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In the late 1920’s Stalin felt that a canal linking the White Sea to the Baltic Sea would be highly beneficial to the developing USSR. In 1931 well over one hundred thousand workers picked up pickaxes, shovels, and wheelbarrows in order to construct the 227 kilometer canal. Completed by 1933, the canal took only twenty months to finish. Tens of thousands of men lost their lives in the construction project. At its conclusion, sailing on the steamship Anokhin, Stalin surveyed the canal. He concluded with disappointment that the canal was too narrow and shallow. By 1936 plans to widen the canal were completed. This expansion project would have cost many more lives. These lives, like the lives lost in the original project, were bartered from the Russian system of forced labor camps, called the Gulag.
The Gulag system was a network of forced labor camps that, at its peak, consisted of over four hundred official prisons and held millions of inmates. First begun in 1919, the system really did not flourish until the 1930’s when Stalin used it with extreme regularity. The Gulag system is believed to be responsible for millions of deaths. That is more than the amount of Americans that have been killed in all wars combined. That amounts to almost three times the amount of people that live in the New York City area. It is truly a gruesome part of Soviet history that has routinely been overlooked or ignored.
The prisoners that were sentenced to spend time in these camps were murderers, thieves, and other common criminals. In the Stalin era, the prison population became increasing enemies who did not subscribe to his political, religious, or economic teachings. Between the years 1929 and 1934 the prisoner population increased by twenty-three times. Stalin used the vast amount of prisoners to his advantage. Turning them into virtual slave laborers, prisoners completed huge architectural projects including, the White Sea-Baltic Canal, the Moscow-Volga Canal, the Baikal-Amur main railroad line, numerous hydroelectric stations, and hundreds of roads and industrial complexes in highly remote regions of Siberia and northern Russia. The prisoners were also used in the extraction of coal, copper, and gold from dangerous mines and in the lumbering industries of the vast Siberian forests. Stalin constantly increased the number of domestic projects, which increased the need for more prisoners from the Gulag. The prisoners were even contracted out to private industries. In the end hundreds of thousands of men lost their lives in these economic and domestic projects.
Surrounded by walls of barbed wire, the camps were secretive and the conditions were extremely harsh. Prisoners received inadequate food rations and insufficient clothing, which made it extremely difficult to survive the bitterly cold winters and the long working hours. A single day often included fourteen to eighteen hours of work. Prisoners were often not told why they had been arrested and most were not allowed to ever see or hear from loved ones. The guards also abused the inmates. As a result, the death rate from exhaustion and disease in camps was high. If prisoners were not killed working on one of the many dangerous social projects, they were killed in the camps by sickness, cold, or starvation.
The Solovetsk Special Camp, while not the first nor the most brutal forced labor camp, is often considered as the mother of the Gulag system. Starting as three isolated monasteries on a remote island in the White Sea, Solovetsk became a part of the Gulag system in the early 1920’s. This camp soon became an experiment. Security measures, living conditions, production norms for prisoners, and all possible methods of repression were first developed and fine-tuned at Solovetsk. Between the years of 1923 to 1939, the height of the Gulag system, it is believed that over half a million people lost their lives inside the walls of the Solovetsk camp. In 1936 an attempt was made to convert to labor camp into a political prison. However, that failed. In 1939, due to mounting military concerns, the prison was shut down and demolished to make way for a new naval base. Today about one thousand people live in a small community built upon the same soil that absorbed the blood of hundreds of thousands of people.
The Russian Gulag system of forced labor camps became a symbol of tyranny and oppression. Millions of people were imprisoned and even more lost their lives. The silent and foreboding barbwire walls of the Gulag affected a generation of Russian men, women, and children. Men were taken from the beds, arrested in the streets, and beaten in their homes, and were never told why. The silent force of the Soviet regime created, built, and populated a nation of persecution and despotism and hid it behind the walls of their camps. In the 1990’s, under the leadership of Gorbachev, the camps’ populations of diminished substantially. Political prisoners and prisoners of conscience have almost ceased to exist. Today the Gulag system is a correctional institution rather than a slave labor concentration camp. However, despite these changes, the Gulag remains a dramatic bloodstain on Russian history. The memory of its horrors will never be able to be washed away.
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