VADIM BELOTSERKOVSKY
55
hospital caved in. Since there was not enough money to repair the
hospital , it was closed altogether and replaced by an infirmary where a
single physician with two assistants saw about eighty patients a day, of
which sixty were suffering from frostbite. While I was at the
Cherpovetsky hydraulic station a rebellion broke out among workers
recruited from recently mobilized soldiers. They won the right to leave
the construction and seek their fortune elsewhere. I tried to include
some of these facts in my
Izvestia
article , "Storm in a Dry Reservoir,"
but they were of course deleted-a graphic answer, incidentally, to the
question ofwhether a voluntary liberalization of the regime is possible
without radically changing its basic structute .
Khmelnitsky , the construction chief of the Volga-Baltic Canal ,
complained to me, " People are getting out of hand! They don ' t want
to work properly. All they do is demand, 'Give me this , give me that! '
They run around the country looking for the biggest ruble to grab ,
looking for places where things are easier and warmer. About 70% of
the engineering positions here are filled by operators [people without
the necessary training] . In old times [that is under Stalin] we didn't
have any problems with specialists or qualified workers. When we
needed any personnel we simply sent an order to the MVD [Ministry of
Interior] which was then in charge of all major constructions and enter–
prises and they sent us as many as we needed."
" As prisoners? " I asked .
" In any capacity. There was discipline then! Even now , we can ' t
manage without prisoners," and he pointed to a near-by fence of the
prisoners section.
At a banquet to celebrate one of the achievements of the builders
of the Volga-Baltic Canal, timed to coincide with a Party Congress , the
drunken engineers began to reminisce about the construction of the
Volga-Don Canal (under Stalin) ; and how many prisoners each of
them had left inside the concrete walls of this canal. At that time, in
order to maintain a high tempo ofwork , there was an order in force not
to
pull out the prisoners who had fallen into the cavities from exhaus–
tion , but to pour concrete over them . And today admiring tourists are
taken along these walls to sightsee!
Khmelnitsky, hearing these reminiscences, banged his fist on the
table and said , "Those were dark days, sure-but , did we do a great
job of construction! "
