Look at what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn parenthetically wrote about Joseph Stalin’s attitude toward horses when he described in The Gulag Archipelago how Stalin got a canal constructed:
The country required the canal so urgently and in such haste that it could not even find any wheelbarrow wheels for the project! It would have been too difficult an order for Leningrad factories.
…
Just try and be an engineer in these circumstances! All the dikes were earthen; all the floodgates were made of wood. Earth leaks now and then. How can it be made watertight? They drive horses over the dikes with rollers! (Stalin and the country were pitiless to horses as well as to prisoners–because horses were a kulak animal and also destined to die.)
The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 2, p 91