The White Sea - Baltic Canal

This month is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, author of The Gulag Archipelago (for background on the book read this). The passage below from the book remains the most vivid in my memory 40-plus years after reading.

The Gulag Archipelago is not dry history, instead brimming with passion, anger, contempt, caustic wit and acerbic asides. The accretion of detail on person after person, on trial after trial, on lawless and arbitrary decrees, on the squalid dehumanizing world of the camps is relentless, overwhelming, and the translation by Thomas P. Whitney captures it all.

The passage is from a chapter entitled “The Archipelago Metastasizes,” which tells the sorrowful tale of the building of the White Sea-Baltic canal in the early 1930s. Stalin demanded a canal that would allow the passage of Soviet naval vessels from one sea to the other in order to avoid the Arctic Ocean, setting a 20-month deadline for its completion. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners were assigned to its construction. The canal was dug by hand without the assistance of any mechanical equipment, under terrible physical conditions, and with brutal oversight from abusive guards. A quarter million human beings perished in the process. Poorly designed, the canal never functioned as planned.

Solzhenitsyn is unsparing in his portrayal of the debacle and near the end of the chapter recounts a visit he made to the canal in 1966 as he was completing research on the book which he was secretly working on.  He recounts the official tour he took:

“It’s so shallow“, complained the chief of the guard, “that not even submarines can pass through it under their own power, they have to be loaded on barges, and only then can they be hauled through.“

And what about the cruisers? Oh, you hermit-tyrant! You nighttime lunatic! In what nightmare did you dream up all this?And where, cursed one, were you hurrying to? What was it that burned and pricked you — to set a deadline of twenty months? For those quarter-million men could have remained alive. Well, so the Esperantists stuck in your throat, but think how much work those peasant lads could have done for you! How many times you could have roused them to attack — for the Motherland, for Stalin!

“It was very costly“, I said to the guard.

“But it was built very quickly!“, he answered me with self-assurance.

Your bones should be in it!

The chapter ends with this summing of accounts:

My Lord! What canal is there deep enough for us to drown that past in?

(Prisoners building the canal)