Perekovka (Reforging)

개조

Part of Gulag

A Soviet corrective-labor doctrine asserting that prisoners could be 'reforged' through productive labor and reintegrated into society. It crystallized as official ideology during the White Sea–Baltic Canal construction (1931–1933), becoming the core propaganda concept that glorified forced labor as 'human remaking.' It was romanticized in Nikolai Pogodin's play The Aristocrats (1934) and the collective volume The Stalin White Sea–Baltic Canal, but after the first Moscow Trial in 1936, the rhetoric shifted to 'ruthless eradication of enemies' and perekovka disappeared from official ideology. Shalamov and Solzhenitsyn later testified that the doctrine was a fiction justifying prisoner exploitation.