Look at what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote about the death rate among Joseph Stalin’s slave laborers building the Belomor Canal versus the way that a local newspaper described their effort:
They say that in the first winter, 1931-1932, 100,000 died off–a number equal to the number of those who made up the full working force on the canal. And why not believe it? More likely it is an understatement: in similar conditions in wartime camps a death rate of one percent per day was commonplace and common knowledge. So on Belomor 100,000 could have died off in just three months plus. And then there was another whole summer, and another winter.
…
The Belomorstroi newspaper choked with enthusiasm in describing how many Canal Army Men, who had been “aesthetically carried away” by their great task, had in their own free time (and, obviously, without any payment in bread) decorated the canal banks with stones–simply for the sake of beauty.
The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 2, pp 98-99