It's a little disturbing that there were a number of people in power, including well-regarded intellectuals, who thought some of the notorious experiments were worth doing.
Giles Udy's interview and his book, 'Labour and the Gulag: Russia and the Seduction of the British Left,' give a chilling account of what happened to the kulaks and what Labour was prepared to tolerate as a 'worthwhile experiment' (cf George Strauss in the debate).
www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-ecclesiastical-history/article/abs/labour-and-the-gulag-russia-and-the-seduction-of-the-british-left-by-giles-udy-pp-xxvii-660-incl-12-ills-and-1-map-london-biteback-publishing-2017-30-978-1-78590-204-8/E3359DA8F21EEFF1AAF48E2CB3D32919
"In January 1930, the New Statesman reported that dekulakisation was a "cruel experiment" involving "imprisonment and execution." Over the next two years, 1.8 million kulaks were arrested and deported to the North. Some 240,000 died. By 1931, 60,000 Russians had been arrested on religious grounds and 5,000 shot. The exact numbers may not have been known in the West, but the basic facts of Soviet mass murder, disenfranchisement, and slave labour were available to any literate Briton by the end of the 1920s.
More than a million people in Europe took part in "Prayers for the Persecuted" in 1930, effectively a mass protest again Russian barbarism towards the clergy. The Soviets’ use of unpaid prison labour to produce timber in the unbearable conditions of northern Russia was well documented and led many countries to boycott Russian timber in the 1920s. British sailors travelling to northern Russia saw the conditions with their own eyes, and numerous stowaways and escapees were able to provide the grim details. The evidence was there for those who had eyes to see.
Not everybody did. Timber made in gulags was illegal under the Foreign Prison-Made Goods Act of 1897 and the Labour Party had taken a strong stand against "sweated goods" when they were in opposition in the mid-1920s. And yet the Labour Party did not ban it once they were in power (the Conservatives finally did so in 1933), and many on the British Left refused to accept the evidence of brutality, starvation, and mass shootings long after the evidence was overwhelming."
www.acton.org/publications/transatlantic/2017/11/03/book-review-labour-and-gulag-russia-and-seduction-british
[Udy's] citations are often long, but it is always worth while persevering with them.
As Udy proves on page after page, facts were not always impossible to come by, but the likes of George Bernard Shaw and Sidney and Beatrice Webb systematically demonstrated deeply flawed political judgement in ignoring the reality.
www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2017/10-november/books-arts/book-reviews/labour-and-the-gulag-russia-and-the-seduction-of-the-british-left-by-giles-udy