What you mean by “people” is not what the Soviets meant by it.

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”:

An American Judge Who Was a Useful Idiot to the USSR

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

“Once you’ve been classified among the goats, then you have to die as a goat.”

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

How the Soviets Saw Slave Labor

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

A Death Rate of One Percent per Day

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