Perekovka (Reforging)

Concept and origin

Perekovka (Russian: перековка, literally "reforging") is a Soviet term for corrective-labor treatment meant to make prisoners reconsider their lives and break with a criminal past. The word arose during the construction of the White Sea–Baltic Canal (1931–1933) and spread widely in colloquial speech, in the press, and even in orders of the OGPU. The 227 km waterway was built in twenty months almost entirely by manual labor, with a workforce of some 100,000 convicts under the Belbaltlag directorate; it was the first major Soviet project carried out wholly by forced labor. The canal therefore served as the showcase of Gulag propaganda claiming the "reforging of class enemies" through corrective labor.

Incentives and amnesties

Alongside work norms, the authorities ran an extensive system of incentives. Prisoners who exceeded quotas received a larger bread ration (up to 1,200 g), a bonus dish and a cash bonus, together with moral rewards such as a Red Banner, official thanks, certificates and a place on the honor board. Teams were also credited three working days for five days of work, or "a day in two" for shock workers. After completion, 12,484 prisoners were freed and 59,516 terms were shortened, and 500 people from the leadership and the prisoners received orders and medals. At the same time official records list 12,300 deaths and a mortality rate of about 8.7 per cent; the rate in 1933 reached 10.56 per cent, far above the roughly 2 per cent of 1931–1932. Anne Applebaum estimates 25,000 deaths.

Propaganda culture

Nikolai Pogodin's play The Aristocrats (1934) became popular, and at the end of 1934 a 600-page collective volume, The Stalin White Sea–Baltic Canal, appeared, written by 36 Soviet writers under Maxim Gorky's editorship. A carefully prepared visit in August 1933 by a group of writers concealed the worst of the brutality, and the Belbaltlag camp newspaper was itself called Perekovka ("Reforging"). All these works stayed within official ideology and romanticized the figure of the blatnoi, the professional criminal.

The turn of 1936

With the first Moscow Trial of 19–24 August 1936, the show trial of sixteen defendants including Zinoviev and Kamenev, official rhetoric shifted sharply from correcting misguided citizens to the ruthless eradication of enemies of the people. Pogodin's play was dropped from the repertoire and perekovka disappeared from culture. In 1947 sentences for criminal offences were raised substantially, to as much as 20 years.

Testimony and assessment

Varlam Shalamov in Sketches of the Criminal World, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago, argued that the state policy of perekovka and re-education toward the blatnye was entirely false. The authorities classed the blatnye as "socially close" and treated them differently from political prisoners, although Shalamov and Solzhenitsyn held them to be almost absolutely "incorrigible" and their sentences unjustifiably light, from three months. Together with the socialist-realist treatment in literature, this meant that, in Shalamov's words, one man was re-educated while ten thousand blatnye left prison early and committed twenty thousand murders and forty thousand robberies. Shalamov also records that overfulfilling a work plan brought a cut in the camp term up to release, the "Krylenko rubber band," while the blatnye, whose thieves' code forbade them to work, extracted the plan percentages from the other prisoners with the connivance of the camp authorities.