RUSSIA: Canal Heroes

Day & night for 19 gruelling months some 200,000 common criminals and political prisoners have been driven by agents of Russia’s dread Gay Pay Oo’ (secret police) to dig what Moscow newspapers abruptly proceeded to call last week the “Josef Stalin Canal.”

Like all dictators the swart Georgian in the Kremlin is alert to link his name with successful achievements. The canal or series of 32 canals with 19 locks, links the White Sea via Lake Onega with the Baltic Sea, puts Leningrad on a direct water highway to Archangel and the ice-free Soviet port of Murmansk. An heroic achievement, the digging was done even while snow fell and under floodlights at night. Last week Dictator Stalin was so pleased that in Moscow the Central Executive Committee bestowed the most sweeping amnesty in Soviet history.

Sentences still to be served by 59,516 diggers were reduced and 12,484 common criminals & political prisoners were set free as “completely corrected.” Of these 500 have performed such “brilliant service in digging the Stalin Canal that the Gay Pay Oo’s records of their misdeeds will be destroyed. Seventeen super-brilliant diggers, two of them women, received Soviet decorations last week but the heroes of the Great Amnesty were two engineers convicted of sabotage some years ago. Pardoned last year because of good work they were awarded last week the supreme Soviet decoration, the Order of Lenin. Shrewd, Dictator Stalin did not forget the Gay Pay Oo in handing out this avalanche of favors. Its Vice Chief, Comrade Henry Yagoda, and five other Gay Pay Oo canal taskmasters also received the Order of Lenin which carries with it a 30% salary increase with a life pension when retired (or if disabled); 50% reduction on rent, heat, light and theatre or other amusement tickets; 75% reduction in vacation rest home expenses with free transportation by Soviet airlines, railways & steamers; free municipal transportation in streetcars & buses.