Historical Dictionary of Russian and Soviet Intelligence

November 1917, a group of “left” SR members joined the Bolshe-

viks in a coalition government. Their lack of discipline and rejec-

tion of Bolshevik strategy and tactics led to a break and the exileor

arrest of the leadership.

BELOMOR CANAL. The first great project of the Soviet forced labor

camps, or gulagsystem, was the building of a canal 200 kilometers

from the White Sea to the Baltic Sea between 1931 and 1933. The

canal was supposed to allow the Soviet navy to transfer major war-

ships between the White and the Baltic seas. The project employed

more than 100,000 prisoners, the vast majority of whom were peas-

ants the OGPUhad arrested for resistance to collectivization. In one

of the first active measuresof the Stalin years, the canal was used to

demonstrate the humanity of the Soviet prison system. Books prais-

ing the humanity of the OGPU staff in saving desperate criminals by

honest labor were widely distributed in the West, but the reality was

different. The canal consumed peasant workers by the thousands. Ac-

cording to some sources, as many as 20,000 prisoners perished in the

building of the canal, and tens of thousands more were broken by

their service. Worse still for the Soviet military, the canal was ice-

bound several months a year, and too shallow to accept major war-

ships. It rapidly became little more than a ditch. The Belomor Canal

was a model for larger forced labor projects in Siberia and the Far

East. A cigarette product named after the canal continues to be sold

to this day in Russia.

BENKENDORFF, ALEKSANDR (1783–1844).Tsar Nicholas I ap-

pointed Benkendorff to serve as the first director of the Third Sec-

tionin 1826. Benkendorff expanded the authority of the Third Sec-

tion and its Corps of Gendarmes to monitor public dissent.

Benkendorff’s most famous case was the persecution of the philoso-

pher Petr Chaadaev, who was officially judged insane for his Philo-

sophical Letters, which took a pessimistic view of Russia’s past,

present, and future. Beckendorff also ordered the surveillance of Rus-

sian dissidentsliving aboard, such as Aleksandr Herzen.

Benkendorff was of Baltic German descent and had fought in the

Napoleonic Wars. An extreme conservative, he played a key role in

convincing Nicholas I that in the aftermath of the Decembrist

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