Although there were no open objections to these projects in Stalin’s lifetime, several, including the “Road of Death” and the tunnel to Sakhalin, were aborted within days of his death. The sheer pointlessness of these feats of crude manpower had been well understood, as the Gulag’s own files prove. One inspection carried out in 1951 showed that an entire 52 miles of far northern railway track, constructed at great expense and at the cost of many lives, had not been used for three years. Another 230 miles of similarly costly highway had not been used for eighteen months. 46
