Russia marks grim GULAG anniversary
Published: 15 April, 2009, 09:45
Edited: 19 May, 2010, 07:42
TAGS: Anniversary, Russia, Thrills&Spills
It has been 90 years since the Soviet authorities published a decree authorizing the creation of GULAG – the Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies.
One of GULAG’s most notorious projects was the Belomor Canal. Deep and dark, the Belomor Canal’s waters stem from the darks underworld of the Russian history. Its route cut through millions of lives, its banks are reinforced by human bones.
“This is what left of the people who built the Belomor Canal through the rock,” says historian Yury Dmitriev.
More than 200 kilometers long, the Belomor Canal was built in less than two years.
Completed in 1933, four months ahead of schedule, it was the first major project in the Soviet Union carried out using the forced labor of prisoners, whose only guilt was either a political joke, a well-kept household or a grumpy neighbor.
“About 100,000 people took part in the construction of the Belomor Canal. Approximately it equals the number of slaves who built the Cheops Pyramid in Egypt. It was a slave construction site here as well,” says GULAG museum director Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko.
Antonov-Ovseyenko himself spent 13 years in Soviet labor camps (also known as ‘gulags’). Now a director of the GULAG museum, he says the gulags were like a black hole in the fabric of life. The places had no sense of time, no justice and, worst of all, no hope.
“It comes back to me at times. How I would lie there hungry, exhausted by hard labor, how I just wanted to fall asleep and simply pass into oblivion,” says Antonov-Ovseyenko.
Historians are still unsure how many people ended up in the gulags. Estimates vary from 14 to 40 million.
 The chapel built at the prisoners' burial site |
“Historians and economists have long proved that the system was never economically effective, but it was very convenient,” says historian Arseny Roginsky. “Just imagine you are starting a major construction project in the Far North. You would need to recruit thousands of people, you would need to provide them with good accommodation, and so on… With prisoners, you have much less headache.”
When keeping such a large number of prisoners became economically unreasonable, many of them were simply retried and given death sentences. Executed in their thousands, prisoners’ bodies were never buried – merely thrown away like used tools.
It was only decades later that Yury Dmitriev found them and began identifying the Belomor Canal victims.
“Six and a half thousand names… It took me six years to collect them. It feels like many of them have become my family,” says Dmitriev.
Before leaving the improvised cemetery, Yury lights up. There is a tradition to leave a pack of Belomor cigarettes at one of the graves. Cheap and bitter, their taste reflects the millions of fates wasted in the gulags.
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As the primary successor state of the USSR, Russia has an unarguable moral responsibility to apologise to its neighbours for the hundreds of thousands of its people whom it arbitrarily deported to the GULAG, most of whom died there. At the very least, it has an obligation to express condolences to neighbouring countries on their annual days of mourning for the victims of deportation. Yet Russia has never done this in regard to the Baltics. Its President has offered a muted expression of regret to Hungary and the Czech Republic for Soviet outrages against their people, but somehow the even greater Soviet crimes against the Baltics remain invisible to official Moscow. Unless Russian regret and reconciliation is expressed, the Baltics can be excused for thinking that Moscow does not regret Soviet crimes there at all, and that it is not interested in reconciliation at all. The obstacle which this places to Russia’s relations with those countries, and with NATO and the EU of which they are members, is hardly in Russia’s interests.
The White Sea-Baltic Canal was the graveyard of untold numbers of people. They were worked to death, fed on a rationing scale that equated work production to the amount of food a “zek” – or prisoner- recieved. The so- called work norms were generally impossible for the average slogger, and as their health declined rapidly, so did the food they received. This quickly established a system under which the weaker the prisoner became, the more rapidly he or she died. This cruel system was developed by the former prisoner, and later the commander of SLON- the Northern Camps of Special Purpose- Naftaly Frenkel. This architect of millions of deaths was protected throughout his career and life by Stalin himself. This monster should sit in the halls of infamy right alongside Heinrich Himmler, the architect of the holocaust- and yet very few even know his name. The Russian republic, as the inheritor of the USSR’s crimes against humanity, has never, even posthumously, denounced this evil fiend, or any of the multitude of criminals responsible for the murder of perhaps as many as 20 MILLION people-the country’s own citizens, and many different nationalities that were deported to GULAG under the Soviet Empire. The mere denunciations of the so called “personality-cult” are all that history will record of official responsibility in this unprecedented, seventy-year long experiment in mass murder, torture, and terror. With that said, the silence of the West during these long years of death should shame every so called “intellectual”, for the West’s silence (and often approval) amounted to collaboration in the whole system of GULAG. The White Sea-Baltic canal alone resulted in the deaths of an estimated 30 thousand people.