#perekovka

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"The idea of mothering and procreation morphed into Gorky’s fascination with prisoner transformation and perekovka. The labor camp would be the mother of a new working class. Both god-building and the maternal impulse dovetailed with the author’s largest philosophical and intellectual preoccupation: human fashioning. Whether it was the literal, biological creation of the human by the maternal womb or the transformation afforded by a personal journey or individual greatness, Gorky remained intrigued by the individual’s ability for creation, journey, and self-discovery. Maintaining that humans were inherently malleable and eternally improvable, he believed in the potential for endless refinement through diligent effort.

Gorky’s special relationship to the Belomor project allows for an understanding of his career as a symbolic representation of the ideals promoted at the camp. Gorky was a staunch enthusiast of prisoner labor and even predicted the possibility of a waterway similar to Belomor in his early works; in the April 1917 issue of his journal New Life (Novaia zhizn’) he writes

Imagine, for example, that in the interest of the development of industry, we build the Riga-Kherson canal to connect the Baltic Sea with the Black Sea […] and so instead of sending a million people to their deaths, we send a part of them to work on what is necessary for the country and its people.

Gorky’s condoning of Gulag camps such as Solovki and Belomor seems paradoxical to many scholars in light of his humanitarian endeavors, and some speculate either that Gorky was ignorant of the full extent of Stalin’s butchery or that he was aware, but was in a position that necessitated acquiescence to safeguard his well-being. When viewed in the context of his philosophical outlook on literature and labor, however, his support of prison camps seems not like an aberration but rather a natural extension of his belief in violent re-birth, a belief related to Marxist-Leninist ideology and the concept of god-building. Gorky sees people and language alike in the framework of craftsmanship. Perhaps his mistake was not so much his general support of Gulag projects, but his belief that human flesh can be formed like words on a page or cement in a factory. Gorky, after all, cared more about the craft than people themselves; in his 1928 essay “On How I Learned to Write” (O tom, kak ia uchilsia pisat’), he claimed that “the history of human labor and creation is far more interesting and meaningful than the history of mankind.” Gorky was key to the canal project because his philosophical interests exemplify the very core of Belomor: the violent transformation of people through creative acts.

Technology’s magic demonstrated humans’ usurpation of God in a tangible way, with the ever-widening capacity to harness and transform the natural environment showcasing the potential of man-made machines. Soviet pilots were imagined as literal incarnations of the New Man, and the massive expansion of the Soviet aviation industry in the mid 1920s provided some of the most concrete evidence of human superiority over the divine. Short voyages known as “air baptisms” (vozdushnye kreshcheniia) supposedly eradicated peasants’ belief in God while highlighting the majesty of Red aviation. In such “agit-flights,” pilots would take Orthodox believers into the skies and show them that they held no celestial beings. Those who participated in the flights would narrate their experiences to neighboring villagers, describing “what lies beyond the darkened clouds.” This phrase served as the title of a 1925 essay by Viktor Shklovskii in which a village elder embarks upon a conversional agit-flight that he later recounts to his fellow peasants. Six years later, Shklovskii participated in the writers’ collective that coauthored the now infamous monograph History of the Construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal, in which a different, often deadly, type of technological program offered the promise of conversion. In both instances, darkness will be overcome by the enlightening potential of socialist rationalism: aviation will liberate the peasants from their ignorant beliefs, just as labor will supposedly bring the Belomor prisoners to the light of Soviet ideology. Such endeavors occurred before the backdrop of a larger civilizing project, since both the rural reaches of peasant villages and the wild expanses of untouched Karelia necessitated modernization.

Yet could such projects ever be completed? Did the New Man really exist, and could his creation ever be achieved? The messianic vision of Soviet socialism necessitated that paradise lie always just out of reach.

Similarly, Nietzsche posits the development into the Übermensch as a perennially elusive goal; like the Faustian concept of striving, the individual is forever trying to perfect oneself without necessarily ever achieving perfection. This constant yearning renders the present as the future, as the purpose of today is necessarily the reward of tomorrow. In the Soviet Union, the regime assured people that the difficulties they endured were required in order to reach the svetloe budushchee (radiant future), a utopia found at the end of an interminable road. In the absence of an end result or final destination, the voyage itself becomes the site of cultural exploration."

- Julie Draskoczy, Belomor: Criminality and Creativity in Stalin’s Gulag. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2014. p 30-32

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"According to Nietzsche, violence is inherent in the formation of society, a process he describes in terms uncannily similar to those of the Soviet project of re-forging:

The welding of a hitherto unchecked and shapeless populace into a firm form was not only instituted by an act of violence but also carried to its conclusion by nothing but acts of violence—that the oldest “state” thus appeared as a fearful tyranny, as an oppressive and remorseless machine, and went on working until this raw material of people and semi-animals was at last not only thoroughly kneaded and pliant but also formed.

Coupled with physical force (thousands of prisoners died in building a waterway that came to be known as the “road of bones”) was ideological force. As prisoners toiled at Belomor, the regime transmogrified their minds as well as their bodies. Imbedded in the ideals of the Russian Revolution was a sense of aggressive transformation, and the Bolsheviks sought to re-mold forcefully those not willing to submit to their worldview. According to Lenin, Marxism had “assimilated and refashioned everything of value in the more than two thousand years of the development of human thought and culture.” The Communist Party, in turn, served as the vanguard of the proletariat. Their task was to actively lead the workers and peasants to consciousness, to help them make the pilgrimage from darkness to light. Not only Belomor but the entire Soviet project is modeled off of the assumption that perekovka—the potential for human self-transformation—is possible. Marxism-Leninism particularly embraced this possibility, since peasants and workers had to become enlightened, class-conscious citizens in the absence of the full development of capitalism."

- Julie Draskoczy, Belomor: Criminality and Creativity in Stalin’s Gulag. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2014. p. 28

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"Although it shared many qualities with total institutions, the Gulag also differed in many respects from the average prison. The fusion of socialist ideology with corrective labor was perhaps the most significant distinction, as Soviet prisons were intended not simply for punishment but for reformation, not simply for retribution but for conversion. This was particularly true in the example of the White Sea-Baltic Canal, where the penal philosophy of perekovka (re-forging) held sway. This concept asserted that criminals could be crafted into socialist citizens through the moralizing power of hard labor and socialist education. Another characteristic feature of the Gulag was the strategic function of creativity, particularly at Belomor—it was not just labor that would set the prisoners free, but also the artistic articulation of their new selves. This adeptly encapsulated the creative/physical duality endemic not only to Belomor but also to Stalinist culture. While social mobility in most total institutions is severely restricted between inmates and staff, barriers among ranks were often porous in Soviet prisons. Sergei Alymov, a Belomor prisoner, participated in the publication of the official history of the construction effort with an editorial collective composed entirely of non-prisoners. Naftalii Frenkel’, the purported originator of the inhumane work-for-food system, was himself a prisoner at Solovki, one of the first camps in Gulag history, before he rose in the ranks of the regime’s administration and eventually achieved the title “Hero of Socialist Labor.” The reverse path was also possible: many of the most prominent figures in the canal’s administration were later purged from the Communist Party altogether.

The inherent industrial connotation of re-forging played a significant role in the creation of selfhood at the White Sea-Baltic Canal, and the close connection between industry and culture was ubiquitous in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s. “Forge” serves as both a noun and a verb: it is both the fire in which metal is melted and the process of melting itself. The term perekovka, therefore, succinctly captures the perpetuum mobile of transformation at Belomor: the prisoners themselves produce the furnace in which they are to be smelted. The fiery heat of industrialization renders self-molding permanent, physical, and transformative. This identity conversion, like a metallurgical process, would be violent, and the Soviet labor camp was an ideal site for building the New Man.

The recasting of industrial processes as cultural constructs began long before the construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal; it was a favorite rhetorical device of the Bolsheviks. In a 1924 speech by Leon Trotsky, workers’ clubs are cited as a “smithy” where proletarian culture is “forged.” In the violent and heady years following the Russian Revolution, a massive restructuring of culture and society occurred, one that was very often portrayed in metallurgical terms. The concept of smelting is apparent in other utopian visions as well. In Book Three of Plato’s Republic, the “myth of the metals,” a fiction assuring citizens that they all have a bit of metal from the earth in their souls—gold, silver, or iron/bronze, depending on their level in society’s hierarchy—is discussed in detail. This “noble lie” is intended to foster patriotism, as one who believes they literally come from the land will most likely be loyal to it. The prisoners at Belomor were encouraged to take pride in the canal project in a similar, fabricated fashion; since they are part and parcel of the industrialization plan—both metaphorically and literally—they must swear allegiance to the Soviet project. Many prisoner narratives, in turn, imagine the project as a homeland, as more dear to them than their families, or even as a romantic lover.

The violence inherent in the molding of prisoners’ consciousnesses— as well as the ferocity that characterized the Gulag more generally—cannot be underestimated. This was a characteristic feature of Soviet ideology."

- Julie Draskoczy, Belomor: Criminality and Creativity in Stalin’s Gulag. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2014. p. 24-25