{"id":4915,"date":"2015-02-17T19:04:30","date_gmt":"2015-02-18T00:04:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/quallsk\/?p=4915"},"modified":"2016-02-01T14:14:46","modified_gmt":"2016-02-01T19:14:46","slug":"soviet-industrialization-and-magnitostroi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/quallsk\/2015\/02\/17\/soviet-industrialization-and-magnitostroi\/","title":{"rendered":"Soviet Industrialization and Magnitostroi"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cIt is a grandiose factory for remaking people.\u00a0Yesterday\u2019s peasant\u2026becomes a genuine proletarian\u2026fighting for the quickest possible completion of the laying of socialism\u2019s foundation.\u00a0You are an unfortunate person, my dear reader, if you have not been to Magnitostroi.\u201d ((Stephen Kotkin, “Peopling Magnitostroi: The Politics of Demography, in\u00a0Magnetic Mountain:\u00a0Stalinism as a Civilization.\u00a0<\/em>((Berkeley: \u00a0University of California Press, 1993: 63))) These are the compelling opening lines of Kotkin\u2019s chapter, \u201cPeopling Magnitostroi: The Politics of Demography.\u201d\u00a0The unknown correspondent\u2019s words were persuasive; however, was this the true story of Magnitostroi.\u00a0A steel plant situated miles from cultured society, populated by a handful of people, deficient in basic commodities and resources, and extreme housing shortages.\u00a0Notwithstanding the extreme working conditions of -20 to -40 degrees made it a truly modern industrial paradise!<\/p>\n

The recruitment strategies of extra pay and free transportation worked to a certain extent, but workers would quickly leave as soon as their contracts were exhausted.\u00a0As time continued, the recruitment results plummeted.\u00a0In the opening days of this project, the population was to consist of volunteer workers, however, just as in the collectivization of farms it quickly turned to mandates of forced workers populating the official state needs.\u00a0The young, unskilled, male populaces were typically former villagers with little or no education. ((Stephen Kotkin, “Peopling Magnitostroi: The Politics of Demography,” in\u00a0Magnetic Mountain:\u00a0Stalinism as a Civilization.\u00a0<\/em>((Berkeley: \u00a0University of California Press, 1993: 75))) A workforce made up of mere peasants and the goal was to establish a strong nationwide proletariat, which these uneducated peasants could not fulfill hence the need to remake people.\u00a0Training initiatives done in true \u201cnew\u201d Bolshevik style sometimes the training was for a skill for which the material was not available for use by the workers.\u00a0This did not seem to matter because the goal was only to attempt to train workers to work more efficiently and as a team.<\/p>\n

Russia was behind in the global industrialization movement. Stalin desired to catch up to the western world as quickly as possible. Unfortunately as the Magnitostroi highlights the speed of changes without thinking of what complications these decrees would initiate did not launch Russia forward, but could have actually hindered their long term achievement of modernization. Stalin\u2019s regime with an exorbitant amount of power centralized at the top was as Lewin notes, \u201callowed to operate independently of economic criteria and results.\u201d ((Moshe Lewin, “On Soviet Industrialization,” in William G. Rosenberg and Lewis H. Sieglebaum (ed.) Social Dimensions of Soviet Industrialization. <\/em>((Indian University Press, 1993:\u00a0277)))Thereby allowing massive amounts of materials to be wasted which included workers time. Without the NEP there was no incentive for workers to work harder, basically, they needed to appear busy. The bureaucracy grew beyond control allowing bureaucratic drift to expunge more resources than needed and ensure that they kept their positions. Let us not forget that most of these workers were in relatively newly acquired positions and incapable of completely understanding or dealing with these responsibilities. The nation was in turmoil and the constant demand for continued changes only exasperated this state. Could Stalin have had more success if he had not eliminated all of the intellectuals? Those men would have taken time to consider the full implications of their actions before decreeing every sector of the nation to change. Lenin showed incite before his death when writing that, \u201che was not sure whether Stalin could be always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution.\u201d ((“Lenin’s Testament.” New York Times.\u00a0<\/em>18 October, 1926.))) What would the history of Russia be today if the party had listened?<\/p>\n

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\u201cIt is a grandiose factory for remaking people.\u00a0Yesterday\u2019s peasant\u2026becomes a genuine proletarian\u2026fighting for the quickest possible completion of the laying of socialism\u2019s foundation.\u00a0You are an unfortunate person, my dear reader, if you have not been to Magnitostroi.\u201d ((Stephen Kotkin, “Peopling … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2545,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[110561],"tags":[110663,110664,110666,110665],"class_list":["post-4915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hist254-archive","tag-kotkin","tag-lewin","tag-on-soviet-industrialization","tag-peopling-magnitostroi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/quallsk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4915","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/quallsk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/quallsk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/quallsk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2545"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/quallsk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4915"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/quallsk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4915\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/quallsk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/quallsk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/quallsk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}