Human Suffering

Human Suffering

While Soviet authorities portrayed the building of the Belomor Canal as a rehabilitative process, those actually involved remembered their time less fondly. These sentiments can be seen in this tattoo, found on the body of an elderly man, who commemorated his time there with an image of skeletons working with picks, with a pledge to “dig deeper, throw further, farting steam.” This rather humorous tattoo highlights some serious issues – the Russian government substituted a paid labor force aided by machinery for slave labor using primitive tools, but nevertheless expected the project to be done at an inhuman pace. The project’s poor tools and inadequate working conditions combined with a culture where speed was prioritized and where humans were regarded as expendable and replaceable to create a human rights disaster where tens of thousands of lives were lost.