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The White Sea-Baltic Canal
To add to the prior posts on Solzhenitsyn, this passage from The Gulag Archipelago 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, and on the squalid dehumanizing world of the camps is relentless and overwhelming, and the translation by Thomas P. Whitney captures it all.
Below is an excerpt from The Gulag Archipelago Two, 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 the building of 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 completion. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners were assigned to its construction. The canal was dug by hand without any mechanical equipment under terrible physical conditions and brutal oversight from abusive guards with 250,000 perishing during its construction. Poorly designed, the canal never functioned as planned.
Solzhenitsyn is unsparing in his portrayal of this debacle and near the end of the chapter recounts a visit he made to the canal in 1966 as he was completing the book and of 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:
Published in GeneralMy Lord! What canal is there deep enough for us to drown that past in?
GM, thank you for a great excerpt, once again showing that lack of results at frightful human cost shall not stand in the way of ideology.
This is just an incredible piece of history. You couldn’t put it in fiction.
That’s some writing!
I just recently finished the Gulag Archipelago for the first time. From one end to the other it’s an eye opening view of what can happen when a group of people who believe ideology trumps reality gain the power to execute their vision. As Rufus said above, if you wrote it as fiction no one would believe it.
Solzhenitsyn reminds me of Melville in the scope and universality and profundity of his prose. That last two sentence excerpt says more in fifteen words than most authors could say in a whole book.