Her commentary about the subway was really concerning and shows that she either took zero time to do a modicum of research about Stalin’s subways, or she’s intentionally trying to be disingenuous.
Stalin’s subways were by no means a Russian version of Roosevelt‘a WPA projects. They were famously built with a lot of forced labor from gulags. And the gulags famously contained lots of politician prisoners, POWs, people with “individualistic tendencies,” etc.
And they were built to signal that Soviet communism could do big things. But like many big things under authoritarian rule, there is often a lot of pain and suffering hidden behind the shining facade.