Engaging.com

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

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

Communist-want-to-be’s today use urgency to promote their projects — everything from the Netherlands government rushing in its attempt to take over Dutch farms to American elites lying to the public about the need for masks in response to the Wuhan virus.

Look at what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote about how Joseph Stalin used urgency to clear the way for the new society:

How did it happen that the Belomor Canal in particular was selected as the first great construction project of the Archipelago? … Stalin simply needed a great construction project somewhere which would devour many working hands and many lives (the surplus of people as a result of the liquidation of the kulaks), with the reliability of a gas execution van but more cheaply, and which at the same time leave a great monument to his reign of the same general sort as the pyramids. In his favorite slaveowning Orient–from which Stalin derived almost everything in life–they loved to build great “canals.” And I can almost see him there, examining with love the map of the North of European Russia, where the largest part of the camps were already situated at the time. And down the center of this region the Sovereign drew a line from sea to sea with the end of his pipe stem.

In proclaiming this project it had to be proclaimed necessarily as urgent. Because in those years nothing which was not urgent got done in our country. If it had not been urgent, no one would have believed in its vital importance, and even the prisoners, dying beneath the upturned wheelbarrows, had to believe in that importance. Because if it had not been urgent, then they would not have been willing to die off and clear the way for the new society.

The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 2, pp 86-87