by Philipp Blom
In fact, and in spite of Stalin’s wishes, the “esteemed capitalists” played a major role in Russia’s push to jump centuries of development within a mere half decade. The inspiration for Magnitogorsk stood in the United States itself, on the shores of Lake Michigan, about twenty-five miles from Chicago: the steel town of Gary, Indiana. Built in 1906, Gary was in many ways a perfect template for the Soviet model, as it, too, was the result of a concerted and at times despotic act of will. What made its story truly American, however, was that the founder and master of this city that was to have a hundred thousand inhabitants was not the state but a private capitalist concern: the United States Steel Corporation.
Gary had been created by a stroke of the pen. It was a gleaming utopia that had become not only a flourishing town but also a powerful steelworks producing more than four thousand tons of steel a day. “An amazing feature of Gary, built as it is on shifting sands, is that it is actually so solid, so permanent, so strong. There is nothing suggestive of the shoddy or the temporary,” commented an observer in 1920. “Schools, libraries, clubs, commercial buildings, homes, churches, meeting places, all have the aspect as if having been built for permanence. This city has arisen so swiftly, so solidly, just because a great Corporation ordered it! It is vastly more of an achievement than as if it had been ordered by an arbitrary monarch, with absolute control of the nation and of its resources.”3
Laid out on a grid, the prosperous and hardworking town was a genuine result of America’s entrepreneurial spirit and seemed to many to be the very incarnation of the United States. Not everybody loved it; President Woodrow Wilson had campaigned against it, going so far as to call it un-American, because it was the private fiefdom of a corporation and not the fruit of truly American democracy. But his was a minority opinion, as a rabbi living and working in the town made clear: “Gary is America. Every American city is Gary writ large and small.”4
Russian Communist leaders were impressed by the idea that an industrial city could be simply invented at the drawing board. They would build a city that was bigger, more efficient, and altogether grander than its American counterpart, and it would be located directly adjacent to one of the largest and most easily accessible deposits of iron ore within the Soviet empire. The steel it would produce would be used in industry, but it would do much more than that, as a pamphlet advertising the town described: “Metal is not produced simply for its own usage. . . . Metal draws all industry along with it, all spheres of human life, beginning with the production of turbines, tractors, harvester combines, textiles, food, and ending with books. Metal is the basis of modern civilization.”5
It was only a matter of time until the lofty dreams of a new and proud proletariat producing steel in an ideal Soviet city would run into the reality of communist bureaucracy. Chicago engineers drew up plans only to find them altered by commissars and committees eager to prove their patriotic usefulness and suspicious of the designs of the capitalist outsiders. Production targets and working capacities were increased arbitrarily, keeping pace not with the technological possibilities but with the ever greater demands of propaganda. The facilities were originally conceived for an annual capacity of 656,000 metric tons of pig iron, but in 1929 this number was raised several times, winding up at 1.6 million metric tons, and then in 1930 it rose again, to 2.5 million metric tons.
The small group of settlers arriving in March 1929 had the task of building barracks and other essential structures. A railway line had been promised for years but still existed only in part. So far, the gigantic plant and the town supplying it consisted of nothing but strings stretched along the windswept, thawing soil to designate where barracks and factory buildings were to be erected. By May, work had begun on a brick factory, and with the help of the Red Army the last few miles of railway lines were being laid. Work on the great socialist project could finally begin in earnest.
At the same time, there was nothing on the ground, and planning was bedeviled by incompetence and fraud. The railway had been built so shoddily that trains could go no faster than six miles an hour, so at times some of the passengers simply walked next to the rail cars. Traveling the 540-mile route from Moscow to Magnitogorsk took more than a week. The Russian state corporation entrusted with the building and oversight of the plant was called, appropriately enough for a steel-producing company, Stalstroi—but only weeks earlier it had been called Tekstilstroi and had specialized in the production of textiles. The only change to prepare it for its gigantic new task had been to rename it. The American subcontractors began to understand that their task would be incomparably greater than just building the world’s largest steelworks. “The fundamental thing that sharply struck us,” its chief of construction noted, “was that among those who work at the site, there was no clue as to what a steel plant was.”6
When the American engineers finally arrived at the construction site in summer, they did not trust their eyes. What had been described to them as a town consisted of little more than tents, and there were no roads, very few tools, and no heavy machinery. To make matters worse, the workers now being brought to the site by railway were overwhelmingly untrained and resentful at their forced move, for very few had come of their own free will. Many of the new arrivals were in fact the victims of the new policy of collectivization and of the prosecution of kulaks decreed by Stalin.
Portrayed by Soviet propaganda as large landowners and capitalist bloodsuckers, the kulaks were in reality not much more than freehold farmers owning a little more land than other peasants. Now, hundreds of thousands of them were forced to surrender their livestock and leave their land or work in collective farms. Predictably, the results were catastrophic. The farmers would rather kill their cattle than hand them over to the new masters, and during 1929 and 1930 millions of farm animals were slaughtered by their owners.
Expropriated kulaks formed part of the new population of Magnitogorsk and were soon arriving by the trainload at the dirt track that served as a station, as a communist activist would remember:
An extraordinary plenipotentiary arrived. They called for me. A car came at 1 a.m., and I rode to them. Comrade Gugel Iakov Semenovich, the chief of the construction, was there. The plenipotentiary turned to me and asked my name. Then he asked: “Do you know who you’re speaking with?” I said, “I don’t know you.” He answered: “Here’s how you can help me. In three days there will be no fewer than 25,000 people. You served in the army? We need barracks built by that time.” . . . They herded in not 25,000 but 40,000. It was raining, children were crying, as you walked by, you didn’t want to look.7
A Symphony of Sirens
THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE CITY was being driven forward relentlessly, despite a lack of almost all basic provisions. The party had set a date by which the factory would have to start production, and the ºresponsible officials knew that their lives were on the line. As the hot continental summer was slowly tipping into a bitter winter with temperatures as low as –40°C, the workers were constantly driven to their limits. “At that time the slogan was: ‘Blast Furnace by the Deadline!’” remembered one worker. “You would see this slogan literally everywhere. . . . You’d go to the toilet, to take care of your natural needs, and even there you’d see it: ‘The Blast Furnace by the Deadline!’ . . . The only thing they didn’t do was to write it in the heavens.”8
Steel ovens in the steppes: Magnitogorsk.
Toiling under constant pressure and with primitive tools and materials, the often untrained workers frequently produced results that were unusable and even dangerous, and accidents were a daily problem. The entire gigantic building site sometimes seemed to be in a state of emergency: “As soon as the phone rang, you knew it was a breakdown somewhere,” wrote Iakov Shmidt, one of several short-term directors. “The switchboard operator notified me immediately of all emergencies. Simultaneously, on the site, in the event of a fire, warning signals on all train engines were sounded, along with the siren on the electrical station. This unusual ‘
symphony’ made disturbing impressions on all those living in Magnitka.”9
Another eyewitness saw the events in an altogether brighter light. Born in Philadelphia in 1912, John Scott was a communist and an idealist and emigrated to the Soviet Union in 1932 to help build a better future for mankind. One of the few people to actually volunteer to work in Magnitogorsk, he suffered the same deprivation as his fellow workers—and loved it. “I was very happy,” he wrote in his memoir, Behind the Urals. “The Bolsheviks planned their economy and gave opportunities to younger men and women. Furthermore, they had got away from the fetishization of material possessions, which . . . was one of the basic ills of our American civilization. I saw that most Russians ate only black bread, wore one suit until it disintegrated, and used old newspapers for writing letters and office memoranda, rolling cigarettes, making envelopes, and for various personal functions.”10
Reading Scott’s account of his experiences in Soviet Russia, one can get a sense of the often genuine enthusiasm of young activists willing to endure anything for the sake of the greatest dream ever dreamed. Just like the party officials, he saw the motley crowds of former peasants, workers in other industries, and prisoners as nothing but raw material to be purified, forged, and shaped into new Soviet men, just like the metal would be processed in the blast furnaces they were erecting. “Khaibulin, the Tartar, had never seen a staircase, locomotive, or an electric light until he had come to Magnitogorsk a year before,” Scott recounted.
His ancestors for centuries had raised stock on the flat plains of Kazakhstan. They had been dimly conscious of the czarist government; they had had to pay taxes. They had heard stories of the October Revolution; I even saw the Red Army come and drive out a few rich landlords. They had attended meetings of the Soviet, without understanding very clearly what it was all about, but through all this their lives had gone on more or less than before. Now Shaimat Khaibulin was building a blast furnace bigger than any in Europe. He had learned to read and was attending an evening school, learning the trade of the electrician. He had learned to speak Russian, he read newspapers. His life had changed more in a year than that of his antecedents since the time of Tamerlane.11
Scott was one of the few Westerners to make his life in Russia out of idealism, but many leftists looked east with the keenest interest. “Intellectuals, social workers, professional men and women are welcome most cordially in Russia,” an advertisement in The Nation read in January 1929, pointing out that this was the country “where the world’s most gigantic social experiment is being made—amidst a galaxy of picturesque nationalities, wondrous scenery, splendid architecture, and exotic civilizations.”
The Sound of Things Falling
AS THE ROARING TWENTIES WERE HURTLING toward the next decade, which promised to bring more stability, more growth, and more wealth for all, an increasing number of economists and other observers began to believe that the good times could not last forever. And in the decade’s last year, the enthusiasm felt by many committed socialists and communists in Russia and elsewhere about building a new world was suddenly galvanized by an event that, they believed, they had predicted all along.
What precisely happened on October 29, 1929, has been exhaustively researched, but why it happened is still a subject of lively debate. Following a period of unprecedented growth that saw the value of the Dow Jones stock index increase tenfold, the market suddenly and catastrophically slumped over a period of five chaotic days. There was no immediate hard and fast reason for this collapse: a fraud case involving a London investor had created nervousness, but nothing that had not been seen before; an oversupply of wheat had created a volatile futures market in grain, but that in itself would certainly not have precipitated financial apocalypse. The real reason was most likely the roaring engine of the Twenties itself: an exuberant and rapid industrial and economic development that saw industry profits rise by more than 30 percent in the United States and brought returns on investment of more than 20 percent.
In this financial feeding frenzy, many investors had thrown caution to the wind in order to cash in. As always happens in moments such as this, many small investors had come along for the ride, acknowledging that things could not go up indefinitely but convinced that they would get out in time. In this atmosphere of heady uncertainty, a small but pervasive doubt, a plausible rumor, was enough to bring the entire immense castle in the clouds crashing down to earth. On October 29, shares traded on the New York Stock Exchange lost 12 percent of their value in a day of chaotic and panic-driven selling. All attempts by big investors such as John D. Rockefeller to restore confidence by buying shares failed as the markets spiraled out of control.
During the next days and months the downward trend continued, and by 1932 the Dow Jones index had lost 89 percent of its value compared to the eve of the crash. Only 16 percent of private households in America had their money invested in the stock market, but the effects of the chaos were much wider and more devastating. The destruction of huge fortunes in the market sapped the optimism that had fueled the great upward trend of the twenties. Workers were laid off, and at the height of what was to be called the Great Depression, twelve thousand American men and women lost their jobs every day; a quarter of the US workforce found themselves on the street with nothing to sustain them but bread lines and soup kitchens.
The Depression was much more than just the end of an economic era of robust, self-confident capitalism and a strong middle class. Karl Marx had predicted decades earlier that the capitalist system would eventually end up destroying itself, and he had continued to argue that a world revolution and ultimately a more peaceful, socialist society would result from this catastrophe. In 1929, this prediction appeared to have become reality, and socialists across the world regarded the crash as nothing less than the historic proof of the accuracy and scientific nature of Marxism.
The Budapest-born author and journalist Arthur Koestler was one of the millions of hopefuls in the West who would come to be known as “fellow travelers,” believing that the only just future for humanity would be in socialism and looking to the Soviet model both for inspiration and also often for ideological guidance and financial support. Growing up in a prosperous middle-class Jewish family reduced to penury during the First World War, Koestler had lived through the brutal early days of Miklós Horthy’s regime in Hungary, had been forced to interrupt his studies in Vienna because he could no longer pay the university fees, and had been driven to look for alternatives to the social order that had treated him and his family so harshly.
Koestler had gone to Palestine to be part of the huge surge of idealism as young Zionists tried to build a new homeland for the Jews, practicing socialism in kibbutzim (agricultural communes) and creating an intellectual culture to which he himself wanted to contribute. Initially forced to support himself as a day laborer, he had managed to publish his first articles and eventually became Middle East correspondent for a prestigious German publication. From Jerusalem he moved to Paris in 1929, where he witnessed the effects of the crash and the change in social climate as the Great Depression took hold. From his perspective it seemed inevitable that Marx’s forecast had been right, and he joined the Communist Party in 1931. “If History herself were a fellow-traveler,” Koestler would later note, “she could not have arranged a more clever timing of events than this coincidence of the gravest crisis of the Western World with the initial phase of Russia’s Industrial Revolution. . . . The contrast . . . was so striking and so obvious that it led to the equally obvious conclusion: They are the future—we, the past.”12
The Soviet authorities did their very best to foster this impression, particularly among intellectuals and artists, whose high social profile could help them spread the good news. This diffusion took two routes: through cultural activity (both open and covert) abroad and by inviting influential visitors to the USSR.
Ballets Russes
SOVIET CULTURE PROVED TO BE a crucial asset in the attempt to capture the Weste
rn imagination. During the postwar years, a period of artistic retrenchment in the West, when neoclassicism triumphed over artistic experimentation, some of the most exciting and most innovative works of art came from the Soviet Union. Before the revolution, there had been Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Now there were films by Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, along with stunning constructivist paintings, posters, and collages by Malevich, El Lissitzky, and Aleksandr Rodchenko, as well as other forms of experimental art. This led the British writer Stephen Spender, then living in Berlin, to rhapsodize: “We went to see those Russian films which were shown often in Berlin at this period: Earth, The General Line, The Mother, But Tim King, Ten Days That Shook The World, Their Way Into Life, etc. These films . . . excited us because they had the modernism, the poetic sensibility, the satire, the visual beauty, all those qualities we found most exciting in other forms of modern art, but they also conveyed a message of hope.”13
Of even more propagandistic value than the message carried by the works of Soviet artists were sympathetic eyewitness accounts published by Western intellectuals who had traveled throughout the USSR to form their own opinion. These visits, of course, were not unsupervised impromptu journeys. Instead, writers and artists of sufficient standing who were judged by Soviet officials to be amenable to giving the right kind of opinion were cordially invited over. Depending on their rank and perceived importance, some or all of their trip would be paid for. During the 1920s and 1930s, some one hundred thousand cultural visitors made this ritual journey at the invitation of the Party, usually strictly controlled by Intourist guides, translators, official visits, rigid itineraries, and spies. Nothing was to be left to chance.
