## EPILOGUE

> Man puts up a building—and falls apart himself. Who'll be left to live then?⁶²⁸

> —Andrei Platonov, *The Foundation Pit* (1930)

Belomor was a unique prison camp. While it mirrored much of the Soviet experience, it did not necessarily represent a typical example of incarceration. Criminal prisoners were given important ideological and functional posts, and they were directly in charge of overseeing other convicts. There was a relative freedom of motion and a lack of barbed wire and tall fences. Prisoners wrote, read, and performed while building the canal. Both criminals and the regime valued or recognized the importance of performance, the significance of music, and the helpfulness of mentor figures. Many criminal texts—such as the thieves' song “Music Is Playing on the Moldovanka”—incorporated aspects of official ideology just as officially published texts—like *The Aristocrats*—specifically highlighted the criminal realm.

In the face of such seemingly lax policies, there was ubiquitous death. Prisoners were used like expendable livestock in order to achieve a socialist vision. The camp was mired in such paradoxes. The construction site lacked any type of modern equipment, and yet its engineering design was radical and innovative. Political prisoners were treated as outcasts but could stay in local hotels. Criminal prisoners participated in literary competitions but also died by the thousands. The underlying, recurring contradictions between these and so many other narratives on the canal animate the tension between creation and destruction. While there is a danger in interpreting Soviet culture exclusively according to dyads,⁶²⁹ oppositional pairs do tend to play a role in the Russian imagination: even Orthodoxy has no purgatory; there is no in-between. The Soviet Union had utopian, maximalist tendencies coupled with nihilistic ones, just as pre-revolutionary Russia did.⁶³⁰

Creation was represented aesthetically, with the production of autobiographies, musical numbers, and theater performances. Destruction was represented violently, with the annihilation of individual lives and
the serenity of nature. This producing/eliminating dialectic meant that nearly all Belomor cultural texts dealt with physicality or aggression, whether in content or in form. The prisoner Mikhail Polokhin captures this physicality—and his esteem for it—in a poem he included in his auto-biography, noting “and so we understood that in the work of muscles we are not any worse than in the work of brains needed for our thieving specialties. We can bravely say that:

> We have elastic muscles
> Muscles swollen on our chests
> We won't be scared by work
> On no matter what ground.⁶³¹

Polokhin views the criminal trade as one of the “brains,” just as many other thieves understood their craft to be artistic and graceful. Criminals lived their lives as productions; as the Kostia character in Pogodin’s play notes, “And, speaking generally, if a thief can’t paint life, then it’s better for him to go and be a dentist.”⁶³² Art was essential for both political and criminal prisoners at Belomor, but this was not the typical view of penal hierarchies. A 1934 sketch in the magazine *Thirty Days* titled “Conversation in Prison” compares political and criminal prisoners: “So this means reason took a person out of prison, through drawing people went out, passed through the walls. We are just sitting, but they sit—with consciousness!”⁶³³ Although the political and criminal prisoners were long imagined as diametrically opposed groups that had little interaction or interest in one another, Belomor shows us that they often crossed paths.⁶³⁴

Art offered escape and could also be a way to ingratiate oneself with the regime. Prisoners themselves were like works of art in progress: their personalities could be crafted, shaped, edited. The *History of the Construction* uses a textual metaphor for identity creation, “Prisons changed the internal contents of people.”⁶³⁵ The conflict between creation and destruction at the camp was so exaggerated that eventually fiction and reality became blurred. It seemed that the only way to truly capture the Belomor experience was through art—music and plays, collage and film, painting and poetry. Not only did the coupling of creation with destruction occlude the distinction between fact and fiction, but it also incorporated art into the everyday, and it mired the camps with
messiness and inconsistency. Despite the ubiquitous propaganda and highly ideological messages of Belomor, the regime exhibited much disorganization and had a surprising lack of control over day-to-day matters at the construction site.

The metaphor of performance pulls together creation and destruction, art and labor. Performance is a creative act but one that disappears once performed, a spectacle vanishes and can never be re-created exactly. More than most other art forms, performance necessitates the human body; it includes the corporeal through the physical labor of acting. Performance, in the end, is precisely what accounts for the multiplicity of Belomor narratives, since prisoners could perform a variety of roles at the camp site—devoted laborer, shamed peer, recalcitrant convict, privilege-seeking sycophant. While this does not give us a black-and-white answer about Belomor, the Gulag, or the Soviet experience, that is precisely the point of the book you hold in your hands. The privileged role of art and its fusion with physicality made fictional realities possible. During socialist holidays—such as the aforementioned “Physical Culture Day”—traditional boundaries that “separate work from play, life from the arts, and the spectator from the artist”⁶³⁶ disappeared in what is a chilling reiteration of Erving Goffman’s model of total institutions. This, after all, is the defining feature of prison: the indistinguishable divisions between sleep, work, and play. Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that so many prisoners imagined the space outside of the Gulag camps not as “freedom” but rather as the “bigger prison,” as a Russian criminal tattoo demonstrates.

In many ways, therefore, Belomor was a condensation of Soviet tendencies; it underscored the violent physicality—and its uncanny link to the artistic—that was part and parcel of selfhood under Stalin.
<figure><img src="image_1.png" /><figcaption>Figure 40. © FUEL / Danzig Baldaev.
Criminal tattoo depicting the "big prison" of the Soviet Union, with the words GULAG and NKVD (the Soviet secret police organization from 1934-54). Reproduced with permission from *Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia* Volume I, FUEL Publishing, London 2004.</figcaption></figure>