17 August 1933. Four carriages of the Red Arrow Express have been set aside for a special party. Standing at the entrance to each carriage along the platform is a railway matron, a solicitous babushka wearing a red armband. But when the travellers finally arrive that evening, the matrons prove as inquisitive as the porters and other passengers at Leningradsky Station: everyone tries to catch a glimpse of the 120 Soviet writers hand-picked by Maxim Gorky. The authors carry suitcases and – according to a reporter from the Literaturnaya Gazeta – ‘are in high spirits’.

‘The writers hurried to the train, and ninety minutes before departure had already settled into the compartments reserved for them.’ The secret police of the GPU, the newspaper says, have organised the excursion (‘as one would expect from these guardians of the Revolution’) down to the most minute detail.

Their destination: the Gulag. Through Gorky’s intercession the writers will be given the chance to view at close quarters this new correctional system based on the concept of ‘re-education through physical labour’. To that end, they will visit the penal camps along the Belomor Canal, which is now nearing completion. The canal, a direct shipping route between Leningrad and the White Sea (Belomor), has been dug by hand by forced-labour crews (‘canal soldiers’) and is seen as the crowning accomplishment of the First Five-Year Plan.

‘Take, for example, the Belomor Canal,’ Gorky has been exhorting his colleagues for the last year. ‘That is already a visible change in our geography. Is it not, then, the perfect theme for us Soviet writers?’

The grand old man of the Soviet writers’ guild, with his tubercular cough and stiff gestures, has alighted on the idea of involving his journeymen writers in a project to construct a masterpiece under his supervision. This test (‘Think of it as our contribution to the Five-Year Plan!’) involves a collective of writers reporting on the completion of the Belomor Canal as an ‘instant narrative history of socialism’.

Stalin grants approval, and in the summer of 1933 Gorky draws up a list of 120 writers to be invited. The satirical duo Ilf and Petrov are on the train, as is the charming Vera Inber with her trademark beret, Marietta Shaginyan (an Armenian who, under the pen name Jim Dollar, writes anti-American detective novels), Alexey Tolstoy (who views Peter the Great as the first Bolshevik) and dandyish Boris Pilnyak (who can’t get it into his head that socialists don’t wear bow ties).

The Benjamin of the group, factory worker Sasha Avdeyenko, marvels at the fact that Gorky has included him in the delegation. ‘Suddenly I had been taken up into the ranks of highly honoured writers,’ he wrote in retrospect. ‘A factory labourer, called to serve literature! I almost couldn’t wait for evening to arrive. The things I worried about! I thought they would strike me from the list at the last minute, or that I would miss the train.’

Avdeyenko’s life story, I Love, about a neglected urchin who works his way up to become a crane operator in a ‘socialist metallurgy town’, has only recently been published. Taking part in the Belomor junket is the highest distinction he can imagine. In his eyes, their secret-police hosts treat the writers to a foretaste of ‘full-blooded communism’: ‘We ate and drank whatever we liked, and as much as we liked. Smoked sausage. Cheese. Caviar. Fruit. Chocolate. Wine. Cognac. And without having to pay for a thing.’

The Red Arrow takes them from Moscow to Leningrad, where satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko (author of the short-story collection Tell Me About It, Comrade!) joins the group. The journey of another day and night brings them at last to the remote forestry encampment of Medvezhyya Gora (Bear Hill), the supervisors’ centre for the Belomor camp.

The success of this excursion is extremely important for Gorky’s personal prestige. Stalin’s warm welcome has cured him of his chronic scepticism. His early trepidation about red hordes from the farmlands setting out to destroy metropolitan culture has given way to a deep respect for the working man. ‘A man is only human to the extent that he is a worker,’ he posits with religious conviction.

It is Gorky’s mission to bring into being a specifically Soviet literature, one with a tone and style of its own. As the Literaturnaya Gazeta writes: ‘The masses demand from the Soviet artist a socialist realism.’ But what does that involve? What distinguishes Soviet literature from that of the old world?

In his attempt to answer these questions, Gorky took a systematic approach. He turned first for advice to workers and farmers, the rightful holders – in accordance with the dictatorship of the proletariat – of the monopoly on taste. In part he was able to fall back on earlier opinion polls dealing with the preferences of the masses: linked to the literacy campaigns, such surveys had been conducted among the burgeoning readership as early as the 1920s. As soon as these new citizens of the republic of books were able to spell their own names, they were handed poems by Mayakovsky and Blok, classics by Gorky, or Isaak Babel’s Red Cavalry – and asked what they thought of them.

‘Useful,’ was the verdict of an 18-year-old farmer’s daughter concerning The Mother. ‘It shows you how a woman should live.’

‘Only Gorky can write with such verve,’ a 48-year-old factory worker stated. ‘And it’s not hard to follow.’

Cattlemen and potato farmers, their fingernails still blackened with soil, were invited to comment on operas and ballets. Such were the times. Timidly, they sank into their seats at the Bolshoi to watch Swan Lake.

‘It’s about the love of a prince for a princess and, owing to its treachery, about a dying swan. And four acts of this stuff,’ they noted afterwards on the questionnaires. ‘Of all the boring stories, this is the most boring of all. No one, but absolutely no one, wants to see this.’

Having rid themselves of the nobility only recently, they now had to watch as that generation of vipers came slithering back into society from behind the theatre curtains.

‘Three of us – there were seven of us in total – kept falling asleep. The people in the row behind poked them in the back every once in a while: “Hey, fellows, stop snoring, would you?” So what did we do? We suffered.’

This theatre review appeared in 1926 in Workers on Literature, Theatre and Music, a book in which the proletariat settled accounts with Pushkin, Chekhov, Tolstoy and ‘everything obsolete and done with’.

Nor was the common man impressed in the slightest by the new, experimental theatre of the 1920s. A worker-critic sent by his factory to a performance by the avant-garde Vachtangov Studio felt all at sea. In the audience he noted only three, at most four, fellow workers, while ‘the rest of the crowd seemed to consist of dandies, primping ladies and talcum-powdered girls wearing rings and bracelets.’

The inhabitants of one urban commune, asked to assess a poem by Boris Pasternak, were unanimous:

‘There’s no rhyme or reason to this. The poem cackles like a plucked chicken. Terrible’; ‘What’s written here is pure garbage, shit’; ‘I don’t have anything against this Pasternak. But his poem was so disgusting that it actually made me ill.’; ‘The words are Russian, but they don’t mean anything’; ‘They swarm around your ears like mosquitoes, buzz-buzz-buzz!’

Gorky paid serious attention to the criticisms voiced by these popular tribunals. He had long been annoyed by the post-revolutionary generation’s failure to consider the accessibility of its writing, or the workers’ intellectual grasp. ‘No, it would seem that they prefer to practise art for the sake of art itself!’ Form, Gorky feels, should at all times be subservient to content; he is sick and tired of the ‘circus tricks’ beloved of the Formalists and other experimental writers.

But then how should one go about it? In 1927 the Central Directorate for Literature published a handbook for writers with the title What kind of book does the farmer need? ‘Farmers enjoy a well-constructed plot. They desire a logical sequence of events. The agricultural reader is not pleased with a book that makes him feel uneasy from beginning to end. All forms of rhetoric, exaggerated mannerisms or formal conceits go against his aesthetic sense and disgust him.’

In his merchant’s mansion, Gorky takes the time to absorb this and similar findings. His is the task of providing a theoretical foundation that establishes writing’s link with Lenin and Marx.

Vladimir Ilyich does not present much of a problem. Gorky believes that Lenin possessed the rare gift of looking down upon the swampy labyrinth of the present ‘from the heights which the people will one day reach’. Soviet writers should develop this Lenin-vision for themselves, in order to serve as reliable guides out of the contemporary morass. Marx, in turn, provides the writer with his central theme: the tangible reality which surrounds him, ‘the materialistic foundation’ now undergoing a revolutionary transformation in the Soviet Union.

In other words, no more fairy tales or love stories. Writers should serve to document the country’s development; let them unleash their lyricism on the metro tunnels, mineshafts and blast furnaces. Gorky writes of a ‘substantial movement that is new to us: Socialist Realism, which can be created only on the basis of the factual material of socialist experience’.

The realism in the term ‘Socialist Realism’ refers to the edifices presently rising up from Soviet soil: cement factories, community centres, collective farms. The socialist part of the equation is the intrinsic promise of a sparkling future, of a classless society, of friendship between the peoples and May Day parades with acrobats and gymnasts.

Generally speaking, the Party, which serves to channel the working power of the masses, is assisted by fiziki and liriki. The former are the engineers and architects, the hydrologists and electrical engineers; those, in other words, who shape physical reality to a socialist mould. The liriki (lyricists) are the filmmakers and composers, the sculptors and painters; artists, in other words, with the writers at their forefront, whose task is to attend to the simultaneous metamorphosis of man and society.

‘I see too few happy faces,’ said Gorky – the Bitter One – at an exhibition of paintings in 1933. ‘Too little spontaneous joy.’

From now on, cheerfulness is mandatory. Gorky demands that characters in novels be either good or bad. The era of the doubters and naysayers (and of ‘Oblomovs’ who can’t get out of bed) is gone for good. In his view, the 19th-century Russians – Dostoyevsky and his disciples chief among them – produced worthless fictions ‘teeming with ineffectual heroes’. Books should feature heroes who are the salt of the earth. Their characters are to be straightforward, dressed for preference in a long coat, beneath which they are devoid of sexual desires. This ascetic, a member of the Communist Party, is both good neighbour and dragon-slayer; but mind you, without the help of ‘the collective’ he can never succeed.

Gorky declares individualism ‘bankrupt’ and ‘worn out’. Sadly enough it continues to flourish in the capitalist world, but only because those who pursue private ownership have not yet evolved beyond the ‘zoological phase’. Follow this argument to its logical conclusion, which Gorky does, and the individual writer has become an anachronism as well. Under communism, art is brought forth by the people; one step further and the name of the creator no longer adds a thing. ‘If workers can pour concrete in brigades, why can’t brigades of writers produce a collective book?’ he asks.

To follow in the footsteps of the 120-strong writers’ delegation, I arranged in the autumn of 2000 for the Russian railway system to carry me to Medvezhyya Gora. The Red Arrow took me to St Petersburg; there I switched to the express bound for Murmansk. The journey took a little more than twenty-four hours. North of St Petersburg the only views were those of the shadowy taiga and the occasional railway yard. Piled on flatbed wagons along the way were stacks of felled birch trees, otherwise identical to those standing upright beside the tracks.

I ordered a glass of tea from the carriage matron and started reading Belomor, the book which the writers had produced after their visit to the Gulag. Edited by Maxim Gorky, it was hammered out by a collective of thirty-six writers – not as a collection of individual contributions, but as ‘group literature’. Anonymous translators in Moscow had then produced an English-language edition for the edification of the capitalist world, published in 1935 by Harrison Smith & Robert Haas, a New York house that also published William Faulkner, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and André Malraux.

Before leaving Moscow I had, with a few clicks of the mouse, succeeded in locating a copy at an online-antiquarian bookshop in Burbank, California. Placing the order and making the payment took barely sixty seconds, but the package did not arrive for three long weeks.

The book, as it turned out, was illustrated. I sniffed at the dust jacket, thumbed through the pages and found myself face to face with J.V. Stalin. He was looking unblemished and youthful, without wrinkle or imperfection. Only upon closer examination could one see that the picture had been carefully retouched.

The title, in its entirety, was: Belomor: an Account of the Construction of the New Canal Between the White Sea and the Baltic Sea. The waterway in question – a full 227 kilometres long – had been dug by an army of 126,000 convicts.

‘Our writers must recount all of this,’ Maxim Gorky explains in the foreword, ‘because the facts must first be known, and only then be subjected to artistic reflection.’

Now that, to the gentle shuddering of a Russian express train, I could quietly read away at Belomor, I happened upon a host of facts, dates and figures, seeming trivia. Incontrovertible-looking information, as solid as the rock through which this channel, longer than the Panama Canal, had been hewn.

The text was preceded by a ‘production calendar’:

13 August 1933:	The editorial presidium of the Publishing House for the History of Factories and Undertakings decides to include in its catalogue a book dealing with the construction of the White Sea–Baltic Canal.
17 August 1933:	A delegation of 120 writers undertakes a journey along the canal.
10 September 1933:	The book’s structure is decided upon and the work divided among thirty-six authors.
20 October 1933:	The writer’s board submits the manuscript for discussion and criticism.
12 December 1933:	The manuscript is ready to go to press.
20 January 1934:	The book appears.

NB: The printing and binding were carried out by a select group of 122 workers operating in shifts, who completed their task within thirty-eight days.

My copy of Belomor also contained a handwritten inscription: XMAS 1936. A MERRY CHRISTMAS TO POLLY AND CLAYT. DOROTHY.

I wondered who Dorothy was. And whether Polly and Clayt had sat around the Christmas tree and read aloud to each other from Belomor. Had they been impressed by the Soviet achievements that unfolded before them?

It was precisely during this period, in the years of the Great Depression, that the estrangement between ‘here’ and ‘over there’ began to assume grotesque forms. The financial markets of the West had collapsed, while the fortunes of the Soviet Union’s centralised economy curved steadily upwards. ‘Autarchy’ was a key concept in Stalin’s Five-Year Plan: using travel restrictions, rolls of barbed wire and import bans, the Soviet Union closed itself off from the outside world. Critical spirits were no longer allowed in: foreign timber merchants and other business representatives became persona non grata.

The West, in turn, closed its borders to suspect Soviet visitors. In 1932, when Maxim Gorky applied to visit an international ‘Anti-War Conference’ in Amsterdam as head of the Soviet delegation, the Dutch government refused him a visa.

The transfer of ideas stagnated, the prospect of a socialist experiment in the West faded. Fear of the Red Menace meant that propaganda films from the USSR could only be shown in the Netherlands to registered members of the Association of Friends of the Soviet Union.

I set out to make a list of what those on the European sidelines at the time could have known, more or less objectively, about the Soviet Union. Setting aside the ideological rhetoric on both sides, for and against, what actually remained?

Scant diplomatic relations (these were established only after Hitler moved into the Chancellery);

censored postal traffic (on both sides);

sporadic tours by gymnastic teams or circus troupes;

Russian grain exports at dump prices (a total of ten million tons in 1930 and 1931: after that, nothing at all);

dwindling exports of timber for mining and pulpwood (in 1933, no more than five shiploads left Odessa).

Very little, in any case, made it across the borders; by a quirk of nature, even the Dnieper, Don and Volga remained within Soviet territory, from source to estuary. The rapid pace of industrialisation – about which Stalin spoke so proudly – could therefore not even be verified on the basis of emissions into those rivers.

Finally, there was the ‘ornithological riddle’: the sudden and unexplained disappearance of migratory birds. During the 1930s, the number of Brent geese settling each winter on the nutrient-rich mudbanks of the Dutch Wadden Shallows decreased phenomenally. Traditionally, they would arrive in massive V-formations, from the virginal coasts beyond Nova Zembla where they bred in the river deltas, by way of the Baltic, the Karelian lakes, the Gulf of Finland and the Danish peninsula. But in the years following 1932, barely a single Brent goose was captured in the decoy ponds of the northern Netherlands.

At first light I was awoken by two Finns who settled down in my compartment with a case of beer. The train was standing at the platform in Petrozavodsk, which can be loosely translated as ‘Peter’s Factory’. Once home to the bronze foundry where Tsar Peter had his cannons and anchors cast, this city had switched during the Soviet era to the manufacture of digging, scraping and retractable arms for all manner of excavation machinery.

I shuffled down to the restaurant carriage for breakfast. In lieu of the waiter, however, a hunter appeared at my table with an armful of fox furs. ‘For your wife or mistress,’ he insisted, stroking the lustrous tails. I said I wasn’t interested, slid open the curtains to chase away the shadows and took out my copy of Belomor.

Whichever page I turned to, the tone was jubilant: ‘In 1931 the map of Russia seemed to have come to life. Looking at it was like tracing myriad enterprises which rose to the surface, as it were, by sheer geological force. New names began appearing: Magnitogorsk, Igarka, Zaporozhye […] Factories and metropolises were popping up across the steppes.’

With unholy glee, the writers’ ensemble recounts the prerevolutionary attempts by greedy timber companies and sea carriers to open for development the impenetrable region of Karelia, bordering Finland. The key to success, as they clearly understood, lay in establishing a shipping route from St Petersburg via the navigable lakes Ladoga and Onega to the White Sea. The northern shore of Lake Onega, which even at its lowest point lies 108 metres above sea level, posed a formidable obstacle. Not only was a canal needed in order to force a passageway, but also a massive staircase of locks close to the village of Povenets.

No one had ever doubted the utility of such a canal, which would eliminate the need to round the Scandinavian peninsula. As early as 1720, Tsar Peter had ordered two frigates to be brought from the White Sea port of Arkhangelsk to his new capital by this direct route. The wooden ships were dragged on sledges through the forests to Lake Onega, a distance of more than one hundred kilometres. Ship-pulling enjoyed a long tradition in Russia. The harnessed labourers were the burlaki, rough and rugged country folk who submitted to the role of pack animals in return for a daily ration of a hundred grams of vodka and a chunk of bread. Gorky’s grandfather had once worked as a burlak, and Burlaki on the Volga, by Stalin’s favourite painter, Ilya Repin, was reprinted in all Soviet schoolbooks as an indictment of slavery under the tsars.

But the White Sea and Lake Onega were too far apart for a permanent system of overland transfer by burlaki; the merchants and concessionaires realised that as well. A canal following the burlaki’s route, however, would reduce the journey from St Petersburg to Arkhangelsk from sixteen days to under a week. Countless routes were surveyed, and the sketches were finally completed; but alas, the gentlemen capitalists were unable to raise the necessary funding. ‘The forests, swamps and waterfalls remained untrammelled,’ Belomor noted. ‘Karelia remained the land of birds that knew no fear.’

In 1931, the comrades decreed that the canal would be built. ‘Not at some distant time, but now, immediately – within the space of fifteen months, twenty at the outside. Could the Soviet Union succeed where tsarist Russia had failed?’

I flipped through to the black-and-white photographs. On page 253 a woman in a loden apron guides a drill bit into the earth. ‘By changing nature, man changes himself,’ the caption reads. They had a point.

Belomor portrayed the excavation work in heroic terms: ‘At night the construction site lights up like Gorky Street in Moscow. Plumes of smoke drift through the dark air. Locomotives blow their whistles. Meanwhile, the bottom of the trench, the inclines and the forests are crawling with thousands of workers. This is unlike anything that has ever been seen, not even in films. And then to think that each and every one of them is a criminal.’

In a single labour crew one finds Caucasian cattle rustlers, Jewish speculators and Siberian diamond smugglers. But the vast majority of the Gulag convicts are kulaks. By hoarding grain or cattle they were deemed to have tried to sabotage the programme of agricultural collectivisation, but now – like the rest of the canal soldiers – they are being given a second chance ‘in the socialist school of labour’.

A special category of prisoner are the ‘engineer-saboteurs’. Across the Soviet Union, this clan of counter-revolutionaries had been caught deliberately undermining the Five-Year Plan. Operating as a fifth column, they attempted, by means of intentional miscalculations and cleverly concealed design glitches, to toss a spanner into the works of socialist progress. Their ringleader was a certain Professor Riesenkampf, a Volga-German who had brought about the failure of an irrigation operation in the Central Asian desert. To compensate the state for damages incurred, Riesenkampf and his accomplices are put to work designing the Belomor Canal. At first their drafting activities are carried out on the top floor of the Lubyanka, the Moscow headquarters of the secret intelligence service, where long rows of drawing boards have been lined up for that purpose.

The engineer-saboteurs – remarkably enough, hydraulic engineers to a man – are ordered to design the earthworks that will make it possible to navigate the Karelian lakes along the route. After that comes the series of nineteen locks, thirteen of them with double chambers. In making their calculations they cannot assume the availability of either concrete or metal: the only construction material is to be the wood so abundant in the region.

More than 70,000 wheelbarrows and 15,000 horses have been placed at the disposal of the convicts in the field. Owing to a shortage of animals, however, they also work twelve-hour shifts designated as ‘temporary horse-power substitution’. Strapped into harnesses like burlaki, they drag logs behind them. But there are no overseers cracking the whip; on the contrary, the canal soldiers are egged on by accordion music and trumpet flourishes to move more earth than their fellow labourers.

The Agit Brigade of Former Thieves parades around the new locks, singing in strident falsetto: ‘By showing Nature who’s the boss/ Our shameful shackles we soon shall toss.’

There are setbacks, to be sure – snowstorms, breached dykes and embankments – but also successes. Rushing mountain streams are diverted or dammed by collective effort. Belomor bursts at the seams with all’s-well-that-ends-well stories. Ukrainian madams and Georgian bandits fall for socialism en masse. One of the former saboteurs, the 40-year-old engineer Maslov, emerges reborn from his labour therapy and receives the Order of the Red Banner for his design of the diamond-shaped floodgates. In 1933, having served his sentence, Maslov decides to stay on and dedicate the rest of his life to volunteer work in ‘socialist hydraulic engineering’.

The real hero of Belomor, however, is the GPU agent, the camp supervisor in his role as ‘bodyguard of the proletariat’. He wears ‘a long, ash-grey coat’ or ‘leather jacket’ and appears, feet planted squarely, in the doorway of the barracks or on a raft in the river. Untiring, his cap pulled low, he explains ‘what truth is, and what socialism is’. His task – the reforging of individuals – calls for self-control and angelic patience, ‘because human raw material is far more intractable than wood’.

Somewhere, halfway through Belomor, I happen upon the camp menu. The description of this daily fare made me think of Sasha Avdeyenko, the youngest participant in the writers’ brigade. In his memoir he had said that he would never forget the meal of chicken Kiev with which they were welcomed to Bear Hill. ‘Such culinary delight, and that in times of scarcity!’ In every barracks hangs a decorated list of the rations to which each canal soldier has a right:

Cabbage soup – ½ litre

Meat gruel – 300 grams

Fishballs with sauce – 75 grams

Pastry with cabbage – 100 grams

Sasha Avdeyenko noted in amazement that this was a well-balanced meal, a rarity now that the imposed formation of rural kolkhozes – collective farms – had resulted in widespread famine. But did the canal soldiers actually receive that daily portion? I found no answer, except for the comment that by the end of the project red ribbons were no longer being handed out to the best diggers, only ‘commendation buns’. One of the black-and-white photographs shows a camp guard standing in the back of a truck with a rifle slung over his shoulder, handing out these special buns; he is besieged by a host of hungrily extended hands.

The handful of passengers disembarking at Bear Hill were greeted with buckets of berries and chanterelles, jars of honey, baskets of dried fish. The wizened old ladies holding up these wares barely reached as high as the carriage windows. As soon as the train hooted once and lost its way in the woods, they too disappeared into thin air.

The station resembled an Alpine chalet but, unlike the Russian ski resorts, advertising had not yet reached this settlement of 20,000 souls. Along the platforms I saw none of the Fanta-drinking windsurfers or Marlboro men present everywhere else. A lone, hand-painted billboard sang the praises of the local hunting club.

‘Felix Dzerzhinsky Street, number 208,’ I noted.

The lane that was Dzerzhinsky Street cut straight as an arrow through collectivised forestland. I shivered at the thought that 126,000 enemies of the people had once marched here.

The asphalt was strewn with leaves the size of a man’s hand, and carried me resolutely to the hotel on the square. This stone colossus had once been erected by the Belomor prisoners to provide a fitting welcome for Stalin. I had hoped to spend the night there, but the hotel on its crumbling columns looked less than comfortable. Clumps of grass and birch saplings grew in the gutters. The only door that gave way when I pushed it led to a cellar beneath one of the wings. The stairwell smelled of sawdust and resin; today, it seemed, the catacombs of the Stalin Hotel contained a carpenter’s shop.

A thin silhouette in overalls looked up from its woodworking and fairly hopped to attention. The carpenter’s name was Nikolay Yermantsyuk. He had apparently mistaken me for a representative of the tax office or some other newfangled agency. He only relaxed a little when, in my foreign accent, I asked where I could find the guest entrance.

‘The hotel’s been closed for years,’ he said, brushing the shavings from his sleeve.

Did he, I asked, remember what it looked like in its former glory? The carpenter began proffering bits and pieces of information. The sea-green tiling, he told me, had been part of a Turkish bath. ‘And across the hall was the shooting range.’

Was that a standard facility?

‘Oh, yes. Hunting is a national pastime around here. When we set up shop the targets were still hanging on the walls.’

Nikolay led me to a breach in the wall and showed me the boarded-up hotel lobby, on the verge of collapse and off-limits to us now. Opposite the lift I could see a guardroom the size of a telephone booth, where a KGB agent had kept an eye on the guests right up until the Union’s end.

The second floor had once housed a restaurant-annexe-ballroom, with tables for two hundred guests. The carpenter had no idea about the quality of the kitchen. ‘I never ate there,’ he apologised. ‘This was where the elite gathered.’

As a craftsman, however, he knew all about the square watchtower built above the lift shaft. That crow’s-nest, which I’d noticed as I crossed the square, consisted of a cube of glass and slender frames. Nikolay spoke respectfully of an ‘atrium’, where easy chairs and potted plants had once stood. ‘Back then it was the highest point in Bear Hill.’

From that VIP box, I gathered, one had a field marshal’s panorama of the entire theatre of operations: Lake Onega with rafts of timber floating along its shores and, in the distance, the majestic entrance to the Belomor Canal, close to the village of Povenets. The original idea was that Stalin, peering through a copper telescope from behind the wall of glass, would be able to view the successive locks of the ‘Povenets staircase’ before departing in a motorboat to make the passage himself.

‘But Stalin never even went into the hotel,’ Nikolay said. ‘He only stopped in Bear Hill for a couple of minutes, then moved on again.’

Did I detect a tinge of regret? I thanked him for his explanation and, before leaving, asked whether things had changed much in Bear Hill since the fall of Communism. The carpenter smacked his lips in assent. ‘I should say so! There’s been no building going on here for the last ten years.’

On my way to the canal, I came across what I took to be the Bear Hill Hunters’ Club, a wooden shed bearing a hand-painted tableau, this one of men in forest green, identical to the one at the station. A Kommandir jeep was parked outside. Pushing open the door of the clubhouse, I found myself in a sylvan playhouse. Moose antlers protruded from every wall, and perched on beams natural and barked was an entire animal kingdom of ducks, weasels and pheasants. Sitting beside the wood-stove amid this trophy collection were two hunters celebrating the opening of the season.

I was given tea with a shot of vodka. Although I was interested mostly in stories about Belomor, the conversation that ensued took in the dwindling wildlife population, the accuracy of double-barrelled shotguns, and the pitiful bounty of only 410 roubles paid for each dead wolf.

‘But don’t go thinking that you actually get paid these days,’ the local game warden said. His name was Alexander, and the army waistcoat he wore was decked with shotgun cartridges where veterans hang their medals.

His gold-toothed companion, Pavel, turned out to be an unemployed fur farmer. ‘There’s no money any more, so instead they give us a moose permit for every wolf we bring in.’

My hosts went on to show me a photo album filled with scenes of gore, innumerable poses of the triumphant hunter, in this one standing tall with a foot on the shattered skull of a wild boar, in the next raising a glass of vodka beside a dead bear.

‘As you can see, we’re not members of Greenpeace,’ Alexander remarked.

Suddenly it came to me: in the vacuum left behind by the Soviet state, the inhabitants of Bear Hill had been catapulted back centuries into the era of hunters and gatherers. Those babushkas at the station, hadn’t they been proffering baskets of fish and buckets of berries they’d picked themselves?

I asked the men whether they hunted for sport, or for the hides and meat.

‘Bear-meat shashlik boosts your virility,’ said Pavel with a gilded smile. ‘At least that’s what the wife says, and she should know.’

The game warden didn’t laugh. ‘Until a while ago we still worked for the Academy of Sciences,’ he said, massaging his forehead with his fingertips. ‘And we all had jobs, like Pavel’s at the collective sable farm. Hunting was something we did on the side. We sent our annual report to Moscow, along with the rings we collected for their migration studies…’

I was about to interrupt him, but Alexander held up his hand. He wasn’t finished yet.

‘Before that we worked for GosPlan, the government planning agency. We were expected to deliver a fixed quota of game and birds each season; that was normal then.’ Taking a good look at me, he asked whether I realised that hunting had been part of the Five-Year Plan. ‘It makes sense, really. Stalin ordered that the riches along the Arctic Circle be exploited, which meant that the Belomor Canal had to be built and the railway extended all the way to Murmansk. In Vorkuta, to the east, the lignite was lying right on the surface; in Norilsk, you had nickel and gold. All that was lacking was manpower, which is why he made use of so-called enemies of the people. The only problem is, if you don’t give them enough to eat, they die too.’

The hunting plan, Alexander said, had included killing half a million birds each year.

‘Brent geese!’ I said.

‘That’s right.’ The game warden pointed to a mounted Brent goose on the windowsill. ‘They come from Holland, don’t they?’

Examining the bird’s black, downy breast and even blacker, beady eyes, snippets from Belomor came to mind. Karelia remained the land of birds that knew no fear. I recalled that Stalin’s first passage through the region had been accompanied by the cries of migratory fowl and that the camp guards had been fervent goose hunters.

But could the geese have been hunted on a sufficiently massive scale to wipe out the entire population?

‘You tell me. The Gulag was pretty much dependent on it. Whenever supplies grew tight, the guards organised hunting parties.’

But, I objected, they could hardly have passed out rifles to the prisoners.

‘Rifles? Above the Arctic Circle, all you need is a stick. The geese that winter where you come from begin to moult here in the summer, after the breeding season. They lose their quill feathers and can’t fly for about three weeks. All you have to do is herd them together and club them to death. Salt them down and they keep for months.’

I told the men about the ornithological riddle of the 1930s, about the sudden absence of Brent geese in the Wadden Shallows.

Pavel, the fur farmer, didn’t seem to catch my drift. ‘Geese are stupid animals,’ he said. ‘You sow a field of oats, stake out a decoy and bingo, they land in flocks. Twice a year, on the way down and the way back, there’s no way you can miss.’

Did he hunt Brent geese, then?

Pavel lit a cigarette, a Pyotr I. ‘Is there anything wrong with that?’

So the population was back to its old level?

‘They made a good comeback in the 1960s,’ Alexander the game warden said. ‘But that’s only logical: the last camps along the Arctic Circle closed around that time.’

That afternoon Pavel took me to Povenets in his jeep. Winding down the window, I let in the autumn fragrances. OUR POLITICS ARE WORLD POLITICS – V.I. LENIN was inscribed on a weathered panel above the door of a town hall. My thoughts were still with the black-bellied bird at the hunters’ club: through their shrinking numbers, they had been the first to tell the as-yet-unknown story of the Gulag; they had been a unique indicator species. Only nobody had deciphered their message.

Just outside Povenets the landscape opened. The fields were pocked with glacier-borne boulders. In swathes several kilometres wide, Pavel explained, the forest on both sides of the canal had been felled to allow the construction of the locks. We passed a little brick office belonging to the Belomor Canal Administration and a grassy park with a cast-iron bell, a monument to the Second World War.

The hunter lived with his wife and daughter behind Lock Number 2. The vegetable garden, punctuated with white and red cabbage in tractor-tyre beds, lay snuggled up against the edge of the canal. Pavel’s 17-year-old daughter, Natasha, walked with us to the bridge with the best view of the descending locks – seven consecutive changes in water level of 15 metres each. Seen from above, the water was a pissy brown with long tendrils floating in it. Natasha insisted this wasn’t pollution, merely washed-away peat. ‘Really, I swam here just last summer.’

I had been hoping to meet survivors of the Belomor project, but Pavel disabused me of that illusion. ‘Povenets was evacuated during the Second World War,’ he said. ‘The canal was the front line. The Finns held positions here on the west bank, where our house is; the Red Army had dug itself in on the other side.’

The ravaged village was colonised anew in the 1940s, not by the original inhabitants but by young Communists with plans to set up a collective, a sovkhoz, for breeding sable. As fanatical Komsomol members, Pavel’s parents had been among the first to arrive. No one in the surrounding area, therefore, remembered anything about the canal soldiers, let alone Stalin’s lightning visit or the cruise undertaken by Gorky’s writers’ brigade.

‘The sovkhoz was privatised in 1993, and declared bankrupt two years later,’ Pavel told me. ‘There’s no market for fur any more.’

We were getting ready to leave when a lock gate opened in the distance. Brown water rose in waves at the bow of a heavily laden cargo ship, a warning light turned red, a bell rang and suddenly the road surface we were standing on pivoted ninety degrees, railing and all. The STK-102 from St Petersburg, loaded with aluminium, drifted slowly into the chamber and was held in place automatically by a metal gate. Centimetre by centimetre, the ship began its descent from the penultimate step of the Povenets staircase.

In the timber-clad kitchen that evening, Natasha told me she had once found a metal spoon during a school outing, somewhere near the fifth lock. She went to her room and came back with the piece of dented cutlery. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘There are initials and a name etched in it.’

Peering closely beneath the kitchen light, we read: ‘P.M.I.’ Below that was an ‘S’, followed by something illegible. And then a name: ‘Mazarov’ according to Pavel, but his daughter didn’t agree (‘Where do you see a “z”? It looks more like Maronov’).

Natasha had showed her discovery to the history teacher. He had passed it around the classroom and told the pupils that it must have been used ‘by at least three prisoners’. Natasha wondered who Maronov and the other two had been. Had they been forced to share the spoon, or had they bequeathed it to each other? And what had ultimately become of them?

‘What a load of nonsense,’ her father said. ‘You could spend the rest of your life worrying about that and never find out.’

When their exhausting labour came to an end, Maxim Gorky spoke to the canal soldiers. ‘The year, the month, the day is rapidly approaching when re-education camps will no longer be needed.’ Gorky praised the victory of ‘thousands of heterogeneous individuals over nature and over themselves.’

Of the 126,000 enemies of the people, 12,484 were released immediately upon completion of the Belomor Canal. 59,516 prisoners received reduced sentences. They and the remaining survivors were put to work on the 128-kilometre-long trench designed to link Moscow with the Volga within the following three years.

‘I congratulate you on what you have become,’ Gorky said. ‘I congratulate our wise Party and its leader, the man of steel, Comrade Stalin.’

Gorky’s valedictory speech was included in Belomor by way of epilogue, followed by a portrait of him. The people’s writer is wearing a work coat, his shirt collar is wrinkled. He looks battle-weary; what I see, at least, is a droopy moustache, a deep groove between the eyebrows, moist, sad eyes. His left ear stands out at an angle, as though he is listening attentively.

‘You have awakened the enthusiasm of no fewer than one hundred writers,’ he assured the canal soldiers. ‘That is of great importance. From now on our literature will be raised to a new pitch, to the level of your grand accomplishments.’