A BODY OF WORK: BUILDING SELF AND SOCIETY AT STALIN’S WHITE SEA-BALTIC CANAL by Julie S. Draskoczy BA, New York University, 2002 MA, University of Pittsburgh, 2006 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2010 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH FACULTY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Julie S. Draskoczy It was defended on May 12, 2010 and approved by: David Birnbaum, Professor, Slavic Languages and Literatures Jane Gary Harris, Professor, Slavic Languages and Literatures Cynthia Ruder, Associate Professor, Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures Dissertation Advisor: Nancy Condee, Associate Professor, Slavic Languages and Literatures ii Copyright © by Julie S. Draskoczy 2010 iii A BODY OF WORK: BUILDING SELF AND SOCIETY AT STALIN’S WHITE SEA-BALTIC CANAL Julie S. Draskoczy, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2010 The dissertation concerns the construction of Stalin’s White Sea-Baltic Canal (Belomorsko- Baltiskii Kanal imeni Stalina), one of the most significant and infamous forced-labor projects of Soviet Russia. In just twenty months from 1931-1933, political and criminal prisoners built a 227-kilometer-long canal in extreme environmental conditions, without the help of any modern equipment. This early Gulag project differed greatly from others in its broad use of art and creativity as a motivational and propagandistic tool. Prisoners performed in agitbrigady (agitational brigades), participated in camp-wide competitions of poetry and prose, worked as journalists at the camp newspaper Perekovka, and attended theatrical performances completely produced by fellow prisoners. Art, in turn, not only served as entertainment but also had the capacity to transform human beings through the ideological process of perekvovka (re-forging), which supposedly re-fashioned wayward criminals into productive members of Soviet society. Through extensive use of archival documents, the dissertation aims to highlight the experience of criminal prisoners in the Gulag, a long understudied demographic of the Soviet prison camp system. Self and society were both re-created at the Belomorkanal with the help of aesthetic products, and what was begun as a laboratory for Soviet culture becomes a utopian vision. This dystopian utopia was riddled by the paradoxes surrounding it—in an environment of supposed re-birth and creation there was ubiquitous death and destruction. This explains the important iv roles that collage, montage, and assemblage play as artistic styles and metaphorical concepts. Collage exemplifies the shredding of the world in order to create a new, unified whole; montage in film and photography promises the creation of non-existent—and idealized—worlds; assemblage, in its three-dimensionality, is used in contemporary artworks about the Canal and can be understood metaphorically, with the Canal’s various bits of lock, dam, and dike pieced together and subsequently stitched with other waterways. From the outset, the significance of the Belomorkanal was seen within the larger industrial context of Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan, and the project has important cultural significance not only for the history of the Gulag but also for the study of Stalinism and the Soviet Union as a whole. v TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE ................................................................................................................................ X 1.0 OVERVIEW AND METHODOLOGY ...................................................................1 1.1 INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................1 1.2 HISTORICAL BACKGROUND ................................................................... 10 1.3 PEREKOVKA AS CAMP PHILOSOPHY ..................................................... 21 1.4 MONTAGE, COLLAGE AND ASSEMBLAGE AS STYLISTIC AND IDEOLOGICAL DEVICES ........................................................................................... 40 1.5 AVANT-REALISM AS LITERARY STYLE ................................................ 48 1.6 RE-CONSTRUCTING THE “OFFICIAL” AND “NON-OFFICIAL” CATEGORIES ................................................................................................................ 56 2.0 PRISONER NARRATIVES ................................................................................... 61 2.1 PRESS ............................................................................................................. 65 2.1.1 Introduction: Realism, the Documentary Aesthetic, and the Camp Newspaper ............................................................................................................... 65 2.1.2 Sergei Alymov: Editor of Perekovka .......................................................... 68 2.1.3 Perekovka Literary Competitions as Artistic Smithy ................................ 73 2.1.4 A Chorus of Perekovka Prize-Winners: Blium, Mel'nikov, and Kremkov 76 vi 2.1.5 Non-Prize-Winner: The Potential Subversion of Iosif Kitchner ............... 83 2.2 PART II: PERFORMANCE .......................................................................... 91 2.2.1 Introduction: Plays as Proletarian Art Form in the Soviet Union ............ 91 2.2.2 Igor' Terent'ev: Agitational Brigade Leader ............................................. 93 2.2.3 Theater Director: Vatslav Dvorzhetskii ................................................... 103 2.2.4 Prestupniki as Performers: The Criminal World and the Cultural Revolution ............................................................................................................. 105 2.3 PAGE............................................................................................................. 113 2.3.1 Criminal Autobiographies as Quasi-Religious Conversion Narratives: Vasilii Atiasov, A. K. Ivanov, Grigorii Koshelev, Orest Viazemskii, Mikhail Koldobenko ........................................................................................................... 113 2.3.2 Women’s Criminal Autobiographies: Lidiia Isaeva, Praskov'ia Skachko, Motia Podgoskaia .................................................................................................. 123 2.3.3 Violating the Norm: Autobiographies that Challenge the Re-Forging Master Plot ............................................................................................................ 130 2.3.4 Political Prisoner Autobiographies: Dmitrii Likhachev, Lev Losev, Nikolai Antsiferov, and Dmitrii Vitkovskii .......................................................... 134 2.3.5 Press, Performance, and Page: A Summary ............................................ 144 3.0 NON-PRISONER NARRATIVES ....................................................................... 146 3.1 SKETCH ....................................................................................................... 156 3.1.1 History of the Construction as Utopian Travel Sketch............................ 156 3.1.2 The Literal Travel Narrative: Tourist Guides from the Belomorkanal .. 170 3.2 STAGE .......................................................................................................... 176 vii Construction, Time, and the New Man: Nikolai Pogodin as Playwright ............ 176 3.3 SCREEN ........................................................................................................ 188 4.0 CONTEMPORARY TRACES AND POPULAR CULTURE ............................ 201 4.1 THE POETRY OF SERGEI STRATANOVSKII ....................................... 205 4.2 THE PAINTINGS OF PETR BELOV ......................................................... 215 4.3 THE COLLAGES OF VADIM VOINOV ................................................... 229 5.0 CONTEXTS AND CONCLUSIONS .................................................................... 237 5.1 UTOPIA AND ITS IMPLICATIONS .......................................................... 237 5.2 PERFORMING FOR STALIN .................................................................... 248 5.3 LEGACY OF THE GULAG ........................................................................ 260 BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................. 272 FILMOGRAPHY .................................................................................................................. 295 ARCHIVES ........................................................................................................................... 297 viii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Belomorkanal cigarette package. Photograph by author. ............................................ 15 Figure 2: Belomorkanal vodka bottle. Photograph by author. ................................................... 15 Figure 3: Exhibit on the White Sea-Baltic Canal at the local history museum in Medvezh'egorsk. Photograph by author. ............................................................................................................... 19 Figure 4: The film The Prisoners (Zakliuchennye). .................................................................. 179 Figure 5: The film The Prisoners (Zakliuchennye). .................................................................. 179 Figure 6: The character the “tattooed woman” in the film The Prisoners (Zakliuchennye). ...... 181 Figure 7: Sergei Stratanovskii. Photograph by author. ............................................................ 205