ropagandists

[Eamonn Kelly · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is the nadir of Russian literature. Maxim Gorky, skint on money, accepts a lucritive position as the doyen of Russian literature at the head of the Writer's Union, gets a bunch of people together to travel to write about the construction (by slave labourers) of the White Sea-Baltic Canal, a useless construction project bridging the White Sea and the Baltic Sea. Miserable. Just morally bankrupt.