Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilisation
By Stephen Kotkin
University of California Press, 1997, 639 pp., $38.95 (pb)
Review by Phil Shannon
Steel by name, steel by nature — perhaps this sums up Stalinism with its iron rule by Stalin (the "Man of Steel" pseudonym adopted by Joseph Djugashvili) and the rapid industrialisation of the '30s and '40s, when the Russian peasantry and working class were sacrificed to the greater glory of steel factories and heavy industry.
Kotkin's book on the 200,000-strong city of Magnitogorsk ("Magnetic Mountain City"), constructed during Stalin's first Five Year Plan (1929-1933) near a remote iron-ore mountain in the Urals, is a detailed case study on the economics and politics of Stalinism.
By 1929, Stalin had eliminated the Left Opposition of Trotsky, and the Right Opposition of Bukharin, from the Communist Party and was free to embark on his program of "socialism in one country", the building of heavy industry at breakneck pace based on the massive exploitation of the working class ("rapid industrialisation") and the destruction of the smallholding peasantry ("forced collectivisation").
Magnitogorsk was built on the abundant reserves of penal labour provided by the "dekulakised peasants" who were driven from their villages at gunpoint or who fled the hunger and desperation caused by Stalin's policy of forcing the peasants off their family plots and into collectives. Allegedly the target was the rural bourgeoisie ("kulaks"), but all peasants felt the whip, and 40,000 of them wound up behind barbed wire at Magnitogorsk.
Other workers were recruited to Magnitogorsk on the promise of good wages. They didn't count on "shock work" and "socialist competition" with their double shifts, piece rates and "subbotniks" (days of unpaid "voluntary" labour).
Stakhanovism turned up the rack from 1935. Named after the Donbas coalminer who set coal-hewing records, Stakhanovism was the setting of ever higher production norms for all the work force through extraordinary (and well-rewarded) exertion by individual workers. The zeal for steel at all costs contributed to more than 60 Magnitogorsk workers a year being killed in industrial accidents.
There was little respite away from the factory. The "socialist city" was stressed by long, freezing winters and hot, dry summers; workers endured in mud huts, tents or crowded barracks in disrepair. Thousands died from cold and infectious diseases, whose spread was promoted by poor sanitation, water, food, public baths and laundries, nurseries and health care. Infant mortality was over 20%.
There was coal and electricity for the factory but cold and dark for workers' housing. Soot and smoke made life unpleasant in the residential districts, which were poorly served by public transport.
Not everyone had such grim prospects, however. The exploitation of the many fuelled the privileges of the few. The district of Berezka had spacious houses, special shops, chauffeured Fords, servants and the good life all round for the bureaucratic elite of the local party secretary, the GPU/NKVD chief, factory directors and administrative bosses of all stripes.
Significant crumbs from this table were thrown to the Stakhanovites, the "150 and 200 percenters", who were rewarded with money bonuses, promotion, motorcycles, cars and favoured treatment in the allocation of housing, holidays, child-care and a better class of sausage. The political control derived from the distribution of goods in a time of scarcity and hardship was one of the key strengths of the Stalinist bureaucracy.
Yet Kotkin can find no evidence of strikes or riots in response to the workers' severe exploitation, despite the resentment that seethed beneath the public face of Stalinism with its state-organised glorification of the regime, where workers marched on May Day with banners that read "Thank You Comrade Stalin for a Happy Life" and "Life Has Become Merrier".
Resistance was limited to individualistic tactics of absenteeism, turnover, go-slows, pilfering and drink, whilst much male anger was displaced into wife-beating.
It is when Kotkin asks why, in less than 20 years, the most revolutionary working class in Europe became the most quiescent, that the book begins to wander erratically.
Kotkin correctly notes that the workers were divided and atomised into self-seeking individuals. He also accurately details the barrier posed to any independent organisational tendencies by the omnipresent political police, who were crossed at great risk and sometimes given to mad rampages of arrests, execution and deportations with the search for non-existent "enemies within" — "Trotskyite-Zinovievist blocs", "spies, wreckers and saboteurs" — such as the terror of 1937-38.
Yet Kotkin maintains that there was a strong element of "authentic, broad support" for the regime and the status quo, and "genuine enthusiasm" for the "building of socialism" at Magnitogorsk. "Most of the population", he claims, "saw Stalinism as forward-looking and progressive throughout".
This is not only speculative, based on little evidence of workers' attitudes, but also a problem of Kotkin's political framework.
Kotkin believes that Stalin really was building socialism, that there was no rupture or degeneration between the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the five-year plans of Stalin, that the essence of socialism is the centralised micro-management, extreme rigidity, bureaucratic muddle and conflict, and colossal waste and inefficiency of the so-called planned economy under Stalin.
In part, this is the typical animus of establishment scholarship against the Bolsheviks, who were, according to them, political opportunists desirous of building a monolithic state and acquiring political monopoly as soon as they could betray the revolution (yawn, yawn). But it is also a belief that Stalin's program of rapid industrialisation based on the exploitation of the working class and favouring heavy industry over consumption really was socialist economic planning.
As Kotkin himself documents, however, the regime's mania to raise output through centrally imposed targets and to divide the working class by individual competition generated chaos, not planning, in industry. A steel plant was built at Magnitogorsk, but at enormous waste of material and human resources, with poor quality output, and the need to weld the workers into a fearful and compliant mass of atomised individuals through bureaucratic control and terror.
When Kotkin argues that the Magnitogorsk workers had a "fundamental faith in the fact of socialism's existence", even in the face of "manifest despotism and frequent recourse to coercion and intimidation", this "faith" seems little more than a despairing sufferance based on a lack of political confidence, independent industrial organisation and class power.
The steel city of Magnitogorsk was not a showcase of socialism or of planned economy. This would require the participation of the producers, the working class, in economic decision-making. It would require working-class political power and democracy. Stalin and his steel city were a million miles away from socialism.