Until 1961, it was called by its original name: the Stalin White Sea–Baltic Canal (Belomorsko-Baltiyskiy Kanal imeni Stalina).

Its economic advantages are limited by its minimal depth of 3.5 m (11.5 ft),[citation needed] inadequate for most seagoing vessels.

[5][6] The canal was originally proposed to be 5.4 m (17.7 ft) deep; however, the cost and time constraints of Stalin's first five-year plan forced the much shallower draught.

The current flows north from Lake Onega to the White Sea, and all navigation marks are set according to it.

Belbaltlag, the Directorate of the BBK Camps, managed the construction, supplying a workforce of an estimated 100,000 convicts,[8] at the cost of huge casualties.

Genrikh Yagoda, Deputy Chairman of the OGPU, as well as Berman, Firin, Kogan, and Rappoport were awarded the Order of Lenin for the completion of the canal by the Politburo on July 15, 1933.

At other times these teams were pitted to compete against each other in surpassing the norms, and promises were made of shortened sentences, food and cash bonuses for the champions.

[4] A carefully prepared visit in August 1933 to the White Sea–Baltic Canal may have hidden the worst of the brutality from a group of 120 Russian writers and artists, the so-called Writers Brigade, including Maxim Gorky, Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy, Viktor Shklovsky, and Mikhail Zoshchenko, who compiled a work in praise of the project, the 600-page The I.V.

Gorky, who had previously visited the Solovetski Islands labor camp in 1929 and written about it in the Soviet journal Our Accomplishments,[19] organized the White Sea trip, but did not himself join it.

Also along on the White Sea trip was Nikolai Pogodin, screenwriter of Convicts, a 1936 comedy about the BeltBaltLag labor camp.

Similarly, Aleksandr Avdeenko's account of Belomor includes conversations between OGPU chief Semyon Firin and Prince Mirsky that reveal at least some of the writers were aware of its true nature.

The Combine was charged with operating the canal and managing the economic development of the adjacent areas, including 2.8 million hectares of forest lands and the industrial facilities that had been constructed along the route.

In addition, the Combine included 21 "special settlements" (spetsposyolok) with some 30,000 residents, mostly dispossessed farm families transported to Karelia from the USSR's warmer regions.

In addition to convicts and "special settlers", the Combine employed about 4,500 free employees and a paramilitary security force.

With Germany's full-scale invasion of the USSR in 1941, supported by Finland in the Continuation War, the canal route became the front line.

In November, a caravan of passenger vessels evacuating families of Povenets canal workers and residents, along with equipment, froze into the ice of Lake Vygozero.

On the night of November 12/13, another boat caravan froze in Zaonezhsky Bay near Megostrov Island, and was later captured by Finnish troops.

During the reconstruction, the guaranteed depth of the fairway was increased to 4 meters, and the channel became part of the Unified Deep Water System of European Russia.

[26] It is now operated by the White Sea and Lake Onega Waterways and Shipping Administration (Беломорско-Онежское государственное бассейновое управление водных путей и судоходства), which is also responsible for shipping on Lake Onega and in the Belomorsk harbor area (but not in the open waters of the White Sea).

The canal was seemingly a small part of the agency's overall shipping business, which in 2007 amounted to 4.6 million tonnes and 155,000 passengers.

[26] The canal makes it possible to ship heavy and bulky items from Russia's industrial centers to the White Sea, and then by sea-going vessels to Siberia's northern ports.

For example, in the summer of 2007, a large piece of equipment for Rosneft's Siberian Vankor Oil Field was delivered by the Amur-1516 from Dzerzhinsk on the Oka River, via the Volga–Baltic Waterway and the White Sea Canal to Arkhangelsk, and from there by the ocean-going SA-15 class Arctic cargo ship Kapitan Danilkin to Dudinka on the Yenisei River.

[27] In 2011, heavy equipment for the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydro power plant was shipped from Saint Petersburg via the canal, the Arctic Sea, and the Yenisei River.

[28] In Soviet times, the canal was used for shipping oil products from refineries on the Volga River to consumers in the Murmansk Oblast and overseas.

Russia's Volgotanker Company, with a fleet of suitably sized petroleum tankers and ore-bulk-oil carriers, pioneered this route starting August 1970, when Nefterudovoz-3 delivered a cargo of fuel oil to the White Sea port of Kandalaksha.

Volgotanker's alleged failure to contain the spill resulted in the Arkhangelsk Oblast authorities shutting down the oil transfer operation with only 220,000 tonnes exported.

[29] Soviet (and later Russian) naval strategists long believed that a well-designed canal system could help establish contact among the separate fleets based on Russia's Black Sea, Baltic, Arctic, Pacific, and Caspian coasts.

[37] Since then, the canal has been regularly used for delivering submarines by transporter dock from the Baltic Shipyard and Krasnoye Sormovo to Sevmash for completion.

There is a monument at Povenets for the prisoners who perished during the construction, and a smaller memorial in Belomorsk near the White Sea end.