Containing analyses of everything from prisoner poetry to album covers, Belomor: Criminality and Creativity in Stalin's Gulag, moves beyond the simplistic good/evil paradigm that often accompanies Gulag scholarship. While acknowledging the normative power of Stalinism—an ethos so hegemonic it wanted to harness the very mechanisms of inspiration—this monograph claims that this approach ironically created numerous loopholes in the self-fashioning process. Perhaps the most infamous project of Stalin's first Five-Year Plan, the Belomor construction was riddled by paradox, above all the fact that it created a major waterway that was too shallow for large crafts. Even more significant, and sinister, is that the project won the backing of famous creative luminaries who truly believed in it. Rather than dismissing such figures' participation as an attempt solely to win official favor, this volume complicates the interpretation of the Gulag and thereby provides a more holistic vision of Soviet imprisonment.