Beatings Continued Until Canal Morale Improved

Reader it’s the dead of summer so you just know I have a post about early twentieth century Russia that I can shake out of the cuff of my sleeve when I’m feeling a bit lazy after all the mint juleps. So here it is! And if you follow this blog with any regularity -or even if you’re irregular which certainly shouldn’t stop you from reading (it doesn’t stop me from writing) you’ll remember that I told you in this November 2012 post that I was going to write about the Bolsheviks that one last time. Well I can’t……stop. Dammit Jim, I’m just an ol’ unpaid country blog writer, not someone who keeps promises. Especially when you have such a juicy topic like those madcap Marxists and all their dogma and death. They’re just the epitome of the unchecked State and to paraphrase a line from a song by Heart (yes, it has come to that) if you lived in the U.S.S.R. back then and didn’t toe the line (and sometimes even if you did) they did in fact “wanna go crazy on you.” I know that took a while to set up but I hope the payoff was worth it. I’m a magic man!

So it all started when I picked up Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, you know, a little light reading. Coupled with this I was also reading Robert Conquest’s Harvest of Sorrow  (I know reader. I know. I’m doing this for you alright!) and the two books kind of merged in my mind (along with a riveting Britney Spears’ autobiography) and I had that moment where after 600 combined pages even a dullard like me thought, “Wait a minute. A prisoner in the gulag, forced labor, the Bolsheviks, this would make a great post.” Or at least a good one. So through this literary haze I caught a line about the building of the White Canal in Russia and how it was done extremely quickly by the use of forced labor. So now that I’ve set the ball up I plan on spiking it, though by true volleyball rules that would be illegal. ***I only play nude beach volleyball.

So anyway the Bolsheviks thought “Wait a minute. We have all this slave labor in the gulag why don’t we get them to join hands and form a human chain while singing “Hands across mot-her Russ-ia. Hands across this land I love.” or, better yet, we’ll have them dig a long canal by hand and kill a lot of them off in the process.” So if you go to your map room and pull out a globe and look at northern Russia you’ll notice that there’s an important port, (Note the wordplay? Important port? Juvenile) way up there near the Arctic Circle called Arkhangelsk. Though you have to wonder why they’d put a port up there because in order to get to the place by sea you have to sail way up over Scandinavia which as you can imagine can be pretty rough anytime but especially in winter. I mean, it’s called the White Sea for a reason. No? Anyway the idea of a canal between the White Sea and the Baltic became one of the jewels of the Bolshevik’s first Five Year Plan, Stalin happily signed off on the thing, and in 1931 digging got started right away. It truly was one of those “shovel ready” jobs we hear about, even in a literal sense since most of the work was done with actual shovels and little else.

Over a twenty month period about 125,000 political prisoners dug the canal at a length of 30 miles and a depth of 11.5 feet, and constructed all the locks and dams almost entirely by hand. To save on cost (weren’t they saving enough on labor?) parts of the canal that should have been built with steel and concrete were instead constructed with stone and wood. The Bolsheviks loved this kind of stuff because they could point to these “class enemies” who were finding that good ol’ Marxist religion through “corrective labor” while also sending a tingle through the undercarriage of all the western thinkers who were okay with a little authoritarian collectivization and who viewed communism as the way to go. For a modern equivalent of some of these boneheads see our favorite dim bulb Thomas Friedman who has publicly fantasized that we as a country could be China for one day and truly see what great things iron fisted, one party rule can do.

So the prisoners dug, and hauled, and suffered but the canal came into being. This was government planning on the grandest scale and the Bolshevik beardos didn’t even try to hide this one. They wanted news of the canal to be out in the press showing the world how to get things done. In classic agitprop fashion the Soviet state set up a visit by nearly 120 Russian writers who came to inspect the work and the conditions that it was being carried out under. This Writer’s Brigade, as it came to be known in true class conflict style, came and looked around and more or less gave the thing the thumbs up, though they were certainly duped to an extent by the project overseers who no doubt put a happy face on the whole affair and hid all the corpses.

And the project moved on. Day after day, mile after mile, the prisoners cut trees, dug the packed earth and solid bedrock with shovels, moved the soil and stone mostly by hand with wheel barrows, all the while the supervisors of the project attempted to pit different work crews against each other. Promises of more food and easier assignments were used to motivate the workers who no doubt before long wanted to tell their bosses to go shit in their fur-lined hats. Ever read Animal Farm?

Now let’s jump forward twenty months to 1933 when the canal was finished. Stalin showed up, took a nice little cruise to check out the new girl. As usual that troll didn’t have a lot to say. But the job was done and the Soviets could point to the canal and give the capitalist world a big, fat F You as tons of cargo now flowed easily from Arkhangelsk down to the Baltic far more quickly than ever dreamed. It was touted as the ultimate triumph of a centrally planned economy.

Except…

Well, there were a few problemos.

First off, the speed at which the canal was built didn’t really allow for much depth or width so many large ocean-going vessels were unable to use the damn thing. Sort of like back in 87′ when you (or was that me?) tried to squeeze that one girl you/I knew into your Pontiac Fiero. Even once she got in there it looked pretty damn ridiculous and was uncomfortable for both of you and anyone who had to see it. So to this day, the canal exists but sees relatively little traffic besides tourists and very nervous ship captains who have about a foot of leeway on either side and about six inches of free water before they scrape bottom. Again, like the Fiero.

It was the fatal conceit of central planning. Bureaucrats using the power of the state to carry out grand plans with little connection to the free market forces that would have stepped in and said that no one was going to invest in a venture that produced a product that was more or less unusable, like an Iomega Zip Drive. <– (Gross throwing a bone to his long suffering tech geek readers.) The free market would have bid up the price of labor (though in this case there really was no price. It was slave labor remember) so that those building the canal would have been able to bargain for a wage based on their skill level and thus become valuable to the employer. That would have stopped all that “bullet to the head/freezing to death” treatment that many of the workers received.

That brings us to our other problem. Besides all the cutting of corners and poor planning, there was the human toll of building the canal. First let’s look at some of the death tolls on major construction projects that took place in the United States in the same time period as the White Sea Canal was being built. First there’s the Empire State Building which led to the death of 5 people. The Golden Gate Bridge killed 11 while the Hoover Dam, that grimmest of all reapers mercilessly cost the lives of 112 people. Those are bad numbers no doubt if you were one of those dudes who got their lights put out. However, the White Sea Canal project edges all of them out at………………..approximately 11,000 deaths. Needless to say, the bookkeeping is a little vague on this total since that wasn’t exactly the kind of thing the Bolsheviks wanted in their recruiting brochure. The deaths came hot and heavy on the ol’ canal and mass graves dot the landscape up and down the length of the lazy old river so if you somehow ever end up on the White Sea Canal just realize you’re sailing through a cemetery.

H.R. Gross