The construction of the White Sea Canal, which claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, went down in the history of our Motherland as one of the greatest tragedies that it experienced in the 20th century. Suffice it to say that the work on its construction was, in fact, the first Stalinist project, the implementation of which was carried out by the forces of the Gulag prisoners. Despite the scale of the propaganda measures carried out at that time, the truth about the creation of the canal was carefully concealed, and in subsequent years it was fame owed mainly to cigarettes of the same name, which were extremely popular in the Soviet Union. Information about how many unknown builders died during the construction of the White Sea Canal is not available to this day.
Object Overview
Before embarking on an account of his story, let us clarify some details related to the topic of interest to us. The full name of the engineering structure in question is the White Sea-Baltic Canal; in the people it was called the White Sea Canal or, in abbreviated form, BBK. Until 1961, he bore the name of Stalin, who was the main initiator and, as they wrote at that time, the "inspirer" of his construction.
The length of the canal at the time of completion was 227 kilometers, and the greatest depth was 5 m. 19 locks were installed along its entire length. The purpose of its construction was to connect Lake Onega with the White Sea in the interests of domestic shipping, which, in turn, provided access to the Baltic, as well as to the Volga-Baltic waterway. Work on its construction was carried out in the period from 1931 to 1933. and have been implemented within 20 months.
Peter's design, implemented in the XX century
Surprisingly, the history of the construction of the Belomorkanal was begun by the sovereign Peter I. In 1702, by his decree, a six-meter clearing was cut through which ships participating in the Northern War were dragged from the White Sea to Onega Lake. Its route almost completely coincides with the route of the canal, dug through more than three centuries. In the XVIII and XIX centuries. there were other attempts to create a shipping lane in this area, but all of them failed for various reasons.
In practice, the construction of the White Sea Canal (photos of this building are given in the article) was carried out only in Soviet times and was, in the words of Stalinist propagandists, “the pride of the first five-year plan” (1928-1933). At the beginning of 1931, Stalin set the country the task of digging a canal 227 km long in the impenetrable forest regions of the North in 20 months. For comparison, the following historical data is appropriate: the construction of the 80-km Panama Canal took 28 years, and the famous Suez Canal, which has a length of 160 km, was built over 10 years.
Building turned into hell
Their main difference is that during the many years of work carried out by the Western powers, the mortality among workers did not exceed the natural medical norm, while the deaths during the construction of the White Sea Canal are in the thousands. According to official figures, during 1931, for various reasons, which should be understood as illness, hunger and overwork, 1,438 people died. The following year, their number increased until 2010, and in the year the construction was completed, 8,870 prisoners died. It is easy to calculate that even the official statistics of those years as a whole recognized 12,318 people as victims of the shock pace, while, according to the surviving builders, this number is many times underestimated.
A characteristic feature of the “building of communism” was that virtually no currency was allocated from the state budget for the work, and all material support was assigned to the organs of the OGPU. As a result, in the spring of 1931, endless trains of prisoners walked into the construction area. Human losses were not counted, and punitive bodies immediately replenished the required amount of free labor.
Construction managers and their rights
Lazar Kogan, who was then the head of the Gulag, was entrusted with leading the construction, and its party curators were prominent figures of the Stalinist regime - Matvey Berman and future People's Commissar of the Interior Henry Yagoda. In addition, the name of the head of the Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp Nathan Frenkel entered the history of the construction of the White Sea Canal.
The glaring manifestation of the lawlessness of the Stalin period was the decree issued in the spring of 1932 on granting special powers to the head of the GULAG, L. I. Kogan, and his deputy, Yakov Rapoport. According to this document, they were vested with the right to individually increase the term of imprisonment for persons in the camps. All kinds of violations of the regime, the list of which was given in the resolution, were considered the reason for this, but it was also indicated there that a similar punishment could be imposed for other misconduct. Decisions to increase the time limit were not subject to appeal. This document stripped the performers of their latest legal rights.
Success at the cost of human suffering
The whole history of the construction of the White Sea Canal is a tragic story of the suffering and death of a huge number of innocent Soviet people. According to preserved documents, in May 1932, of the 100 thousand people who took part in the work, only slightly more than half (60 thousand) were placed in barracks, while the rest had to huddle in huts, dugouts or hastily constructed temporary structures. In the harsh northern climate, such conditions of detention of workers caused mass diseases and extremely high mortality, which, as noted above, was not taken into account by the country's leadership.
It is characteristic that in the complete absence of construction equipment and the necessary material support in such cases during the construction of the Belomorkanal, prisoners were shown production rates that significantly exceeded the average all-Union indicators of those years. Thanks to this “success” achieved at the cost of incredible human suffering, G. G. Yagoda, already 20 months after the start of construction, reported to I. V. Stalin about its completion. The unusually short time required to complete such a large-scale project became a world sensation and made it possible to present it as another victory of the socialist state.
The Miracle of the Socialist Economy
The propaganda campaign launched during the construction of the White Sea Canal, at the end of the work, reached a new level and was significantly expanded. The beginning of its next stage was a boat trip made in July 1933 by I.V. Stalin, S.M. Kirov and K.E. Voroshilov along a recently constructed waterway. It was widely covered in the press and served as a pretext for the next mass event, which pursued purely ideological goals.
In August of the same year, a delegation consisting of one hundred and twenty prominent figures of Soviet literature — writers, poets and journalists — arrived at the Belomorkanal to familiarize themselves with the “miracle of the socialist economy”. Among them were: Maxim Gorky, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Alexey Tolstoy, Valentin Kataev, Vera Inber and many others whose names are well known to modern readers.
Writer's laudatory odes
Upon returning to Moscow, 36 of them together wrote a laudatory book - a real panegyric dedicated to the construction of the Belomorkanal, which had already been named after that time by the name of Stalin. On its pages, in addition to rave reviews from the authors themselves, retelling of conversations with prisoners - direct participants in the work. In a single impulse, they all praised the party and personally Comrade Stalin, who provided them with an excellent opportunity to redeem guilt before their homeland with shock labor.
Of course, there was no mention of the thousands of victims of this inhuman experiment conducted by the country's leadership on its citizens. Not a word was said about the cruelty of the orders established by the leadership, about hunger, cold and humiliation of human dignity. The truth about the construction of the White Sea Canal became public only after a report was read out at the XX Congress of the CPSU by its Secretary General N. Khrushchev exposing the personality cult of Stalin.
Cinema in the service of Soviet propaganda
In expressing their loyal feelings, Soviet filmmakers did not lag behind the writers either. In the mid-30s, when the hype in the press around the completion of the White Sea Canal reached its zenith, the film “Prisoners” appeared on the screens of the country, which was, in fact, a crudely fabricated propaganda video. It talked about the unusually beneficial effect exerted on former criminals by staying in "places not so distant" and how quickly yesterday's criminals turned into advanced builders of socialism. The leitmotif of this “movie masterpiece” was the words repeated many times from the screen: “Glory to comrade Stalin - the inspirer of all victories!”
Under enemy fire
During the Great Patriotic War, the canal that connected the White Sea with Lake Onega was an important strategic object, and for this reason throughout its entire length it was regularly subjected to massive bombardments and artillery shelling of the enemy. Particular destruction was suffered by its southern part. Damage was inflicted to infrastructure facilities located in the area of the village of Povenets, as well as lighthouses located near it.
The main culprits of this destruction were the Finns, who captured at the beginning of the war a vast territory that stretched along the western shore of the canal. In addition, as a result of the operational situation prevailing in 1941, the Soviet command was forced to issue an order to undermine the seven locks that made up the so-called Povenchan ladder.
Post-war canal restoration
After the end of the Great Patriotic War, a new stage in the history of the Belomorkanal began - the construction and restoration of everything that was destroyed by enemy fire and their own bombers. As in previous years, the work was carried out at an accelerated pace, but in view of the fact that the country could no longer allocate human resources without restriction (it took a lot of labor to restore other objects destroyed by the war), they stretched until 1957. During this period, not only previously built and war-damaged structures were lifted from ruins, but new ones were erected in large volumes. Thus, the postwar years can be considered as a separate, second in a row, period of construction of the White Sea Canal.
Work carried out in subsequent years
The economic importance of this object, which became the brainchild of the first five-year plan, increased significantly after the operation of the modern Volga-Baltic waterway began in 1964. The volume of traffic, which increased many times, required urgent measures to increase the throughput of the water main. For this reason, in the 70s, its comprehensive reconstruction was carried out, which also went down as a separate stage in the history of the construction of the White Sea Canal. Documentary evidence of that time allows us to present the volume of work performed.
Suffice it to say that after their completion, a four-meter depth of the ship passage was guaranteed throughout its entire length. In addition, the attraction of significant human resources to the work gave impetus to the emergence of several new cities on the banks of the canal, the largest of which was Belomorsk, and the development of enterprises of the woodworking and pulp and paper industries in them.
Conclusion
Decades passed after the Soviet Union revealed to the world its “economic miracle” built on human bones. To the sounds of victorious fanfare, it was called a symbol of the triumph of socialism, built in a country led by the "father of peoples" - IV Stalin. Over the past years, many books have been written about this gigantic construction site by both adherents of Bolshevism and its opponents, but nevertheless, a lot of its history has remained hidden from us.
It is not known, for example, what is the real volume of capital investments required for the construction of the canal, and how rationally the allocated funds were spent. But the main thing is that it is hardly ever possible to give an exact answer to the question of how many people died during the construction of the White Sea Canal. Mortality was a negative indicator, and therefore many tragic cases were not documented.