The Belomor Canal was the first large-scale slave-labour project of the Gulag
Archipelago, built by actors, poets and priests as well as criminals: 120,000 people are thought to have died in its making. This film tells the hidden story of The Opening of the Belomor Canal by the feted Soviet artist
Dmitri Nalbandyan , a painting notorious not only for what it depicts - Stalin and his henchmen at the inauguration - but for what it leaves out: the men and women who worked, and died, on the canal. Director David Jeffcock
Series editor Keith Alexander