“Sure people will fall. But we’re building blast furnaces all the same, aren’t we?” (Scott 21) The author uses this statement and the visuals of the injured workers to make the clear case that this was a very dangerous build. Then when you read into the quotes and stories a little bit more, it seems that there was a general disregard of human life. The only thing that mattered was building the factories and making the steel that needed to be made. They are “mostly plowboys” so what does their deaths matter away way? (Scott 21) These values seem to be very characteristic of the Stalin period, where advancement came at any cost. There was almost an expectation of suffering and death built into these grand building projects. Was the suffering worth it to build these factories? Does the general disregard for human life line up with traditional socialist values? Would the deaths have been more notable if they were engineers and not plow boys.
