Stalin’s White Sea Canal prioritized symbolic publicity over actual function

Evidence

Stalin seems to have been so intent on creating a highly visible symbol of development that he pushed and squeezed the project in ways that only retarded the development of the project. Thus the workers and the engineers were never allowed the time, money or equipment necessary to build a canal that would be deep enough and safe enough to carry twentieth-century cargoes; consequently, the canal has never played any significant role in Soviet commerce or industry. All the canal could support, apparently, were tourist steamers, which in the 1930s were abundantly stocked with Soviet and foreign writers who obligingly proclaimed the glories of the work. The canal was a triumph of publicity; but if half the care that went into the public relations campaign had been devoted to the work itself, there would have been far fewer victims and far more real developments – and the project would have been a genuine tragedy, rather than a brutal farce in which real people were killed by pseudo-events. — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 92

Categorization

• CANDY: The image of the useless canal toured by obliged writers who ‘proclaimed the glories of the work’ is a striking, portable anecdote.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 92
• XREF: connects to: Audited work reshapes labor toward producing representations rather than outcomes — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 91