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The Put ' of Perekovka : Transforming Lives at Stalin's White Sea‐Baltic Canal
Author(s) -
DRASKOCZY JULIE
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
the russian review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.136
H-Index - 24
eISSN - 1467-9434
pISSN - 0036-0341
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9434.2012.00641.x
Subject(s) - gulag , convict , ideology , narrative , white (mutation) , period (music) , rhetoric , sociology , history , literature , law , political science , aesthetics , politics , art , philosophy , biochemistry , chemistry , linguistics , gene
As a highly propagandized Gulag project, the construction of Stalin's White Sea‐Baltic Canal (Belomorsko‐Baltiiskii kanal im. Stalina) produced a plethora of cultural products. While scholars have explored at length many of the official texts concerning the Canal, narratives written by the prisoners themselves remain largely unexamined. The present article uses unpublished, convict‐composed autobiographies and short stories from the period of the Canal's construction to explore the various approaches to and interpretations of perekovka (re‐forging), the ideological backbone of the Gulag project. These archival materials offer a fresh perspective on what has become one of the most infamous projects of the Soviet Gulag, and demonstrate how prisoner rhetoric often imitated official parlance. The notion of put ' (pathway) is an essential component in these texts–not only as the road to socialist labor but also as the path to a life of crime, which further complicates the analysis of these texts while addressing Soviet self‐fashioning and the potential for identity construction through writing.