Draskoczy, Julie Belomor: Criminality and Creativity in Stalin's Gulag (review)

Abstract

SEER, 94, 1, JANUARY 2016 160 while the images from About This and New LEF show the visual creativity that came out of his collaborations with Rodchenko. However, perhaps more interesting and less well-known are the occasional drawings and sketches from Maiakovskii’s letters and notebooks, such as his caricature of Elly Jones, the American woman who bore him a daughter (p. 337). Mayakovsky: A Biography will have a far-reaching appeal beyond specialists, thanks to Jangfeldt’s gift for lively narration, the cast of intriguing characters and the dramatic political events that shaped their lives. The original Swedish version took the August Prize in 2007, and this English translation follows on the heels of successful Russian editions. Admittedly, some readers will find less about Maiakovskii’s poetics here than they might have hoped. However, this valuable book will nevertheless win a place on the shelves of Russianists and on the reading lists of those with an interest in poetry or the cultural history of revolutionary and early Soviet Russia. Department of Russian Connor Doak University of Bristol Draskoczy, Julie. Belomor: Criminality and Creativity in Stalin’s Gulag. Myths and Taboos in Russian Culture. Academic Studies Press, Boston, MA, 2014. 250 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $69.00. Performance runs as a thread throughout this thoroughly researched, stimulating and also in part baffling study of the relation between creativity and criminality in this innovative study of Belomor, the early 1930s White Sea-Baltic Canal construction project. While previous scholarship has focused on the raw human cost of the canal’s construction, Julie Draskoczy has followed a different line of inquiry, attempting to understand what it was other than brutal coercion that motivated the scores of thousands of prisoners who laboured under debilitating physical conditions to complete the canal’s construction in record time, an achievement hailed in contemporary Soviet propaganda as the finest success of the USSR’s first Five Year Plan. Estimates of those costs vary. Draskoczy, relying on recent research, states that over the course of the twenty-one months of active canal construction some 143,000 prisoners under the control of a special White Sea-Baltic Canal directorate within the Gulag system performed the backbreaking labour required to construct this hand-built canal, approximately 25,000 of these prisoners died on site, and untold numbers succumbed later to illnesses that probably were the result of their Belomor experience. Without letting her readers lose sight of the brutality of the Belomor camp regime, Draskoczy focuses on the prisoners’ experience through a lens provided by memoirs, contemporary literary and REVIEWS 161 journalistic narratives, and most importantly, an extraordinary trove of prisoners’ written testimonies and the Belomor camp newspaper preserved in Russian archives, supplemented by a small number of interviews she was able to conduct with former prisoners of the Belomor camp. Her analysis is informed by her conviction that ‘creative activity, it seems, is an inevitable product of incarceration’ (p. 48), in part because ‘[t]he criminal profession requires a certain amount of artistry’ (p. 109). The most intriguing chapters in Belomor explore the artistic contributions of prisonerstotheStalinistprojectofremakingor‘reforging’(perekovka)bothman and nature. It is fascinating to learn that the Belomor camp had a department, the Cultural-Educational Division or KVO (Kul´turno-Vospitatel´nyi Otdel), charged with transforming criminals into model Soviet citizens through such cultural modalities as literacy education, writing competitions, theatrical performances and participation in agit-prop brigades. (Relatively few of the prisoners of Belomor had been arrested on political charges; the majority were petty — or not so petty — criminals from various ethnic groups and regions of the USSR.) The prisoners’ autobiographical sketches not surprisingly conform in large measure to what would soon be the norms of Socialist Realist narratives: the criminal is first converted, as it were, to criminality by a mentor who offers salvation from an early aimless, loveless life; later, thanks to incarceration under the harsh regime of the Belomor camp and guided by the wisdom of a camp mentor, reforges his or her identity through hard labour and becomes a convert to social responsibility and an enthusiastic participant in canal construction. In short, the remade prisoner becomes a New Soviet Man...