Soviet engineering and technocracy

Among the Soviet engineering projects that Loren Graham discusses in his book, The Ghost of the Executed Engineer, the White Sea Canal was one of the biggest. As to whether it was "successful" or not, the answer depends on what criteria are used to measure success. It's generally considered to be one of the quintessential Stalinist projects in that it was a colossal achievement, fraught with technological inefficiencies, that cost an enormous number of human lives.


Here's a documentary film Stalin commissioned after the project was complete that shows some of the scale of the project.

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