The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

How foul-smelling were the crimes of these bourgeois engineers? Here is what they consisted of. They planned to reduce the tempo of development, as, for instance, to an over-all annual increase in production of only 20 to 22 percent, whereas the workers were prepared to increase it by 40 to 50 percent. They slowed down the rate of mining local fuels. They were too slow in developing the Kuznetsk Basin. They exploited theoretical and economic arguments—such as whether to supply the Donets Basin with electricity from the Dnieper power station or whether to build a supertrunk-line between Moscow and the Donbas—in order to delay the solutions of important problems. (The work stops while engineers argue!) They postponed considering new engineering projects (i.e., they did not authorize them immediately).