Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [52]
Kitchin, along with several thousand other prisoners, was marched out of the forest. He believed that more than 1,300 prisoners died in this and other overnight evacuations.12
By March 1931, Molotov, then Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, felt confident that there were no prisoners left working in the Soviet forestry industry—or at least no visible prisoners—and he invited all interested foreigners to visit and see for themselves. 13 A few had already been: the Communist Party archives of Karelia record the presence, in 1929, of two American journalists, “Comrade Durant and Comrade Wolf,” American contributors to TASS, the Soviet news agency, as well as “radical newspapers.” The two were welcomed by a rendition of the Internationale, the workers’ anthem, and Comrade Wolf promised to “tell the workers of America how the workers of the Soviet Union live and how they are creating a new life.” It was not to be the last such staged occasion.14
Yet although pressure for a boycott had collapsed by 1931, the Western campaign against Soviet slave labor had not been wholly without effect: the Soviet Union was, and would remain, very sensitive to its image abroad, even under Stalin. Some, among them the historian Michael Jakobson, now speculate that the threat of the boycott might even have been an important factor behind another, larger shift in policy. The logging business, which required a great deal of unskilled labor, had been an ideal way to make use of prisoners. But wood exports were one of the Soviet Union’s main sources of hard currency, and they could not be put at risk of another boycott. Prisoners would have to be sent elsewhere—preferably somewhere where their presence could be celebrated, not hidden. There was no lack of possibilities, but one in particular appealed to Stalin: the construction of a vast canal, from the White Sea to the Baltic Sea, across a landscape largely composed of sheer granite.
In the context of its time, the White Sea Canal—Belomorkanal, in Russian, or Belomor, for short—was not unique. By the time construction began, the Soviet Union had already begun to execute several similarly grand, similarly labor-intensive projects, including the world’s largest steelworks at Magnitogorsk, huge new tractor and automobile works, and vast new “socialist cities” planted in the middle of swamps. Nevertheless, even among the other offspring of the gigantomania of the 1930s, the White Sea Canal stood out.
For one, the canal represented—as many Russians would have known—the fulfillment of a very old dream. The first plans to build such a canal had been drawn up in the eighteenth century, when Czarist merchants were looking for a way to get ships carrying timber and minerals from the cold waters of the White Sea to the commercial ports of the Baltic without making the 370-mile journey through the Arctic Ocean, down the long coast of Norway.15
It was also a project of extreme, even foolhardy ambition, which is perhaps why no one had tried it before. The canal required 141 miles to be dug, five dams, and nineteen locks. Soviet planners intended to build it using the lowest possible technology, in a pre-industrial, far northern region which had never been properly surveyed and was, in Maxim Gorky’s words, “hydrologically terra incognita.”16 All of this, however, may have been part of the project’s appeal to Stalin. He wanted a technological triumph—one the Old Regime had never managed—and he wanted it as fast as possible. He demanded not only that the canal be built, but also that it be built within twenty months.