White Sea-Baltic Canal - truth and lie about Stalin's great construction site
On August 2, 1933, the White Sea-Baltic Canal named after Comrade Stalin was officially opened, which entered the memory of tens of millions of our compatriots as the White Sea Canal - also thanks to the super popular brand of cigarettes. For some, this construction is one of the first significant victories of the USSR in socialist construction and a symbol of those truly fantastic successes that were achieved in its process. For others, this is just one of the “horrific Stalinist crimes” that marked the “birth of the Gulag monster” and launched the “slave labor” that allegedly built the Soviet Union.
It so happened that with the Belomorkanal and the history of its construction is associated a huge number of various tales, oral legends that have entered the public consciousness so firmly that everyone a priori perceive them as immutable truths, and, of course, "black" myths, which in the great many have spawned in due time and continue, tirelessly, to produce gentlemen liberals. Well, let's try to consider at least the most common tales about the White Sea Canal, while trying, as usual, to separate truth from lies, "grain from chaff", and frank inventions from really proven facts.
Canal Grand, meaningless ...
One of the most widespread (and downright adored by Messrs. Liberals) myths about the White Sea Canal is that its construction was supposedly "completely meaningless", and the waterway itself obtained as a result of titanic labor was "useless." The most amazing thing is that the characters defending this point of view refer to none other than Comrade Stalin, who is passionately hated by them! Like, it was he who, with annoyance, dropped the above definitions during an inspection trip along a barely open canal, made in the company of Kliment Voroshilov, Sergei Kirov and the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs Genrikh Yagoda. Iosif Vissarionovich supposedly thought the canal "somehow narrow and too shallow," so he overlaid it with all his heart. Sheer nonsense! If Stalin had not looked at the results of the construction, he would have given out not orders for them (6 Orders of Lenin, 8 Orders of the Red Star and 15 Orders of the Red Banner of Labor), but something completely different. And it would not have approved an amnesty for tens of thousands of rank-and-file construction participants in prison uniforms, but, what good, would have imposed new terms on them. By the way, I would definitely not have given the "unfortunate channel" its own name. Iosif Vissarionovich categorically did not approve of stupid spending of people's money and human resources.
However, some liberal “clever men” go even further in their fabrications and declare that nobody needed the White Sea Canal at all and started it exclusively to “exterminate as many people as possible” under the guise of “labor refining”. Well, we will consider the issue of "extermination" in detail a little later, but for now let's talk about the practical meaning of the White Sea Canal. The country did not just need it, it was vital! During the Great Northern War, Peter I spoke of the acute need for a route that would connect the Baltic and White Seas, only during his time frigates were dragged to Lake Onega from the White Sea. I must say that under the heirs of the first Emperor, the matter did not advance much - many intelligent people, like Franz de Vollan and Count Alexander Benckendorff, came forward with the corresponding projects, but there was no further talk. The plan for the construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal, presented at the World Exhibition in Paris by Professor Vsevolod Timonov, aroused general enthusiasm and was awarded her gold medal, but, as usual, “died” in the Winter Palace. Payback for the unwillingness to start a construction project in "wild and lost places" was the trap in which in 1915 the Baltic Fleet, tightly locked in Kronstadt, found itself. However, this did not encourage St. Petersburg to take real action. For the implementation of the project, which was of great importance for our country, both from the military-strategic and from economic point of view, the October Revolution was needed, the Bolsheviks and Comrade Stalin.
... And merciless?
Another statement that is often encountered regarding the White Sea Canal: it was built almost with bare hands. But this is just the truth. Well, it's over, the earth was not dug with nails, but with shovels, picks and crowbars, using dynamite for blasting operations in especially difficult-to-pass areas. But there were no excavators, concrete mixers, cranes or anything else at this construction site. Someone again calls for this fact to be considered a manifestation of "Stalin's atrocity" - they say, he forced, a monster, to hammer the frozen ground by hand! Sorry, but at the time of the start of construction (1931) there was no construction equipment in the USSR there was practically none! The industrialization of the country was just beginning, and it was very problematic to buy the same bulldozers abroad - no one in the West wanted to trade with the USSR. And who would drag the equipment bought for gold or bread into really wild and, in the most literal sense of the word, impassable lands, where it would inevitably be ditched instantly? And by the way, how was it to be delivered there - in the absence of roads? I can already hear howls in the liberal camp: "That's it, they preferred to destroy not cars, but people!" Well, well, let's talk, finally, about the "ditched". I will not deny myself the pleasure of mentioning that in the writings of some "historians" without a twinge of conscience it is said about 300 thousand "innocently tortured at a hellish construction site." Well, well ... And how was it really there?
I am forced once again to disappoint the adherents of ravings about “Stalin's hecatombs” - three hundred thousand is not just a fictitious number, but completely impossible. For the simple reason that only from 64 to 108 thousand people worked at the White Sea Canal in different years. Yes, almost all of them were prisoners, convicted of certain crimes and did not come to the construction voluntarily. 12 thousand of them were subsequently released. Approximately 60 thousand for shock work very seriously "cut" the terms. Moreover, this was done, which is typical, literally the next day after the opening of the channel - on August 4. So who was pardoned and pardoned? Cold corpses? Of course not. There are absolutely exact figures about the "victims of the White Sea Canal": in 1931 less than one and a half thousand people died there, in 1932 - about 2 thousand. The mortality rate rose sharply at the final stage of construction - in 1933, when it reached 8870 people. In general - 12 deaths during construction. A lot too, you say? Well, what to do - it was such a time. No, no - not only in the Soviet Union! Before getting acquainted with the next part of the story, I recommend that the witnesses of the sect of "holy democratic values and Great America" strengthen their spirit, for they will face the most severe cognitive dissonance, which risks turning into a complete culture shock.
Divintendant Frenkel and his channelmen
Yes, at the construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal, hundreds of thousands of wedges were injected like the damned. By the way, here one cannot ignore one more point - popular rumor attributes the appearance of this term to the construction of the White Sea Canal. З \ к is an abbreviation for "prisoner canal soldier". It is quite possible that this was the case, for those who worked at this construction site were not united in the usual "Zon" detachments, but in companies and "phalanxes" with their "headquarters", thanks, letters of gratitude, passing Red Banners and other paraphernalia inherent more likely to the army than a prison. All this brotherhood was led by a man who truly is one of the most striking and, I am not afraid of this definition, phantasmagoric figures of that time - Naftaly Frenkel. This personality is shrouded in legends and lies. In one of these libels dedicated to the White Sea Canal, for example, I came across the statement that "after the completion of the construction of the canal, its traces are lost - probably shot by the Chekists in 37". I hasten to disappoint - in 1937, Comrade Frenkel received the rank of divintendant (divisional quartermaster) and continued his service to the Motherland, for which he was later awarded three Orders of Lenin, the Order of the Red Banner of Labor, the Red Star and the rank of lieutenant general. He died peacefully in 1960 and was buried in Moscow. The former Odessa smuggler and adventurer began his path to all this with the same as his future subordinates - with a substantial term (which was replaced by a death sentence) and the status of a prisoner.
It was he, in fact, serving time in one of the most severe camps of the USSR - Solovetsky, who managed to convey to the minds of the "citizens of the chiefs" the idea that prisoners can and should be used for socially useful labor. At least in order to have something to feed them normally. He began in 1924 with the construction of baths on Solovki, thereby saving the local "contingent" from typhus, and already in 1930 he headed the production department of the GULAG of the OGPU USSR. The construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal by the hands of prisoners was, without a doubt, his idea. An idea brilliantly realized. Oh, yes, I promised a cultural shock to Messrs. Liberals, didn't I? Excuse me. Before yelling about the "horrors of the White Sea Canal" I ask you to remember that exactly in the same years (from 1929 to 1933) the Great Depression was raging in the USA. Their counterparts to the GULAG were called the Public Works Administration (WPA) and the Civil Works Administration (CBA). During the mentioned period of time, at least 4 million (and not 100 thousand!) Americans passed through them, working, as a rule, in conditions not at all better, if not worse, than the builders of the White Sea Canal. Do you know what was the main difference between them? These US citizens were not legal criminals at all! They just didn't have a job - and the WPA literally forced them into labor camps.
Stalin's gift to today's Russia
Figures on the mortality of American "labor army" are one of the closely guarded US state secrets, but, most likely, they were simply not counted (unlike the USSR). Given that some researchers estimate the total number of millions of commercials who died during the Great Depression at 8, the approximate scale is not so difficult to calculate. Feel, as they say, the difference between the "brutal totalitarianism" of the USSR and the "flourishing democracy" of the United States. In our country, convicts worked in difficult conditions, thus earning freedom - their free people hunched over without any terms and sentences, like convicts ... However, all this does not in the least prevent the restless anti-Stalinists from spewing more and more insinuations and streams of lies. We have to go to absolutely obvious falsifications (like the number of "tortured", three times the number of those who worked). Someone scribbles nonsense that "the ration at the construction site consisted of 500 grams of bread and seaweed gruel." This is despite the fact that, in fact, the food norms in construction were strictly differentiated - depending on labor zeal, and, accordingly, production. Those who fulfilled and exceeded the norm ate more than normal. The bulk of the dead were not victims of hunger and backbreaking work, but infectious diseases that are inevitable in such conditions. Not treated? In that case, everyone would die. Let's not forget about the difference in the level of medicine of the present and the 30s of the twentieth century.
The role played by the White Sea Canal for the USSR is evidenced by the fact that only its construction made it possible to get rid of the British-Norwegian domination of the White Sea. Until that time, poachers and smugglers from these countries reigned there, openly and brazenly operating under the cover of their warships. Predatory beaten seals, caught fish, did what they wanted. When our border guards tried to intervene, enemy battleships intervened, in their insolence reaching the point of shelling the territory of the USSR. Any diplomatic demarches of our country on this issue were simply ignored by Oslo and London. They acted by the right of the mighty ... It lasted exactly until August 6, 1933, when the "Special Purpose Expedition" arrived in Murmansk from Kronstadt - the destroyers "Uritsky" and "Kuibyshev", the patrol ships "Uragan" and "Smerch", underwater boats "Decembrist" and "Narodovolets". The impudent robbery ended once and for all. Also, the presence of the White Sea Canal put an end to the Anglo-French plans to land troops on Soviet territory in 1939 during the "Winter War". This is not to mention its economic significance. In recent decades, the White Sea-Baltic Canal cannot be classified as one of the busiest waterways in Russia. However, in the future development of the Arctic, its role may turn out to be very significant. Say thanks to Comrade Stalin?
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