Making History for Stalin

The Belomor Canal, exalted in the 1930s by the Stalinist press, came to symbolize what was morally deplorable in Stalinism. The author reconstructs the Canal project as a pivotal social, political, historical and, most important, literary event. Built with forced labour, the Belomor project has been a forbidden topic for half a century. With access to opened archives and to interviews with Canal construction survivors themselves, Ruder examines the project and its attendant literary works - drama, poetry, novels and the collectively written ""History of the Construction of the Stalin White Sea-Baltic Canal"" - to create an understanding of Stalinist culture. She argues that the project was the first to institutionalize the philosophy of ""perekovka"", the idea that a new people who personify the Soviet Union in action and deed could be created through forced labour and ideological re-education. As both a construction project and a literary event, Belomor was characterized by contradictions: enthusiasm versus revulsion, good will versus cynicism, self-destruction versus self-preservation, and scorn for the West versus a desperate hunger to impress it. Ruder shows that these juxtapositions capture the tension that infused many other events at the time, turning Belomor into a microcosm of life and literature in Soviet Russia.