Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism As a Civilization

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating Book, But Limited Conclusion
Review: At several points in Magnetic Mountain, the Stalinist state appears like "Bizarro" world, where up is down, people permanently dwell in "temporary" cities, and claims of exceeding expectations really meant falling far short of the goal. Yet, according to Stephen Kotkin, all of these apparent contradictions were perfectly sensible and functional within Stalinist civilization. Kotkin, in his analysis of Magnitogorsk --the industrial centerpiece of Stalin's five-year plans-- demonstrates how and why society functioned, treating Stalinism in an analytical style not unlike those employed by anthropologist observing and explaining the bizarre behavior of non-western "others". Kotkin considers Stalinism as civilization rather than solely a political ideology because it provided unique ways of thinking, speaking, living, organizing, and constructing.
Kotkin's work is an excellent blend of theoretical models and empirical evidence. The book, dedicated to Michel Foucault, embraces many of the suggestions proffered by the late theoretician, such as the definition of "power" as a defining rather than an oppressing "force" and the need to explore power on the micro-level. And true to form, Kotkin locates power in a wide variety of domains- from the divide between the imagined and real layout of Socialist City to a list of names and profession tacked onto the front of a workers' barrack. Kotkin convincingly demonstrates that while party ideology and administrative policy was imposed from above, it was by no means absolute. Realities within and without the "official" system created spaces that shaped resistance and defined the ways in which the individuals could utilize the to accommodate their needs/interest. For example, Kotkin argues that policies that outlawed rent and obligated the state to house and employ gave individuals considerable justification for acting against and successfully resisting the efforts of "officials" trying to enforce decisions on housing and work allocation determined by the State apparatus. True to his Foucauldian sympathies, Kotkin maintains that Stalinism defined what it meant to be a good Soviet citizen and, unwittingly, the legitimate ways in which the good citizen could contest the unpopular policies.
Kotkin's micro-level archaeology of power in Magnitogorsk upsets the totalizing reputation of totalitarianism. Stalinism offered ample ideology but skimped on the details of just how Marxist/Leninist analysis related to developing a real industrial community. Rather than dictating and imposing the minutiae of everyday life, Kotkin claims that it was the incessant disharmony between ideology and practicality, as manifested in the institutional split between the Party and Administration, that created the contradictory atmosphere within Magnitogorsk, and, paradoxically, permitted resistance but also facilitated repression. Overlapping and unspecified jurisdictions made it difficult to determine who was in charge of what, but the rivalries generated by this discontinuity of policy and practice ultimately fueled the purges. Ironically, the many ways in which Stalinism empowered the worker, by allowing worker-run newspapers, elevating the worker as a mythical hero, and iterating the Marxist/Leninist values of equality, brotherhood, and collective ownership, the Stalinist state promulgated the language that allowed individuals to contest the State's designs. The nature of criticism was tailored to the system. In newspapers, local officials in the party or Soviet could be legitimately critiqued within the bounds of acceptable discourse-- what Kotkin terms, "Speaking Bolshevik". By claiming that all aspects of Soviet society were controlled by workers, Stalinist Russia may have unwittingly achieved this goal. Contrary to the totalitarian myth, Stalinism did not transform the Soviet population into inert slaves of the State.
In Kotkin's estimation, Magnitogorsk in the 1930's is indicative of the general social dynamics that defined the Stalinist State. Magnitogorsk was undoubtedly important in terms of its economic output and as a symbol of Soviet progress under Stalin; the city itself, was clearly saturated by the strange interaction of myth and reality, ideology and novelty, that made Stalin and his Soviet Union into international enigmas. However, Kotkin's claims that Magnitogorsk was a representative microcosm are questionable. A major component of Kotkin's narrative is Magnitogorsk's fundamental "newness". According to Kotkin, Magnitogorsk was a region with little historical baggage, devoid of local power dynamics, large populations, or interests that could obstruct Stalin's grand design. Moreover, on the sparsely populate plains east of the Urals, Marxist/Leninist ideologues had the rare "clean slate" from which to imagine their ideal city. Magnitogorsk's unique characteristics raise the questions: Did Stalinism function comparably in Kiev, Moscow, or Leningrad? What Kotkin generally describes as resistance and his numerous examples of unclear and ill-planned State policies may have been primarily the products of Magnitogorsk's lack of precedence and not something inherent to Stalinism. While an excellent regional study, Kotkin's work needs to be considered in a comparison to other sites of heavy Stalinist intervention and to cities/regions that existed long before the Bolshevik revolution.
For both the theoretically and empirically minded, Kotkin's work is rewarding. Strict Foucauldians may bristle at the degree of "agency" Kotkin allows his subjects and empiricists will undoubtedly raise the issue of Magnitogorsk's, but it is a engaging book that effectively explains why people not only tolerated, but embraced Stalinism. Magnetic Mountain is by no means the definitive book on the first decades of the USSR but it is an important historiographical contribution to the still woefully under-researched Soviet Union.

Rating:
Summary: Narrow and Illuminating Study
Review: Kotkin has done excellent work here in Magnetic Mountain. This is a landmark study on the building of an industrial city in the Soviet Union during the Stalinist era. It's extremely bizarre that some have taken the view that it is a pro-Stalin work. I can only conclude that they haven't read Magnetic Mountain but only certain reviews or are so head-in-the-sand dogmatic that they render any view outside of cold war totalitarian model as pro-Stalinist.

Especially ironic is the Stalinist tone of many who oppose any view outside this strict cold war construction. Like it or not the facts are many who lived in the Soviet Union during that era believed in communism as their salvation and future. I've lived in Russia and have seen the older generation protesting in pro-Stalin demonstrations in St Petersburg's Palace Square. Stating this doesn't make Kotkin pro anything. It makes him a historian.

Kotkin's rendering of Magnitogorsk is great history. From the initial idealistic workers that established the city, he quickly shows the disillusionment that occurred when theory and practical organization clashed. Labor shortages abound in this workers paradise ironically because workers couldn't stand the conditions. Kotkin shows how internal passports and party cards gradually began to be used to make sure workers could not move freely or that party members could be monitored.

Not that all was oppression. He correctly describes how many used the opportunities that were available to proceed with gaining an education in the evening technical programs that proliferated in the Magnitogorsk community.

Kotkin does not shy away from the effects of the purges, but he does describe them as being focused particularly on party members. With the benefits of communist party membership came the dangerously increased odds of being targeted in the purges. He's especially effective in his description of how the balance of power was structured between the technical experts running the factories, the local communist organization and the NKVD.

This is good history. It may ruffle feathers, but more importantly it illuminates the complexity of life in the Soviet Union. Citizens in the SU were much more involved, benefited from and bought into the dogma of Soviet marxism much more than the Conquest cold war scholarship of that era showed. Having spoken to many of the older Russian generation myself I've seen the confirmation in the discussions.

Ignore the lock-step cold warriors; if you are a historian of left, middle or right wing views you'll find this is history well worth reading.

Rating:
Summary: Very important!!
Review: That's an important book on Stalinism and Soviet Union. It presents new extremely interesting and well documented information about key aspects of life and politics mainly during the Stalinist period. What makes this book really important though is that this information is used in a structured way to substantiate a well-defined interpretation of Stalinism as civilization. Kotkin is not the first researcher to analyze USSR in these terms (many people see the Soviet regime as a peculiar type of theocracy), but it is one of the first attempts to study the civilizational aspect in such depth.

Another achievement of the author is he manages to transcend the ideological commitments and polarizations that are connected with his broader theme. "The Magnetic Mountain" is a sober, academic study of Stalinism and therefore, it is bound to displease those who are looking for excuses for the Soviet regime or those who looking for stongly worded condemnations and connections with present enemies.

My only criticism is that, unless I missed the references to it, Kotkin does not mention E. Wallerstein's essay "Capitalist civilization". I believe that the approaches of the two authors have many parallels and it would have been interesting to compare them.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Social History
Review: This book is about building socialism, Soviet style. Magnitogorsk was the site of an outcrop of rich iron ore and Soviet economic planners elected to construct a whole new steel manufacturing center with accompanying city on that site. The site lacked easy access to coal, required extensive damming of the neighboring river, was hundreds of miles off the main Russian railroad system, and was sparsely populated. The rational approach would have been to develop an iron mine and expand the rail lines connecting to established industrial centers; a Soviet equivalent of the once important iron mines in nothern Minnesota. In keeping with the goal of erecting a whole new industrial civilization, the new Soviet state treated the site as a physical and social tabula rasa, developing not only a whole new vertically integrated production complex but also a whole new society. Kotkin's book is a social history of that enterprise. Based on extensive archival research and using extensive secondary sources, Kotkin describes the social experience of building the factory/city and life within Magnitogorsk.

This is an excellent book. The quality of writing and documentation is excellent. Readers will get a vivid sense of the Soviet experience during this period of Russian history. The underlying theme of the book is the efforts of the Soviet state to transcend capitalism and totally transform human existence. The resulting efforts to break the social mold and develop rational modes of social organization are described well. The Soviet emphasis on heavy industry, central planning, and subordination of the individual to social goals is demonstrated through close analysis of the system of factory construction, housing organization, and many aspects of daily life. The remarkable brutality, inefficiency, and corruption of Soviet life are described very well. At the same time, Kotkin is careful to point out that the Bolshevik/Soviet system enjoyed a real measure of popular support. It brought full employment and bread to millions at a time when the Great Depression had idled factories all across Europe and North America. The emergence of fascist states in Europe also seemed to vindicate Marxist predictions of the terminal throes of capitalism.

One criticism of Kotkin is that he attempts to emphasize the ways in which common people responded to the actions of the state. To paraphrase Eugen Weber, Kotkin attempts to present common people as subjects of history rather than objects of history. While this is a laudable attempt to avoid presenting most people as mere victims of impersonal forces, readers will be struck with how the Soviet state intruded itself into all aspects of human life. This is not surprising as the avowed goal of the Soviets was to re-engineer human society. A good deal of recent social history attempts to avoid the image of common people as passive victims but I feel that Kotkin has gone a little too far in this direction.

Kotkin is very good at demonstrating the essential nature of the Soviet state. In a section on relationship of the Communist Party to the state proper, Kotkin summarizes the nature of the Soviet state by describing it as the equivalent of a theocracy. Implicit in Kotkin's analysis is the concept that the Soviet state was an ideological construct offering a form of secular salvation mediated by the state. While Kotkin doesn't use the term, a good alternative description would the phrase 'political religion.' The latter term has been used by the historian Michael Burleigh to summarize his analysis of the Nazi state.

Finally, I have to address some of the prior negative reviews of this book published below. Magnetic Mountain is not an apology for the Soviet state. As mentioned, Kotkin is very good at showing the brutality, corruption, and inefficiency of the Soviet State. Kotkin employs rather temperate language. He does not describe Soviet acts as crimes or brutalities. His careful descriptions, however, of the acts themselves and his systematic demonstration of how the Soviet state attempted to control all aspects of life are damning. This dispassionate approach is at least as effective as more emotive accounts. It is also unfair to characterize this book as a post-modern interpretation or as primarily an attempt to settle historiographic controversies. While Kotkin does invoke the name of Foucault and does address important historigraphic issues, Kotkin's primary goal is to describe the social experience of this phase of Soviet history. He succeeds completely.

Rating:
Summary: Fine account of heroic industrialisation
Review: THIS IS the story of Magnitogorsk, an industrial city built from nothing in the Urals. Its site had long been known as Magnitnaia gora, 'magnetic mountain', because the iron ore disturbed the early settlers' compasses. The Soviet Union decided that it should be the base for developing the country's eastern regions and for spreading industry more evenly through the Union. They knew that "Metal is the basis of modern civilisation." Industrialisation, making the machines needed to make machines, was a matter of the Soviet Union's survival as an independent country, under constant threat of capitalist attack.

They used coking coal from 2000 kilometres away, from the Kuznetsk basin in West Siberia, thus uniting the Urals and Siberia, iron-ore and coal production. They built a mining-energy-chemical metallurgical complex, responsible also for housing and schools, for a population of 200,000 in the world's first newly constructed socialist city. The Soviet welfare state was centred on its large factories. On 1 February 1932, blast furnace No. 1 produced the first pig iron, for the 17th Party Conference, to symbolise the fact that it was a steel plant created by and for the working class, in the class war against capitalism.

The plant comprised the largest blast furnace in the world, the largest mechanised mining enterprise in the Soviet Union, a coke plant equal to any in Germany or the USA, one of the first large blooming mills in the Soviet Union, and a series of rolling mills. In 1934 it was renamed the Stalin Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Complex.

How was it achieved? There was national unity, there was no private ownership of land or of the means of production, and no hiring of wage labour. A sense of social justice was built into property relations, and there was party leadership. According to Lenin, the party is "the mind, honour and conscience of the epoch". It was also the inspiration.

So, the Soviet Union was able to plan its leap forward to an advanced industrial civilisation, a city-based society engineered to create the utmost well-being, productivity and national power. The Soviet Union was twice as urbanised in 1939 as it had been in 1926."National power and social welfare drove the revolutionary process."

The Soviet Union promised a better life for workers and their children, based on tangible improvements: jobs for all, universal pensions, universal benefits for disability, sickness, pregnancy and childbirth, affordable housing, free health care and child care, education for all, subsidised prices, and paid holidays for workers.

These achievements can still inspire workers today. We can learn from their heroic efforts, their triumphs and tragedies.