——————————————————— Endnotes ———————————————————— BELOMOR Criminality and Creativity in Stalin’s Gulag — 1 — ——————————————————— Endnotes ———————————————————— Myths and Taboos in Russian Culture Series Editor: Alyssa Dinega Gillespie—University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana Editorial Board: Eliot Borenstein—New York University, New York Julia Bekman Chadaga—Macalester College, St. Paul, Minnesota Nancy Condee—University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh Caryl Emerson—Princeton University, Princeton Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal—Fordham University, New York Marcus Levitt—USC, Los Angeles Alex Martin—University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana Irene Masing-Delic—Ohio State University, Columbus Joe Peschio—University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee Irina Reyfman—Columbia University, New York Stephanie Sandler—Harvard University, Cambridge — 2 — ——————————————————— Endnotes ———————————————————— BELOMOR Criminality and Creativity in Stalin’s Gulag Julie Draskoczy Boston 2014 — 3 — ——————————————————— Endnotes ———————————————————— Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: A bibliographic record for this title is available from the Library of Congress. Copyright © 2014 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved. ISBN 978-1-618112-88-0 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-618112-89-7 (electronic) Book design by Adell Medovoy On the cover: illustration from the USSR in Construction (SSSR na stroike). Reproduced with permission of Productive Arts. Published by Academic Studies Press in 2014 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com — 4 — Effective December 12th, 2017, this book will be subject to a CC-BY-NC license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/. Other than as provided by these licenses, no part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or displayed by any electronic or mechanical means without permission from the publisher or as permitted by law. The open access publication of this volume is made possible by: This open access publication is part of a project supported by The Andrew W. 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Published by Academic Studies Press 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com ——————————————————— Endnotes ———————————————————— For my parents, with boundless gratitude — 5 — ——————————————————— Endnotes ———————————————————— — 6 — ——————————————————— Endnotes ———————————————————— Table of Contents Acknowledgments 9 A Note on the Text 10 Preface 11 Introduction: Born Again: A New Model of Soviet Selfhood 17 I: The Factory of Life 41 II: The Art of Crime 76 III: The Symphony of Labor 110 IV: The Performance of Identity 145 V: The Mapping of Utopia 165 Epilogue 197 List of Figures 201 Notes 205 Bibliography 233 Index 246 — 7 — ——————————————————— Endnotes ———————————————————— — 8 — ——————————————————— Endnotes ———————————————————— Acknowledgments This project has benefited from the insights of numerous colleagues. I would first like to thank heartily my dissertation committee, in particular my inimitable and indefatigable advisor, Nancy Condee. I am especially grateful for the generous mentorship of Cynthia Ruder, without whose early assistance this work would not have been pos- sible. I am deeply indebted to the wit and wisdom of those I met at the “Memorial” human rights center. While I am grateful to all of the staff at the St. Petersburg and Moscow locations, I would like especially to thank Viacheslav Dalinin and Boris Mirkin for sharing their stories with me. For their seemingly endless help with the Russian language, I must recognize the patient and benevolent teachers at St. Petersburg State University’s philological department. Alyssa DeBlasio, Drew Chapman, and Olga Klimova provided emotional support during the long years of research that culminated in this book. I benefited greatly from the shrewd guidance of J. P. Daughton and R. Lanier Anderson, the directors of the Mellon Fellowship at Stanford University, while transforming my dissertation into a book manuscript. Members of the Slavic department at Stanford University read early pieces of this project, and I would like to acknowledge Gabriella Safran, Grisha Freidin, and Monika Greenleaf for their helpful edits. The manuscript also benefited from commentary and suggestions by Sasha Senderovich and Irina Erman and from the astute permissions advice of James Thomas. I extend my deep gratitude to the Jewish Community High School of the Bay for their generous support of this project. Last but most certainly not least, I offer my end- less appreciation to Philip Zigoris for being my rock. — 9 — ——————————————————— Endnotes ———————————————————— A note on the text The Library of Congress system of transliteration has been used through- out the text for Cyrillic characters. A few exceptions occur with more notable and well-recognized names, such as Fedor Dostoevsky, Maxim Gorky, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Leon Trotsky. Unless otherwise cited, all translations from the Russian language are mine. — 10 — ——————————————————— Endnotes ———————————————————— Preface I with the pen, you with the shovel—together we built the canal.1 –Vladimir Kavshchyn, Belomor prisoner Dmitry Likhachev, a preeminent Russian scholar and historian, served time in two of the most infamous Soviet prison camps—Solovki and Belomor. In his memoirs he describes the irony of incarceration in the Gulag: When you consider [it], our jailers did some strange things. Having arrested us for meeting at the most once a week to spend a few hours in discussion of philosophi- cal, artistic, and religious questions that aroused our interests, first of all they put us together in a prison cell, and then in camps, and swelled our numbers with others from our city interested in the resolution of the same philosophical questions; while in the camps we were mixed with a wide and generous range of such people from Moscow, Rostov, the Caucasus, the Crimea, and Siberia. We passed through a gigantic school of mutual education before vanishing once more in[to] the limit- less expanses of the Motherland.2 Likhachev’s recollection gets to the heart of just one of the many inconsistencies structuring the Soviet prison system: in separating unwanted elements from socialist society, the regime facilitated their communication. Likhachev’s depiction addresses this irrationality while also highlighting the pedagogical function of prison, which he calls “a gigantic school of mutual education.” Likhachev here reverses the standard relationship between homeland and prison camp. Rather than vanishing within the limitless expanse of the Gulag, prisoners are first educated in the Gulag and disappear only after their release from the camps. Here the camps are not unlike a hardscrabble type of higher edu- cation, similar in some ways to Maxim Gorky’s education on the streets — 11 — ———————————————————— Preface ———————————————————— through low-skill professions in My Universities (1923) and mirrored in criminal slang terms for prison, such as “academy,” “big school,” and “college.”3 Yet to imply that a Gulag camp could be more educational, more self- imprinting, than society itself seems controversial, almost repugnant. How do you make sense of a didactic death camp? In working with cul- tural narratives from Belomor, one of the most notorious and deadly prisons in the decades-long history of the Gulag, I was repeatedly faced by this uncanny educational quality. On the one hand, prisoners at the camp were remarkably creative. They worked as journalists, composed academic research papers, debated philosophical issues, and staged costumed operas. On the other hand, they lived in a landscape of de- struction. The prisoners broke apart solid rock in twelve-hour shifts, dug a 227-kilometer canal with no modern equipment, and died by the thousands. How could one make sense of this seemingly irresolvable contradiction? That is the question this book tries to answer by assert- ing that such a paradox is in fact not a contradiction at all: the prison camp embraces the life-affirming thrust within violence itself, the pos- sibility of creation within destruction. I first became fascinated by Belomor because I could not believe that a Gulag prison, a place I would have assumed to be top secret during the ideologically charged atmosphere of the 1930s, was instead so can- didly and positively depicted by prominent Russian figures. These camp enthusiasts were not necessarily official political representatives or de- vout Communist Party members—many were authors and artists, some of whom I counted among my favorites: Mikhail Zoshchenko, Viktor Shklovskii, and Maxim Gorky. These well-known Soviet writers, along with many others, depicted Belomor as a “school” of socialist education as well as a prison camp. While scholars and historians often explain away such statements by claiming that these artists had no choice, that they were intimidated by the State to make them, this did not seem like a satisfactory or sufficient explanation to me.4 In addition to win- ning the support of artistic luminaries, the Belomor project spurred a play, a film, and innumerable other cultural products. I was continually left with a perplexing question: how was it possible to evince