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Look what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago about how the Soviets extracted much extra labor from prisoners for little extra reward:

Percentages above 100 conferred the right to supplementary spoonfuls of kasha (those previously taken away). What a merciless knowledge of human nature! Neither those pieces of bread nor those cereal patties were comparable with the expenditure of strength that went into earning them. But as one of his eternal, disastrous traits the human being is incapable of grasping the ratio of an object to its price. For a cheap glass of vodka a soldier is roused to attack in a war not his own and laws down his life; in the same way the zek, for those pauper’s handouts, slips off a log, gets dunked in the icy freshet of a northern river, or kneads clay for mud huts barefoot in icy water, and because of this those feet are never going to reach the land of freedom.

The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 2, p 156

Look at what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago about the word “people”:

“Have you fed the people?” “Have you sent the people out to work?” “How many people do you have there?” “Send me one person!” People, people, whom do they mean? That’s the way they talked about serfs. And that is how they speak about prisoners. One cannot speak like that about officers or leaders, however–“How many people do you have?” No one would understand you.

The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 2, p 150

On a happier note, here’s a South Park excerpt with a song to “people”:

Look at what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago about a “useful idiot” judge:

Oh, “what an intelligent, farsighted humane administration from top to bottom,” as Supreme Court Judge Leibowitz of New York State wrote in Life magazine, after having visited Gulag. “In serving out his term of punishment the prisoner retains a feeling of dignity.” This is what he comprehended and saw.

The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 2, p 147

Look at what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago about the “mobility” of prisoners in slave-labor camps:

However, for the state there was no economic nor organizational sense in carrying out all this superfluous shifting about of some people from camp to the front, and some people to camp in their place. Everyone had had his own circle of life and death determined for him: Once you’ve been classified among the goats, then you have to die as a goat. Sometimes they did not take nonpolitical offenders with short terms for the front, and not in penalty companies, of course, just in the ordinary active army.

The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 2, p 135

Soviet Legislation Publishers in 1936 published Ot Prestupleniya k Trudu (From Crime to Labor) by I. L. Averbakh. Look at what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago about Averbakh’s view of slave laborers in the Soviet Union:

Following in his teacher’s footsteps, Averbakh similarly elaborates: The task of Soviet corrective-labor policy is “the transformation of the nastiest human material [Do you remember raw material? Do you remember insects?–A.S.] into worthwhile, fully useful, active, and conscientious builders of socialism.”

The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 2, p 104